Latest / Lucid Interval Podcast / Human Evolution From An Alien's Perspective - Nick Longrich, PhD

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Human Evolution From An Alien's Perspective - Nick Longrich, PhD · Lucid Interval Podcast

• Andrew Heacock: Nick Lawrich, thanks for joining Nick: thanks for inviting me here. Andrew Heacock: So what do you like to study more, dinosaurs or people? Nick: I think these days I'm more interested in humans. I've been doing dinosaurs for years and years, and there's there's always new things to find. There's new species and just kind of new things to figure out about the revolution, but it's kind of yeah, it's a bit more the same. Here's a new ceratopsy and it has slightly pointier horns and more scallops on the frill. here's another species of duckbell. And it it is super fun. but it's I think for for humans it's There's still an extraordinary amount we don't know about how where we come from and how we got here in our evolution. and I think, you know, it's we are a really interesting species. Now, part of that's gonna be, of course, vanity. We're we're interested in ourselves. Our favorite topic is always gonna be ourselves. But I think there's I think you can say objectively, like, we're a pretty interesting species. we are highly intelligent, we can make complex tools, we have language, very complex social structures. We're We're outliers from other species, not just in one or two ways, but in multiple ways. We are like the best at what any we're the best at what we do in many different ways. And I think if aliens came down here and they were trying to figure out a species to study, they would naturally look at us. I'm not saying ants wouldn't be interesting. I'm not saying there wouldn't be aliens studying octopi, but aliens would say this species right here, this is the one that's spread out across the entire planet. It's modified the surface to, you know, produce food for itself. It's wiped out the megafauna. There's a lot going on with this species, and we think this is the most interesting thing one to study. And you know, it seems like in recent years there's been this kind of I don't have to be too far to go to call it sort of this kind of anti-human thing of saying, like, well, we're we're really not that special. We're just one species out of millions. there's more bacteria types out there, et cetera, et cetera. and I disagree. I don't think you necessarily have to say that everything we do is positive, but I think we you do have to argue that we are we are extraordinary outliers and therefore interesting to study. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, I mean, what I noted what you were saying is that we're outliers like a number of different domains. And one of the things that's interesting to hear you talk about this is, well, we're human, so we take some of these things for granted. You know, I mean, what are some of the more remarkable things about us that you think that people don't really don't really appreciate? Nick: I it's kinda like you you look at you know, people want to say like, well, what makes us special, what makes us human? And they'll hit on, you know, bipedalism, intelligence, tool use, socialization, language. And it's it's kind of all those things. We do them all. We're we're not exceptional in one way, we're exceptional in several different ways. And you'll you'll see, for example, like you know, a certain You if you look at like what makes an iPhone so so effective, you know, what makes it really extraordinary, there's not one single magical technology that makes the iPhone work. It's a bunch of different things that combine together. You've got cellular communications, you've got very small, powerful processors, you've got batteries that can pack a lot of packet and punch into a small form factor, touch screens, the operating system. It's everything together that makes the iPhone the iPhone. So, you know, some people say like, okay, well, Steve Jobs didn't really invent any of those things. No, but he combined them together. And you know, likewise, if you look at, you know, say, well, Apple Corporation, what makes it exceptional? it's not world class and just one thing. It's extraordinary with their marketing, their manufacturing, their interface design. They're, they're, they're great at a lot of different things. So outliers are often outliers in multiple ways. And that's kind of how our species is. Like we're, you know, there's not just one thing. You can pick these three or four different things that, you know, we have the most complex. Social structures of any any species on the planet. We have the most elaborate language. We have the most sophisticated tools and just that general intelligence. We're an outlier. So we're outliers on multiple axes simultaneously. which is sort of remarkably improbable when you think about it, unless you see those things as not really being independent. They're probably kind of all driving each other. You know, intelligence drives tool use and vice versa, language drives sociality, and vice versa. They're all kind of moving in tandem. so but yeah, we're just like really, we're really weird and we are we are a special species. Again, you know, we're you know sometimes that's wonderful and sometimes it's terrible. we make, you know, Michelangelo's paintings on the the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We also make nuclear bombs. so it's like but any way you look at it, you know, no judgment implied positive or negative. We just we are an exceptional and special species. Andrew Heacock: it does seem like there's kind of a virtuous cycle too, like what you were saying. Like intelligence, of course, is a precursor for tool use, but then you know, tool use an intelligence also might lead to better hunting, which of course is gonna make more calories available for bigger brain growth, right? D is there like a period at which there's like a a tipping point in human evolution where we see this virtuous cycle really take off? Nick: I I think so. I think it's been going on for a long time. And you know, it's kind of like it's like this exponential curve and it's it's it's going upwards. and but if it does really have an inflection point, I would put it about two million years ago. And that's just suddenly suddenly our brains get a lot larger, our tools get more complex, you know, our bodies get bigger. There's there's just a bunch of things happening at that point. We become much more widespread. We start Moving out of Africa into into Europe and Asia and so on and so forth. And kind of trying to look at, you know, triangulate. It's it's very human evolution is tricky because, like, you know, what we have to work with is bones, rocks, sometimes genes for some of the younger fossils. But so much of what makes humans interesting and special, our culture, our language, our soft technologies, things made out of wood and fiber and leather, these things don't preserve. I I call it like archaeological dark matter. You can see this stuff that kind of like dark matter influences the way the universe moves and the way the galaxy orbits. You can't see dark matter, you can't touch it, you can't sense it. All you can do is like see it by its effects. And you see weird things starting to happen in human evolution, and I think that's in some of these things that don't preserve. The one that I suspect is probably kicking off all these other changes is probably weapons technology, and specifically. The acquisition of ranged weapons around two million years ago. it's at that point we become good enough to tools we can expirate. And the the paleoanthropologists find anatomical specializations in our shoulders, our arms, our our our backs that allow us to kind of you know pull our arm back and throw things using our entire body. And it's at that time we start becoming more carnivorous, we become bigger. basically we're shifting from being. Things like Astrelopithecus are kind of like they're like bipedal chimps. You know, they're they're they're walking upright, but they're they're not that much more intelligent than us. And a lot of these early hominins actually had brains the size of a chimpanzees or even smaller. Like Artithecus doesn't even have a chimp-sized brain. And it's at this point brains get big when we start using ranged weapons, our shoulders and arms start changing, our teeth get small more. Andrew Heacock: Like a ranged weapon is something you you can throw, like a at distance, right? You don't have to get right up close to right, missiles. Right, right, right. Nick: Yeah. Missiles, missiles. And you kind of cast around and say, well, what would that be? some people think, you know, maybe you start chucking rocks, but it's pretty hard to kill anything with a rock. Small short of like, you a little bunny or something. you know, a bird, you can kill a bird with a rock, but it's just gonna piss off an antelope and it's gonna run away. to kill big prey, you need to to bleed you you need to bleed it. And that's what spear does, is it creates a penetrating, impaling injury that bleeds. And bleeding is, you know, if you you bleed something, you can kill animals as large as an elephant that way. So it basically the spear allows us to become top predators. Is we can kill it a distance, we can fight off other predators like lions. I mean, they're up close. Well, even even up close, you spear, you can use it at short range as a stabbing spear. And you have a lot of reach with that thing. You can stick something from six feet away before it can get you. And, you know, from a distance, you can kill it before it even gets close. And so basically, I think ranged weapons shift us from being kind of, you know, chimpanzee like omnivores, maybe one, you know, not quite at the top of the food chain. All of a sudden, we're at the top of the food chain, we become top predators, rivaling lions and stable-tooth cats. And I think this kind of kicks off a whole series of innovations. I think it we become more intelligent, partly because we're becoming predators. but I think the other thing that happens is. Once we're no longer prey, once we're not like being eaten by lions and hyenas, where we can, you know, we can take take on the other predators, without predators to thin our numbers, there's just a lot more competition. And so then I think the bands of hominins start fighting each other in the same way lions have these really intense fights over over lions have intense conflicts over territory because there's nothing to thin the ranks of lions except other lions. You know, so if you like you're your little you're a little fox or a jackal or something, other things eat you. so there's there's there's a fair amount of niche space out there, there's a fair amount territory, fair amount of food. But at the top of the food chain, nobody's controlling your numbers except you. So there's lot of competition between other you and other members of your species. So I think once we shift to hunting, I think that leads to a competition between bands of of humans. As we start fighting each other. And we bec we start evolving larger, more complex social groups to do that. And so that all these things are kind of evolving in in tandem. Like, you know, what leads what? Is it is that the brain leads tools or tools lead the brain or language or sociality. I think they're kind of all evolving in lockstep. And they're kind of all, you know, it is kind of like you say, this virtuous circle or or you know positive feedback loop. All these things are kind of integrating into each other and pushing each other's evolution forward. Andrew Heacock: Man, one of the the biggest mind blowing things you just said was I I never thought of this before. As our numbers increased, the competition increased, which I assume would kind of like accelerate the race for fitness. You know, I mean, I guess by almost raising the stakes essentially for for what counts as fitness, because there's more people. So there, you know, are more that there's going to be more competition for the best mates, the best, you know, hunting grounds, the things like that. And so you'll have more people to be, you know, genetically more fit. Nick: It yeah, it it doesn't I wouldn't necessarily I mean It's always survival of the fittest, but what fittest means can change dramatically. And in a high predator environment where you're under a lot of predation, fitness means being able to escape predators, being able to sense predators, maybe having a fairly high r rapid reproductive rate to replace losses to predators, things like that. where where you have less predation, now you start having more competition between species, and other things become more important in fitness. That might be cooperating with each other. To defend territory against other members of your species. So things become much more territorial. So it's like it's kind of there's a con if you look at like say how island species operate, you know, things like kiwi birds in New Zealand don't have a lot, historically didn't have much in the way of predators. But because they weren't getting eaten all the time by foxes, that meant they had to fight with other kiwi Kiwis. So they they, you know, they had to the male and female had to cooperate to defend a territory where they could get food. they'd have these enormously large eggs so they can invest a lot in their offspring. So their offspring were big and and could then go off and compete for their own territories. so it's a very different strategy than on a mainland where, you know, if you're a you know, if you're a quail, you're constantly getting eaten by foxes and hawks and whatnot. So you're just kinda like spamming the environment with lots of little eggs, having lots and lots of little baby quails. So because, you know, most of them get eaten within a week or two, you gotta have a lot of them to have even one or two survive. So just The the nature of the natural selection can shift radically depending on whether a high predation regime or a low predation regime. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, so I guess the needs of the environment change. So what counts as fitness is different. And then so nature begins to select for things like the cognitive ability to cooperate. Obviously. I mean, Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I'm just thinking as you were describing hunting, the big thing was bleeding. And I do I have heard that our capacity as distance runners has a lot to do with this. Like that we, you know, when we lost our hair, we can run. So you bleed something, but then you Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: kind of run it to death while it's bleeding. And it, you know, is sort of a way I mean when I've learned to hunt deer, which is not really my Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: not a hobby that I engage in, but Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I was told was like if you wound a deer, like it will go and kinda lay down and you just kind of it will it can heal, but if you kind of pressure it it can it can bleed out and die. and Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: so like there's there's a sense of like pushing an animal to exhaustion. Nick: I you know, from what I saw, you know, I I went out and hunted these guys in Tanzania, the Hadzebe hunter-gatherers. And from what I saw, and this seems to track fairly well with what I was reading about other African hunter-gatherers, is they're mostly they're mostly ambush hunters. They they they they go through the bush very long distances. They're walking. They're just walking huge distances, like ten, fifteen, twenty miles a day trying to find game. And they find game and maybe they stalk it through the bush, you know, following footprints or following scatter, whatever the heck. And until they hit close enough and they ambush it with a with a bow and kill it. And and when they hit it, it might or might not, you know, it it's gonna take off. So they have to track it. But it's basically they're not running these things down. And the environment isn't really conducive out there. Maybe it would be on the Serengeti, but in the bush where a lot of these tribes live. you just can't see that far. You can't, you know, see a you can't see a an antelope or a a kudu a mile away. You know, if it gets more than a couple hundred feet away, you're it's kind of lost in the bush. So I my sense is that, you know, you know, those guys just they just kind of walk huge distances. They kind of walk everywhere. And people didn't really do a lot of running. There was I mean, the one the one exception I can think of is like, you know, the I was with I was with these kids and they're kind of out there with their bows and like somebody spots a squirrel. And it was kind of like kind of like a bunch of dogs, you know, like a dog or something like squirrel, and everybody just like took off running and we ran over and like a squirrel went in this in this hollow tree and people started banging on the tree to get the squirrel out. it was really fun. so when we saw the squirrel, we started running for it, but everything else was just like walking, walking, walking huge distances. And my senses were my senses were designed for long distance walking more than really being pursuit predators. And again, this gets back to our, you know, the kind of our our our kind of key innovate one of the key innovations that kind of kicks everything off is ranged weapons. We can kill at a distance, you know, spear at 50 or 60 feet, bow at 100 feet. And so we don't have to chase things down. We just have to sneak up to it close enough. I mean, even even today, a lot of bow hunting is, you know, pre tree stands, right? You're kind of getting up there hiding in the tree, waiting for the deer to come along. We're kind of more ambush predators. So that's that's my sense of things. Could be wrong, but I think we're We're more yeah, we're I think we're more kind of like using stealth and ranged weapons and stalking game and pursuing it slowly over long distances. Andrew Heacock: What is it like being able to go and in bed and live with traditional societies, hunter gatherer societies? Nick: It was it was amazing. That's one of the most amazing things I've ever done in my life. It was just like they're just kind of chill, cool people. It's just like, you know, it's sort of interesting. In some ways, it was kind of anticlimatic. Like, yeah, I was hanging out these dudes by the fire. But like, you know, I I think the the the vibe, I was trying to think what what vibe it reminded me of. And reminded me of like high school cross-country hanging out when guys are doing warming up and stretching before the run or something like that. Just a bunch of guys and like. And I mean, in the same way as that kind of thing, there's this kind of like, I don't know, there's this kind of like, you know, you know, friendly masculine vibe to it that I remember from those days. And and as part of that, it's just like people taking the piss out of each other constantly. It's like that's a big thing in these societies, is like they're always they're always kind of it it's kind of part of the culture, the egalitarianism is like don't let anyone get too up their own asses and like but. You know, it's like, you know, somebody would see a bird and everybody'd calm, you know, calm down. This guy would take a shot and it'd miss. And everyone just laughed and like, you idiot. It's just like it was just really funny. And it was just kind of like it was just Andrew Heacock: Right. Yeah. Nick: kind of all in good fun. And it just kind of so yeah, it was just kind of a in some ways it was very normal, but it it just had, yeah, I don't know. It seemed like a yeah, it is it was just really kind of a chill, interesting place. And I mean, admittedly, I just got to go there for a couple of weeks and it's just not like You know, to really understand a place, you probably have to spend your entire life there. But it was just what I saw, was really yeah, it was really I don't know, they're they're just just fun guys to chill and hang out with. Andrew Heacock: So are you and you're you're not an anthropologist by training, right? Your your training was in something else? Nick: I I train I I did a number of different god, what different departments was I in? I was in I majored in ecology and evolutionary biology. then I went to a a program in, I guess what is it, organismal biology and anatomy at Chicago, then I was in zoology at Calgary, then I was in geology department at Yale for about and so kind of like bouncing around from department to department. and Yeah, I just I don't know. I just kind of got interested in humans as I figure, like, well, I'm I'm an evolutionary biologist. I study vertebrates. Humans are vertebrates. It's like and I find some of the principles that I learned studying dinosaurs and dinosaur evolution apply very well to understanding human evolution. We're just another spe I mean, we are special, but we are in some ways just the another species of vertebrate, and you can study us the same way you'd study dinosaurs. So I've been kind of trying to like apply some of what I learned studying reptiles to studying humans. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, I mean, are you talking about like methodology in terms of just like how we know what we know? Nick: Yeah, a bit of that. Like, I mean, I've done a lot of work in like systematics and like you know building evolutionary trees, you know, vertebrate paleontology, they use morphological codistics, you know, grouping things based on anatomy. And so you get to where you can like, you know, this little bump indicates that dinosaurs related to that species, not that species. And this translates over fairly well to to humans. And I I that this thinking has been a bit slow. It's been adopted, it's been kind of late to be adopted over in human evolution. So for a long time, people weren't really building cl you know, cladograms and evolutionary trees, just kind of like dotted lines kind of randomly joining things together. And having that background, you know, saying trying to tease apart Tranus Revolution, I can kind of look at a skull and so, you know, I I you know, what is it? Homo Rhodesiensis is kind of a controversial taxon. And I can just kind of look at that and say, well, okay, in these features, it seems more primitive than Neanderthals. So I don't think it's I don't think it's up near Neanderthals. I think it's kind of between Neanderthals and Homo erectus, for example. And or, you know, looking at human evolution, I can kind of look at some of these things and say, okay, these morphologies seem plesiomorphic, which is a fancy way of saying primitive or ancestral relative to modern humans. So I suspect they're not on the human mainline. So you can do things like that. you know, you can also try to build evolutionary trees for, you know, based on genetics or based on on culture, even. you know, we have what we call Synapomorphies, which are derived characteristics, specialized characteristics that you know allow us to recognize groups. So a synapomorphy of certain dinosaurs is feathers. birds have feathers. certain dinosaur species, like drumosaurs, have feathers, and that allows us to unite them together. You can you can kind of do the same thing with culture to a degree and language. And you know, it's kind of looking into some languages recently, like a lot of African languages have have tonality. which is something they share with Mandarin. And whereas a lot of Western languages lack that. And the loss of tonality might be a synapomorphy pulling together, say, Indo European languages, Semitic languages, Basque Dravidian, things like that. Or it might be convergent too. Andrew Heacock: So just to clarify, tonality, tonality is basically where like the emphasis you put on a word can change its meaning. Nick: I how to explain it. Like I'm not a very good linguistic, but you know, like Chinese has that kind of sing-song characteristic to it. some of the African ones do too. Like Hadzebe is like the way they say it isn't Hadzebe, it's Hadzabe. And it's like kinda got this emphasis on it. and so that it just, yeah, just you can have different tones on different syllables, and that will change what word it is. And I it it seems to be something that's quite common in African languages. So we think of it as something that's Peculiar to Chinese, but it might actually be an ancestral characteristic that's retained in Chinese, then lost in the Indo-European languages. So basically, this way of looking at the world is it's a powerful way of looking at everything from anatomy to genetics to cultural evolution. The other thing I've kind of learned with paleontology is you're how to work with very limited amounts of data. Andrew Heacock: Right, right. I mean you were saying like there's a lot of dotted lines in the human evolution tree, and I was wondering is that just 'cause we have a dearth of evidence? Nick: Partly, it's partly lack of fossils. There's a lot of, yeah, there's just a lot of missing data. The thing I've kind of learned, I was very interested early on in my career in like paleobiology, like how do we know what animals are doing biologically? And a lot of people get fixated on one particular way of reconstructing function, like biomechanical modeling or tooth wear or comparisons to extant species. I guess what I would argue is that. Your inferences are most robust when you're looking at a lot of different lines of evidence and trying to, you know, see where they all kind of converge. so if you're interested in, say, the dinosaur Spinosaurus, you know, there's a big debate is the thing aquatic or not. And I would argue you want to look at things like diet, tooth wear, bone density, anatomical specializations, the the habitat it lives in, and all of these things kind of none of them by themselves are conclusive, but they kind of all point in the general same direction that this is a highly specialized. Aquatic animal. And so I'd argue that robust inference comes from not a single line of evidence, but multiple lines of evidence. And if you go back and look at the original Origin of Species by Darwin, he does this, is he makes a really compelling argument for evolution. And he doesn't fixate on one thing like fossils. He looks at fossils, he looks at biogeography, he looks at vestigial structures, he looks at, you know, homology, he, you know, taxonomy. There's like five or six different lines of evidence. And he says, look. All of these things point in the same direction. It's unlikely they're all wrong in the same way. Therefore, evolution, you know, descent with modification explains the diversity of life. And it's a very powerful way of arguing. in the same way, if you look at like the asteroid impact, how do we know the asteroid killed the dinosaurs? Well, it's not one thing. It's palinology, it's fossil plankton, it's carbon isotope anomalies, it's the iridium, it's changes in erosion patterns, it's it's all of these different lines of evidence. That point in the same direction, that's what makes it so robust. And so one of the things I do in with humans is kind of a recent arrival to it. I'm not a specialist, but I take this generalist approach and try and say, okay, let's look at all the different lines of evidence, the tools, the genetics, the bones, you know, ancient reconstructions of shorelines, whatever, and see where they all kind of converge. And the hypothesis that has the most different lines of evidence pointing in favor of it is probably the right one. And even if one line of evidence kind of disagrees with it, it's unlikely all the all the other five are independently pointing to the correct correct hypothesis and and they're not pointing in the right direction. So that's something I've kind of, you know, I feel like the the you know, kind of developing my skills on on dinosaurs and and paleobiology, it's kind of given me a bit of insight into how to approach some of this human stuff. Andrew Heacock: That's so cool. all of that is so cool to me. I there's a there are so many questions I've always wanted I've wondered about human evolution and the thing just about the taxonomy of it and and kind of the organization. And one of them is, are we still apes? Nick: I mean, it's like these these get into like so taxonomy is like the art of applying. There is an evolutionary tree, which it's even a little simplistic call it a tree because there's reticulation, there's hybridization, we hybridized the Neanderthals. Andrew Heacock: More like a bush, right? Yeah. Yeah. Nick: But to a broad approximation, there is an evolutionary tree. And what names you want to put on what branches and your rules for naming, that's a human construct. So, you know, one one. Phylogenic taxonomy would say that we want to name what they call monophyletic clades, which is like one branch and all of its descendants. So, you know, the branch that leads to dinosaurs includes birds, so we put birds and dinosaurs. So using that framework, if you say your clades must be monophyletic, dinosaur must include birds, and fish must include people and dinosaurs and and and so on and so forth, and birds. so In that sense, if you if you ascribe to that philosophy, yes, we're apes. But you know, who says that you can't have what they call paraphyletic taxa, which be this group minus the descendant group? So the traditional concept of dinosauria would be basically like all these things minus the birds. And you could define apes in such a way. It's just kind of an arbitrary human convention. It's like, I don't know, I I don't I don't like to get too caught up in these. arguments about names. It's just like it's kind of like I don't know. It's just like, you know, what should we call this? You know, it's just like the the name is the name is something we apply to a piece of land on a map. It doesn't change the territory is. You can call it whatever the heck you want. I don't know what is it? Is it you know is it Lake Ontario, Lake America, Lake Canada? It's the same lake. You know, we can name it whatever the heck you want. I mean, whatever it depends on kind of what's useful for your tur your your Whatever I guess for whatever's useful for looking at the world, I'd say. Andrew Heacock: Right. For that construct. Yeah. so this also gets to another thing that I think that a lot of people, you know, sort of miss about evolution. When I was growing up, in and I grew up in the nineties, you know, I would still hear people talking about things like the missing link. And, you know, I've noticed nobody ever brings that up, but they would say, Where's the missing link? And I'm Man, we've found so Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: many missing links by now. But it implies that there is a bright line that divides human and our our ancestors, you know, and it doesn't seem like it really works that way. It's a just a much more gradual evolution. Nick: I mean, every every time you get a missing link, it creates two more missing links. So you've got chimps and humans. You've got something in between. Well, between that species and humans, you've got another gap there. And between that species and chimps, there's another gap there. So they fill in those gaps. Now you have the gaps between the gaps. So it's just kind of like, in a way, I don't know, it it's kind of Yeah, I think part of the reason we don't like to talk about missing links is that it it's relatively uncommon to find direct ancestors. so, I mean, in some ways, like the bird Archaeopteryx is it's probably a pretty good stand-in for what the ancestor of birds looked like, but it's unlikely that single species is the one that gave rise to all living birds. There were probably, you know, 10, 50, 100 Archaeopteryx like species. And some and and it's unlikely we just happened to find the one that gave rise to all living birds. now it might be a very good standard, it might be a very good proxy for what the ancestor looks like, but it's unlikely to be just from a just statistical standpoint, it is unlikely we found the direct ancestor of all living birds. So that's kind of one reason we don't like to talk about ancestors and missing links as much, just kind of statistically. But yeah, I don't know. It's just kind of a yeah, you know, certain terminology just kind of goes in and out of fashion. Living fossil used to be a terminal term that was pretty popular and people like to talk about living fossils. And then, you know, people would kind of say, well, you know, everything evolves, so it's not really like it stopped evolving, which is technically true, but a bit pedantic, in the sense that, like, you know, no one would have argued that just like, you know, horseshoe crabs entered stasis for 200 million years and just no evolution has happened. but I think it's fair to say that, you know, they've evolved v relatively little. And in that sense, they are kind of living fossils. Andrew Heacock: One of the so I found you be from your YouTube channel, which is amazing. the content on there is just endlessly fascinating. And one of the videos that is coming to my mind that I've liked so much was one you did on quote unquote early modern humans, but and the diversity morphologically among what we call early modern humans. And I think one of the earlier points you made was, well, what exactly do we mean by anatomically modern? You know, even there, it's like, you know, that term again, it's like, I mean, and how long ago were we talking about? I mean, what is that concept? mean when we're talking about something that's anatomically modern. Nick: Yeah, I I think it's I think that's again, I I hate to be the language police and say you must talk about this word or this word or whatever. but I I think it at the same time, I don't want to get too deep into the weeds of arguing about terminology, but this is a case where if you aren't clear about what your terms mean and how you're de how you're defining them, it can be misleading. What do you mean by modern? I mean, compared to Neanderthals, they're modern, compared to GIMPs, they're modern. compared to us, they exhibit a number of primitive characteristics. It's kind of like glass, half full, glass, half empty. And from a from a phylogenetic or cladistic standpoint, I would define these things as what you call stem humans. Is there's the there's the crown group, which is all all modern humans lead back to a common ancestor living maybe a quarter million years ago. And there's a lineage that leads up to that common ancestor that gives rise to modern living humans, living Homo sapiens. Are these species inside the crown, inside the the group that gives rise to us, this modern radiation, or are they below that modern radiation, what we'd call stem group. And I would my s my hypothesis, it's a testable, it might be right, it might be wrong, but it's a testable hypothesis is a lot of these th the a lot of these hominins they call anatomically modern are in fact stem group Homo sapiens. They're on the line to us, but they're not quite there yet. I just think they they appear too late in the fossil record to be directly ancestral unless we're wrong about a lot of stuff. but yeah, it's just like that's Andrew Heacock: And the how long how far back is that, by the way? Just can you date like where they're appearing? Nick: I mean they I think like the what is like Schull and Kafsa is something like I think like s what is it, seventy, eighty thousand years back to a little over a hundred thousand years, something like that. And that's it's it's roughly It's roughly contemporary with the earliest modern humans known from fossils. Molecular clocks push us back another 50 200,000 years, depending on which molecular clock model you like. And I've been going down that rabbit hole recently. there are molecular clocks that say we could have been around 300,000 years ago. I I have a hunch based on the fossils. We might have had a more recent, more explosive radiation. you know, 250, 200,000, 150,000 years ago. But the reality is we just don't know. But a lot of scenarios, a lot of scenarios suggest that something essentially fully modern, or rather what I'd call crown group Homo sapiens, was around 150,000, 300,000 years ago. And extrapolating backwards from the modern things, we can do ancestral states reconstruction. You take the modern things, extrapolate backwards. I mean, Yeah, you see a bunch of you see a whole village and everybody's everybody's redheaded. You can assume their ancestors is redheaded, right? in the same way you look at modern humans and we have we lack brow ridges, our foreheads are very tall and domed, our our faces are quite short and short and narrow. All of these features are are widespread and nearly universal in modern humans, to the point you can extrapolate backwards and say the the ancestor of modern humans looked modern. It is not impossible we independently lost our brow ridges, but based on what we know of the fossil record, that's probably not what happened. Is if the molecular clocks are right, then around between 150 and 300,000 years ago, there was a lineage of people somewhere and they had no brow ridges. They had these big bulbous foreheads and they looked like us. And, you know, so we're finding if we're finding at the same time, we're finding people that don't have those features that retain the archaic features, they're not part of the ancestral population. They're a side branch that's persisting alongside the more advanced ones. I kind of like kind of like Neanderthals are not ancestral to us, right? Neanderthals don't give rise to us. They're they're Andrew Heacock: Right. They're cousins, right? Yeah. Nick: they're competing side branches. And my the my argument is: in the same way that Neanderthals and Denisovans are competing side branches, we were competing with side branches of archaic Homo sapiens, stem group Homo sapiens were competing with us. So we're not just facing off against other species, but other subspecies of Homo sapiens. And again, this this might be right, it might be wrong. We just kinda need more fossils. But that's kind of my that's kind of my read of it. And again, this is coming at as someone who spent a lot of time trying to like tease apart Tyrannosaurus evolution. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, that's cool that that's cool that the but the same methods are essentially transferable. I'm I'm wondering d from what we know now from genetic studies, I think you were talking about Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: molecular clocks, that kind of comes from that science as well. it does it look like that we competed, we outcompeted them, or did we just kind of like absorb these other STEM groups? Nick: It's a bit tricky. Like I think so the ones in the Middle East, they the Neanderthals probably take them out. They seem to go up to around 60,000, 70,000, and then a wave of Neanderthals comes in. And so it's it's an interesting case where generally speaking, Neanderthals did not fare well against modern Homo sapiens. But in this case, Neanderthals are able to push in against these primitive Homo sapiens, and I suspect. you know, outcompeted them, wiped them out. And then we go in and we kind of we kind of mop up the Neanderthals. so that's the pattern in in Asia and Europe is we these these primitively Homo sapiens seem to have gone extinct before we we expanded outwards. But inside Africa, they were they would have been probably the dominant humans. They would have been you know probably outnumbered Not just modern Homo sapiens, but all other species. The Anderthals were probably never that abundant. Denisovans might have been fairly abundant. You can imagine Southeast Asia supporting a lot of those guys. But Africa, you know, just these plains and woods and savannas, huge numbers of Homo sapiens, but they were these stem group Homo sapiens. And I think as we spread through Africa, we probably wiped them out. We may have interbred, and it may be kind of difficult to recognize that because you're mixing Homo sapiens with Homo sapiens. It's a lot less obvious than when you mix Homo sapiens with something really archaic like Neanderthals. That sticks out. But you might have trouble disentangling where this genetic signal is is kind of like modern archaic Homo sapiens. So I I suspect that I suspect if we ever get any archaic DNA from these guys, we'll probably find evidence of admixture. And but it does look like, you know, they're kind of there in in East Africa, in places like Lake Iasi. There's archaic Homo sapiens, and then right above them, there's modern Homo sapiens. So I suspect just like Neanderthals, I think we kind of came in, competed with them, drove them off, or killed them. hard to prove, but that's my suspicion. We can also show that what's really interesting is these archaic Homo sapiens persisted in North Africa until relatively recently. And I don't really have a name. I call them the Attyrian people because there's these. special spear points called Aterion points that they made. And these Aterion points go up to 20,000 years ago. And then modern Homo sapiens move in and they disappear. And then there's actually actually there's evidence they sur survived until even more recently in East Africa, up until something at least like about 14,000 years ago. So this is like just before the dawn of farming in, you know, up in the hills in Eastern Africa, we have a non-modern human. And they sort of they they outlasted Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homerectus, everybody else. They're kind of like this last little group of holdout holdouts. And I've always kind of wondered, could there be like, you know, some like you know, population hanging on somewhere in the middle of nowhere, like, you know, I you imagine, like, I know, some somewhere in Siberia or the or the or the Tibet, like a little holdout population, Neanderthals or Denisovans. And I think it I think that's kind of sure, it it's it's it's fun to. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, it's well it's I've always thought about like the Yeti like the Yeti myth is kind of almost that. Like you know what mean? Nick: It's fun to think about and the the the you know kind of the the unfun answer is I think that's unlikely is in these environments, these really hostile environments, you need huge ranges to support even a small group of people. You need to be really highly mobile and you need a big territory and you've got a bunch of highly nomadic hunters coming in there and competing. You're you're it's it's not a great place to be a holdout. And probably we would have found, and these places are also pretty well sampled. At least Europe is very well sampled, kind of Eastern Asia is well sampled. It's unlikely there's Neanderthals hanging out there until 5,000 years ago. Africa, on the other hand, is a completely different, a completely different situation. Like huge areas of Africa have not been well explored. we we we've dug the heck out of Europe. All the every there's a lot of universities and museums in Europe, so they've all done field work there. A lot fewer museums and universities in Africa. So there's less field work, less sites have been explored. It's harder to access. you know, you got it bushwhack through jungle. Some of these places are unstables, they're not really great places to work, they don't have a lot of infrastructure. It's very poorly explored, but also because Africa is so much more productive, you can have like an area 100 miles across, can support a viable population of a thousand humans for thousands of years. So if there are any real holdouts, they're gonna be somewhere like either Africa or like Southeast Asia up in the hills. And so, and again, like, you know, this population in Africa goes out around about 14,000 years ago. That's not when they went extinct. That's just when they disappear from the fossil record. And it could be that somewhere further up in the hills, they survived until, I don't know, even the advent of farming or something. in the same way a lot of hunter-gatherer tribes survived until the the Bantu migration, it's it's not inconceivable that there was, you know, until a few thousand years ago, there could have been some. some archaic humans hanging out in Africa. That's I I I don't know. don't know if that's good. I I I wouldn't bet my money on it. I wouldn't you know bet you a million dollars, but I think it's not impossible. Andrew Heacock: Right. But it's it it's a cool thing to think about though. Yeah, that I mean, it's exciting to think that there's still discoveries like that left to be made. one of my favorite I'm a movie buff and one of my favorite Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: series is the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. I don't know if you've ever seen it. there's Nick: Yeah. Yeah, some of it. Andrew Heacock: in in this so in the second film of the trilogy, there's a kraken and it's Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: menacing the pirates. And it you see it's it's a real beast and Davy Jones, who's like a squid man, controls it. And Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: then at the very beginning of the third film. The opening scene is there's a bunch of pirates that are essentially shipwrecked. Their ship is beached up on a on a beach, and there's the dead crack in the carcasses on the beach. Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: And one of the the men walks up to it and then he then they're kind of sad, even though this has been like the menace to them for the whole previous film. And Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: the first mate says to the captain, the world's a little bit smaller today. And the captain says, Nick: Yeah, yeah. Andrew Heacock: No, the world stayed the same, there's just less in it. And so Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: much of what I love about that, that trilogy is that it's about like the magic and adventure of discovery, of things not being, you know, the things unknown to be discovered. So it is cool to think like this is sort of your job. Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Like to go in to go in search of these things and to think about whether those things are still true. It's a cool thing that, you know, to be able to do it's sort of my job now too, because I get to talk to people like you about Nick: It's yeah, it it's so I mean Andrew Heacock: it. Nick: it it's fun and it's a privilege to go out there and and find something that has never been found before. And, you know, to find some dinosaur species we didn't even know existed or a whole subgroup of dinosaurs that we had no idea ever existed. And it's like and it's like it's it's amazing to like, you know, uncover these mysteries, but then like, you know, kinda like the the the amount of the the known and the unknown, like the as the known becomes larger, the unknown becomes smaller and like I mean It wasn't that long like when I was a kid, you know, you'd have T V programs about, you the Loch Nest monster, you know, colossal you know, i colossal octopi, Andrew Heacock: I love those. I did a report in the seventh grade on the Loch Nest Monster. Nick: Yeah. I mean, there's like there's like you know, Arthur C. Clarke had a Andrew Heacock: It was a Nick: a great show on this called Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World. And I liked it because it was like it was not sensationalistic. He took a fairly rational scientific approach to these mystery things like the Bigfoot and the Yeti and stuff like that. And it was like, Yeah, I'll give you about ten percent odds that the Yeti exists and things like that. But it feels like, you know, back when those programs were made in like kind of late 70s, early eighties or whatever. These things were more plausible because we we there's still areas we hadn't really documented all that well. Every you know it wasn't like everybody cared around smartphones all the time. We didn't have satellite, you know, surveillance, we didn't have deep sea, we didn't have dr you know, undersea drones to survey the water. There was like the the unknown was much larger. And the idea of something like a a giant ground sloth surviving the Amazon or Mokili Mimbi, a dinosaur in the Congo, it didn't seem totally crazy. There was just like stuff being found out there all the time, it seemed. And now, after many years, I know it's just kinda like the Loch Ness monster was implausible back in the early nineteen hundreds. But as the photography has gotten better and everybody is carrying around a a high resolution video camera in their pocket at all time, what are the odds that, you know, it just like it it just always evades video? What are the odds? Like nobody out in Canada yes, people do spend a lot more time hiking out in the woods. Like, what are the odds that just like no one's run into Bigfoot and managed to pull out their their smartphone in time? And likewise aliens, like, you know, we had all these alien encounters in the 70s and eighties. And then once people have the technology, you got the you got the smartphone to like kind get a picture of the aliens. All of a sudden the aliens got a little, you know, like it just, I don't know. It's kind of like I I I thought about I thought about doing a talk about the Loch Ness monster and like call the death of mystery. I did well we did we well we we found something pretty cool. We found some plesiosaur bones in the the river system the chem chem beds in Africa which is Cretaceous. So we had like a little and it's freshwater it's a freshwater plesiosaur living alongside Spinosaurus and Carchodonosaurus. And I'm like, well, this is pretty cool. And I as like I mean, one of the implications, I mean, I you know, the Loch Ness monster is supposed to be a freshwater plesiosaur. And and it kind of it was kind of funny how it worked out because like we were writing a press release about the story, and and the the the person in the press office is like, Well, what does a plesiosaur look like? I'm like, Well, the simplest way to describe it for most people just say it looks like the Loch Ness monster. And so I said, you plesiosaurs, yeah, there's the creatures that look like the Lochness monster. And then this kind of little throwaway line at the end, I said, Well, what does the discovery of freshwater plesiosaur say about the Loch Ness monster? And I just kind of like, you know, it's kind of being a bit of a smart ass, or whatever, having a little fun with us. Well, it's plausible on one level. You know, yes, plesiosaurs could live in freshwater, but it's unlikely to survive 65 million years after the asteroid impact. We never found any fossils of them. So I'm just thinking, well, it's kind of fun to think about. And but of course, what the media ran with is the word plausible in close proximity to Loch Ness Monster. take it out of context, edit a bit, and then like scientists say Lochness monster plausible. So I think that got that might have gotten the most press of any story I ever did. maybe it's not the way you want to be. Andrew Heacock: I believe it. I you told me if you did a video called Loch Ness Monster of the Death of Mystery, I bet that would do very well, regardless of knowing what's in it. Like just the title is so provocative. And Nick: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: there is this massive interest. I mean, so when we did our little pre talk before we came on, you saw my my my setup here, and you said Nick: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: it looks like we're gonna be talking about CIA mysteries and things. And it's Nick: Yeah, yeah. Andrew Heacock: funny, that's not really my thing, but there is a what people are calling like crypto archaeology or cryptozoology and like these sort Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: of mysterious esoteric. approaches to like wanting to study the past. That's been I think Nick: Pentagon. The Pentagon, the reason we don't see Loch Ness monster anymore is the Pentagon captured them all. And they have a secret breeding Andrew Heacock: Pentagon man. Yeah, that's it. Nick: facility to weaponize Nessie. And like no I don't know it. Like Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. They were putting missiles on it, you know, and making it do sonar and but only only in this one lake in Scotland. Nick: I could probably sell that movie to Hollywood, I betcha. But like No, I I yeah, it just I guess I kinda Andrew Heacock: You probably could. You probably could. Yeah, I'm a filmmaker. I'd I'd be right there with you. Nick: like, you know, on the one hand I I kinda you know, it's like I don't know. There's that kind of There's that kind of scientific scold where it's like, well, well, Billy, you know, Santa couldn't really exist because he'd have to travel so fast. It Rudolph would burn up in the atmosphere. And it's kind of like, you know, kind of let the kids have their fun. And you know, part of me is like if people, you know, who's it really hurting if people want to believe in the Loch Ness monster? It's nonsense, but like it's kind of harmless nonsense. I don't know. Some people would argue that to the extent we tolerate this sort of nonsense, it just kind of Andrew Heacock: Creates a slippery slope. Nick: pseudoscience proliferates and stuff like that. But you know, I had an interesting thought about it. If you think about like, you know, you know, the the culture that has done the most for science over the past hundred years had the most Nobel prizes and scientific advances and technological advances. You know, the you know the United States has has got all these Nobel prizes and we, you know, developed computers and and you know men on the moon, all this stuff. And and yet Alongside these extraordinary technological and scientific achievements, we have belief in the Loch Ness monster. We have people who believe in angels and ghosts and Bigfoot and all these like crazy nonsense pseudoscience things. alien abductions and you know stuff like that. So it's kind of interesting that like you can make the argument that there's something about pseudoscience, which you know, I hate to be a killjoy. I think the Loch Ness monster is pseudoscience, but You know, it's it's like, I don't know, it's like somehow the United States, which is one of the most pseudoscientific societies in the world, we have all this crazy pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, but we also have the best science. I don't know. Maybe it maybe it takes like a a divert maybe there's some like, you know, a culture that tolerates a huge amount of nonsense is also able to come up with like controversial ideas and is open to thinking about the world in different ways. So I don't know. I mean, a part of me, part of me feels like as a scientist, I should you know, be militant against things like the Loch Ness Monster and you know, like no Billy Santa doesn't exist and Loch Ness Monster is impossible. And part of me is like let people have their fun. If it doesn't hurt anybody, I mean I don't I mean as long as we're not like, you know, teaching Lochness Monster in high school science, you know, who does it hurt? So but yeah, I guess I I feel like there's that thing where like, you it seemed like, you know, again, I was a kid, the Loch N what the the the Bermuda triangle was a big thing. And Andrew Heacock: Right. I remember better report on those. We had a whole in seventh grade, like I remember all of us were assigned mysteries like this. I got the Lac Ness monster, someone else has got Bermuda Triangle. And Nick: Okay. Okay. Andrew Heacock: like, yeah, th those I remember no one's talked about it in years 'cause I guess we have GPS now. Nick: Yeah, we have GPS, we have satellite phones. If you're if your boat starts Andrew Heacock: We don't lose things anymore. Yeah. Nick: you know where you you have you have digital charts. So you've got like a computer plotter and it shows the reefs are and you just plot around them. Boat drives itself, you know exactly where they are. If you don't start taking on water, you call the Coast Guard. It's like and you know the planes have much better navigational systems. So all these you know, the Bermuda Triangle just, you know, coincidentally, you know, these strange anomalies in the space-time continuum just disappeared as soon as we had cell phones. So Yeah, and it's like, I mean, which is great. I mean, I I'm not saying that, like, you know, you know, it'd be a it's a small price to pay to have a have boatloads of tourists go down if it means we have more mystery in the world. No, obviously, like, you know, it's a great thing that people aren't being lost at sea. you know, but yeah, I I don't know. Some days I kind of feel like it is sort of like, you know, it's it's kind of like, you know, every time we find a new dinosaur species or w one less species out there to find, every time we go out in the jungle, it's that much less likely there's something lurking out there we haven't found. And it's kinda yeah, it's kinda a little sad. I I guess we'll always have aliens in theory, like but I mean what what if they did show up? That would be kind of really a bummer. We couldn't we couldn't argue if they exist or not, if if we actually had evidence, I suppose. I don't know. Andrew Heacock: Right. Well, I mean, a lot of people would say that we do have evidence. And I'm I'm a little skeptical that what they're saying is evidence is evidence of aliens coming here. Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I think there's a number of problems from that. But like one of the best one of the best videos you've done, you did a two parter, I think, on the Fermi paradox. can you tell us like what is that? And like it's three parts. Nick: I it's it's it's at three parts and I might go to four. I'm I've I've definitely there's gonna be part four. And I'm thinking I might do it even do a part five or something. no it's it's Andrew Heacock: Keep going. I mean, it's it's so fascinating. It's one of the most important questions in science. The the can you explain what the Fermi paradox and like and you know, essentially what the what the issue is there? Nick: Yeah, so so basically the problem is that like The universe is really old, you write, you know, it's almost 14 billion years old, according to current estimates. And it's really vast. There's something like on the order of 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone. And in the entire just the visible universe, just the stuff we can see, there's on the order of a trillion trillion stars. So there's a huge amount of space out there, lots of stars and probably lots of planets around the stars. And there's been abundant time for life to evolve. So it should have evolved somewhere before Earth. And then you would if given millions of years, even if it emerged a million years before it did on Earth, it would have a million years just spread out through the galaxy and you'd expect, you know, just broadcast from alien civilizations, see an alien space probe on the moon, somebody visiting us, something, maybe a You'd you'd expect there's been a lot of ample opportunity for life to evolve and become widespread and make itself known, but we don't see any evidence of life. Why not? And the the name Fermi Paradox goes back to a discussion that was at lunch at Los Alamos Laboratories in New Mexico. And Enrico Fermi, the the nuclear physicist, was talking with his buddies there. I think I think Teller, the father of the H-Bomb, was of the guys at the table and they're talking about aliens. And Fermi gets really quiet and People kind of start talking about other things, and then Fermi suddenly blurts out. He goes, Where is everybody? And he turns and goes, that's a really good question. They instantly know what he means. He's like, Well, if the universe is so big and it's so old, where is everybody? Why haven't we seen anyone? It's just that that the paradox is like this contradiction between there seems to be an abundant time and opportunity for intelligence to evolve and become widespread, yet we don't see any any evidence of it. And so why is that? And generally, Most explanations fall into one of two classes, I'd argue. I'm not sure if I can think of a third class of explanation, but one explanation says life is abundant, we just don't see it for some reason. It's an apparent absence. And the other says that intelligent life genuinely is rare. And I think that's the simpler hypothesis. It's just like what you see is what you get. We don't see, you know, alien space battles and Dyson spheres and robot swarms or probably really generally is uninhabited for for as far as we can see. And if that is the case, why is that? That and the thing is, like you say, it is, it is one of the most profoundly interesting questions in evolutionary biology, and that, you know, it it tells us it's it it basically says, how likely is it that something like us would evolve or not evolve? Andrew Heacock: Yeah, well, I mean, intelligent life is not all that common on Earth. I mean, if you really think about it. I mean, i guess there's multiple ways to look at it. I mean, if you look at Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: it in terms of individual organisms, there's way more bugs. And even Nick: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: if you just look at it at the species level, I mean, I'm wondering what what other are there any other species that you would say are definitely intelligent other than humans? I think that'd be kind of in enlightening to know. Nick: Well, there there's kinda there's kind of two ways of looking at it. You know, there's I I'd say, you know, cats and dogs have a fair amount of intelligence. But by intelligence, for the purposes of the paradox, intelligence means not just being smart, but some combination of being sufficiently smart to make spacecraft, having tools to make, you know, thumbs and to make tools to make spacecraft, social structures and language that allow us to, you know, travel between stars or communicate with other stars. So by intelligence, I mean an intelligent tool using civilization specifically. So dolphins, even if dolphins are pretty smart, even if you had dolphins evolved to say Einstein level, they'd never have tools. You got flippers. So, you know, but yeah, we're the only species that really comes close to being, we're the only species with a space program. So in that sense, we're rare. And that's only been for the last, like, you know, well, 10,000 years we've even had farming. We've had space travel for less than 100 years. So it's rare in that sense as well. Over the past four billion years, you've only got this tiny little time s time sliver where space travel has become been possible. In terms of abundance, like our biomass, like we outnumber all other terrestrial animals. Like we're human biomass, there's eight billion of us. We we outnumber, you know, wildebeest and lions and elephants and so on and so forth. So in that sense, we're not really rare and we're pretty widespread, and we exert a huge impact on the environment. But yeah, there's only one species. We evolved quite recently. And so yeah, you might not necessarily expect something like us to evolve elsewhere. It's not like if you saw human-like intelligence evolve and civilizations evolve 50 times in Earth's history, you might conclude, okay, intelligence is highly likely, but it doesn't evolve that many times. we we think of flight, powered flight, as being a fairly rare, improbable, difficult adaptation to evolve. Like, Powered flight happens like four times. There's birds, bats, pterodactyls, insects. And yet that's four times more than you know, that's that's far more frequently than something like us has ever evolved. So as difficult as a bird wing is to evolve, it's far more difficult to evolve in, you know, opposable thumbs intelligence. Andrew Heacock: So and and also going back to where we began with like hunting and coordinated hunting, it seems like intelligence is mostly adaptive because we're highly social. Nick: Yeah, I mean there's there's different i intelligence is well, it's a versatile adaptation. So it can evolve for a lot of different reasons. but one thing we tend to see is the species that are really highly intelligent, ourselves, chimpanzees, gorillas, you know, lions, dolphins, parrots, ravens, tend to be highly social. So intelligence tends to tends to track sociality to a high degree. Andrew Heacock: So you know, I as I was thinking, you were talking about like again, it's not just the the Fermi paradox that wants to know about intelligent creatures, it's intelligent creatures that are also trying to explore space. I remember the have you seen the movies Avatar, the Avatar series, any of those? Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. in Avatar, the planet itself is intelligent. They call her Awa, she's the god, but like they have these, the, the, Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: these Avatar species have these things on their hair, these braids that they can Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: they will tie in, and essentially the whole planet is a big neuronal mass. Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: But of course we're not gonna see that it's not extraterrestrial by definition. So like Nick: Yeah. So I mean that that's a potential answer is that like a a certain number of species, like they're you know in Avatar, they're like they're they're basically hunter gatherers. They're like kind of like kind of like plains Indians and but in space and they live in live in harmony with the planet, which I I think is maybe a little simplistic way to look at hunter gatherers. Like they did wipe out the manus. But Andrew Heacock: Sure, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Nick: but basically that there's a scenario in that I if I was gonna do another video on the Fermi paradox, that would you know, probably get into this. You can imagine kind of getting stuck at the hunter-gatherer level, which is all kind of relative. Like if you view progress as a an inherent virtue, as Western civilization does, you'd view that as a bad thing. You kind of get arrested at the hunter-gatherer level. But you know, hunter-gatherers were perfectly happy being hunter-gatherers for a long time. They didn't they didn't choose to be farmers because they they hated hunting and gathering. They just like kind of ran out of game. You know, the populations became too large to subsist on. On what game was left after the megafaunal extinctions. So they kind of shift over to farming, at least certain populations do. And then the the populations that were able to stay hunters and gatherers, like the Plains Indians or the Bushmen in South Africa, or the Hadze Bay in Tanzania, they wanted to stay hunters and gatherers. They actually, you know, when they when they saw farmers coming along, they had no interest in that. It was more fun and less work to be hunters than to be farmers. So they were. You know, the the Bushmen didn't look at the Bantu farmers and say, How can we do that? They're like, we have no interest in that. Let's just keep doing what we're doing. And like, you know, the the Plains Indians fought tooth and nail to remain hunters. And they they they finally surrendered when basically the the you know you know we wiped out the buffalo. you know, we basically wiped out their food base and we made the hunter-gatherer strategy impossible because there was no longer enough buffalo to hunt. And so that's the only reason that finally drove them to settle on on reservations, they had to surrender because otherwise they'd starve. So they they literally the only thing that would that persuaded the Comanche and and Sioux to become, you know, civilized for lack of a better word, was they simply had no option. The option, the alternative is starvation. So, you know, these hunter-gatherers are perfectly happy being hunter-gatherers. And you can't imagine that maybe on other planets, assuming something like a hunter-gatherer lifestyle emerges, that the species kind s gets at that level and never progresses past it, if there isn't a megaphonal extinction, you're kind of just like, yeah, just kind of stay being Neanderthals forever. So that's that's one possible explanation is that, you know, you can get to intelligence and tool use and sociality and you just don't evolve civilization for whatever reason. And there could be a number of reasons to don't get to civilization. Maybe maybe the hunter gatherer lifestyle, whate whatever the alien equivalent of, is sustainable. maybe they lack the resources, just not enough metal or fossil fuels or something. but that's one possible explanation is that intelligence might be more common, relatively common, but the conditions that allow you to get to space flight might be quite rare. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, well, and then there's also I mean, like we have got space flight. We're not going to visit Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: other galaxies, or definitely not other another galaxies, but even other planetary systems. Like that's another order 'cause you got a now you've got physics problems with relativity. You know, Nick: Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I I I kind of I It's been I I read a lot of science fiction back in high school. so I know a little bit about, you know, like kind of like relativity and and yeah, just like I mean, the extraordinary amounts of energy required to s accelerate a spacecraft to anything close to light speed. And so it's it's a non-trivial problem getting just the nearest star system. And if you combine this with something like the rare earth hypothesis that habitable worlds are quite rare, you know, it might be that, you know. The nearest habitable star system isn't like three or four light years away. It might be 300 light years away. It might be 3,000 light years away. And then you'd have to find it. And so it just might not be terribly practical. interstellar travel might be just be very, very difficult. That's one possibility. And I don't know. I I I I'm sympathetic to that point of view, but I've been pretty surprised by how rapidly spaceflight has progressed just in the past ten years. if you looked at kind of the trends in, you know, the price price per pound to orbit. For years it remained very, very high. And kind of looking at that graph, you just kind of assume, okay, well, we're just kind of running it up against basic physical constraints. It's just like physically impossible to get, you know, stuff into orbit cheaply. And it turns out that's not the case. It comes down to it comes down to like, you know, how you your manufacturing technologies and the you know, kind of our kind of the way our our our our defense industry and and space industry is structured is they extract a lot of money from the government makes things very expensive. And so you've got private space things like SpaceX that are allowing us to get to orbit much more cheaply. So I I don't know. I don't really I I I don't know enough about space technology to say what's Andrew Heacock: Well, that speaks to another thing about us that makes us incredible within with intelligence is that we we have market economies. Like this is almost kind of Nick: Yeah, I there they're Andrew Heacock: like a meta intelligence because it just it's it's constantly selecting for the most efficient, lowest cost thing through competition. And so like that's another thing driving all of this. Nick: Yeah, it's like it we we can collaborate, you know, it it's sort of like, you know, for all of its evils, money allows us to collaborate on on a huge scale. You know, get a butt a big pile of money together and all of sudden people can do things like make a rocket. and yeah, so it it's it's Andrew Heacock: And it otherwise has no no utility of its own too. I mean, currency is a thing I've been fascinated by for a long just why we accept that. It's a really useful fiction that, you know, Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: this thing it's really it's not doesn't have value, it's really a proxy for value, but it sort of acts as like a like a conduit for things to happen. Nick: Yeah, it's sort of interesting like the history of money, like You know, the gold, it seems natural that you would hit on gold as a unit of of exchange, but you know, that that happens in the old world, it happens in it happens in the Middle East, happens in China. I don't know if that's independent or they kind of riff off each other or what, but you know, it doesn't really happen the same way in in the new world is they they have gold, but they mostly use it as, you know, as as an ornament in the Aztec or Inca societies. They don't use you really use it as a as a medium of exchange. And the other thing is that the the idea of making standardized units of gold, little discs, that's kind of like the the Lydians come up with that. And like everyone's trying to like, you know, it's really kind of complicated exchanging things because you got gold varying purities and different sizes. And say, okay, we're gonna make the standard unit of gold. And you know, it just becomes very much easier because you're like, okay, well, you know, I got a bushel of wheat for, you know, one piece of gold from these guys. I'm gonna, you know, sell it to you for one piece of gold and piece of solar. And it's just like it becomes much easier to negotiate when you have these kind of standardized units. And, you know, so Lydia became super rich and then that innovation spreads. And offhand, I don't know if the Chinese got their their coins from the West or or independently invented them. But yeah, it's something that never really took off in the same way in in the New World. And that might be partly why their technology their societies just never quite became as advanced and complicated. but yeah, it's a useful innovation and then it allows it allows us to build things like rocket ships and computers. so I don't know, yeah, maybe maybe there's aliens they're stuck in the barter system, they just kinda can't get Andrew Heacock: That's it. Well, I the hunter gatherers don't have d they don't use currency, right? Nick: No, they they engage in in Andrew Heacock: It's really I mean, that's really about tr I guess that f currency facilitates trade between different cultures. Right. I mean, within one culture, if you're only ever dealing with people that are in your culture, you wouldn't necessarily need to standardize a system of exchange, right? Nick: I think I think even within a culture it's helpful. Like even, you know, even within a a country, it dramatically facilitates trade. but yeah, hunter and gatherers, they it's interesting. Like they don't have anything we would recognize as money. They do engage in trade to a degree, but there's not a lot they have to trade. You know, you might like you've got some ostrich eggshell beads, you might, you know, give them to this guy and he gives you some obsidian for tools. They would exchange things like arrowheads, or arrowheads kind of had a bit of a a value in. Certain tribal farming cultures like axes were axes were the closest thing you got to money. Because axes were super useful. So but because axes were highly in demand, if you if you got an axe, you could trade it as any it was highly likely you could find someone to trade your axe for something else you wanted. So, you know, if you had you had some yams, you traded this them, this guy first for an axe, and then you could trade your axe with this guy for some feathers. And because everybody wanted axes, they were the closest thing you came to a unit of exchange. And curiously, in in in kind of Neolithic Europe, they make these giant stone axes. They're sure, you know, it's it's not impossible. They're kind of like that stone money you had in in in Micronesia. But yeah, money is kind of this interesting thing. We kind of take it for granted that like it's just like, you know, but yeah, the the coin coin the the use of gold and silver as a medium of exchange is not something everybody hit on. And then, you know, turning into little discs, standardized units is also kind of a bit of an innovation. And that's sort of an interesting thing when you get into the history of civilization, is a surprising number of major innovations were effectively unique one-off innovations. And it's like the wheel, for example, as best we can tell, the wheel was only ever invented once. And in the New World, they had like little toys, they have like little clay animals and put wheels on them, but they didn't actually have a proper wheel in the sense of like, Andrew Heacock: Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, they're not using them, but I'm wondering like, did they just not have the materials? Nick: Yeah, I don't know. Andrew Heacock: 'Cause it's so useful. You know what I mean? Yeah. Or maybe they didn't have the beast of Nick: Yeah, I mean it's like I mean yeah, I don't know, maybe Andrew Heacock: burden that would be needed that you would need to pull a plow or or something like that. Nick: That that might be part of it is that like the wheel is more useful if you have a cow to you know, a you know, a steer to hook up to your wheel and pull things. And Andrew Heacock: Right, or horses. Right. We horses had gone extinct here, right, by then. Nick: Yeah, I th there's an interesting kind of thing that's like why One one reason why the New World and the Old World went very different directions is they just didn't have the same number of domesticated animals in the new world. And at least part of that goes back to the megafaunal extinctions being more severe there. Is they had horses, multiple species of horses in the new world, and they just were all wiped out. And the horses survived in the old world. yeah, and other just other yeah, camels. They had camels domesticated in the old world, they went extinct in the new world. Well, I guess they had like llamas and guanacos and things like that in South America. But you had a much more severe extinction in the New World. And that might be part of the reason they don't get as many domestic animals. Other things that the you have in the old world you didn't have in the new world is they had dogs quite early on. 20,000 years ago, they don't arrive in the in the new world until 10,000 years ago. And in the Andrew Heacock: Do you think they came with us from Siberia? Nick: No, they they seem to be a later, later thing. Like we're, you know, humans are probably in the new world like 30,000 years ago, and the oldest dogs are only 10,000 years old. So dogs seem to be a fairly recent. They weren't part of the original Beringian migration, as best we can tell. So a lot of the things we associate with Indians, like dogs and bows and arrows, are recent imports over Beringia. yeah, so but yeah, like another thing is like the there are these things they found out in the Middle East called desert kites. And then like they have the square, and then it's got these two like long streamers, the tail that comes off of it. And they they they started seeing these things when they'd invented aircraft. People are flying over the Middle East, over you know, Mesopotamia and Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, and they'd see these huge stone structures out in the middle of nowhere, and like, what the hell are these things? We now know that are animal traps. These long streamers are these kind of like corrals, they would they would drive a herd of like gazelle or something in there. And the little kind of corral, and there's like a little area in the middle, like a little corral or paddock or something like that, they drive the animals into, and it would have pits in there, and the animals would fall into the pits. And so basically it allows you to capture animals alive. whereas like the the the game drive techniques the Indians used, they would use like fire or drive animals off off of you know, buffalo jumps. It kills all the buffalo. You don't get any live buffalo. but when you have a live capture trap, which you which you had in the old world, You get a lot of live animals. And, you know, maybe that's how domestication started. They just kind of corral the animals, keep them alive. The most docile ones they keep for a while, keep them alive longer so they got fresh meat. And eventually that turns into herding of sheep and cows and and horses and things like that. It's this tradition of of live capture. So maybe that animation, along with the lower extinction rates of megaphon in the old world, leads to all these domesticated animals. And then that has all these knock-on effects at civilization, because domestic animals, they provide labor for ploughing fields, for moving goods. you know, another key thing is that the the contest between agricultural peoples and hunter-gatherers, well, farmers move in and kind of displace hunter-gatherers from all the places that are good for farming. But there's a lot of places that aren't very good for farming, at least not with primitive technology. And those places in the old world, herders take over. So, like the steps of Eurasia are not great places. Traditionally, and back in the Bronze Age, weren't great places for farms. You know, just not a lot of, you know, just these huge open fields, but not a lot of water out there to. And so what displaces the hunter-gatherers, it I think is not the not farmers in these steppe areas, in these drier areas. It's the herder peoples move in, displace hunter-gatherers. so there's this kind of one-two punch. Farmers move in and take over and move out the hunter-gatherers. And the herders, everywhere that's too hostile for farmers, the herders come in and displace all them. So in the old world, you have basically almost complete replacement of hunter-gatherers north of the Sahara. You lose the hunter-gatherers all through North Africa, all through Europe, all of Asia, up into like, you know, maybe just the northern Siberia is the only places where herding and farming are too difficult. Whereas in the new world, where you don't really have herder cultures, you don't have the equivalent of the Amnaya herding, you know, cattle and sheep, you have the persistence of hunter-gatherers over huge areas. And that's why cultures like the Plains Indians are able to survive, is you just didn't have these herder cultures. So that might partly be one reason why that the evolution of civilization takes a different course in the New World is they just don't have the domestic animals that allow the herder people to displace hunter-gatherers and also facilitate long distance trade. Andrew Heacock: And so and then as a result of that, they kind of have over hunted the megafauna. Nick: I the megafaunal I think the megafaunal extinctions come before that. They might help drive that. The lack of the lack of domestic. Andrew Heacock: Okay. Okay. And that that was independent of people? Nick: That's I mean, that's that's a separate question, though, is like why are the megafauna extinctions more severe in North America? And I don't really have a good answer for that. I mean, it it's not impossible that you know, in in the Americas, they'd only been the animals only had about 20,000 years get loose to humans. Whereas in the old world, They'd been dealing with Neanderthals and Homo erectus for a couple of million years. So them the animals may have kind of slowly gotten wise to humans in a way that made the extinctions less severe in the old world. And the new world they just didn't have as much time to adapt. And so maybe that's why the extinctions are more severe. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, right. It was just kind of a shock to the to the e ecosystem to have these basically we're just like the apex predator of the world at that point. So when we move in, that's Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: gonna disrupt everything, I imagine. Nick: Yeah, I mean that's one possibility. I don't know, it's a complex problem. Like I mean, part of the problem with all these things is, you know, all these I'm I'm reading like, you know, this this book by David Raupe kind of talks about mass extinctions. And he he says if you want to study mass extinctions, you want to study a ta a group of species that has like a fairly high number of species going extinct and a fairly high number of species surviving. And clams are relatively good. You know, you've got hundreds of species of clams and most of them go extinct, but dozens of them survive. And so you can kind of look for characteristics the survivors share. You have dozens of examples of survivors. And so you can you can find patterns, you can generalize. But when you have like a unique one off event, it's like you have Maybe three bird species survive the asteroid. And you know, it's just not a it's it's it's you might try to identify something they all share, but you know, it's without a large number of species to it's hard to make sure that hypothesis is it's hard to generalize from a low sample size, n equals three. And with something like humans, you have like these events, you know. If we had a thousand continents and we could study the mass extinctions on all the different continents and say, okay, on this one we had this level of extinction, on this level, that level of extinction, we could tease apart patterns and say, okay, in more severe extinctions associated with this, and in the 10 most severe extinctions, they all show this this feature. And the least severe extinctions, they all show this. But what we have is we have like, you know, what, like six different continents, because you can't really count out count to Antarctica. It it's not a lot of really like independent observations. We're trying to generalize off very small sample sizes. And so it's really hard to say what made North America different. Why are the extinctions so severe? You can think of a number of different things. You could talk about the amount of time people were there, you could look at the geography, you could go look at the climate, you could maybe say it's something about the fauna. But there's probably a lot of different explanations because we just don't have. I know, I just don't know if we have enough sample size to to tell these th I'm not saying we shouldn't think about it, but it's kinda hard to generalize. Andrew Heacock: Right, right. I've been thinking about you mentioned the rare earth hypothesis. I'd I'd like to go back to that. yeah, the that's basically the just saying that from what the planets we are discovering, most of them seem to be gas giants. and so it's just the idea that like you're looking for something that has earth like characteristics of being rocky and in a habitable zone. One of the questions Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I've had for a long time is I imagine if there's I'm sure there's life everywhere. That would be my guess. There's there's bacterial grade life all throughout the universe. I could be wrong about that, but that that seems way easier to get to than intelligent life. But even if there was, I assume a lot of it would be on moons, not just planets. Is the rare Earth hypothesis, does it account for moons as well? Nick: So first off, I think part of part of the gas giant thing is partly a detection bias. Like bigger planets are easier to see just using any method. Like if they're if they're passing in front of the star and dimming it, the bigger planets have a bigger dimming effect. we also kind of look at the tug of the planet on its sun and it creates a wobble, and that's larger for the bigger planets. So there's Andrew Heacock: Bigger planet, bigger tug. Yeah, yeah. Nick: a bigger bias, there's a big bias in favor of larger planets. That being said, Like even if you look at the smaller planets, what's just really striking is very few of them look like ours. Like ours just looks like an outlier in multiple ways. So I think the the where Earth hypothesis argues that Earth is unusual. And we talk a lot about the Goldilocks zone, the I gotta be the right distance from the sun, and optimizing for that. And so a lot of a lot of what NASA does is look for planets in the habitable zone, not so far away they freeze, not so close that they they boil. But you can come up with a number of other criteria, other things that kind of make Earth habitable. So there's the size of the planet. If it's too too big, it just has a super dense atmosphere. It's too small, no atmosphere. there's the size of the sun. If the sun is too big, it burns very rapidly. There's the inc intense pressure at the core, accelerates fusion exponentially, and it burns out in like 20 million years. So you have to be small enough that your stun doesn't burn out before life and all its intelligence. But if it's too small, then it it's unstable and flickers. And you can kind of keep going and going and going like this. It turns out plague tectonics are important for recycling minerals. They also have you also help kind of regulate the climate. So you can identify something like a dozen different characteristics that Earth has to contribute to habitability. And it looks like if you remove any single one of those, it fails the test. And so Earth's habitability isn't due to one single variable, but this intersection of multiple variables. Now, I'm not saying that the only way to make it a planet habitable is like ours. But what it does seem to imply is that even though there might be different models of habitability, like you can't imagine, say, moons around a gas giant, you still have you still have to like tick a lot of it might be ticking the boxes a slight different way, but that moon still has to be large enough to hold an atmosphere. It still has to be close enough to the sun to get enough sun and be habitable. It still has to have a magnetic field, which may the gas giant would provide that. it still probably needs plate tectonics to recycle minerals so that all the minerals don't end up at the bottom of the sea due to erosion. And so it probably, I suspect I could be wrong, but I I think it's well, I mean, you can just kind of look around our solar system. Like there's there's the worlds of our solar system are incredibly diverse. they have some of them or rotate backwards, some rotate very slowly, some are Have very little orbital inclinations, some are tilted over 90 degrees, some are close to the sun, some further away, they vary in their composition. They vary in all these different ways, but none of those are are the only one that comes remotely close to being habitable is Mars. So it seems like there's just a lot more ways to make dead planets than live ones. And Andrew Heacock: When you say remotely close to habitable, I mean are you basically just saying stable? Like the environment is stable enough? Nick: Well that that's another characteristic is it's it's not only gotta it's not only gotta tick all these boxes in terms of habitability, be the right distance from the sun and the right size and plate tectonics, those things have to stay that way for long enough for life to evolve intelligence. it you know, if if if for example plate tectonics is active early on, but then it stops, like let's say just There's not enough uranium in the core. The uranium undergoes radioactive decay. You run out of nuclear fuel. the core cools, the the plates lock up. Well, that's kind of game over for habitability on a couple of different levels. Is one thing is that the you know, all your all your minerals kind of just weather and go into the bottom of the sea, like your iron and your phosphorus and whatnot. So you're you're kind of with these seas that are kind of very sterile because all the minerals are at the bottom of the sea. the plant the the continents would erode away, so you wouldn't have anywhere to put a city. Because just erosion slowly level the continents. You have a raw water world. And another thing is that the the the there's this kind of complex interplay between volcanic eruptions and erosion that kind of regulates carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's it it's crazy technical. It's this thing called the silicate carbonate cycle. but basically, volcanic eruptions put CO2 in the atmosphere, which helps that greenhouse effect keep helps keep the plant from getting too cold. And then the the buildup, if the CO2 becomes too If it becomes too much CO2 in the atmosphere and the temperature goes up, accelerated erosion starts pulling it out and scrubbing it out of the atmosphere. The high temperatures, the high concentrations, the CO2 reacts with the rocks, creates carbonates, the carbonates become calcium carbonate in the seafloor and pulls it back out. And so this is kind of complex like this. It's like a it's like the climate control of a spacecraft or a space station that our ecosystem naturally does. It's all powered by plate tectonics. And so if your plate tectonics shuts down, you you can't you can't scrub this car, you can't inject more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. it would get scrubbed out, and I guess you would probably freeze over, maybe, or I don't know. But it gets very or or it maybe go the other way, instead of put too carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and no way to remove it. And so basically this this kind of mechanism that can mech that regulates your climate, it doesn't just have to form, it has to remain functional for four billion years. And you have to remain the right distance from the sun for four billion years. So one thing we kind of don't, you don't might not think about, but like the habitable zone isn't static. It it changes. Because over time, over time the sun gets brighter. The sun was about, you know, something like at the ear at the start of the solar system, the sun was like something like 10 or 20% as bright as it is today. And over time it's gotten brighter and brighter and brighter. So what that means is that the habitable zone is moving outwards slowly over billions of years. And Earth has been in the habitable zone for four billion years, but you can imagine if we formed just a little closer in, as the habitable zone moved outwards, we might now be outside the habitable zone. So that could also, yes, you have all these different variables, all these different boxes you have to tick, and then it has to like stay that way kind of perfectly balanced for four billion years. Andrew Heacock: Yeah, that's amazing. I'd never actually thought about how, I mean, the the homeostatic the homeostatic st like nature of Earth and how it just sort of auto-regulates its own climate and even life is sort of now part of that. Like biology has sort of plays a regulating effect with carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere. Nick: Yeah. And there there there is this hypothesis called the Gaia hypothesis that basically life promotes life. The as life becomes more sophisticated and diverse and it just basically increases the habitability of a planet over time. And I I think it's it's it's a little kind of hippie, a little bit woo. but it's not totally crazy either, in the sense like, I mean, if you go out to like these tropical islands in the Pacific and you have younger islands that are just rock and then slightly older islands, and over time. things move in. Coral builds up reefs. And then, you know, plants help create soil, which creates more plants. And over time, you go from this highly uninhabitable rock to this beautiful tropical paradise. So life is effectively terraforming these atolls and islands in the Pacific. And you can imagine that a similar process sort of happens on Earth as so for example, as life becomes able to live on land and you have plants, well, that creates all these ecosystems for other things to evolve. You have trees. Now you can have birds and monkeys and insects. And so life begets more life. So you can kind of in this virtuous circle. So you can you can totally imagine this might be a general property of ecosystems and life in general, that as life diversifies, it creates niches for more life, which is just this endless positive feedback loop. On the other hand, It just might be a coincidence in the sense maybe some planets evolved to become more habitable, and other planets become evolved to become less habitable. you know, just kind of a an observer effect. We if there was a planet where life evolved in such a way to make the planet less habitable, we wouldn't exist on that planet to look back through our history and see it. So you Andrew Heacock: Right, right. Of course. Right. Like we're we're looking the observer effect. Yeah, observer bias basically. Yeah. There's a there's a Nick: Yeah, so I don't mean there's like some Andrew Heacock: there's a cartoon, I think it was a far side. Do you remember Gary Larson? You ever seen him? He and for some Nick: Yeah. Yeah yeah. Andrew Heacock: re I I I'm I'm as I've been talking to this, I've been thinking about him. He loved anthropology and paleo anthropology, had all these old, you know Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: bones and stuff. There was one that was it was a puddle and the puddle says, thank God. I'm so glad that God made this hole just the perfect size for me to fit in. Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: You know what I mean? Like it's just like, and so that's kind of what I think about when we think about this problem is like there are all these things because I I think we are probably limited in our imagination for what life could look like. Like it's possible it could just be so radically different that we wouldn't be able to conceive of it. And then the question becomes, will we recognize it as intelligence if we saw it? I Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: mean, I I know one of the things that's been discussed is That life might all n not need to be carbon based, that it could be silicon based. Nick: Yeah, I don't know. Like I I thought about this a bit and I guess I think the observer effects or or you know the anthropic anthropic principle says the if if the world we observe must be habitable for for intelligent life, because if it wasn't, we couldn't be here. So basically it it constrains what's possible. So we we can't look back through our history, for example, and see a sterilizing extinction a billion years ago. Like if if a giant, you know, hundred kilometer wide asteroid hit the surface and just kind of wiped out all complex life, that It's not that that couldn't happen. It's just if it had happened, we wouldn't be here. So we can't see it in our history. And You know, you you look back at like I mean there there's a surprising number of authors who have are were like you know pilots like Joseph Heller, you know, Roald Dahl, Antoine de Sentexuberie, who did the Little Prince. And you know, these guys all have like crashes or no near misses. but if there had been a crash, if you know if Joseph Heller's aircraft had been taken out by German flak. He wouldn't have written the book. And there's probably a number of, you know, great books that were never written because those bombers never came back. So necessarily look back through their history and they're gonna have near misses and not catastrophic misses and not catastrophic hits. And so that that's something that kind of applies to Earth. the other question is whether, you know, how typical we are or aren't of life or intelligent life more generally. And this is where can kind of invoke another another principle, something called the the mediocrity principle. And the mediocrity principle is like, well, we're probably not special. Now you can't take this too far. You can't say, well, the earth probably isn't special. Like, we're here. That constrains Earth to be habitable, which is kind of a special property. But the argument would go is that like imagine imagine we do live in a universe where there's billions of life life forms out there, intelligent life, civilizations. Maybe very, very far away and can't talk to them. But imagine all these aliens. how likely is it that we are exceptional in some way? That we're like, you know, we're probably not smarter than 99% of the aliens out there. we're probably not, you know, we probably are more likely to use the most common chemistry than the most unlikely commas chemistry that we're probably not special, we're probably pretty typical. And of course, it's very difficult to test this idea, but I mean, if you think of there's billions of different, you know, pathways evolving to evolution. You know, there's probably certain pathways are more probable than others. And we're more likely to be one of those probable pathways than the highly improbable ones. And so partly because of that, I think you could Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Again, by definition, yeah. Like it it it's just kind of a regression to like being with the just the odds are we're in the middle of the bell curve. Nick: Yeah, yeah, we're we're probably not like in yeah, we're probably somewhere in the middle. Andrew Heacock: Even among what's exceptional about us, among other things that, you know, among other species that would be exceptional on other planets, we're probably in the middle of the bell curve of those. Yeah, you know. What what about Nick: Yeah, it's like, you know, probably like probably about half the aliens we meet are gonna be less intelligent, half will be super intelligent more than us. I dunno, but Andrew Heacock: Right, right. But if they but the thing is there's also a threshold because if they were less intelligent, we wouldn't meet them unless we got there first. You know, they're not coming here. Nick: That's true. That's true. Yeah. I I think the other argument you can kind of make though is that if you go back and look at like there, I there are things that seem to be kind of historical accidents. It could have gone this way or this way. And you know, it's what they the the Courty effect. It's like we the on my my keyboard here, the you know, Q W E R T Y, like somebody came up with that arrangement, it kept the keys from jamming. That particular model took over the the market. And then then once everyone's trained on that keyboard, it's kind of a a pain in the ass to learn anything else. So everybody adopts that. But it probably could have it probably could have been, you know, other arrangements are about as good. And so you can imagine that in a in a multiverse You know, that there's other keyboard arrangements. You mean there's some some some alternate universe. You go through a dimensional travel to another another timeline, and everything's exactly the same, except the keys are in a slightly different layout. So it it's arbitrary. It's there's no particular reason it has to be that way. now if you look at the chemistry of life, that doesn't seem to be the case. Is every Every element has unique chemical properties as a result of the arrangement of protons and neutrons in the nucleus, and they constrain what you can and can't build. And carbon is just like a super versatile molecule. Like it can form, you know, basic chemistry, it can form four bonds, four singles, a single and a triple, two doubles, one quadruple, etc. So it's super flexible and those bonds are strong as your atom gets larger. The the outer orbitals are more loosely held and the bonds are weaker. It's like silicon can form four bonds, but they're weak bonds. So that's why diamond is super strong and silicon is kind of weak. Like, and then carbon is super common. It's like, you know, one of the most common elements in the universe. And the other one that's really common is oxygen. And, you know, so our kind of carbon-oxygen-based chemistry, it's two of the most common things after hydrogen and helium, they're the most common elements. And then carbon is super versatile, makes strong bonds. And then water is a really good solvent. And so it's like probably not an accident we hit on that chemistry. Which is not to say nothing else is possible, but I think, you know, if we could find like yeah, I I think if we could find like a million Andrew Heacock: just most probable. Yeah. I mean, as well, we got a large numbers problem too, because like if you're trying to narrow the problem down, like that's where you you would start with what's overwhelmingly going to be the most abundant and also the most conducive. Nick: Yeah. So I think I don't my my hunch is I think it's more likely we have we hit on one of more common pathways to intelligence and a common chemistry than an uncommon one. I think I'm not saying nothing else like, you know, something like methane as a solvent is impossible, but I think it's it's I suspect it's, you know, the majority of species probably use a chemistry pretty much like ours. I mean, another thing's really striking is like despite the kind of the variety of shape and complexity of life. It all uses the same basic chemistry. There's something like two dozen different elements. So it's like you know, it's like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfurous, sulfur, you know, nickel, iron, sodium, calcium, like it but on and on. and Yeah, there they're like everything uses that chemistry. Like there's I don't think there's any life form out there that can live without copper, for example. Everything needs phosphorus. everything needs iron. And there's not a lot of like op there there might be a few organisms that use things. I don't know, there's there's some debate about whether silicon's essential, but that that same that basic chemical composition is remarkably stable between bacteria, archaeans, algae, fungi, humans. We all have roughly the same chemical makeup in a broadly similar pattern, and even in very chemically different environments. Like some environments have lots of oxygen, some have no oxygen. Some of these organisms are chemosynthetic, some are photosynthetic, but they see they seem to all use that same basic toolkit. And silicon, for example, is used by almost nothing. I mean, it's used it's used as skeletal components and diatoms, it's used as a defense in, you know, the the silicate granules in in grasses, the phytoliths. certain sponges use silicon silica as the skeleton. But you know, you don't see organisms using silica in their proteins. there was a paper. Did you see that the arsenic life paper a few years back? It it was a big controversy. I want to say about 10 years ago or more. they proposed that this one bacterium was able to replace some of its DNA and use arsenic in place of the f phosphorus or something, or maybe it was a sulfur, but they were. They argue with swapping out some of the elements and using basically a completely alien chemistry that no organism was used known to replace, I want to say phosphorus with arsenic. And it was a big deal because so, like these are the chemical, the chemical building blocks of life. Everything uses them, it's very conserved. And here we found an exception. It's very arsenic-rich lake. This this organism is using a completely different chemical makeup. It's like an alien. And they tried to go back and replicate it, and they they were not able to replicate this. seem to be some sort of artifact or you know they I think the idea was that the the bacteria were growing in an arsenic rich medium without phosphorus, but they'd the bacteria were cheating. They'd they'd sp you know stash some phosphorus away so they're able to keep replicating even even though they didn't have a lot in the environment. so yeah it was like this this idea that like maybe there's this different chemical thing and then it turned out to be wrong. So it looks Who knows? I mean I mean I it's not impossible that on some alien planet they're having a podcast like this and they're saying, Yeah, I I wonder if you could have carbon-based life. No, that's too crazy. It's not impossible, I guess. Andrew Heacock: Right. And it's interesting. And what if they have more silicon based life but they use carbon for their computers? Nick: Yeah, I I don't know. It's like Andrew Heacock: You know, for their for their chips, you know, 'cause they just they didn't have an you they had a little bit. And it this kind of leads me to I've been thinking about computers. Nick: What's the the what's the Rick and Morty where it's like the chairs sit on people or something? Something like that. Like it's just the Andrew Heacock: No, I haven't seen that, but I that's a god, that's that's the perfect that's the perfect series for guys like us. Nick: I I don't know. It's like yeah, it's I I don't know. I I suspect I mean the more Andrew Heacock: The chairs sit on people. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, yeah. Like the podcasts are really in charge and we're just the we're the entertainment. I've been Yeah, yeah. I Nick: let me adjust my person here so I can talk better on this podcast. Andrew Heacock: I've been wanting to ask about you know, so this all kind of gets to another question I've had for a long, long time, which is, you know, I've noticed that you know, we we basically have created our computers to to think like us, basically. Like it's interesting, it's even becoming the lexicon. People will talk about things like, I need to clear my RAM, you know, or my RAM clears at the end of the night instead Nick: Yeah, yeah. Andrew Heacock: of working memory. And I've also and I've thought a lot of the same arguments you're making as what I've thought about why we did it that way. What number one, it's taken like eighty years to build AI just based on how we Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: already work. So it's way easier to do it that way than to think of a completely different way. But I also wonder if we are limited in our ability to imagine different forms of intelligence just because of the architecture of our brain. But I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on like if there is alien intelligence, do you think it's basically the same intelligence that we have, or is there Is it possible that there's completely different ways to be intelligent or plausible? Nick: I mean people have argued, you know, I don't know if you you've seen probably like the meme where it's like this kind of like weird tentacle thing with all the eyes and it's got like this little human mask on the front. that the front end looks human but the back end is like this alien thing. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Nick: it's usually it's a meme that's popular with the Doomers. that like basically this thing you're conversing with is alien and it puts on a human face. And I don't fully understand AI, so I'm not really like qualified to talk on, but as I understand, like the way it operates, you know, like prediction pr predicting sequences of text, like it's it's, you know, it's working in a fundamentally different way than the human mind does. And it's using not these, you know, or you know, neuron networks. It's using Turing machines, which are fundamentally different in how they operate. And so, you know, a lot of people argue that like we've basically we've created aliens. We've created an alien intelligence. And we You know, and it it's agreeable and sometimes a bit sycophantic and it uses the words we use, so and it speaks our language. Literally it speaks in English. So we we tend to project a degree of of consciousness or, you know, assume it's thinking like us, but behind the scenes it's it's not. And even I mean, one little quick little trick is like, you know, yeah, you ask it to count like the number of E's in a letter and it can't do it. It'll like, you know, it'll it'll, you know, it just like it's this There's other yeah, there's other little things I found. Like I've I've really I've found AI is remarkably good at explaining kind of textbook science. If a problem is known and well understood and you just don't know how it works, it's like walk me through this. And it teaches you like a really good teacher. But the moment you get into an area where there's a slight bit of controversy, and some literature says this and some literature says that, and there's some sort of controversy, it really can't reason from first principles. It just kind of goes the consensus and divers to authority. And it's like, well, most scientists say this, so I'm gonna make this argument and can't really process that maybe certain observations don't fit. So I think it reasons in a very different way. I think it it you know, maybe what we're seeing is an illusion of humanity. It's that's kind of it's but I don't know. At the same time, it's like it's a fundamentally different architecture, but it's trained on the stuff that we've produced. It's it's read. I mean, in in some ways it's the ultimate scholar of humanity. It's read Shakespeare, it's read the Bible. It's read you know, it's, I don't know, the this you know, it's the the complete screenplays for breaking bad. It it knows it knows us far better than we know ourselves at some level because it's been trained on the stuff we produced. So yeah, I don't know. In that way, maybe it it uses a different architecture, but kind of funnily thinks like us. You could also make an argument that like for I mean, if these things do start becoming more complex, more intelligent, more cooperative, they might need to replicate something like human morality. That, you know, to survive in a complex cooperative slash competitive system, you might need something like basic ethical principles and the ethical values that human societies share, AI would need those because I mean, I guess if it gets super smart and tries to kill us all and wins, it could work that way if it was evil. But if it Tries to come at us and it's evil but not sufficiently clever to finish the job, we're gonna ax it, right? You know, we're gonna like, there's gonna be a strong selection pressure for us to eliminate the AIs that are trying to eliminate us. So AI might evolve to become highly collaborative and might evolve something. Yeah, maybe certain moral principles, you know, do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Maybe any sufficiently advanced intelligence hits on that as a valid strategy of cooperation. Whether it's an alien or an AI or whatever. Or or maybe not. I mean, most societies throughout history have not believed and do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Genghis Khan certainly didn't. so I don't know. Andrew Heacock: Right. I mean, well, so I remember I don't remember the name of this book, but in high school I read it. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke. And it was Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: the premise of the book was that, you know, it's just on Earth, alien life comes to Earth, like we'd make this discovery and then humans stop reproducing, I think. Do you know the do you know the novel I'm talking about? Nick: Is that Arthur is that childhood's end? Andrew Heacock: Yeah, that's it. Childhood's in. and I think there's there's kind of two different tropes in in media for how we see alien life. I mean, for one thing, there's all these anthropomorphic Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: characteristics. You know, they have a face, you know, they're vertebrates. Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: But they either tend to like be they come here to destroy us and it's like a war of the worlds thing or independence day, or they're like super benevolent species that they've come here to give us Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: to give us life. And it's interesting that again, like they might be moral or immoral and in different circumstances one could be beneficial and one could not. Nick: Yeah, I mean, it's kinda like, you know, incentives dictate the outcomes. And if you have a universe where if you have a universe that rewards cooperative expansion rewards expansion and conquest, you might get species adapted to that. And if you have a universe that rewards cooperation, you get species that, you know, are adapted to that. And you know, our s our own species, are we altruistic and benevolent and cooperative or like you know, genocidal monsters? We've been both at different times. Part of that comes down to the choices we make as a culture, and part of that just comes down to the just comes down to incentives and and possibilities. I mean, Genghis Khan was able to be expansionist because that the environment, the steppe, these broad open plains, lend themselves well to nomadic cultures going out and conquering other people. If he was born in a highly hilly country with lots of little ravines and valleys that are highly defensible, he wouldn't have become a A great warlord like that. So the geography and whether the universe Andrew Heacock: Right. And they needed horses too. Like horses were a big deal for the Mongols. They horses or else they you mean you can travel what twenty times as Nick: Horses horses are a big deal. Andrew Heacock: far per day? Nick: Yeah, I I think I think Jared Diamond was recently arguing that like, you there was just like he he came of age at a time when there were unusually wet climates and just meant there was a lot of horses and lot of people. He he had the horses he needed to do the to do the expansion. If he'd if he'd, you know, emerged in a time of drought, it wouldn't have happened. Yeah. So you you can imagine Andrew Heacock: And there were lot more people for him to kill. Yeah. Nick: kind of like similar scenarios where I don't know what the equivalent of the geography would be for, you know, the galaxy, but you might imagine certain times and certain places in the galaxy might reward expansion. might reward like a Klingon Empire. And maybe other times and places in the galaxy you'd have these, you know, cooperative logical Vulcans taking over and dominating. And it might not be that universally one strategy, you know, the global conquerors or the or the peaceful ambassadors always wins out. It might be, I mean, maybe some galaxies, I mean that's when getting back to the Fermi paradox, maybe in certain galaxies, the the something about the galaxy makes galactic conquest highly viable and you end up with these galactic empires and they just wipe out all your species and one dominates. Maybe though the galaxies, that doesn't happen. you know, you have very different patterns of empire building in in our world that come, you know, people have argued it comes down to geography, that they built big empires in the Middle East because you have these broad open plains where you can use chariots. And it's harder to do that in in more mountainous terrain. You tend to have these fragmented little kingdoms. And maybe something like that could explain aliens. So I mean one thing I think people kind of People kind of act like, all the aliens will converge on this one way of behaving. I think Star Trek does a a decent job of kind of exploring the idea that different aliens just have very different ways to look at the world. You've got your highly logical Vulcans, you've got your warlike Klingons, you have, you know, the society where everyone does whatever the computer tells them to do. And I think that's something, if you want to get into the Fermi paradox, you know, a lot of these explanations say, all aliens are super. pacifists, non-interventionists, and don't want to contact me, but they're all isolationists. Well, humans, human cultures are highly diverse and even a single culture over time switches between more expansionist and more isolationist. Why would you expect that aliens would all behave the same way all the time? And they might just, yeah, this might, you know, certain strategies will work at certain times and places, not other times and other places. And so I presumably, you know, any given alien race would just hit on whatever the viable strategy is. Andrew Heacock: I was gonna ask you about science fiction and wanna get to that in just a second. There's one more question I wanna ask, just pure science. asteroidal impacts. I mean, you mentioned that of what killed the dinosaurs, now we know. what about the Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: prevalence of that happening on our planet? I mean, we're we're sort of fortunate that like it's been sixty five million years since we had a big one, right? Nick: Yeah. It's I mean, it's a really weird event. Like you really have to go back about half a billion years to even find candidates for anything as large as that. So it seems Andrew Heacock: Okay. Nick: to be an extreme outlier event. I I think it's unlikely it happens the next million years, let alone the next thousand or a hundred years. So I mean some people say we need space travel in case there's an asteroid. And it's like, you know, maybe maybe eventually, but you know, we I mean, I'm I'm not necessarily anti-space travel, but it's like it's not like we need the next 10 years. we we can we can take our time, you know. Maybe, maybe in a million maybe we should be off the planet the next million years to be safe. but we have we have time to solve that problem. I don't think it's likely to happen soon. Volcanic eruptions have historically been much more important in driving mass extinctions. but that being said, we also seem to exist at a period where volcanic eruptions have become less frequent than they were 100 million years ago. They they kind of go through go through waves. And the last peak was about a hundred million years ago and when a lot of dinosaurs go out and go extinct. So I don't know. I I think if there is an existential threat, these geological events, they do happen. They are inevitable, but they're inevitable over ten or hundred million year timescales. We don't need to worry about tomorrow. if there is a catastrophic event that's going to happen the next hundred years or thousand years, almost certainly something we create. You know, so you got your rogue AI, you got your superviruses, you've got some sort of environmental catastrophe, maybe an intersection of all those things. But Andrew Heacock: Nuclear war. Yeah, nuclear war. Yeah. What about what but what about the in just in terms of the Fermi paradox? I mean, is it possible that, you know, these these that's another reason why it would make ex like intelligent life less rare because it keeps getting wiped out or wiping itself out? Nick: It could, it could. I've thought about this. I've thought about how to wipe out the entire human species. Not as like a a hobby of mine, but like Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Nick: you see, Mr. Bond, Andrew Heacock: Right. Nick: you know, it's like if you try and think about how that might happen, like you you release a supervirus, even the most lethal virus that kills 90% of people, well, you know, a certain number survive and become immune. you knock down the population density to a certain point, it can't transmit anymore. The virus goes extinct. You know, it's basically a self-limiting process. And you can you can't imagine that maybe a a virus or combination of viruses could knock out 90% of the planet, maybe even 95%, but you can't imagine something get every single human. And then survivors rebuild. likewise, even a nuclear war, even a fairly severe nuclear exchange, I can see something wiping out 50 to 90 percent of the population, but the survivors. You know, maybe the Bushmen survive and they kind of, you know, in over 10,000 years they rebuild civilization. I guess you could maybe imagine we get into a situation where it's hard to rebuild because like all the all the easy oil is gone, but there's a lot of coal out there. So it's hard to it's hard to think of a situation where we could completely wipe out everybody. and if it is if it is like the AI, well, that just kind of kicks the problem down the road in a sense like, okay, the organic intelligence is wiped out by the machine intelligence. Well then the question is, but why aren't we seeing machine civilizations? Why aren't the machines spreading out through the stars or broadcasting? So that's just kind of not necessarily the intelligence goes extinct, it kind of upgrades to to silicon instead. So it's very difficult for me to see a viable self-extinction. Any yeah, even I don't know, like if if you push the environment too far out of whack, our population crashes, the environment covers. It's hard to for me to think of that as the answer to the Fermi paradox, you know, yeah, I could be wrong. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. All right. I've got to ask about some science fiction science fiction, because you mentioned that. are there are there any works of science fiction that stand out as just having particularly good portrayals of alien intelligence or alien life as you would as you would understand it as a scientist? Nick: I thought Larry Nevan in Ringworld does some really creative, interesting things with alien species. Like his puppeteers are very built on a very different body plan. They're not just like aliens with pointy ears. They've got like, you know, multiple heads, their tripods, and they just have a very distinct personality and life cycle. So I think he did some interesting things with alien design. The other, another one that I think was really good is is a Fire Upon the Deep by Werner Vinge. And Vinge does a really good job of not envisioning necessarily like radically different body plans, but like different modes of consciousness. And so one of the aliens is like it's basically like a sentient computer virus, and it spreads throughout this kind of galactic communications network and then kind of, you know, kind of takes over people through their implants and turns them into little puppets. So it's kind of like kind of like the kind of like a viral spreading, kind of like a Borg type thing. and it's kind of like this this computer hive mind. so it's a cyborg, but it's like one one electr one electronic intelligence with like billions of bodies. It's a very different idea of how it Andrew Heacock: It's almost yeah, it's almost like an like ants or like cordyceps was something that came to mind for that. Like Nick: Yeah, yeah. Or imagine like a cordyceps that links all the individual ants together. And so it's Andrew Heacock: Yeah, yeah. Nick: like basically parasitizes humans. And then and the book is kind of about fighting against this intelligence. Then the humans trying to escape this thing, they're trying to develop a countermeasure to it. It's like and and they they encounter these aliens that are kind of stuck at a sort of medieval level. And the aliens are these these vaguely dog-like creatures with kind of prehensile jaws and lips to make tools with. And they have like a pack intelligence, like four or five of them get together, three to five of them work as a team, and each one of them has like fairly low intelligence, but they communicate with each other and they have a collective identity. And so they're kind of like these, like kind of like miniature hive minds or miniature, like a they're like this little committee mind. They're like these kind of like dog-level intelligences that kind of communicate and network, and they they see themselves as one individual share it with multiple bodies. And so it's just kind of a completely different concept of like what an intelligence might look like. so I thought that. Andrew Heacock: Have you seen the series since eight? Nick: No, I have not. Andrew Heacock: It's on Netflix. It's this the word sense and then the number eight. It's made by the Wachowskis who who did the The Matrix. Yeah. Nick: Okay, yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: So they and and the idea of senseate is that it it's essentially something in human evolution reaches a point where all of a sudden eight random people around the planet all of a sudden merge their consciousness. And so Nick: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: they're they're they're eight individuals, but they also share a consciousness. So that's They also they have each other's abilities is one of the cool things. So like one of them knows Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: karate, so now they all know karate. It's a beautifully done series. I mean, it's it's the most expensive thing ever made, Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: I think. And they only had two seasons of it on Netflix. It's really about empathy. but it kind of reminds me of that when you're saying like the the hide mine were like in packs. And so this Nick: There's Andrew Heacock: these eight people are like one person, but but with eight bodies. Nick: There's there's an interesting argument about consciousness that like it's like what we that the the I and the self is to a degree an illusion and what we really are is kind of committee. And like if you think like what's the what's the is it the Pixar movie with the, you know, the different the anger and the inside out joy, it's like that. Andrew Heacock: Inside out. Yeah. That the committee members. Yeah. And that's also how like internal family systems is conceived. And like there's a lot to that idea, I think. Nick: Yeah. So you can you can think of it like that. Yeah, we have all these various, like we have our our creative side, our logical side, our emotional side, these our anger or memories, all these things kind of in this little out of this committee comes this this illusion of I. But then like, why does that committee have to be limited to what's here? You can imagine, like if you're constantly talking to the you're talking to the chat bot or whatever the heck, you know, getting in, you know, or you're interacting with people on the in the out in the community there, like you're the thoughts here are being influenced by this network of ideas, by AIs, by people on social media. And that kind of, you know, it sort of starts making me think a bit of like Vinge's idea of this like, you know, networked intelligence, this AI linking all these individual people. in in in his in in Fire Upon the Deep, there's this single centralized intelligence, hyperintelligence, kind of godlike, malevolent, and everybody is kind of networked through that thing. but what if instead of having a single godlike intelligence, you have flocks and and networks of AIs, and then just kind of the human, the internet, we're all kind of like I don't know. It's like we are, you know, it's like this he creates this interesting picture of a cyborg, a cyborg with multiple organic bodies and one mind. But you could also imagine a cyborg where you've got eight billion bodies, and then you've got like this little device here that kind of links all those bodies. So we're sharing our thoughts, and and and the result seems to be, if you look on the world today, it seems to be driving us insane. so it's like it's kind of it's dystopia like Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Yeah. But it also is a source of of it's a source of cumulative knowledge though. And like we know that that like what we're doing here is it's in the zeitgeist as soon as I publish it. Right. Disinformation Nick: And and and disinformation too. That's the thing. Is we we are the we are the most Andrew Heacock: lasts forever too. Yeah. Nick: we we are the most educated we have access to like you know you have access to like the Shakespeare and Roman and Greek classics and all the novels that've ever been written, all the scientific papers, and you know, and instead we're interested in crazy conspiracy theories. You know, it's like you know, Bigfoot did 9-11. You know, it's like, you know, the government's weaponizing Nessie. Andrew Heacock: yeah. The the the conspiracy theories have mated now. Basically. Yeah. That's Nick: They well it's like it's they Andrew Heacock: kind of the nature of conspiracy though, is that there's a drift. Like you gotta you gotta always be looking for Nick: Yeah, I I mean I think a book Andrew Heacock: the next inside thing that no one knows about. Nick: A book that feels unusually timely. It was written like back in the 1800s, I think, and it's like called Extraordinary Popular Delusions, The Madness of Crowds. And it's just basically this long catalog, just like crazy stuff people believed, like financial manias, witchcraft, alchemy, doomsday prophecy, and just kind of everybody kind of goes mad. These like bonkers ideas. I I think a lot of the doomsday prophecies become unusually common in when the In times of plague, it's kind of weird because you've got the plague, which is kind of the closest we've ever come to the end of the world in a lot of ways. And then people start looking for other ways the world is going to end. And I kind of feel like, you know, well, it it feels more than a little similar to what we've gone through with the coronavirus, is we had this big pandemic, a lot of fear, you know, panic. And then we've just kind of gone since then, just one one panic after another. And maybe AI is that, or maybe it's a real threat. I don't know, but it it seems. Yeah, I don't know. It just seems like the world seems to have gotten a lot crazier as we've gotten able to exchange information. misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, Bigfoot, whatever the heck seems to spread as as rapidly, more rapidly than correct information. So yeah, I don't know. Andrew Heacock: That was a n I'm gonna give you some rapid fire movies. One of the ones you were just describing was is it's an essential part of the movie Everything Over All at Once. Have you seen that? Have you seen the movie? Every Nick: Okay. Haven't seen that one, I'm afraid, sorry. Andrew Heacock: Everything Everywhere All At Once. It won the Best Picture Oscar a few years ago. It's Nick: Yeah. Yeah, okay. Andrew Heacock: a multiverse film, but it essentially like you're in one body, but there's a multitude there's a multiverse, so like there's an unlimited number of views out there, so you can access their Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: consciousness, but there's a and it's a brilliant sci-fi horror comedy action family thriller. Nick: yeah, yeah. Andrew Heacock: One of the most brilliant movies ever made. how about Project Hail Mary? Have you seen that? Nick: I read the book. I haven't seen the movie yet. Andrew Heacock: Read the book. Okay. I'd love I'd love to know your opinion on it. We I I've got a reviews channel. I'm a I'm also an amateur filmmaker. I love movies Nick: Yeah, yeah. Andrew Heacock: and it would be cool for us to watch them in the same movies and just talk about like the sci fi in it. That would be really, really fun. Nick: Yeah, maybe I just I don't know. I just haven't just gotten caught up on these things. I haven't watched as many movies these years. I did read the book. I enjoy it. yeah, I don't know. I it's there's there's I don't know, it just seems Andrew Heacock: Yeah, Peter Weir seems to really understand. I mean, like the the depiction of this this alien organism, Rocky, you know, he's a rock. You know, he basically is just a Nick: Yeah. Yeah. Andrew Heacock: moving rock, like and he would have to move, but it was definitely not humanoid. but it could Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: sort of understand our it had enough pattern recognition to understand our language. And there was this astrophage. there's some interesting ideas in there, you know. Nick: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I read the book. Yeah. It's a neat, it's a neat book. And there's not enough good sci-fi out there. we're as Andrew Heacock: Really. Nick: one of the few people in in recent recently, I kind of work actively working on hard sci-fi, hard sci-fi. yeah, I think Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep was kind of the last gasp in a way of an era. It's kind of one it's space opera, but it also combines elements of, you know, kind of cyberpunk in the sense that everything's sort of networked. And there's just kind of, yeah, there's been sort of a fall off on sci-fi. You know, the there's sort of a golden age of it, you 50s, 60s, 70s, some amazing things being written. Philip K. Dick feels unusually prophetic in a lot of ways, like, you know, which is interesting, he's writing in the 70s, but like I think kind of his thesis is that the the final frontier isn't out there, it's kind of up here, which feels his Andrew Heacock: Yeah. Yeah. Nick: stuff ages aged pretty well. it's kind of too bad. Andrew Heacock: Cool. Yeah. Nick: Like there's you know, the thing is the stuff I was reading growing up in high school. Andrew Heacock: Philip K. Dick wrote wrote the source material for Blade Runner, right? Why do why do we do robots dream of electric sheep? I think is what it was called. Nick: Yeah, he did, you know, a bun he had a number of things. Yes, he had Android Stream of Electric Sheep. He also did like the the short story that became Total Recall. a number Andrew Heacock: Mm. Nick: of other ones. I think Screamers might be based on one of his. And so none of them are super faithful adaptations because he's a difficult guy to adapt. But but the other thing is like a lot of the great space opera, you know. When they wrote it, the novel was the only way to make these worlds come alive. You know, use your imagination because you couldn't like special effects of the day were too limited to create something, these crazy aliens and these crazy worlds and things like that. But now now we can make movies like a movie like you know Ring World would be a really interesting one to adapt for the film. you know, some some of the some of the authors' views are a little bit, you know, not politically correct these days. You have to update that a bit probably to get it made, but it's just a cool story and that it's just like visually it's like you know, it's like it's about this, you know, this this bigger than worlds, you know, pl superstructure, the alien megastructure that these this team of humans and aliens have to explore and they crash land on it. That's a pretty cool one. rendezvous with Rama, which I think they're actually making. but we're finally at the point where they can make a rendezvous with Rama. And it's it's it's kind of it's another Arthur C. Clarke alien encounter thing, but it's the type of thing they 2001 just doesn't have a lot going on visually in comparison, whereas Rendezvous with Rama is this elaborate world and it's got these alien kind of robot organic creatures, and there's these alien seas, and it's this very elaborate, detailed world that you know you couldn't you couldn't make until maybe 10 or 20 years ago we had the technology. So it'd be neat to see. I mean, given especially that something like Hail Mary has done well, it seems like they should be mining this this hard sci-fi and some this older sci-fi. you know, I don't know, I mean but Dun Dune has done well. Andrew Heacock: I think also the Dune trilogy has done the the at least the first two have done well. Have you have you seen them and did you like them? Nick: I I've seen, you know, I I saw the original Dune. I saw the I think I've seen the first and second of the new trilogy. you know, I I think they're good. I I think it I it's kind of complex. I think that the original David Lynch Dune, it's just so weird. And the Baron in that one is such a good villain. He's so just his over this top, cackling, you know. It's kind of a melodramatic villain, but it's like he's just He does a great job and it's just kind of I have I kind of have a soft spot for that one. That's like one of the weirdest sci-fi movies I've ever seen. It kind of captures, it makes it feel very alien, whereas the current Dune feels more modern in a way. the Ornithopters better at all. It's it visually it's pretty spectacular. yeah, and I I don't know. Like Dune's an interesting one. It's almost more like fantasy in a way. Andrew Heacock: David Lynch's Dune feels like you're on spice the whole time. Nick: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's which is that's a very good description. Andrew Heacock: You know what I mean? Like there's a sense of like a f drug in drug fueled fever dream sort of happening and you're like where there like there's a dream logic, which David Lynch always does did. Nick: Yeah. I I think which, you know, yeah, it's like you it's like the which I think it's not exact it doesn't c exactly capture the feel of the original book, but like definitely it just like this is a very weird world that it just doesn't operate according to our ideas of morality or, you know, some of its very old fashioned ideas of, you know, that's one thing is that like, you know, I I didn't kind of like about the new one is there's this thing, this this Paul Atreides thing, like, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. And it's kind of like, which is very modern. whereas in the origin in the novel, it's like there's there's never any question in Paul's mind that he is going to be, that he is gonna take over from his father, the Duke. That he's been raised since the young age, this idea of duty Andrew Heacock: Kind of arrogant to think that you get to decide what you're gonna do. Nick: and honor, and it's kind of implicit. And I think, you know, look, I'm not saying I necessarily think that's the best way in the world to look at the world, but it feel it it feels like, this kind of modern Western sensibility of like, you know, like it's like, Dad, I don't know if wanna be a Daduke or backpack across Europe kind of thing. Like that feels really like a very modern problem. And I I like the fact that Andrew Heacock: It's kinda arrogant, right? To think that we get to decide what we want to do with our lives. You know, it's not not how it's been for most of Nick: No, well, I don't. I'm just saying, I'm just saying I'm saying as an element of world building. I'm not saying that like I I I like the idea of being able to decide what I want to do with my life, but I'm just saying that this alien world of basically kind of this neo-feudalist society of people fighting with swords and shields and spice empires and intrigue, that like the idea that Paul has from a young age decided and is he's never questioned becoming duke. I think that just make that that feels more it feels more authentic to the world for me. So I feel in that sense that like, you know, I think kind of it kind of pulls it breaks the immersion. you know, that the in the I think that was just one, I don't know, it's just one element. It's it's a it's a good adaptation. Visually, I think the is a great director. and yeah, and I wish like, I wish it seems like there's clearly between Project Hail Mary and Dune, there's a market for sci-fi. They should do more of that stuff. That seems like kind of a financial no-brainer. And there's a lot of great sci-fi out there. and probably some things, I don't know. I don't know why you have to go back and look and see. There might be like some forgotten gems or you know, I th I thought a great one they did is they they the the remake of Battlestar Galactica. you know, if if you remake a classic, it can only go downhill. But the original Battlestar Galactic was kind of cheesy but had some kind of cool ideas to it. And the remake is just like really good sci-fi. So I don't know, I think there's a there's a niche out there for it. Andrew Heacock: Okay, I got last one to ask you about same director as Dune, Nick: Okay. Andrew Heacock: Denny Villeneuve, he made Arrival. Did you see that? Nick: Yeah, I did. Andrew Heacock: What did you think of it? Nick: Yeah, I mean it's yeah, it's a it's a neat one. It's an interesting yeah, he does like an i he's he's a very visually interesting director and kinda, you know, yeah, yeah, creates interesting creates interesting spaces and scenes. And I think, yeah, I think in terms of his visuals, I think he's unparalleled and kind of creating these cinematic worlds. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. What about the alien life? I mean, like Sapir Wharf hypothesis. I was sitting there in the first few minutes, I'm like, this kind of reminds me of Sapir Wharf. And then I realized, that's what this movie is about. Like that's that you would and it was interesting that you would Nick: What is the Sepier Wharf hypothesis again? Andrew Heacock: Yeah, the Sapir Wharf I in psycholinguistics, the idea is it's called linguistic determinism, that it's not the mind that creates your language. It's the language you speak will determine the architecture of your mind. And so by essentially the idea, it's just kind of at the to skirt around Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: the the plot, spoilers, in that movie, by learning an alien's Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: language your began Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: to your mind takes on their capacities. and so one of the ways that like and and that's like Sapier, I think Warf observed, is that certain cultures don't have words for they don't have verb tenses for past and future. Nick: Yeah. Andrew Heacock: and so the idea was, well, can they conceive of the future and in the past? Or are they always living in the present moment? So it just kind of raised this interesting possibility that like your language is actually what shapes your brain and not the other way around. I think that's largely been disfavored by linguists, but Nick: Yeah, I don't know. Like I I mean there Andrew Heacock: it was cool to see it in film. Nick: It's interesting to think about like, you know, one way in which language kind of creates our reality is like time and space and and distance and you know these you know like African hunter-gatherers don't have originally did not have words for numbers higher than three. so you can't really indicate things and you you think of s and you can't like you think of like an empire, you know, you've got like a Roman century, you know, you know, you've got to be you have thousands of guys, you gotta be able to count them and organize them. And you've got your your century of 80 soldiers. You have to be able to count to 80. And those 80 groups of 80 soldiers make up a a a legion of 5,000. And then you've got you've got to be able to count to to create that grouping. And then you want to march them 20 leagues to go take out this other city. And then you need like, you know, a hundred wagons of of grain to feed your army, whatever. But you have to have this ability to like count things and and yeah, maybe, you you need a campaign of you know. 100 days or whatever in the field, and a calendar to plan these things. And these early societies lacked any of this. So there is like this infrastructure of numbers, calendars, time, mathematics, units of distance and weight that we can describe our world very accurately that we've developed. so I think there's there's something to it maybe. but yeah, I don't know. It's it's an interesting thought. But like, yeah, like the these hunter-gatherer societies, they They don't have birthdays because they have no calendar. And they don't know how old they are because they have no way to count the passing of the years. And it's like, yo, I was born in the year of the flood a long time ago. and so it is kind of like a a sort of I don't know if timelessness is exactly right, but there's a different conception of time and space when you just don't have words to think about something. So it's it's nursing thought. And I have kind of wondered to what extent, like our does our language influence how we see the world, The languages spoken by the West are Indo-European languages. In the Indo-Europeans, the Omnaya were steppe conquerors. They were like the Mongols before the Mongols. The Mongols got their whole, you know, step step nomad conquest thing from the Omnaya. And elements of their language carry over into our language and probably subtly influence how we think and their their values and mythology as well. So You know, does that help explain why the West went on to conquer the world? Well, maybe, because it's kind of part of our our cultural DNA as step herders and conquerors who ride out, you know, kill a bunch of people, enslave the survivors. you could see how that might kind of just kind of flavor and and color how we see the world if our language and culture comes out of that, for better and for worse. You know, we're kind of explorers and conquerors. I don't know. but yeah, it's an interesting idea. Andrew Heacock: Yeah. So I've had I've had the most fun talking with you. This has been great. we could have a whole separate series on just doing mus movie reviews, Nick: Yeah, likewise. Andrew Heacock: I'm sure. that would be great. I've really loved watching the content on your channel. I'm just like it's an automatic for me. I've got subscribed and hit the bell. because it's just, I mean, they're like lectures, like you know, it's the kind of lectures you would people pay good money to go to college to see, but they're also it's like an a it's a podcast too as well. So it's it's a really cool thing. I'm glad to see it's been going really well for you. Nick: Well thanks, Sam. I'm glad you like glad you appreciate it. So thanks for inviting me. Andrew Heacock: Okay, thanks so much.