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Are we all Martians? · Stuff You Should Know

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  Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and I'm with Charles Bryant
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  Speaker 1: and what we're doing Stuff you should know today? Oh yeah,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: not the other one. Stuff you should not know. Nothing
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: you should know now we're out there inspiring podcasts. Yeah.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Who we heard about that today? Right, someone started podcast
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: in the Illinois Valley. I don't know where that is.
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: I don't think it's Illinois though, but they wrote about
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  Speaker 1: it in the paper, right, Yeah, they got to write
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  Speaker 1: up in the paper. Pretty cool. Yeah. Okay, before we
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: get started, buddy, we need to announce our upcoming New
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: York trip in Trivia night. Yeah. We talked to Mayor
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: Bloomberg and he, uh, he said that Friday, October twelve,
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: two thousand twelve is Stuff you Should Know day in
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: the five boroughs of New York City. That's right, and
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  Speaker 1: we will be presented a not a key to the city,
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: but a key card to our hotel. At least it's
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: a set of lock picks to the city. That's right.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: And uh, So we're coming for Comic Con. If you
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  Speaker 1: have a Comic Con pass, you can come see this
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  Speaker 1: podcast live and we're gonna have details on like what
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: room and what time and everything. Yeah. Plus it's cheap
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: even if you don't have a past, like like day
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  Speaker 1: passes are not expensive. Yeah, even in this economy. It's
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  Speaker 1: it's it's good. So we're gonna be podcasting live during
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  Speaker 1: the day on Friday, and um you can check out
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: Facebook and Twitter for info on exactly where and when.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: And then that night another stuff you should know Trivia Night,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: which was a huge success, huge success in New York
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  Speaker 1: last year. So it's just two years ago, right, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: two years ago. Yeah. Uh about this time too. I
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  Speaker 1: think it was October, wasn't it. Yeah. Um, So that's
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  Speaker 1: a whole day, the whole day of your life in
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  Speaker 1: New York City, packed with stuff you should know, featuring
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  Speaker 1: Chuck and myself. So this is gonna be great. Uh
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  Speaker 1: and I know it's just me, but I like saying myself. Um,
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  Speaker 1: and we're gonna have details for sure on that. We're
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  Speaker 1: locking down the menu hopefully as we speak, and um
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  Speaker 1: locking down our all star celebrity trivia team as we speak.
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  Speaker 1: If you're out there and you're an all star celebrity,
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  Speaker 1: you want to play with us. I think that's a
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  Speaker 1: great call out up. We're still assembling our team. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: a couple of the stalwarts are going to be out
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  Speaker 1: of town, which is disappointing. So we're looking for for
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  Speaker 1: comers as it were, Yes, as it were, And we're
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  Speaker 1: also looking for commers to challenge us and uh and
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  Speaker 1: and Duke get out on the trivia floor. It's gonna
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  Speaker 1: be fun for free, that's right. And there will be
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  Speaker 1: adult libations involved if you're into that. Probably if you're
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  Speaker 1: into that, and Uh, that's about it. Anything else. I
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  Speaker 1: think it's high time we started the episode. Thank you
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  Speaker 1: for bearing with us. I guess everyone, Uh, let's see, Chuck.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: I'm a little under the weather today. I know I'm fighting.
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: I I'm not I'm not gonna get sick. I'm just
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  Speaker 1: it's like, man, that that one day where it's like
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: you're right before you're about to get better the worst day,
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: but you're just not going to get sick, you know
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  Speaker 1: what I'm saying. So I don't have like five days
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: of sickness ahead of me. I've got bagel days of
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: sickness ahead of me. You're saying this like positive thoughts.
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  Speaker 1: Is that the deal? Okay? Yeah? I found that my
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  Speaker 1: mind body connection is really really strong, especially in the
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  Speaker 1: horrible way where I'm like, I'm not gonna get sick.
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  Speaker 1: I wonder if I'm getting sick though, Am I getting sick?
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  Speaker 1: And then all of a sudden, I'm sick. It's like
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  Speaker 1: I just talked myself into getting sick. But that sounds
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  Speaker 1: like you just talk to yourself into getting well. So
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  Speaker 1: I'm trying it out. It's mental gymnastics. Uh, sometimes it works. Yeah, um,
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  Speaker 1: but I guess let me just go ahead and start
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  Speaker 1: and get this one over with. Okay. I like this one. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: not bad. You realize that's half of an article I
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  Speaker 1: sent you before that. You you're like, now, let's not
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: do this one. Yeah, the origin of life on Earth.
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  Speaker 1: But didn't we do that? We never did that? Well
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  Speaker 1: there was a reason. Wow, I believe it now. But
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  Speaker 1: maybe we can do the other half. We'll do. This
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  Speaker 1: is like part of a two part suite about where
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  Speaker 1: life on Earth came from Mars. Maybe there's another way,
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  Speaker 1: and this is my intro. There's another possible way, and
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  Speaker 1: it's something called a biogenesis, and a biogenesis basically says
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  Speaker 1: that all the proteins needed to form RNA. Somehow we're
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  Speaker 1: present in the early Earth and the primordial soup, and
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  Speaker 1: somehow they came together in a structure that was RNA.
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  Speaker 1: And RNA is a pretty specific, weird little thing, and
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  Speaker 1: that it can not only replicate itself, it can make
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  Speaker 1: new stuff too, so it can build d N A,
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  Speaker 1: but it can also replicate itself. It sounds like something
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: Ridley Scott movie, very much so. And they think that
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  Speaker 1: RNA somehow came together and over the course of millions
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  Speaker 1: of years, in all these different trials and errors, finally
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  Speaker 1: started to form DNA, which kick started life. The origin
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  Speaker 1: of life was just a bunch of proteins that came together.
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  Speaker 1: There are a lot of reasons people pooh pooh this.
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  Speaker 1: A lot of people a lot of creationists say, hey,
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  Speaker 1: you know Occam's razor, which you scientists love so much,
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  Speaker 1: do you think that's it? Or that somebody created us?
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  Speaker 1: So the abiogenesis hypothesis, maybe theory by now has kind
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  Speaker 1: of has some holes in it, but it's really interesting
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  Speaker 1: and we'll talk in depth about that in another one.
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  Speaker 1: This one is about the big rival to a biogenesis.
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  Speaker 1: And it's called panspermia, which is a pretty pretty neat name.
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  Speaker 1: What does that mean? Seeds everywhere? Yeah, seeds everywhere over
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  Speaker 1: the place, panspermia. And it's from a guy in the
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  Speaker 1: nineteen o six Swede whose name is pretty awesome, uh,
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  Speaker 1: Savante Argennis, who wrote a book called Worlds in the Making,
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  Speaker 1: and he coined the term pants fermia. But it was
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  Speaker 1: um about fifty or so years maybe thirty or so
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  Speaker 1: years before him, um that the idea of pants fermia
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  Speaker 1: was first put forth by Lord Kelvin. Yeah, the famous
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Lord Kelvin, British physicist, mega famous. I mean not many
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  Speaker 1: people get a temperature scale named after him. No, there's not,
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  Speaker 1: just the Tommy Celsius and Billy Fahrenheit man and Lord
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  Speaker 1: Kelvin trimember that is. Uh. So his idea was that
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  Speaker 1: seed bearing meteorites, which is kind of where we are
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  Speaker 1: here with this, did we come from Mars? Potentially that
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  Speaker 1: these meteorites that had uh life buried within them, or
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  Speaker 1: at the very least you know, sitting on the surface,
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  Speaker 1: had life there found its way to Earth and that's
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  Speaker 1: where it all started, right, And it's pretty cool to
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: think that way back then. They were thinking of this
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: stuff back in the seventies. Yeah, man, you know, well,
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: I mean the super far off the space elevator came
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: from a Russian guy in eighteen. People were thinking back then.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: They had a lot of time to um subjugate. The
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: other cultures may have been thinking even more, you know,
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: because they didn't know as much. All they did was
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: sit around and think. Well, if the Olympics taught me
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: anything the opening ceremonies, it's that they had a lot
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: more time to toil and think, and everything just got
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: better after the sod was removed when the Industrial Revolution
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  Speaker 1: came about. You think that got better. I think it
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: got worse. Oh I see. It seemed to me that
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  Speaker 1: it was the saving grace of um of civilization was
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: when the Industrial Revolution hit. Oh okay, I thought you
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  Speaker 1: meant the opening ceremonies because they got much worse after
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  Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution. All of a sudden, people were texting
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  Speaker 1: each other on screen, and it was it was like
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  Speaker 1: these little romance stories playing out on the field. They
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  Speaker 1: got so yeah, it did. Yeah uh. But fortunately the
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  Speaker 1: Olympics had John Hodgman to defend it. He was the
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  Speaker 1: sole person to defend it on Twitter. Boy could think
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  Speaker 1: Twitter went around in the Atlanta Olympics. Yeah, I don't
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: remember that one, but you he was like, you remember
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: the Atlanta embarrassing He was like, it was like little
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: Richard driving around in a truck or something that we
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: had stainless steel pickup trucks driving around. We had like
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  Speaker 1: line dancing and like Georgia peaches. It was just like,
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: oh man. But the point was it was big. It
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: may have been gaudy, but it was big. Right, No
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: one could out do Beijing. But they were saying they
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: weren't even trying to do outdo Beijing. They were trying
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: to do something different. But it's still it missed. Yeah,
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: it comes down. Yeah, Okay, So anyway back to it,
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: back to the Victorian era, um, and there their science thought,
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: uh the wow, we got so far off, it's ridiculous. Um.
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  Speaker 1: But the point was the concept of pants permia is
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  Speaker 1: that the Earth, prior to the arrival of life was
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  Speaker 1: like a virgin Petrie dish, and then there was some
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  Speaker 1: cosmic cough and like a little bit of cosmic spittle
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  Speaker 1: infected this peatree dish, and all of a sudden, life
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  Speaker 1: took off, that's gross pants. Bermia used to have a
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: more narrow definition back then, but now it's been broadened
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  Speaker 1: out to the point where pretty much most scientists believe
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  Speaker 1: that you can exchange life among bodies in our Solar system,
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  Speaker 1: like it can happen. Yeah, well it's had proven to happen.
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  Speaker 1: It was broader right back in the day, it was broader,
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: and then they now it's broader. Back then it was
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: more specific, it was broad narrow, and then when and
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: then it went back to the original broad version. Now
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: sciences started to kind of back up the what was
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: originally considered a flight of fancy. So what Lord Kelvin
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  Speaker 1: thought was that asteroids brought life to Earth um and
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: and probably from Mars, maybe elsewhere in the galaxy, here
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: elsewhere in the universe, but the point was they arrived
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: via rock. Well, after a few years of consideration, most
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: people were like, that's not possible, Like an asteroid would
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  Speaker 1: basically pulverize everything on it, there's heat involved, there's no way.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: And so the Swede comes along sipante are hineous and
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: he says, no, these are just basically like little little
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: microbes traveling between the planets, right, Yeah, It's like you
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: don't even need the meteorite as the vessel. This stuff
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: is just going by what starlight? Uh yeah, that's kind
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: of a simple way to put it. In electromagnetic energy
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: in the other articles at starlight, which sounds a little
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: more fanciful or ether I think they used to call
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: it to that. Really. Yeah, so this is all great,
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: And then we find out in n when we launched
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: the Viking probes which to Mars, which I think we
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: goofed on this before, right, the Viking name or something. Yeah,
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: it seems like Viking one touchdown at uh Chrysa plinysa
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: Viking too on Utopia Plinysia. And interestingly, they took some
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: some atmospheric readings and they found that the same stuff
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: in the atmosphere of Mars was also contained inside these
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: meteorites from the nineteen eighties. Pretty cool, right, Well, they
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: figured out the signature of the atmosphere of Mars and
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: then they compared it and it was the same. Right,
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: And then they went back and said, well, wait a minute,
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: let's find out what other rocks have this specific unique
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: signature that we can locate on Mars and say these
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: are Mars meteorites. And they I think they had like
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  Speaker 1: fifty thoud of them. Uh yeah, the ones they already had,
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  Speaker 1: they like looked back into them and a hundred and
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  Speaker 1: four of them came from Mars. That was kind of low,
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: I thought, Yeah, I was a little disappointed. But the
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  Speaker 1: point is is these things show that rocks can travel
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  Speaker 1: from Mars to Earth and survive intact. That was the
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: big part of it. So you have a little bit
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: of Lord Kelvin's original idea starting to come back into reality.
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  Speaker 1: You know, just good for him. Yes, a scale and everything,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: but they dug him up and shook his hand and
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: put him back. Uh. Shall we move on to um
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: A l H eight four zero one. This is one
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: of my favorite metior rites. This one. You remember this
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  Speaker 1: one like caused a huge stir, Like Clinton came out
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: and I was like, there's life on Mars. Like we
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  Speaker 1: found evidence. They found three different traces of what they
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: considered UM I guess microbial fossils from Mars, and two
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: of them were discounted, but another one was like a
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: chain of magnetite that was arranged in such a way
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: that it couldn't possibly have been created by anything but
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: an organism UM That I think the results are still
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: out on that one. I don't. The other two are like, no, no,
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  Speaker 1: it's definitely in organic, Nick, But this one, the jury
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: is still out on whether it's possible it was created
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: by some sort of organic life that basically excreted magnetite chains. Uh.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: So the cool thing about this is they studied, you know,
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: years later, they they've come up with all these different
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: issues of why this might not be able to happen.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: One of them is the intense heat that would be generated.
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: Could the meteorite survive it? Could my life on the
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: meteorite or buried within it survive it? And they studied
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: at cal Tech, Yes, cal Tech, they studied a l
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: H eight four zero zero one. I wonder what they
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: call it. Probably the Allan Hails, the Alan Hills meteorite. Yeah,
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: probably so, because that's where it was found. So they
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: and that's what the l H stands were. Um. So
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: they studied this and they they figured out that inside
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: this thing, it actually never got hotter than a hundred
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: and four degrees And they did this through magic called
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: magnetic signature. They cut off a slice of it and
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: found its magnetic signature. Uh, couldn't heat beyond that, So
• 14:06
  Speaker 1: that means it never disappears. Yeah, it never got hotter
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: than a hundred and four. So that kind of put
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: that one into bed. Ye. So there's plenty of microbes
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: that can survive temperatures of a hundred and three or
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: a hundred degrees in fact a better. A lot of
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: them love that kind of temperature, love it. Yeah, they're
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: called um retirees, right. Uh. And then so so that
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: backs up Calvin a little bit. The fact that there's
• 14:31
  Speaker 1: rocks that we can say definitely came from Mars back
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: him up. Um. And then also getting back to the
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: rocks coming from Mars, the possibility, the probability of one
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: infecting the planet, I guess you could say the early
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: planet also came to be supported through further research. Um,
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: some guys from NASA was it NASA. They calculated that
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: as many as fifty bill in Martian rocks pummeled Earth
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: in the first five hundred years of the Earth's life
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: at Earth a decade, No within a decade, but over
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: the first five hundred million years while the Earth is
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: cooling and the prior just prior to the existence of
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: life on Earth, Mars rocks hit Earth Okay, so they're
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: saying the rocks can survive. There were plenty of them,
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: and we know that at least one traveled and did
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: not heat up over a hundred and for degrees. And
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: the NaSTA dudes also said that basically our inner solar
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: system all has sort of a similar suitable environment. So
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: exchange of life and the inner Solar system only is
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: you know, very much likely. Yeah, yeah, if you, if you,
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: if they care, If you look at Mars, the chance
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: that Mars um can send a rock to Earth is
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: way higher than it's It's pretty high, right, but if
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: you if you go outside of our solar system, the
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: chances start to plummet exponentially downward um to where if
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: you go outside of our Solar system elsewhere in our
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: galaxy um, even in the Milky Way, the odds are
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: like one in a billion that even a single rock
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: could have hit Earth in its first five million years.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: It just doesn't happen. But apparently the interplanetary exchange between
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: Mars and Earth is a lot more frequent than you'd think.
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: We're also talking about how that hundred and four degree
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: internal temperature bacteria can survive that maybe even thrive Um
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: there are some bacteria too that have been studied that
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: have been able to survive UM basically trips on satellites
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: exposed to solarate viation much as they would be like
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: on a meteorite, and they've been found to survive pretty
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: pretty well as well. A lady name no, I'm sorry
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: a UM well, yeah, a microbiologist named Lynn roth Child
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: and her partner Rocco Mensinelli. I believe that's how you
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: pronounce that. Uh. They put some halophiles, which are salt loving,
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: which you'd find in UM the dead sea. Yeah, and
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: they can like these these buggers or survivors. Yeah, they
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: basically just scab over their cells and um survive like that.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: And they found that after two weeks on a satellite UM,
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: ten of these bacteria had survived. Not bad. That's not bad.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: So we know that bacteria kind surviving space. We know
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: that it could possibly hit your right on a rock,
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: and we know that plenty of rocks come from ours. Uh.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Jumping back a little. One of the initial things they
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: thought would be that, you know, if these asteroids or
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: if these things are colliding in space, it would just
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: disintegrate into dust. Basically, they found out that not that
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: is not necessarily true either. Um. They found traced trace
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: gases within meteorites that originated on Mars in the nineteen
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: eighties and basically figured out that if one of these
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: impacts happens, maybe the it's disintegrated in the middle, but
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: on the outer edges there could be like larger chunks.
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: They just get shot away. Right, So that's that's basically
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: where these things are coming from. Ok But some other
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: people said, all right, well, those ones that get shot away,
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: they get to escape Earth's gravity or mars Is gravity,
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: they would have to suddenly, in a less than a second,
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: be accelerated from zero to eleven thousand, five hundred miles
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: per hour thousand if you did that in a thousandth
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: of if you did that to human, the human would
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: become liquefied, of course. Okay, but the that's that doesn't
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: necessarily hold truth with bacteria. And we know this because
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: certain microbiologists have packed bacteria into bullets and fired them
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: and then studied the bacteria and found that they were
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: alive still they survived that UM trajectory, yeah, which wouldn't
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: be that fast though, it wouldn't be eleven thousand, five
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: hundred miles an. I guess as the fast as they
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: could get it there, right, I guess? Okay, well, at
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: least it was a good effort. Um. Oh the Gerda
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: Hornick microbiologist in Germany. She also sent organisms into orbit
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: for six years, not too bad in the nineteen eighties.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: Basilli's uh subtillists. And this is pretty wacky because not
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: only did it survive, but when this thing started like
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: depriving itself or getting deprived of nutrients, it formed like
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: a shell, like a spore or shell on top to
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: basically protect everything underneath it. That's the one I thought
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: with nothing, That's the one I thought was scabbing over. Correct,
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: that was that one. Yeah, so you know, in the
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: cold dark, no water, no nothing, about thirty of these
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: things survived. That's survival. Okay, So then we have one
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: last factor, chuck time. Yes, so it's not like this
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: is a ten hour, two week trip like this can
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: take a really long time for a rock to escape
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: mars Is gravity and then basically make its way to
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: Earth millions of years that kind of time. Cane bacteria
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: survive that length of time? Sure, why not? Well, in
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: some really smart people at cal Poly isolated a living
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: spore from the gut of a bee preserved in amber,
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: kind of right out of Jurassic Park. How long ago
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: would that be? Been? Preserved in Nember to forty million
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: years and the bacteria is still alive. Yes, And that
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: is not even the most amazing one, the most amazing. No. No,
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: Russell uh re Land of west Chester University in Pennsylvania
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: extracted bacteria from a two hundred and fifty million year
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: old salt crystal. Living bacteria, Yeah, chapped inside liquid in
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: that salt crystal. So I think all the questions have
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: been answered, is like, it's not probable, but it's feasible
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: at least that these things could have taken place. So
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: it is possible that we are in our origin Martians.
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: That's right. It's still raises a question, Chuck, what's that?
• 21:32
  Speaker 1: Where did that life begin? Yeah? Jeez, that's it. Dial
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: it back even further. That's all I got. You got
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: anything else right now? That's all I got. So I
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: would recommend going to how stuff works dot com and
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: typing in are we all Martians? And will bring up
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: this article UM. On the site, you can also type
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: in origin life Earth in the search barineal up my
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: article on panspermia and a biogenesis. Actually, there was one
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: more thing we should have pointed out. What we said
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: that it can take fifteen million years for these meteorites
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: to to reach Earth, but we didn't point out that
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: that's not always the case. Sometimes these things find their
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: way to Earth in just a few years or day.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: It doesn't always take fifty million years. Okay, Chuck Josh.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Before we go any further, we need to tell everybody
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: to go do some reading, too, sweet agreed o horror
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: fiction contest. That's right, as everyone knows, every Halloween for
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: the past couple of years, we read a horror story
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: and Jerry Jazz is it all up with sound design.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: She does good work. And this year Josh had a
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: pretty awesome idea that sort of bad us on the
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: behind by calling for fans submissions, and we got a
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: lot of them. We got a hundred and four of them, uh,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: and they had to be between three thousand and four
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: thousand words. So we read between three h four hundred
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: thousand words of these submissions, and we went through and
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: we picked out our favorite sixteen and it was tough.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: There's some really good stuff in there. Um, but we
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: came up with the Sweet sixteen, and now it's up
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: to you guys out there to pick which one we
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: read for the Halloween episode. Um, we've entered the sixteen
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: into this fancy little bracket UM game. A widget on
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: the house Stuff Works website has this grossly inappropriate country
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: music that we can't disable. There's there were extensive emails
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: about whether or not we can just say what we can't.
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: We couldn't like put horror sounds or anything. No. I
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: wanted to so bad. So it's like this really scary
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: bracket game with like the it's crazy anyway, Um, there's
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: bracket's brackets up there. First you need to go to
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: UM type this into your favorite search engine blogs how
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: stuff works, uh Sweet sixteen here, and it'll bring up
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: this blog post that has a link to all sixteen
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: articles or um entries. Yeah. We're also linking to this
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: on our Facebook and Twitter, so you can do that too. Yeah. Uh.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: And then you read the six team and then there's
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: a link on that same blog post that has um
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: the Brackett game. You can jump off to that and
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: vote for your favorites. And the round one and this
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: Friday Round two starts. Uh, I think that day, okay,
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: and then it keeps going and going until we come
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: up with the winner four weeks okay, and we will
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: read that on the air. It'll be awesome. And I
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: think we already have next year's picked out as well.
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: We do because we had what we thought was the
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: best one that was disqualified for certain reasons and uh
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: so we're just gonna clean it up and read it
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: next year. Yeah, it's not a winner in no way
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: is it a winner. In fact, it lost it lost
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: qualified right out of the game. But we still liked it. Yeah,
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: and the other sixteen are really great, so it's like
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: any of them are going to be really good. Yeah.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: I'm not disappointed in the least me neither. I'm very
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: excited as a matter of fact. Okay, So go to
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: uh blogs how stuff works, um, and then sweet sixteen
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: horror Fiction something like that, and it'll bring up that
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: post that says, like, read this sweet sixteen horror fiction
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: entries here. I think there's an explanation for all right,
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: that was lengthy. And then jan Nick I call this
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: another trucker emails us. We've heard from a few truckers,
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: long haul truckers, and I imagine podcasts are pretty great
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: if you're sitting there with hemorrhoids driving across canvas. All right, Uh,
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: just listen to the White Color Crime podcast. Guys can't
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: help but think of my own experience. My last job
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: was working in the counter at a general auto repair shop.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: There were two of us at the counter. Both handled
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: the phone's inventory, parts and cash drawer, just about everything
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: except turning wrenches. As we didn't have charge accounts with
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: all of our parts suppliers, we paid cash for some
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: of the parts right out of the till the part
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: said to be entered into the inventory as a cash transaction,
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: and the system would spa out a piece of paper
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: showing the transaction and then would get file the way.
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: A couple of weeks after the other guy quit, um,
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: I was now handling all the transactions and started noticing
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: some things. Every quarter we would audit the invoices and uh,
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: some of the invoice numbers were repeated, as well as
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: very unusual things like a distinct forward part number on
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: an invoice from the local Dodge dealer, something small as
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: one here. Uh. Some of them were photo copied invoices
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: and we didn't have the original, so we uncovered basically
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: that this guy was taking legitimate parts invoices, making color
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: photo copies using a razor blade. He would cut out
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: things like the invoice numbers, parts and prices and alter
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: another legitimate invoice by taping those numbers over the originals
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: and photo copying. So this dude was just like basically
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: manipulating his documents. Sounds like very easily. Uh. Since I
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: left the company a year ago, they have continued looking
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: through the files. I'm covering more and more forced invoices.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: I don't know the exact figure, but this guy stole
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: a staggering amount of money from the business, and he's
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: gotten away with it up until now. Does it's just
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: in there? Yeah weird, I don't I mean, yeah, this
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: person doesn't work there anymore, so Justin doesn't work there.
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: I don't know if they're pursuing this anymore. That's I
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: guess this white collar crime. Sure it is not, you know,
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: it's not like stocks and bonds and things, but sure
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: that's white collar crime. Altering documents. I feel like it's
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: on the blue collar side of white collar crime. In
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: a part store, an auto parts store. Maybe that's what's
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: tripping me up. Um. If you are on the road
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: a lot and we keep you company, we want to
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: hear your thoughts. You can tweet to us Wait until
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: You're Parked uh s y s K podcast. You can
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: also join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: Should Know, and you can email us at Stuff podcast
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: of other topics. Is it how staff works dot com
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: MHM brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
• 28:11
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