Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Is Planet Earth Alive?” with Ferris Jabr

Transcript

“Is Planet Earth Alive?” with Ferris Jabr · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
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  Here's a dangerous idea for it.
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  How about we stop just for one damn cotton-picking moment talking about politics and democracy
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  and the election and the future of civilization and the war in the Middle East and Ukraine
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  and blah, blah, blah, and talk about something that really, really matters and is actually
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  uplifting and awe-inspiring.
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  I loved this conversation.
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  This is a conversation predicated on what is a dangerous idea, which is that idea that
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  you might have had when you find yourself in the middle of a natural environment that
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  is kind of spooky, like you might be standing in a desert or a rainforest or somewhere where
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  you can just kind of hear and feel the hum of life going on around you.
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  And you know that feeling where you go like, huh, is this environment sort of alive in
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  some way?
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  Is it like, is it buzzing with something kind of teeming with something, is this sort of sense
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  of eariness or maybe even transcendence that you can sometimes get in natural environments?
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  That's what I wanted to interrogate with Ferris J.B.A. who is a journalist and a scientist
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  a biologist, he got his journalism degree at New York University, he got his science
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  degree at Tufts University, and he's a brilliant writer and think about the natural world.
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  He's been a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine for Scientific American,
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  he's been published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Harpers, National Geographic, wide,
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  the Los Angeles Review of Books everywhere, but his latest contribution is about the idea
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  that the way that life expresses itself on planet Earth actually makes planet Earth alive.
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  Like there's not a new idea, or when I was in my teens I read the classic book Gaia, which
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  is a kind of 1970s, like hippie biologists attempt to argue that planet Earth is actually
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  a gigantic living organism, and that was part of the, I don't know, woodstocky kind of wave
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  of psychedelic group love for all things planet Earth.
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  This is not that, this is actually a more rigorous sort of scientific analysis of the ways
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  in which life and geology intersect on the planet.
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  If you like listening to a couple of, you know, brainy, nerdy guys geeking out about
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  stuff, this will be the cut of your jib, we talk about climate change and geoengineering
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  and you know how we might fix it by spraying sulfur into the atmosphere, we talk about
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  God and agnosticism and the purpose of the cosmos, I just feel like this is a great
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  antidote to too much bad news and too much same, same news, you know, the last thing that
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  I ever wanted this show to become was some kind of, you know, cancel culture, peers more
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  going to attempt to always be banging on about how terrible the far right and the far left
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  are.
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  So please enjoy this respite as much as I did with Ferris.
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  His book is Becoming Earth, How Our Planet Came To Life.
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  Read it and enjoy the one and only Ferris J.
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  Have you been to Australia?
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  No, Australia and New Zealand are at the very top of my list for places to go that I
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  have not been to yet, but yeah, I've talked to a lot of scientists that have worked there,
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  you know, and read a lot about the natural spaces and ecosystems.
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  It's fascinating.
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  I mean, so before we ask whether the planet is alive, which is kind of what I'm interested
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  in, we should probably ask what it means to be alive, like what is what is life?
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  Yeah, so despite life being this phenomenon that is obsessed scientists, you know, for
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  centuries, we still don't have a consensus definition within science of what life is.
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  So if you open up a textbook today, you will not find a succinct definition or an
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  equation.
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  You'll just get a long list of criteria that supposedly distinguish things that are
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  inanimate for things that are animate.
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  And so there's still a lot of debate and discussion about what it means to be alive.
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  I settled on a version of a definite, you know, sort of a working definition that a lot
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  of experts have favored in the past century, which is that life is a system that actively
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  sustains itself.
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  So living things do something to keep themselves alive, which is different from most stuff
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  in the world, you know, like a rock doesn't do anything to preserve itself.
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  If you give it enough time, you know, the elements will erode a rock into it, you know,
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  its components, but living systems are different.
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  They're continually doing something active to preserve the way that they are, you know,
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  to preserve their state of being raw.
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  So that's a change the way that they are, I mean, in terms of growing at least.
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  Yeah, living things do change all the time.
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  So it's a dynamic equilibrium that they're maintaining.
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  And how do you contrast the growth of a living thing like my children growing up from
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  a rock eroding like they're both changing?
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  Right.
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  What what what living things are doing is they're preserving themselves as cohesive
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  entities, right?
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  So a human, a child, you know, they remain a cohesive entity through time, like they're
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  still recognizable as an individual.
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  So you know, everything our bodies are doing are metabolism or physiology, homeostasis.
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  These are the things we're doing to keep the human body intact, right?
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  And when like that's, that's why when we die, we decompose because we've stopped doing
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  all those things that keep us, you know, the way that we are.
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  Right.
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  It's a daily fight against attrition and decay and entropy and why would a river or a whirlpool
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  not fit that because they're also doing, I guess they're not, I mean, obviously I'm taking
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  what we're parking volition and consciousness and sentience here, right?
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  To try to get our heads around the ways in which systems that we don't normally think
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  of as being alive might be alive like a planet.
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  So parking the fact that I don't think that a river is conscious is a river doing, I
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  mean, would a river be alive?
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  That's a great question and that's something that philosophers and scientists and even legal
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  scholars are debating right now, you know, within the context of giving a legal personhood
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  rights to rivers and forests and other, you know, ecosystems that are not typically thought
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  of that.
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  Right.
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  But that's not going to be scientific.
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  I mean, let's maybe we should make a distinction and this is all a big side track before
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  we get to the big question, but I think it's interesting anyway between a river that has
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  life in it and a river that doesn't have life in it.
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  Like if you had an, if you had an estuary that was devoid of life, but it operated in
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  ways that sustained its estuariness through the tides and whatever, wouldn't that satisfy
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  the definition you gave me earlier of life?
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  Well, I think that sounds wrong.
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  Living things, you know, I think living things, they actively use energy.
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  They're doing something to acquire energy in order to maintain themselves.
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  And I think if we look at all forms of life, you know, from the cell, to the organism,
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  to the ecosystem, to the planet, they're all doing that, you know, they're all taking
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  an energy in some way and then using that energy to maintain themselves, a river on its
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  own, you know, a river devoid of life on its own, I'm not sure that it's doing that,
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  but it could be part of an ecosystem, you know, that is doing that to something.
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  I mean, it might be taking, it might be taking energy in from, I guess, you know, suppose
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  that the river is being fed by melting ice or something like that.
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  It's taking that energy and it's distributing it through the river system, but you're right
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  that it's then not doing, it's not harnessing the energy to do something with it.
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  Yeah, I like that.
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  Okay.
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  That's a cool definition.
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  What about the planet Earth alive?
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  I came to the conclusion that it is in the course of writing this book and I think the
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  first step to realizing this is to, you know, to realize that life is not just something
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  that exists on the surface of the planet, that you can't separate life from the planet,
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  that life is a literal physical extension of the planet, it's an outgrowth of the planet.
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  So when you come to see all the life on the planet, you know, all the living tissues out
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  there as literally continuous with Earth, then everything that life is doing is something
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  the planet is itself doing.
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  And by the way, just to clarify, you're not speaking in some metaphorical sense about
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  like our mother planet or something like that, you're talking literally about the geological
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  formation, like any other planet you could talk about Jupiter, you could talk about Saturn
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  or whatever, you're talking about the planet Earth, which is a ball of rock and you're saying
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  that intrinsic to its earthness is life.
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  Yeah, intrinsic to the Earth that we know.
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  So if we go back way back in time, you know, Earth is some 4.54 billion years old.
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  I think in the very beginning, it was a purely geological construct, it was just a rock,
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  there was no life about it, there was no life on it, it was not alive.
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  As soon as life emerged, that is when the planet starts to stir to life itself because
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  if you think about it, the only matter available to become life was the matter of the planet itself.
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  So it was bits and pieces of Earth that were rearranging themselves into the first living
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  systems.
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  So literally, Earth was coming to life.
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  That is what now how I think of the origin of life, whereas traditionally we think of
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  it as this phenomenon that occurred on the planet, but it is really something that is
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  happening to the planet, it's something the planet is doing itself.
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  That's fascinating.
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  That's almost, I mean, if you think about all of the moral controversies that we wrestle
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  with in culture that have to do with euthanasia or that have to do with abortion or things like
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  that, these are all about those gray areas at the border of life, right?
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  You know, when does it, or even, you know, evolution versus creationism, like when does,
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  when does consciousness emerge, when does personhood emerge, you know, is it freshly fertilized,
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  human egg?
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  Does that possess all of the same rights of personhood as a newly newborn baby and so on?
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  And it is interesting to think about the planet, the first stirrings of life on the planet
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  as being a little bit like a sperm and a zoa, fertilizing an egg, like you've got a lot
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  of potential there, but it's obviously not exactly the same thing.
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  Right.
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  And so even in the very beginning, you know, even if bits and pieces of the planet were
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  coming to life, that's very different from the Earth system that we know today where
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  life has been evolving, you know, for billions of years and is now thoroughly integrated with
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  the planet's geology, with its structure and its chemistry and its climate.
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  Yeah.
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  And I just want to make one more distinction before we get into the details of that integration,
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  which is that you make a distinction between what's alive and what is an organism.
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  Why is that salient?
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  Because when this idea was first proposed within Western science as the guy hypothesis,
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  one of the biggest sticking points and contrasts on that guy out, this book, I read it in
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  my teens, blew my mind, thought it was really interesting, you know, but just tell people
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  about Jim Lovelock and what that, and especially the moment that that was entering into in culture.
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  Yeah.
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  So the guy hypothesis was conceived in the 1960s by British scientist James Lovelock, and
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  then it was later developed with American biologist Lynn Margulis.
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  And they proposed that wherever life emerges on a planet, it will inevitably transform
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  that home planet and that together life and a plant in life and the planet form a, you
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  know, larger single living self-regulating system.
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  And so Lovelock would often compare the earth to an organism or even sometimes call the
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  earth an organism or a super organism, an evolutionary biologist like Richard Dawkins and others
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  really did not like that because organisms as we define them are by definition shaped
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  by natural selection, a natural selection requires a population that is reproducing and
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  that is competing, you know, individuals competing in species are competing and that doesn't
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  really apply to planets.
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  You know, we don't have earth as not part of a population of planets that is competing
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  and reproducing with each other.
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  So far as we go.
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  So they did not.
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  Yeah.
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  So far as we go.
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  Yeah, depending on how theoretical and cosmic and philosophical you want to get.
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  So they didn't like this idea of conflating, you know, earth with an organism.
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  And but I think that we don't need to do that, that we need to recognize that life is
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  a phenomenon that happens in multiple scales.
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  You know, it can happen at the scale of the cell.
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  Like the cells in our bodies are not organisms, but we all agree that they're alive.
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  You can happen at the scale of the individual organism and it can also happen at higher
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  scales of populations or ecosystems or even planets.
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  Right.
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  So you could be comprised of living things, but not be an organism.
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  And you could be an organism, conversely, but comprised of mostly not living things.
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  Is that, I mean, in the sense that, you know, you and I are basically skeletons surrounded
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  by mostly water, exactly, neither of which you think I was being alive, right?
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  So why are we?
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  I mean, yeah, I'm not going to go back into why we're alive, because we're doing things
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  that are life like, but I'm just making the point that you could have constituent parts
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  that are dead and be alive and you could also have constituent parts that are organisms
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  rather and not be an organism yourself in the case of planet.
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  Exactly.
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  All complex forms of life are made of inanimate and animate components, mostly inanimate components.
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  Like you're saying, the human body is mostly water by weight and we have a bunch of rock
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  and minerals forming our skeleton.
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  A tree is mostly dead tissue that is just, you know, dead wood that is just laced with
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  thin strips of living cells and tissues, but nobody just agrees that a human individual
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  or a tree is alive and that's the same for ecosystems and planets.
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  You know, they are comprised mostly of inanimate material of rock, water and air, but they're
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  also made of living things and it's the relationships, the connections between those things, that's
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  where the phenomenon of life starts to emerge.
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  Right.
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  So let's go back in time.
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  So living things breathing in and out is what has created the Earth's blue sky.
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  Should we just go back to before that?
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  What did the Earth look like?
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  What would it have looked like to stand on the surface of planet Earth before any living
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  things were converting gases into other gases?
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  So if we go back some, you know, three to four billion years, Earth probably had a hazy
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  orange atmosphere.
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  It was full of carbon dioxide and nitrogen and with no oxygen whatsoever and it was basically
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  a water world.
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  There was a vast, vast ocean and there may have been some islands or maybe some very tiny
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  continents, but not the substantial land masses that we have today.
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  And what's underneath that water?
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  Is it basically just the same stuff we find underneath the oceans today or is there a
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  difference?
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  There was, so beneath the ocean is the oceanic crust which is different in composition
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  from the terrestrial continents, but the sea floor was very different from today because
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  today the sea floor is defined and dominated by the kinds of life that inhabit and that
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  changed it over time.
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  Back then there may have been some microbial mats or maybe not much at all, but there certainly
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  wasn't the kind of life that we have today on the sea floor.
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  No, right.
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  I mean, I'm just talking about the geology of it now before we even get to life, right?
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  Because one of the interesting things that you point out is that even the existence of
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  huge land masses on which land animals were going to be able to evolve on which plant
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  on which terrestrial plants were going to be able to evolve.
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  Like plates, like continental shift, all of that stuff I hadn't realized is actually
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  predicated on life that that's caused not just by geological forces but by living ones.
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  How is that?
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  Yeah, that's one of the most interesting theories and it is, it's a theory, it's not
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  definitively proven this particular point, but the idea is that my ancient microbial life
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  may have been pivotal to the initial formation of the terrestrial continents which are made
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  of granite.
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  And we've only discovered granite and any abundance on our planet, nowhere else in the
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  solar system.
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  And the leading theory is that granite was formed through this melting and subduction and
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  recycling of basalt, which is what forms the oceanic crust.
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  So as the oceanic crust was pushed down into the mantle and melted and then recycled,
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  it formed a less dense material that we call granite and granite being less dense than
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  basalt can float on top of it.
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  And that's how we started to get these exposed land masses building up over time.
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  So ancient microbes inhabiting this crust, they were dissolving it with their metabolic
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  activities and they were hydrating it.
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  They were bringing in these wet clay mineral byproducts and by hydrating the ancient
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  basalt, they were lubricating it and accelerating its subduction and its melting and its recycling
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  into granite.
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  And so some scientific models suggest if it weren't for the presence and activity of these
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  ancient microbes, you know, we wouldn't never have had these substantial continental land
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  masses forming.
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  We've been stuck with very tiny continents.
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  Right.
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  Because everything would have been stuck in one place forever and you wouldn't have had
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  drifting chunks of land.
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  Yeah, you wouldn't have had this accelerated fluid recycling of basalt into granite.
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  So you never would have had the chance for it to build up into the substantial land
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  masses we have today.
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  Would that mean you wouldn't have mountain ranges because you wouldn't have tectonic plates
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  bumping into each other?
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  You wouldn't have, you wouldn't have the extent of land masses we had today.
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  You'd have something more like the Hawaiian islands, like you'd have volcanic islands here
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  and there, but that's very different from the, you know, the giant, like North American
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  and South American continents, right, these massive, massive accumulations of a granite.
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  Right.
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  Is there anything necessary for the evolution of intelligent life in the existence of terrestrial
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  land?
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  That's a great question.
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  Could you have had, could you have had human level intelligence, I suppose it's a hypothetical
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  no one can answer, but you can imagine a, yeah, huh.
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  Well, octopus is show us, yeah, octopus is show us, you can have extreme intelligence
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  in, in aquatic environment, right, because our last common ancestor and with octopuses split
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  off a long time ago, I think more than 500 million years ago or something like that.
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  And yet they evolved completely independently and extremely high intellect, you know,
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  they're, they're incredible problem solvers, they're almost certainly conscious and self-aware.
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  And that happened all completely separately from terrestrial evolution.
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  However, there are some really interesting ideas about what the, you know, the movement
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  onto land allowed for terrestrial life and in particular animal life, because once you
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  get out of the water, you can actually see a lot further, a lot easier because of the way
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  light moves through air versus the water.
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  And so there's this hypothesis, I think it's called the Boena Vista hypothesis, which
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  is the idea that when animals moved onto land, they could see a lot further into the,
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  into the distance and that made a planning a lot more important because they could start
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  to sort of anticipate things a lot better.
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  And so that started to select for higher, you know, cognitive functions related to thinking
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  into the future and planning.
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  And so that would be very much tied to, you know, what, what psychologists call executive
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  functions, you know, like forward thinking, planning and things like that.
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  So there definitely could be a link there for sure.
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  That sounds fascinating.
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  Kind of sort of like bullshit to me a little bit, right, like you could, because you could
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  imagine, you could imagine other forms of long distance or long range perception that
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  were not visual, right, that could be auditory or something.
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  I mean, obviously when we think about smart things in the ocean, my mind goes to dolphins
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  and whales, but the reason I didn't mention them is because they left the ocean and
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  can evolved on land and then move back into the ocean because they're mammals.
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  Right.
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  But you could imagine some kind of, you know, sonar or some other, or like the way that
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  sharks can sense one drop of blood in, you know, so from so many miles away, you could
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  imagine things that could be proxies for seeing long distances on land that could hypothetically
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  evolve in water.
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  Yeah.
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  That's a good point.
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  I think sound actually travels easier through water than it does through air over long distances.
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  So the acoustic communication is really important.
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  But there's another thing you can't have underwater, which is fire.
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  And you know, obviously fire is, you know, integral to human evolutionary history.
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  And it's what kind of liberated us from the energetic constraints that are imposed on
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  most other animals on land.
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  So that couldn't happen underwater.
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  Just explain those energetic constraints.
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  So the idea is that if you cook food, you absorb many more of its calories than if you're
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  restricted to raw foods, you know, cooked foods are much easier to digest.
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  So our body gets more calories per gram of cooked food than it would per gram of raw food
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  of the same food.
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  So when our ancestors learned how to use fire to cook, that coincides with the evolution
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  of our really large dense brains.
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  It basically super juiced our cortical processing power.
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  And we evolved brains with three times the cortical neurons we had previously.
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  And so there are quite a few scientists who think that, you know, the use of fire was
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  very much linked to the human evolution of the human brain and then to our greater intelligence.
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  Right.
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  Brains are incredibly energy hungry.
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  It's almost impossible to get enough calories to feed them.
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  If you're chewing, it's spending all day chewing raw meat because you're digesting it.
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  It takes a lot of energy as well.
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  So cooking is the, it's supposedly the game changer there.
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  I mean, you could imagine, I mean, whales would eat a lot of plankton, wouldn't they?
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  I mean, I suppose they've done a lot of energy digesting them, but you could imagine the,
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  the, the brains, huge brains evolving without fire hypothetically.
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  But I mean, just to pause on fire for a second, you also make the point that half a billion
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  years ago, fire wasn't possible even on land because there was nothing to burn.
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  So one of the ways in which life is kind of intrinsic to planet earth is that it enables
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  us to ultimately make the leap from being, you know, just like any other animal to being
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  the kind of weird tool makers that we are by using a tool that couldn't even have existed
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  half a billion years ago.
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  Yeah.
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  Fire is very much a product of life because you have to have enough oxygen in the atmosphere
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  and you also have to have something that's dry and combustible to burn.
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  And neither of those things existed before photosynthetic life, you know, breathed oxygen
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  into the atmosphere and then land plants ascended onto land and covered the continents.
• 22:22
  And then of course, what we're doing right now in terms of unearthing fossil fuels is kind
• 22:27
  of, you know, yet another evolution of that because fossil fuels are yet again, ancient
• 22:32
  stores of life, you know, stores of ancient life that have been cooked and compressed
• 22:35
  deeper than the planet, then we unearthed them and burned them.
• 22:38
  And so you use all the sunlight that they've trapped over millions of years and have been
• 22:42
  stuck down there.
• 22:43
  Yeah.
• 22:44
  I think that half a billion years ago, there was nothing to burn because there were no
• 22:47
  trees.
• 22:48
  I thought, yeah, but you could have just dug up coal.
• 22:51
  And then I thought, oh, wait a second.
• 22:54
  Colors.
• 22:55
  Yeah, there wasn't coal yet, either.
• 22:56
  Yeah.
• 22:57
  Exactly.
• 22:58
  Coals not just a mineral.
• 22:59
  But even if it were a mineral, another point that you make is that minerals themselves
• 23:02
  in rocks are, are they organic byproducts or what's the difference between a rock that
• 23:08
  has had no life that you would find on Mars and a rock on Earth?
• 23:13
  Right.
• 23:14
  So, you know, minerals are defined, I think of them as extremely elegant rocks because
• 23:19
  minerals are defined by these highly organized, often crystalline structures.
• 23:24
  And Earth has something like 6,000 mineral species, which is much more than even Mars, Mercury,
• 23:30
  and the Moon combined.
• 23:32
  And half more than half of those species can exist only in an oxygen-rich environment.
• 23:36
  So before life, oxygenated the environment, Earth had a much more impoverished mineral
• 23:42
  repertoire.
• 23:43
  And it's really because of life that we have the incredible diversity of minerals that
• 23:47
  we have today.
• 23:48
  And we even know that some microbes living in the crust, they'll do things like they'll
• 23:53
  attract bits of metal around their cells and then that'll pull in even more metal flakes
• 23:59
  and they'll eventually become an ore or reservoir of precious metals.
• 24:02
  So microbes are even involved in creating the kinds of reservoirs and ores of precious
• 24:07
  metal that we mine for gold and silver and such.
• 24:11
  Amazing.
• 24:12
  You went down an old gold mine, like 1,500 meters under the Earth's surface to hunt for microbes.
• 24:20
  Why did you do that?
• 24:21
  And what do they do?
• 24:22
  Yeah.
• 24:23
  In South Dakota, the former home state gold mine has been converted into a scientific laboratory.
• 24:27
  You can still descend about a mile beneath the planet's surface.
• 24:31
  I went with a team of geomicrobiologists.
• 24:33
  So these are biologists who study microbes that are involved in geological processes in
• 24:37
  some way.
• 24:38
  And these microbes inhabit these tiny pores and fishers within the planet's deep crust.
• 24:44
  And these pores are filled with water, but they don't really have access to much oxygen
• 24:48
  or light.
• 24:49
  So they have to evolve different ways of getting energy.
• 24:52
  So they've evolved to eat or breathe rock and metal.
• 24:56
  And what would it mean to breathe metal?
• 25:00
  So what we call breathing is more technically known as respiration, and it's all about
• 25:04
  moving electrons around.
• 25:06
  So we use oxygen as our final electron dumping ground, because oxygen is incredibly reactive
• 25:13
  and it wants other electrons all the time.
• 25:15
  So it's very amenable to that process.
• 25:18
  If you don't have oxygen, you have to use something else.
• 25:20
  So these microbes have turned what they do have, which is rock and metal.
• 25:23
  So some of them will even form these electrical conduits outside their cells and then use
• 25:29
  them as little wires to shut all electrons off of their cells onto the rock and metal surrounding
• 25:34
  them so that they can perform cellular respiration and do the kind of cellular work that all
• 25:38
  cells do.
• 25:39
  Do you mean like little tendrils that come off them?
• 25:41
  Like it was a fungus or something like a yeah, almost like I think scientists call them
• 25:45
  like nanowires.
• 25:46
  They're almost like little like little wires that come off the cells.
• 25:49
  And you were just saying that they that respiration is basically about shedding electrons.
• 25:55
  This is interesting.
• 25:56
  I mean, I always just think that oxygen is life giving, therefore we need oxygen, but
• 25:58
  I've never really interrogated why, why do we need to give oxygen molecules our electrons?
• 26:08
  So at the molecular level, you know, if you want to do any kind of work within a cell,
• 26:13
  you have to get energy from something.
• 26:15
  So moving electrons from one place to another is a way to do that because energy is released
• 26:20
  as they kind of move from one location or from one molecule to another.
• 26:25
  That's what you know, that's what plants are doing as well with photons, right?
• 26:28
  You know, they're taking in photons from the sun and then they're kind of moving them
• 26:32
  up and down these molecular staircases to be able to actually use that energy, convert
• 26:36
  that light energy into chemical energy.
• 26:39
  So you know, at the cellular molecular level, it's all about, you know, harnessing energy
• 26:43
  right and turning it from one form to another and moving electrons and forming bonds between
• 26:48
  molecules and breaking bonds between other molecules.
• 26:51
  Okay.
• 26:52
  This comes back to what you had you were defining life at the beginning of the conversation
• 26:55
  really, right?
• 26:56
  You know, doing something with energy in order to change things so that you can keep surviving.
• 27:03
  Are those minerals that were created by early life now prerequisites for life or do we
• 27:12
  just like digging them up because they're pretty?
• 27:14
  Yeah, I think probably mostly the latter.
• 27:18
  I mean, they're certainly very important to us and to our civilization because we use
• 27:21
  minerals for all kinds of things, including this device through which we are, you know,
• 27:26
  talking to each other right now.
• 27:28
  You know, they weren't prerequisites for the initial evolution of microbial life because
• 27:32
  they didn't, you know, those didn't exist.
• 27:34
  Of course.
• 27:35
  Those minerals didn't exist yet, but you do need a certain amount of raw elements for life
• 27:40
  to evolve.
• 27:41
  You know, in many scientists think that clay minerals, the various kinds, were very important
• 27:45
  for the initial evolution of life.
• 27:48
  But it is fascinating how, you know, so now geologists and mineralologists recognize that
• 27:53
  every planet's mineralogy is going to be largely defined by its life if it is a living planet.
• 27:59
  You know, and that was something that was not thought to be true even a few decades ago.
• 28:03
  I quote one scientist, you know, whose professors told him, don't take a biology class because
• 28:07
  you're never going to use it.
• 28:08
  Like it's not important to geology and mineralogy whatsoever.
• 28:11
  And now his whole career is based on the opposite.
• 28:13
  I mean, I do find it funny how rigid the disciplines can be in the perception of some
• 28:19
  people.
• 28:20
  When in reality, all we have is the world and the universe and the cosmos.
• 28:25
  And we have to, you know, we have our five senses and we have our rationality.
• 28:29
  And we have some good heuristics that, you know, philosophers and scientists have come
• 28:33
  up with.
• 28:34
  But the idea that there's like this clean clinical boundary between biology and geology
• 28:41
  and, you know, these are just fictions, I mean, we've just made them up.
• 28:45
  It's so true.
• 28:46
  Yeah, it's every time you start to study something deeply, any sort of dividing line begins
• 28:50
  to dissolve so quickly I find, you know, whether it's geology and biology, the living, the
• 28:54
  non-living, whatever it might be, it's so hard to specifically delineate anything from
• 28:59
  another.
• 29:00
  And so many of these so-called boundaries are so much more porous than we believe they
• 29:03
  are.
• 29:04
  And just before we leave minerals, rather than just fixate on whether or not minerals
• 29:10
  are prerequisites for the creation of life, I guess I was also thinking about people taking
• 29:15
  mineral pills and vitamin pills and, you know, you'll get your blood tests done and they'll
• 29:19
  be like, oh, you're high or low in particular minerals.
• 29:22
  So presumably we need to consume some of those things, but I don't know if those minerals
• 29:26
  are ones that were generated by early life or if they're just natural in rocks.
• 29:30
  Yeah, that's true.
• 29:31
  I mean, I think, you know, if scientists have sort of laid out all the elements that
• 29:37
  compose the human body, right?
• 29:38
  And like the main ones are the ones you would guess, like hydrogen and carbon and oxygen
• 29:42
  and nitrogen and such.
• 29:44
  And there are certain ones that are quite difficult to get, like nitrogen and phosphorus.
• 29:49
  They're not very abundant in useful forms.
• 29:53
  Our atmosphere is full of nitrogen gas, but it's extremely hard for living organisms to
• 29:58
  use that nitrogen in any way.
• 29:59
  In fact, only microbes have evolved to actually cleave the bond that ties to nitrogen molecules
• 30:07
  together.
• 30:08
  So we are all dependent on microbes to convert nitrogen gas into more biologically
• 30:14
  useful forms until we humans invented something called the Haber Bosch process, which, you know,
• 30:19
  were the only form of life that's ever evolved away to split nitrogen gas apart from microbes.
• 30:25
  And now something like 50% of all the nitrogen and human bodies comes from the so-called
• 30:31
  Haber Bosch process, which was invented during the World Wars.
• 30:35
  And we now are completely dependent on these synthetic nitrogen fertilizers.
• 30:39
  You know, that's how we make these nitrogen fertilizers that we rely on for agriculture.
• 30:43
  Something like two out of five people would not exist today if it were not for these synthetic
• 30:48
  nitrogen fertilizers that we make through the Haber Bosch process.
• 30:50
  Incredible, isn't it?
• 30:51
  Yeah.
• 30:52
  Most people don't even know about, like, the invent, I mean, everyone's heard of penicillin,
• 30:57
  but not many people have heard about artificial fertilizer as being a thing that saved billions
• 31:04
  of lives from malnutrition.
• 31:07
  There's a teleological kind of fallacy that is, you know, worthy of pointing out here that
• 31:14
  one could make, right?
• 31:16
  So in all of these conversations where we talk about, like, oh, you know, if it wasn't
• 31:19
  for the early micro, the early microbes, then we wouldn't have the minerals that we now
• 31:24
  need.
• 31:25
  If it wasn't for, you know, the plants creating combustible material for the fire, we
• 31:29
  wouldn't have had the fire that can then give us our big brains.
• 31:32
  If it wasn't for this, we wouldn't have had that.
• 31:34
  Everything had to go right.
• 31:35
  It looks like the planet has been conspiring from day one to create the conditions that
• 31:41
  allowed homo sapiens to flourish.
• 31:44
  And yet that could just have the causation backwards in the sense that because we're
• 31:50
  here, we have to retroactively explain how we got here.
• 31:54
  And so if those things hadn't happened, we wouldn't be here to be asking the question
• 31:58
  of where we came from.
• 31:59
  There'd be some, maybe some other hyperintelligent organism pointing back at the weird path of
• 32:04
  its evolution going, wow, there must be a special guiding hand of a living planet that
• 32:10
  is kind of leading towards my special existence.
• 32:14
  How do you think about that and how do you got against it?
• 32:17
  I mean, I've heard this proposition before, and to be honest, I've never fully understood
• 32:23
  why it's a very helpful or useful statement.
• 32:26
  It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me to be totally honest.
• 32:29
  I don't really understand what people are trying to argue when they make that point.
• 32:33
  I don't think that this necessitates any sort of teleology or guiding hand.
• 32:37
  I don't think that our existence or ability to look back on what's happened through
• 32:41
  geologic time requires that in any way.
• 32:43
  I think that because we are self-aware creatures, we are able to ask these questions and we
• 32:48
  are trying to figure out what is the sequence of events that created the planet as we see
• 32:53
  it today.
• 32:55
  As I understand it, I don't think of evolution or co-evolution as a guiding hand.
• 33:00
  I think of these as sort of inescapable physical processes that once you have the right conditions
• 33:05
  in place, they just unfold.
• 33:07
  They can unfold in many different ways, and this happens to be the particular branching
• 33:12
  sequence that we are a part of, but there's many different alternative timelines that
• 33:17
  could have unfolded.
• 33:18
  So yeah, I've never really understood that so-called anthropic principle or what people are
• 33:22
  really trying to make a point of view.
• 33:24
  Well, I think they're pushing back against the guiding hand claim.
• 33:27
  I don't think they're pushing back against the claim you just made, which is the way
• 33:30
  that it is and this is the way that the planet unfolds.
• 33:34
  I think they're pushing back against either some kind of soft creationism or intelligent
• 33:39
  design or purpose-driven.
• 33:43
  How could you possibly explain the wonders of the cosmos if it wasn't rigged to create
• 33:48
  this outcome from the start, to which they were taught is, of course, it's rigged to create
• 33:52
  these outcomes from the start because we wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't.
• 33:57
  Therefore, it's an A-Pray-RA kind of claim and you can't imbue it with greater purpose
• 34:03
  or meaning than just the fact of its existence.
• 34:05
  I think that does that make some sense?
• 34:08
  Yeah, I mean, if that's their argument that I don't find that particularly compelling
• 34:11
  or convincing, I don't really see why that's true.
• 34:13
  I mean, I think that's part of the power of evolution, right, is that it shows us that
• 34:18
  you can get incredible complexity and sophistication without there being some sort of overarching,
• 34:24
  intelligent or engineering pre-planning or design.
• 34:27
  Yeah.
• 34:29
  I mean, of course, that's true and it still leaves the person who sees a guiding hand
• 34:34
  in it with an unanswered question, which is, okay, great.
• 34:39
  We have this incredible mechanism that Darwin outlined, which creates for an incredible
• 34:46
  range of different species through the process of natural selection.
• 34:51
  Why does that mechanism exist?
• 34:53
  What's it up to?
• 34:55
  What's it all about?
• 34:56
  What kickstarted the first life that created the instigation of that mechanism?
• 35:02
  It could be framed a billion different ways that would not yield consciousness, but it's
• 35:08
  not framed in those ways.
• 35:10
  It's framed this way.
• 35:12
  And so then the anthropic kind of poo-pooer goes, yeah, well, of course, because we wouldn't
• 35:17
  be having this conversation if it weren't.
• 35:19
  But I agree with you that that doesn't truly resolve what I think is ultimately kind
• 35:25
  of a spiritual or just a woo-woo feeling inside, which is that something else is going on.
• 35:31
  It is going on in this universe.
• 35:33
  Yeah.
• 35:34
  And if for somebody individually, it is more meaningful to them or it brings them some
• 35:42
  sort of purpose to say that there is some sort of deity or some divine force that kickstarted
• 35:48
  everything that is behind these evolutionary processes, I don't personally have an issue
• 35:52
  with that.
• 35:53
  I'm personally a Magnostic.
• 35:55
  I don't see evidence for or against that one way or another.
• 35:58
  But you're right, it doesn't answer that ultimate question of basically, why is there anything
• 36:03
  at all?
• 36:04
  Why does the universe exist at all?
• 36:07
  Why were these processes even possible in the first place?
• 36:10
  We don't have a scientific answer to that question, that's even one of the most unanswered
• 36:16
  questions even beyond the origin of life, or is like, why does anything exist whatsoever.
• 36:23
  For me, I'm just so odd by the miracle of it existing in the first place, that it does
• 36:29
  exist.
• 36:30
  I'm just so entranced by the wonder of nature and universe itself, and that is enough
• 36:35
  for me personally.
• 36:36
  But I totally understand if it's not enough for somebody else, and if for them it's more
• 36:40
  meaningful to believe that there is something more behind it, and I don't have a personal
• 36:44
  problem with that.
• 36:45
  And when you say you're agnostic, do you mean that you're agnostic towards?
• 36:49
  I'm only asking because these phrases have become so ambiguous and mean and million things
• 36:53
  to different people.
• 36:55
  I would say that I'm agnostic towards the question of whether or not there is some vast
• 36:59
  inevitable purpose behind the existence of everything, but I'm quite clearly not agnostic
• 37:05
  towards the claims of any, I mean, I'm an atheist towards specific claims about history
• 37:10
  and cosmology that are made by religions of the book.
• 37:13
  Do you make that distinction?
• 37:14
  What do you mean by agnostic?
• 37:16
  I'm definitely agnostic in the former sense, and I'm agnostic in the sense of whether
• 37:20
  there is a god or some sort of divine force behind it all.
• 37:26
  You know, I just, I think that science demands open mindedness.
• 37:34
  So for me, I have trouble making an absoluteist claim one way or the other.
• 37:38
  So that's for me like where I, that's why I have difficulty, you know, with atheism
• 37:43
  in the sense of definitively declaring that there isn't or is.
• 37:47
  Are you agnostic about whether Jesus bodily rose to heaven or Mary was a virgin or Muhammad
• 37:53
  flew to heaven on a wingtour?
• 37:55
  I mean, I guess I don't, I don't subscribe to the more spiritual claims in these texts,
• 38:00
  but I, there is a legitimate robust historical scholarship surrounding these texts, right?
• 38:05
  And there are sort of well-accepted claims about, I think so.
• 38:09
  I mean, the Bible was written like between 80 and 150 years after Jesus died.
• 38:13
  I mean, obviously he was a guy and he got crucified, but like to give too much faith to,
• 38:18
  there isn't a lot of, there's not a lot of historical evidence that Muhammad flew to
• 38:22
  heaven on a winged horse or that Mary had never had sex before she had the baby Jesus.
• 38:27
  Right.
• 38:28
  No, I mean, more in what you were just saying earlier in terms of like that Jesus was
• 38:32
  a real historical figure and sort of well-accepted facts like that.
• 38:35
  Yeah.
• 38:36
  Yeah.
• 38:37
  I mean, it's also interesting because I think we sometimes have a double standard.
• 38:41
  I don't want to go down the path of religion necessarily, but like we wouldn't say that
• 38:45
  we're agnostic about the existence of fairies or the existence of Zeus or the existence of
• 38:52
  you know, witches.
• 38:53
  Most people are quite comfortable saying that they're atheist towards those things, but
• 38:58
  we just find ourselves in a cultural environment in which there's something that sounds unpleasantly
• 39:04
  dogmatic about saying that you're an atheist about Christianity or Islam or Judaism or something,
• 39:11
  which I think is just weird because that's obviously a culturally contingent thing and
• 39:14
  we could imagine if you lived in Denmark, then maybe you'd be like, oh yes, I'm totally
• 39:19
  an atheist.
• 39:20
  That's fine.
• 39:21
  It's 80% of people are.
• 39:23
  Yeah.
• 39:24
  Let's talk about the big ways in which life changes planet Earth because we sort of got
• 39:29
  eyesight tractors after we talked about the early phases of life.
• 39:34
  So let's fast forward to, oh, actually, there's an interesting aside about like prehistoric
• 39:40
  times and the ice age and stuff and I think you went to Siberia to before we get to present
• 39:47
  day.
• 39:48
  Can you tell us about that?
• 39:50
  Yeah, I visited an experimental nature park in Siberia in their remote Arctic called
• 39:55
  Plysticein Park.
• 39:56
  It's managed by a team of Russian scientists and they are trying to revive some version
• 40:01
  of the grasslands that ringed the northern latitude during the Plysticein, so tens of thousands
• 40:06
  of years ago, they are bringing back large grazers, you know, to this area because they
• 40:12
  believe that the grazers and the grasses sort of maintained each other through symbiosis
• 40:17
  and they think that doing so will help keep the permafrost more frozen than it is right
• 40:22
  now because it is thawing very rapidly and releasing a lot of carbon and methane.
• 40:26
  And they believe that when you have intact grasslands and thriving grazers, they help preserve
• 40:31
  the permafrost in the tundra in that region.
• 40:34
  So they are part of this.
• 40:35
  Grazers being like who?
• 40:36
  Well, I mean, what rather?
• 40:38
  They have brought like a bison and yaks and these decution horses that can survive extreme
• 40:45
  climates, but it used to be mammoths and nastodons and the megafauna that existed in
• 40:50
  the Plysticein.
• 40:51
  Yeah, right.
• 40:52
  I was actually just reading this to my kids because Yuval Noah Harari has a really interesting
• 40:56
  book about where humans came from and why are homo sapiens dominate the world and what
• 41:00
  happened to Neanderthals and stuff.
• 41:03
  And one of the threads in that book is that the early humans wiping out the big mammals
• 41:10
  did cause like an ice?
• 41:13
  I mean, kind of course an ice age, right?
• 41:16
  But it had completely revolutionary profound impacts on the ecosystem when mammoths were
• 41:21
  no longer stomping around.
• 41:23
  Can you just explain that mechanism?
• 41:24
  I don't recall it or really understand it.
• 41:26
  Right.
• 41:27
  So there's long been debate about why exactly did so many megafauna go extinct?
• 41:32
  And sort of two of the competing theories have been climate change versus humans hunting
• 41:37
  them to extinction.
• 41:39
  And there's now thinking that maybe those things are more related than we realize.
• 41:44
  So animals are incredibly important parts of these systems that sequester carbon and
• 41:50
  that regulate climate.
• 41:52
  And the idea is that grasses and grazers were essentially maintaining the ice age climate
• 41:57
  that they evolved into some extent.
• 42:01
  For example, grasses are much paler than trees and shrubs.
• 42:05
  So they reflect more heat and light back to space.
• 42:08
  So they're actually keeping the land cooler than if there were trees and shrubs growing
• 42:11
  there.
• 42:12
  And grazers are trampling the trees and shrubs that would otherwise compete with the grasses.
• 42:16
  And the grazers are fertilizing the grasses with their dung and then the grasses are providing
• 42:20
  the grazers with their generating vegetation.
• 42:22
  So they're both supporting each other and supposedly keeping the planet in this cooler
• 42:27
  state.
• 42:28
  So if humans came along and killed a bunch of megafauna, they then destroyed the ability
• 42:33
  for the grasses and grazers to maintain each other.
• 42:36
  And then a bunch of carbons getting released to the atmosphere and perhaps triggering
• 42:40
  or accelerating an end to the ice age bringing the plant back into a hotter state.
• 42:45
  So as vast waves of Canada and Siberia Thor due to the current climate crisis, is there
• 42:54
  some opportunity to harness that principle in positive ways?
• 43:00
  What would that look like?
• 43:01
  Well, what the Russian scientists, the Zimabs, are engaged in implies dissing park, is
• 43:05
  an incredibly ambitious, rewilding experiment that kind of doubles as a management of climate
• 43:11
  change.
• 43:12
  To do it on any scale that would truly matter for global climate would require millions
• 43:18
  of animals, spread across a vast area.
• 43:20
  They have enough access to enough land, but to actually get that many animals there is
• 43:26
  incredibly challenging.
• 43:27
  But the good thing about some animals is that they have sex and they create other
• 43:31
  ways.
• 43:32
  Yes.
• 43:33
  So you probably don't need a million right off the bat if you pick the wrong ones.
• 43:35
  No, but they only have like a hundred at most.
• 43:39
  You know, I mean, it's just they just don't have nearly enough yet.
• 43:42
  And unfortunately, there's this feedback loop with the thong of the permafrost where the
• 43:47
  more glaciers and snow and ice melts, the more the permafrost thaws that releases more
• 43:52
  carbon and methane to the atmosphere that heats up the planet and that thaws even more
• 43:55
  permafrost.
• 43:57
  Positive feedback loop.
• 43:58
  So it's it's reinforcing itself.
• 44:00
  So it's happening and accelerating pace.
• 44:02
  Plus, it doesn't reflect as much sunlight back into space, right?
• 44:04
  So it's a darker surface also makes the heating get worse.
• 44:08
  Exactly.
• 44:09
  How do you feel about counteracting some of these things using, you know, what they call
• 44:13
  geoengineering and stuff like that?
• 44:15
  You know, a lot of scientists are frustrated somewhat, often with the environmentalist
• 44:23
  left for immediately dismissing out of hand things like, you know, spraying sulfur into
• 44:27
  the atmosphere or which would reflect more sunlight.
• 44:30
  So putting mirrors into space or something because they think it's just a distraction
• 44:33
  from what really needs to happen, which is reducing emissions, which of course is true.
• 44:37
  But even if we reduce them really fast, there's still going to be really bad impacts
• 44:43
  in for our economy and our societies as the effects ripple out over the coming century.
• 44:49
  So, you know, you mitigate those using technology, but how do you feel about that?
• 44:53
  Is that a space we should be playing in?
• 44:56
  That's my understanding as well as that the consensus is that, you know, these technologies
• 44:59
  should be explored, but should not distract from the central goal of a lot of people don't
• 45:04
  think they should be explored.
• 45:05
  I've I did a story on this and there are a lot of environmentalists who say, once you
• 45:08
  open this, people are going to, you know, China's going to regard it as being a get out
• 45:11
  of jail free card.
• 45:12
  They're going to go rogue.
• 45:13
  They're going to do something and then you're going to start messing with things that are
• 45:16
  far more complicated than anything that we understand.
• 45:18
  The people who are researching this say, we're already messing with things that are far
• 45:22
  more complicated than we already understand because we're pouring so much, so many greenhouse
• 45:25
  gases into the climate.
• 45:27
  So, it's not like we're operating with this pure, you know, scenario and now we're trying
• 45:32
  to do something.
• 45:33
  We're just trying to do something in addition to something that's already being done,
• 45:35
  which we know is really bad.
• 45:36
  Yeah, and I do think we should distinguish between, you know, carbon sequestration as a
• 45:42
  form of geoengineering versus something like injecting aerosols into the stratosphere.
• 45:48
  You know, solar geoengineering because, you know, direct air capture pulling carbon
• 45:52
  down from the atmosphere and sequestering it in the crust like they're trying to do in
• 45:56
  Iceland.
• 45:57
  You know, scientifically, the consensus is that there's not really any major risks to
• 46:01
  doing that.
• 46:02
  The real problem is that you can't do it at the scale and speed you need to actually
• 46:06
  be effective in terms of managing climate change.
• 46:08
  That's very different from the proposal to inject sulfur particles into the stratosphere,
• 46:14
  which could have severe ecological consequences and repercussions, right?
• 46:18
  So with that example, and unrelated ones, there's a lot more concern.
• 46:23
  But I do think that people are going to get so desperate fairly soon that somebody might
• 46:28
  try it, you know, in sort of a renegade way, just to sort of stave off death, you know,
• 46:34
  because the extreme heat's going to become just so unservivable that somebody might try.
• 46:40
  And that is how Kim Stanley Robinson opens his recent novel, Ministry for the Future,
• 46:45
  is that, you know, it's in the, it's in a near future where India is suffering so many
• 46:50
  extreme heat waves that they decide to just go ahead and do this, regardless of what,
• 46:53
  you know, permissions they've given or what the United Nations thinks is permissible.
• 46:56
  Yeah.
• 46:57
  Yeah.
• 46:58
  I was in Delhi four weeks ago when there was a heat wave and it was 48 to 51 Celsius.
• 47:05
  I mean, this is a city of tens of millions of people.
• 47:09
  They don't have air conditioning.
• 47:10
  Like I walk out, I may a condition to hotel, and it's just like you in a blast furnace.
• 47:14
  Right.
• 47:15
  So yeah, at some point, they're going to get fed up.
• 47:18
  Someone's going to get get fed up.
• 47:19
  Exactly.
• 47:20
  I mean, in terms of spraying sulfur in the atmosphere, I look, I understand how dangerous
• 47:26
  it can be to metal around with complicated systems.
• 47:29
  I live in a country that is overrun with cane toads because they were brought in to try
• 47:33
  to deal with a pest and now they've run completely a mark.
• 47:38
  But every time a big volcano erupts, you know, Mount Pina Tuba goes up and the planet's
• 47:43
  climate gets cooler by one and a half degrees Celsius for the next 18 months or two years
• 47:49
  because of all the sunlight that's being reflected back into space by the ash.
• 47:54
  It's not like we don't have a precedent for the idea of putting reflective particles
• 47:59
  in the atmosphere.
• 48:00
  That's true.
• 48:01
  But we also have a precedent of having major repercussions like are you familiar with
• 48:05
  the little ice age?
• 48:07
  Go for it.
• 48:08
  This is a...
• 48:09
  So this was...
• 48:10
  It's thought to be a sort of dip in global temperature, possibly caused by volcanic emissions
• 48:15
  and it led to massive crop failures, it led to massive reductions in crops in Europe.
• 48:20
  And so it was actually tied to a lot of famines at the time.
• 48:23
  So, you know, we'd also have the president for things like that, you know, having pretty
• 48:27
  severe consequences.
• 48:28
  But, you know, I do...
• 48:29
  I think like you're saying, there are scientists that are very much advocating for trying
• 48:33
  to at least explore these options in a safe way, you know, to just do some sample tests,
• 48:39
  right?
• 48:40
  Not to inject...
• 48:41
  Not to do it at such a scale as to affect the entire global climate right off the bat,
• 48:45
  but just to see what is feasible, you know, and what the consequences really are in practice.
• 48:49
  So we all know that there are living things that change their environment, right?
• 48:54
  Let's just fast forward to President Day now.
• 48:55
  We've kind of done the microbes and, you know, we've done the disappearance of the mammoths.
• 49:01
  President Day, you know, when you're a kid in biology class, you learn about beavers
• 49:06
  making dams and you learn about, you know, earthworms tilling the soil and so on.
• 49:11
  What's interesting about your take is that you're looking at...
• 49:14
  You're pulling right out and looking at huge systems that are planet-wide, one of which
• 49:21
  is the Amazon rainforest and an unexpected relationship between the Amazon rainforest
• 49:26
  on one continent and there's a higher desert on another continent, what's going on?
• 49:32
  Right, so the Amazon, first of all, you know, it actually generates about half of the rain
• 49:38
  that it receives every year.
• 49:39
  It's not just passively receiving that rainfall, it's actually creating that rainfall.
• 49:44
  It is, you know, releasing huge volumes of water to the atmosphere and it is breathing out
• 49:49
  these massive plumes of tiny biological particles like pollen grains and microbes
• 49:53
  and it's the combination of all that water vapor and all those particles that give something
• 49:57
  for the vapor to condense onto that allows for the formation of clouds and really accelerates
• 50:02
  the water cycle above the Amazon.
• 50:04
  And then that massive, you know, amount of water and biological detritus is actually traveling
• 50:09
  throughout South America and bringing precipitation elsewhere and it's even affecting whether
• 50:14
  another continent through these long-range atmospheric ripple effects.
• 50:18
  And at the same time, dust is blowing over from Africa to the Amazon and fertilizing
• 50:23
  the Amazon with a nitrogen and phosphorus it needs and it turns out that dust is actually
• 50:29
  mostly made of the remains of ancient plankton that lived tens of millions of years ago and
• 50:33
  it's coming from an ancient lake bed in Africa.
• 50:36
  So these ancient plankton are blowing across a continent and fertilizing the Amazon rainforest
• 50:40
  today.
• 50:41
  So these incredible interconnections, you know, between far-flung ecosystems that exist
• 50:47
  within the larger Earth system.
• 50:50
  So I can go to the Amazon and I can take a, what, a soil sample and I'll find things
• 50:56
  that were generated as I stand in South America by life in Africa.
• 51:01
  Yeah.
• 51:03
  And in fact, I climbed a tower in the middle of the Amazon rainforest called the Amazon
• 51:08
  Tall Tower Observatory.
• 51:09
  It's the tallest structure in all South America, more than a thousand feet in the air
• 51:13
  and scientists climate specifically to sample gases and particles above the Amazon's
• 51:18
  canopy.
• 51:19
  And so that, you know, yeah, it's in, it's a northern Brazil and you can find all kinds
• 51:24
  of these bio aerosols as they're known in the atmosphere.
• 51:27
  So, you know, pollen grains, fungal spores, microbes, even bits of insect shells, and you
• 51:32
  can also find dust that is blown over from Africa and is dripping, you know, settling
• 51:36
  down through the atmosphere into the forest.
• 51:39
  Incredible.
• 51:40
  How necessary is that?
• 51:41
  Is that just a bonus or is it fundamental?
• 51:42
  Like you remove Africa from the planet?
• 51:44
  Is the Amazon still okay?
• 51:46
  I think it's considered quite essential because, you know, in the Amazon, there actually
• 51:51
  are not a lot of nitrogen and phosphorus-rich soils.
• 51:55
  All of the, a lot of the nutrients actually come from this rapid decomposition and end
• 52:00
  of all the vegetation, you know, by like ants and termites and microbes and fungi.
• 52:04
  So if it weren't for that rapid decomposition by life and for sort of this fertilizing dust
• 52:09
  blowing from far away, the life there would not have a lot of sort of inherent or innate
• 52:15
  elements or vital nutrients to pull out of the ground.
• 52:18
  So I think it is quite essential.
• 52:19
  I mean, it feels like the Sahara got the raw end of that deal.
• 52:22
  The Sahara's got the good stuff and it all sprouts up a half a planet away.
• 52:28
  Why then if the Sahara soil is good, this may be a really stupid question, then why is
• 52:33
  it so desolate?
• 52:35
  Like what's obviously there's a riddity going on and, you know, precipitation, but why is
• 52:41
  that happening?
• 52:43
  Well, I think today it is because of the climate, because it's so, because of where it is,
• 52:49
  because of basically a confluence of climactic and topographic features.
• 52:53
  Like the Amazon, part of the reason the Amazon is so moist is because of the mountain ranges
• 52:58
  that border it, which force incoming air to rise cool and condense.
• 53:01
  The orrographic effect.
• 53:02
  I remember from my geography teacher in I.
• 53:05
  Exactly, but if we went back far enough in time where that dust is
• 53:10
  blowing from an Africa would have been a lake, you know, if we go back 10 to millions of years.
• 53:14
  So, you know, these things do change dramatically throughout geologic time.
• 53:18
  It's just that the way it is right now, it's a desert in that part of the world and
• 53:22
  rain forest and the other.
• 53:23
  It's amazing, isn't it?
• 53:25
  And just as an aside, I just during the winter school holidays, which just ended here,
• 53:29
  I drove my family to the outback in Australia to this national park called Mungo National Park,
• 53:36
  which is if you imagine like the cliche in your mind of what like the really arid parts of
• 53:41
  the Australian back look like, which are kind of not the Sahara desert style, but like low shrub,
• 53:50
  salt lakes, a moonscape, very weird kind of misses and things that look a bit like the American
• 53:57
  West, like Death Valley or Monument Valley or something.
• 54:01
  But teaming with kangaroos and emus and stuff, so enough water to support that life.
• 54:07
  And the ranger who took us up onto one of the hilltops there was saying that the entire thing
• 54:14
  is moving east at like, I think it's like a, I think it's like 10 centimeters a century or
• 54:21
  something that sounded pretty fast to me. I think a centimeter or a decade.
• 54:26
  And there are quite remarkable physical icons that you would be able to navigate according to.
• 54:35
  And the entire thing in some thousand years or so will just be in a neighboring part of the country.
• 54:43
  Right. Yeah, that's really fascinating. I wrote a piece about the lifespan of ecosystems
• 54:49
  through geologic time because the Amazon for example has endured as a cohesive ecosystem for
• 54:55
  more than 50 million years. And there are also rainforests in Australia that have been on the
• 55:00
  continent for some 40 billion years. But if we could see a time lapse of that time, we would see
• 55:06
  them kind of shrinking and expanding and moving across the landscape almost as if they were like giant
• 55:11
  amoeba, you know, responding to the changing climate. But they do, they maintain themselves and
• 55:16
  their fundamental structures and relationships. But they do shift their borders quite a lot
• 55:20
  through geologic time. Yeah, cool. So in this time lapse, you would both see the continental shift.
• 55:26
  I mean, you see the tectonic shifts, right? And you see all of these land masses breaking up
• 55:30
  and splitting apart and smashing together. And on those land masses, you'd see organic systems
• 55:35
  like rainforests and deserts and whatever spreading apart and almost, you know, like a, I guess,
• 55:41
  a cancer on an X-ray. Yeah, yeah, exactly around one cool thing that I'd love to pick your brain
• 55:49
  about is you mentioned mobile earlier, right? And the bass and the bass alt and the tectonic plates,
• 55:54
  right? Things that we make out of mobile here and travertine, I hadn't realized that those things
• 56:01
  are chemically limestone, essentially, which means that they're chemically made of skeletons.
• 56:08
  Is that right? Exactly. Yeah, this really, this really blew my mind when I first learned about it.
• 56:12
  And I learned about it through the white cliffs of Dover in the UK, which is this massive
• 56:17
  chalk or limestone formation. And if you chip a small piece of that off and you look at it under
• 56:21
  a really powerful microscope, you will see the remains of ancient single-celled ocean plankton
• 56:27
  that lived in the ocean more than 60 million years ago. And they encased themselves in these
• 56:31
  really elaborate intricate little skeletons and shells of calcium carbonate or what we call limestone
• 56:37
  or chalk. And then they sunk to the sea floor when they died and they accumulated in these vast
• 56:42
  chalky sediments that were eventually compressed and turned into stone. And then through the rising
• 56:48
  and sinking of sea level, that was exposed as the white cliffs of Dover. And so that's true for
• 56:53
  the vast majority of chalk and limestone formations on our planet. There are these massive fossil beds,
• 56:58
  these accumulations of tiny ancient plankton. So everything we've made with chalk and limestone
• 57:02
  is itself made of these tiny ancient plankton. Right. And just to clarify, chalk and like, I mean,
• 57:08
  you think, well, we didn't make anything out of chalk. But if limestone is chemically granite,
• 57:14
  then you're talking about the colosseum and the pathonon and the pantheon and the Taj Mahal
• 57:21
  and the dome of the rock in Jerusalem and the statue of David by Michael Angelo. These are all made
• 57:27
  out of skeletons. Yeah, yeah. If you could look at them with a super powerful microscope,
• 57:35
  you might just find the other remains of these skeletons. And yeah, the majority of all these
• 57:40
  limestone chalky formations, that's what they're made of. Incredible. Have you had moments where
• 57:48
  like you're in an extremely ecologically rich environment and you just
• 57:55
  pause and like feel overwhelmed by the sheer weirdness of and complexity of the whole thing.
• 58:03
  And for you, is that like a source of purpose? Yeah, I mean, I feel overwhelmed or in awe of the
• 58:13
  complexity, the intricacy of nature all the time, even in my own backyard because when you stop and
• 58:19
  and sort of look really closely, you just, you start to see so much that you miss most of the time.
• 58:25
  I mean, even on a single leaf on a single plant, just the incredible universe of life in that
• 58:31
  tiny area, you know, is so mind-boggling because you know, you have like little animals and insects
• 58:37
  and then you have either all the microbes that you can't see and all the fungi and then you know
• 58:42
  that, you know, all of these cells contain organelles and the organelles were themselves
• 58:47
  free-living microbes. If you go back far enough in evolutionary time that, you know, we're
• 58:51
  subsumed by larger things. And then within like the genomes of everything, you know, it's all a patch
• 58:57
  work of like viral DNA and microbial DNA and like it's all just as big mishmash. And that's part
• 59:03
  of what I love understanding, you know, is about science that it reveals those hidden layers,
• 59:07
  right? It reveals all this complexity that is, you know, hidden to us most of the time that we don't
• 59:12
  realize is there. So yeah, I feel that, I feel that all the time, anytime I'm sort of engaged
• 59:17
  closely with nature. And half frequently is that, do you walk through the world with that perspective?
• 59:22
  I think so. I mean, I am the kind of person who can't help but like try to identify all the
• 59:27
  mushrooms and plants and stuff on a hike. And the gardening has become really important for me
• 59:32
  personally and it's become a way that I sort of engaged with this material more directly. And
• 59:36
  I've had to learn a lot about soil science and, you know, how to sort of maintain a healthy soil
• 59:42
  ecosystem and all that. So that's surprisingly micro for a person whose brain is so macro,
• 59:47
  actually, that's interesting. Because I like, I often find that, you know, that big brain
• 59:53
  scientific types who wrestle with gigantic themes, the Dawkins' of the world. And not actually
• 59:59
  that, they're not great fans of Petri dishes and, you know, flowers. Well, it's interesting you
• 1:00:05
  say that because I do think in earth system science, you know, in kind of holistic thinking,
• 1:00:10
  you do get kind of stuck in the planetary scale of things. And I really wanted to look at the
• 1:00:15
  connections between the micro and the macro because I think that's what's really important, right,
• 1:00:18
  is, you know, the connections between the cellular molecular and then the planetary on the other end.
• 1:00:24
  And so that's what so much of the book is invested in is where those how those things are tied
• 1:00:28
  together. And I do, I do like toggling back and forth between those scales. And why is life like,
• 1:00:34
  I mean, when you get down, when you start talking about like the leaf and all the interplay of these
• 1:00:38
  complicated things that are going on inside the leaf, frankly, to a non scientist like me,
• 1:00:43
  my eyes just glaze over. And I'm like, well, okay, yeah, good for you because you know lots about it.
• 1:00:47
  So you find beauty in it, but anyone can find beauty. And yeah, there's a universe in the in the leaf.
• 1:00:51
  But there's also a universe in a rock. And I'm sure that a geologist goes, oh my goodness,
• 1:00:56
  look at the rock. It's made up of this and that type of, you know, in organic material. And then if
• 1:01:00
  you, and then the physicist goes, yeah, but it's not actually a solid rock because you go down,
• 1:01:04
  you just what's happening in a subatomic level is so incredible. And you wouldn't believe what's
• 1:01:07
  going on with the quarks and the parallel universe, whatever the hell. Like you can become a nerd
• 1:01:12
  about anything in other words. And then it, and then there's a universe inside it. You could
• 1:01:16
  be saying the same about a piece of a violin concerto or something like that. But for you,
• 1:01:21
  is there something different, something unique? Like give me the, give me the elevator pitch about
• 1:01:25
  why your field is the one where the universe being inside it is the most profound.
• 1:01:31
  Well, there is kind of this half joke in science, you know, about the softer and squishier
• 1:01:35
  sciences and the more fundamental or the real sciences, you know, so like the chemist will tell
• 1:01:40
  the biologist that all biology is actually chemistry. And then the physicist will tell the chemist
• 1:01:44
  that all chemistry is actually physics. You can keep going down until you get to the most
• 1:01:47
  fundamental, which is probably math, right? And then the theologian says, yeah, but yeah,
• 1:01:52
  created it all. Yeah. But I would argue that I've always been most interested in biology. I
• 1:01:58
  would argue that it's the most complex, right? Because it's kind of like the topmost layer,
• 1:02:02
  right? So it's like everything is kind of building up to it. It's like biology rests upon chemistry
• 1:02:07
  and physics and math, but it's it's in biology where we have the most complex things going on.
• 1:02:13
  You know, and that's that's what's so fascinating to me about living systems versus non-living
• 1:02:17
  ones is they are doing something that non-living things are not, you know, they're they are by definition
• 1:02:22
  more complex than non-living things. And that's what I'm really interested in is like how that
• 1:02:26
  complexity arises. And so yeah, so we, I you know, I've I've been interested in that since I was the
• 1:02:33
  kid. It's so intrinsic to me that I don't even know where it came from. I just always have felt
• 1:02:37
  that way about living things. Yeah. You said something earlier when we were talking about
• 1:02:41
  octopuses that caught my attention. You said that they're you you think they're probably conscious
• 1:02:45
  and self-aware. Two words which like agnosticism and atheism can mean a lot of things to different
• 1:02:52
  people. Sam Harris has pulled me up in the past for using the word self-aware probably wrongly,
• 1:02:58
  which I used to just mean that the self has awareness has a subjective experience that it's
• 1:03:03
  like something to be that thing. He uses it to mean that it is aware of its own existence and
• 1:03:10
  is aware of its of its being an organism that in duos over time and could die. What do you mean when
• 1:03:17
  you say an octopus is conscious or an octopus is self-aware? I agree with that distinction that
• 1:03:23
  you just made. I tend to think that I tend to think of consciousness as simply having a subjective
• 1:03:28
  experience of some kind of the world and self-awareness is being aware of oneself as an individual
• 1:03:34
  entity and being able to think about oneself thinking that kind of metacognitive level.
• 1:03:41
  And you know, I definitely think that all vertebrate animals and probably many invertebrates
• 1:03:49
  like octopuses and bees are conscious at the very least. And I think that octopuses display a
• 1:03:56
  level of consciousness and intelligence that indicates to me self-awareness because, you know, they are
• 1:04:04
  they are able to think very creatively in the moment and, you know, the way that they relate
• 1:04:11
  to other creatures in their environments indicate that they have some understanding of themselves
• 1:04:16
  as individuals, you know, versus others, you know, others being different from them.
• 1:04:20
  Right. Interesting. So to contrast that with my kitten, for example, who I think
• 1:04:27
  perceives the world as if she were, um, God kind of like as if she were just a veil right through
• 1:04:34
  which the world is happening like she's not really an entity. She has drives and she has emotions
• 1:04:39
  and she knows that we are things and objects, but I don't think she thinks of herself as being
• 1:04:43
  an object really. She's just the thing that's doing the viewing, right, which is conscious,
• 1:04:48
  which would be consciousness there. You're saying an animal like an octopus is able to go that one
• 1:04:53
  step further that we go. And we only go there as adults, right? I mean, there's this interesting,
• 1:04:58
  there's a lot of interesting stuff about the development of a theory of mind in children that I've
• 1:05:03
  seen happen in my kids recently where you, I'm sure you know, the experiment, you know, you get a
• 1:05:08
  three-year-old and you give them a box of chocolates and they open up the box of chocolates and
• 1:05:14
  filled with nothing but straw. And you say, your sister's about to come into the room. We're going
• 1:05:19
  to close up the lid of the box of chocolates. What is your sister going to think as inside the
• 1:05:23
  box of chocolates? And a three-year-old will say that the sister will say that there's straw
• 1:05:28
  inside the box of chocolates, but a five-year-old will say the sister's going to think there's
• 1:05:32
  chocolates inside the box of chocolates. Three-year-old hasn't yet developed the understanding
• 1:05:37
  that they are a human being and the sister is a human being and we have different minds and we
• 1:05:42
  operate different assumptions and we are doing our own mental processing, right? So that's all a
• 1:05:48
  very long way of saying, roughly what animals do you think fall into that club of self-awareness?
• 1:05:55
  Right. So I think one of the best tests for that is deception, right? If an animal can deceive
• 1:06:01
  another individual, then it's showing it has theory of mind that it recognizes that another
• 1:06:05
  individual's perspective is not the same as its own. And I think some of the most famous tests
• 1:06:10
  that degree have been done with the great apes like chimpanzees and gorillas and orangutans,
• 1:06:15
  which definitely seem to have that capacity. But one of the great challenges with testing non-human
• 1:06:21
  species is that we're so human-centric that we often want to just give other creatures the test
• 1:06:26
  that work best for us but may not work best for them. Like with elephants, for example, they're not
• 1:06:32
  particularly, you know, vision is not necessarily their strongest sense. They're incredibly tactile,
• 1:06:37
  incredibly olfactory creatures, but we kept testing them with the mirror recognition test.
• 1:06:41
  Like can an elephant recognize itself in the mirror? But what if a better way to do it is through
• 1:06:46
  scent or touch, right? Because that's how that particular species has evolved. And in fact,
• 1:06:52
  they probably have, they can sense things that we cannot. Like an elephant can detect thunder
• 1:06:58
  through its foot pads from a great distance because that's one of the ways that it knows where
• 1:07:03
  rain is falling and how to get to water. You know, that's something that we can't pick up on. They
• 1:07:07
  can communicate through sort of the, you know, parts of the sound spectrum, the acoustic spectrum,
• 1:07:14
  that we're not sensitive to, right? They can detect sense that we're not privy to hormones and
• 1:07:19
  things and pheromones and things like that. So, you know, every creature has its own umvelt,
• 1:07:24
  right? Its own sensory bubble. And they can access parts of the world that we may not be able to
• 1:07:29
  access. Yeah. And so just lastly, I'll let you go. But
• 1:07:36
  there remains the question of like why sort of that I wonder how you noodle on as a biologist. I mean
• 1:07:47
  I was sitting on top of a volcano in the South Pacific, like watching the sunrise once and kind
• 1:07:53
  of was struck by one of those weird moments of kind of transcendence, I suppose, but want to
• 1:08:00
  a better world like thinking here I am. It looks like the sun's rising, but what's actually happening
• 1:08:06
  is the South Pacific Ocean is tipping forwards towards the blazing nuclear reaction that we are
• 1:08:14
  that this speck of, you know, dust is floating around in the cosmos on an outer spiral arm of one
• 1:08:22
  galaxy out of hundreds of billions of galaxies or rather, you know, solar systems in our galaxy
• 1:08:29
  and then hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond that. And I am like made up of some of the materials
• 1:08:37
  that are ejected from distant stars that have assembled themselves into a creature that is capable
• 1:08:44
  of having this experience sitting on top of a volcano that could erupt at any moment on an
• 1:08:49
  infinitely complicated geological timeline. Like, what the fuck? You know what I mean? Like,
• 1:08:56
  yeah, what's your, what's your, and I'm not asking this as a like a theological question necessarily,
• 1:09:02
  but like, how is it that the octopus and the elephant and I am having experiences at all?
• 1:09:14
  Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. I've had similar moments where you just, you realize the sheer
• 1:09:22
  scale of the cosmos in relation to yourself and you realize the full extent of, you know, events,
• 1:09:30
  the chain of events that had to happen to be in this moment right now, going way past the
• 1:09:36
  origin of life on our planet to the beginning of the universe itself, right? You know, and everything
• 1:09:40
  that had to happen for our solar system to form in the first place. And it is truly, it is so,
• 1:09:45
  I mean, mind boggling, I mean, we are, we are this primate, you know, this, just this little vertebrate
• 1:09:52
  species that evolved to understand things on a sort of day to day, year to year basis, not to,
• 1:09:58
  not to interrogate, you know, the 13, 14 billion year history of the entire universe, right? So we're
• 1:10:04
  really grappling here with things that are beyond our 10 in many ways. And maybe there are some
• 1:10:10
  sort of limits to what we can really understand at this stage. But I totally know what you mean,
• 1:10:15
  that, that, that feeling of just like, wow, just like being overwhelmed by the sheer miracle of
• 1:10:22
  existence itself. And it's like, and I don't, yeah, sorry, I was just going to go ahead or because you
• 1:10:27
  said like about the scale of the cosmos, it's both hum, it's humbling and also the opposite of
• 1:10:32
  humbling in a sense that you feel tiny because you are incredibly tiny in comparison to the
• 1:10:38
  cosmos. But you also feel special because you're the one who's capable of reflecting on it in a
• 1:10:43
  way that the volcano presumably isn't like I have the gift, this rare gift in the universe,
• 1:10:50
  you know, we may not be the only ones, but we're clearly fairly rare of being able to notice it.
• 1:10:57
  Yeah, and if you do accept, you know, the scientific truth of our material continuity,
• 1:11:02
  not only with the planet, but with the universe, right, then we, then there is very much truth to
• 1:11:07
  this notion that we are the universe aware of itself, you know, we are this expression,
• 1:11:12
  this outgrowth of the universe that has been able to contemplate itself. And that is,
• 1:11:16
  that is a truly miraculous thing to think about it in that way. And I really, I really do feel,
• 1:11:22
  you know, viscerally continuous with the planet in a way that I didn't before, sort of after
• 1:11:27
  doing all this research. Yeah, so give us a wrap up here. What is the aliveness of the planet?
• 1:11:34
  Right, mean, like what are its implications? So first of all, I think there's a massive
• 1:11:39
  difference between thinking of ourselves just as inhabitants of a world or as passengers on a
• 1:11:45
  spaceship earth versus being, you know, literally continuous with the planet and being an outgrowth
• 1:11:49
  and expression, you know, a extension of the planet. And, you know, that means that that has
• 1:11:58
  implications. First of all, for how we all think about ourselves and day to day life and our
• 1:12:01
  relationship of the planet, but also more collectively as a species and a civilization, right, because
• 1:12:06
  now we have not just obligations to each other as individuals and to all the nonhuman species out
• 1:12:12
  there, but also to this larger living system, this larger living entity that we are physically a part
• 1:12:17
  of. So for me, it amplifies, it heightens the moral urgency of our current predicament on this
• 1:12:24
  planet right now. And it also, I think, it makes it, you know, to me more compelling, it gives me more
• 1:12:31
  inspiration for why we should fight to save the world, you know, that we have right now, because
• 1:12:37
  the planet, I think, is going to be okay, regardless of what we do, the earth system as a whole will
• 1:12:42
  endure, because it's endured much worse things than this in the past. But the question is, can we
• 1:12:47
  preserve a version of our planet that is familiar enough to us that we can continue our way of life,
• 1:12:52
  right? It's our version of earth that we are trying to preserve, that we are trying, you know,
• 1:12:57
  trying to preserve some variation of that theme into the future so that we can continue as a
• 1:13:01
  civilization and species. In some ways, is there a fatalistic kind of reassuring twist in all this,
• 1:13:08
  which is that worst case scenario comes, we don't manage to control our own intelligences with
• 1:13:16
  and climate, the climate crisis and nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence just, you know,
• 1:13:22
  essentially wipe out civilization and we go back to being hunter gatherers or something like that.
• 1:13:28
  Does the planet then throw up another version of, like, does the planet try again with conscious
• 1:13:34
  and consciousness? You know, suppose it goes really bad and we go back to, you know, there are no more
• 1:13:37
  primates or something. Does your theory about the planet's aliveness imply that it's going to
• 1:13:45
  keep chugging along and creating new attempts at brilliance? Well, some scholars have proposed in
• 1:13:54
  a fatalistic manner that wherever, you know, intelligent, highly technologically capable life emerges,
• 1:13:59
  it is almost always fatal for its planet that it ends up ruining things, you know, it ends up
• 1:14:06
  destroying the life of the planet as a whole. I have come to have a different perspective though
• 1:14:11
  because I think if you look through geologic time, when you give life enough time and opportunity,
• 1:14:17
  life and environment tend to converge upon relationships and structures that favor their mutual
• 1:14:25
  persistence, right? Like the Amazon enduring for 50 million years. That is a co-evolutionary phenomenon,
• 1:14:32
  you know, between life and its environment. So I've come to have a deep admiration for the tenacity,
• 1:14:37
  the resilience of living systems and the earth system as a whole through great spans of time.
• 1:14:45
  If we were wiped out, I think that, you know, microbes and photosynthetic life and, you know,
• 1:14:52
  the planet's most resilient organisms, they are going to endure. They're going to survive whatever
• 1:14:57
  happens. Will, you know, then the, will the earth system generate some new self-aware, you know,
• 1:15:06
  fire manipulating technologically capable species? Honestly, I think that has a lot to do with
• 1:15:12
  roles of the dice that we have no control over and that nobody can predict to be honest because,
• 1:15:17
  you know, what if primate evolution, if primate evolution hadn't gone the way it had gone,
• 1:15:22
  then we wouldn't be here right now, you know what I mean? Like there's no, there's no reason
• 1:15:26
  that had to happen that way. There's no necessity that for, you know, to primates for it to evolve
• 1:15:30
  all that way. It could have been birds, it could have been cetaceans, it could have been nothing.
• 1:15:34
  I think probably most living planets get stuck at the microbial level, you know,
• 1:15:39
  some analog to microbial life and never progress beyond that because so much has to happen for
• 1:15:44
  multicellular complex life to emerge in the first place, that took billions of years of evolution,
• 1:15:51
  you know, trying various things to get there on our planet, you know. So imagine true that the
• 1:15:55
  real hurdle is getting from microbial life to more complicated life forms because I think my
• 1:16:02
  layperson's assumption is that the hurdle is going from an inorganic to organic life in the
• 1:16:08
  first place and that there's some mystery about how life becomes living. But once you're living,
• 1:16:13
  then you've got natural selection, which is pretty inexorably going to lead you towards more
• 1:16:17
  complicated life forms. And in the process of lots and lots of different life forms, which are
• 1:16:22
  ultimately very complicated finding lots and lots of different niches, one of those branches of
• 1:16:27
  the evolutionary tree is probably going to be something that's conscious and self-aware. So
• 1:16:32
  there's hope that there's some kind of inevitability about something, even if it's not us evolving out.
• 1:16:38
  Yeah, it's a good question, which of those hurdles is more difficult to, you know, to surmount?
• 1:16:45
  It's interesting, though, that we for the majority of Earth's history, it was a purely microbial
• 1:16:50
  planet. So for something from like maybe let's say three and a half billion years ago to like
• 1:16:55
  half a billion years ago, there was no complex multicellular life, but there was single-celled microbial
• 1:17:00
  life. So why was it that for so many billions of years there was only single-celled microbial life
• 1:17:05
  took so long to get to the multicellular stage? Right. And what is that impediment?
• 1:17:10
  Like what are the stars that have to align? It has a lot to do with energy, but it also has to do
• 1:17:17
  with complexity. So we think multicellular life arose when different kinds of single-celled
• 1:17:24
  microbes basically fused. So like, you know, mitochondria, the powerhouses of ourselves,
• 1:17:29
  like those used to be free-living bacteria that were subsumed by larger bacteria, like really
• 1:17:35
  early on in the evolution of multicellular life, the same for chloroplasts and plants that perform
• 1:17:39
  photosynthesis. Once you have these organelles sort of as permanent tenants within cells,
• 1:17:46
  you can start doing much more complex chemistry. And it's also thought that the oxygenation of the
• 1:17:53
  atmosphere may have provided the sort of energetic kick that multicellular life needed,
• 1:17:59
  because when you do respiration with oxygen, you actually are able to do a lot more cellular work
• 1:18:04
  than if you do anaerobic non-oxygen-based respiration. Okay. All right. Let's hope that it's replicable
• 1:18:10
  in a billion planets across these gross cosmos of ours. It's fabulous to talk to you. Thanks
• 1:18:15
  so much for being here. I could go for 17 hours, but thank you so much. Thank you.