Episode 138 - Discoveries About Extraterrestrial Life & Vikings Ancestry
Discoveries about extraterrestrial life are rare; that’s why they fascinate us. They present an opportunity to understand our future as a species.
In this episode, Aaron and I discuss discoveries about extraterrestrial life. We pick apart the possibility of life on Venus. We also discuss space exploration and colonization of other worlds. Finally, we talk about recent discoveries about Vikings. What we know about our ancestry may not be entirely accurate!
Tune in to the episode to learn more about life—on and off the planet!
Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:
Learn what scientists discovered on Venus that suggests life.
Know the plans for space exploration and what recent discoveries mean for some scientific ideas.
Discover the new findings concerning genealogy and how we are more connected than we think.
Resources
Toxic gas on Venus could point to life by Hannah Sparks on New York Post
Does Venus Have Life? by Janusz Petkowski from the MIT team
Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus on Nature Astronomy
The first interplanetary helicopter is on its way to Mars on Space.com
Will the Mars 2020 helicopter fly? on Metaculus
The Vikings Were More Complicated Than You Might Think by James Gorman on The New York Times
Key concepts: Phosphine, Panspermia, Great Filter, Drake Equation
Related Episodes
Episode 84 with Anthony Aguirre with Big Questions About the Universe
Episode 42 on Untouched Civilizations
Episode Highlights
Life Outside Planet Earth
The New York Post released an article indicating the possibility of life on Venus.
Humanity has always assumed that life outside Earth would come from Mars or Jupiter's moons.
Venus is extremely hostile to life as we know it.
There is evidence of high amounts of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus.
3 Possibilities Behind the Phosphine on Venus
First, the detection of phosphine may have just been an error.
Second, phosphine could instead be a result of a biological process occurring on the planet.
Third, it could also be the result of an unknown inorganic process.
The Probability of Life on Venus
Researchers are putting high emphasis on phosphine as a result of biological processes.
To date, researchers cannot find an inorganic process that produces phosphine, so they've put that question to the scientific community at large.
This discovery may motivate us to explore planets other than Mars.
Exploring Other Planets with Aircraft
There have been plans to send a helicopter to Mars.
These plans may also apply to Venus exploration. There is suspicion that biological processes are happening in Venus' atmosphere, not on its surface.
We have limited methods of testing in vacuums and reduced gravity.
Why Is Finding Extraterrestrial Life on Venus Such a Big Deal
The possibility of extraterrestrial life on Venus is significant because it is a planet hostile to life as we know it.
We may be incorrectly assuming that life exists only in specific environments.
We have found life adapting to extreme conditions on Earth.
Anaerobic life exists on Earth, which could mean that life exists in even more extreme conditions.
The Panspermia Hypothesis
This idea states that life began in one place in the solar system. Later, it somehow traveled between asteroids, moons, and planets.
In the context of Mars exploration, there are many discussions regarding life originating on Mars.
It is difficult to determine the origin of life under this concept.
Independent Life Source Hypothesis
Another hypothesis is that life exists on different planets, and they were all created independently.
The current attitude toward life on other planets is that our solar system is unique, and we should find Earth-like planets.
With the new Venus discovery, this hypothesis has started to seem more likely.
The more we discover, the more opportunities there are to find data. However, observations suggesting the absence of life do not decrease the probability of finding a new form of life.
The Probability of Intelligent Life
We discuss the Great Filter, the Fermi Paradox, and the Drake equation.
Humans are the only known form of intelligent life, making it difficult to imagine an intelligent species' extinction.
Civilization only goes back 10,000 years.
Extraterrestrial Colonization
We should consider colonizing the moon or Mars in the case the Earth gets hit by an asteroid or some other catastrophe.
Moving out may be the way to getting past the Great Filter.
The short-term benefits of the Venus discovery are minimal right now. However, in the future, it may show significance.
The Diversity of Vikings
A new DNA study shows that Vikings were pan-European and Mediterranean.
Pop culture depictions of blond, blue-eyed, Nordic Vikings aren’t accurate.
Vikings were more than just raiders and had an agricultural community.
Humanity Is Genetically Connected
Our genealogy shows us how connected humanity is because we have little bits of every race.
The family trees of Icelandic people are closely related.
New Facts About Vikings
The Varangian Guard is an elite unit in the Byzantine Empire, and it was composed of Scandinavians.
A recent study confirmed that one Viking warrior grave was for a woman.
5 Powerful Quotes from This Episode
“I'm glad that we're talking about things that are happening outside the planet today, because the planet is so messed up.”
“One thing that we could find is that life is just so extremely rare. And it turns out that every time we find evidence on Mars and Venus and all these places, it turns out to be a false alarm, which is possible.”
“The more information we gather, the more opportunities we have for finding promising data. Sure. Whereas when we continue to make observations that don't suggest the presence of life, that doesn't really push the probability down so much as it continues to keep us kind of at our steady state level.”
“Another thing that can kind of bring us all together [is] the realization that the world is often a lot more multi-ethnic, diverse, complicated than one might assume.”
“The world often surprises us. There's something uplifting about the stories that we have today where science has a way of fighting against our human narrow minded nature and sort of saying ‘No, actually, the world is a really interesting, crazy, diverse place.’”
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To expanding perspectives,
Max
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 138.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome, everyone. Welcome. You have reached another local maximum. I've got a new podcast set up today. But same old co-host here. We're gonna welcome Aaron to the show. Aaron, how are you doing?
Aaron: I'm doing well.
Max: Yeah, good.
Aaron: It's officially autumn now, we've made it out of the summer. So that feels like it caught me off guard. But things are good.
Max: I mean that's nice. I'm just trying to make it through the year. And I know that people are like, it's not like the year changes and the problems don't follow us. But I need a cut off point.
Aaron: You can't accomplish large goals without setting small benchmarks along the way so...
Max: I guess we have the Jewish New Year right now.
Aaron: Right.
Max: So that's sort of one tick. And, then I feel like this is now the time when I'm like these are the changes I want to make and then the real... I don't wanna say the real...
Aaron: The secular new year.
Max: The secular new year is though, is the time when I'm like, “Okay, this is when it should start.”
Aaron: That's not a bad model. It keeps you from getting caught off guard on New Year's Eve saying, “Shoot. What's my resolution? What am I gonna do with myself?
Max: No, no, yeah. You have to prepare it. You have to prepare it for sure.
So, okay, so last week I did my first ever call in-show. And I was surprised—I was not sure how that was going to go. I thought people are going to be like, “Well, what is this? This is kind of weird, jumping from topic to topic.” I actually got a few emails on that. People liked it. So maybe we should do more calling shows.
Aaron: Yeah, I thought it went well.
Max: Yeah. We talked about all sorts of things—the election. We talked about Bayes applied to COVID. And I think we'll apply Bayes to one of our topics today. We're doing science topics today. We're talking about cosmology, we're talking about biology, we're talking about genealogy. So this is a little bit outside our wheelhouse but we have our toolkit.
Aaron: Yeah, we got pop sci.
Max: Yeah, yeah. All right. So actually, so why don't we just get into it. I mean, the first one I wanted to talk about was an article I have linked here to the New York Post. So you can always link to various different sources. And the New York Post is always one that might be controversial, but they tend to take science topics like this and make it like a short article that appears interesting.
This is about whether there is life outside of planet Earth. And that's always been a topic of great interest to me. I feel like it's something that a lot of people are interested in. Some people probably don't care. Some people are probably like, “Well, what does this have to do with my life?” Where do you stand on that?
Aaron: Ah, I mean, I can see both sides of it. I think it would be undeniably cool, it would be kind of a mind blowing thing if we were actually able to confirm that. But the flip side is if at least in the forms that we're discussing today or the instigating story, it's not like all of a sudden my world would be changed day to day. This is a far shot from little green men landing on the White House lawn saying, “Take me to your leader.”
Max: Yeah, I feel like this is one of the slow moving areas of science where we've actually seen quite a bit of progress in our lifetime. I feel like physics, when they're trying to make the unified theory, I mean there's been some stuff, but they've almost kind of seem to have hit a brick wall there in many ways. I'm sure the brick wall will dissipate at some point, but it seems like we're learning a lot about our galaxy or universe, our solar system, and we're learning about it fast. Like every few years there's something else. And today, it was always assumed that if there's life on the solar system outside of Earth it's got to be in Mars, where it's much colder than Earth but it has an atmosphere.
Aaron: And there's something about Mars in that context in the last 10, 15 years.
Max: Right. And the moons of Jupiter where there's oceans underneath, ice, where it's like, “Okay, we could see life there.” And there has not been a lot of focus on Venus and the reason has been because it is hot. It is dense. I mean that planet is, if you think Mars is trying to kill you if you go there, Venus is a thousand times worse. Like that atmosphere will crush you and it is toxic gas.
Aaron: It's not just toxic. It's like sulfuric acid or something.
Max: So how is that worse?
Aaron: I mean, you wouldn't want to breathe it. But I think even if you didn't breathe it, it would probably corrode through whatever. You need a special suit not just to separate you from the outside, but to keep it from eating away at you.
Max: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So Venus is definitely not somewhere you want to go. And some scientists have and I believe this—where were the scientists, I have to look. Here's the paper in Nature Astronomy Magazine, but I want to know, like, I did not look up what universe is, but this is talking about they found evidence of phosphine on Venus. Not like tons of it but enough where it's like we don't know a way to produce that amount of phosphine in an inorganic way, without microbial life.
Aaron: And I don't remember what the source was where I read this, but I think they said that they were kind of using this as an excuse to calibrate one of their instruments. They pointed Venus to look for this and they were expecting that we're going to see barely trace, if any recognition of this particular compound. And then they found it in, not just detectable, but significant beyond background that it can't just be a measurement error level.
Max: Right.
Aaron: It’s almost an accidental discovery.
Max: What a lot of these are, and that's pretty cool. I mean, people have made the point well. It's on Jupiter but you kind of expected on Jupiter. Because the gas giants are a little different. That means the pressure and whatever. So I don't understand all the chemistry but apparently this is something that they don't have.
And so, we have a bunch of points here. We're gonna do some Bayesian probabilities on all of these points that we have. So we wrote down here three possible explanations, right? And one is, it’s not actually phosphine. We've detected it in error. It's not like you could actually see the phosphine. They're detecting, I believe, spectral evidence of it.
Aaron: Yeah, and that's how most astronomy work is done. It's very hard to directly observe anything that...
Max: I mean imagine…
Aaron: Even when we're discovering planets, it's often, “Well, we can't see the planet but we can see that the light from the star is being affected in a way that indicates there's probably a planet there.” So this is...
Max: One of the most mind blowing discoveries is that you can actually tell what these foreign bodies are made out of just from astronomy, just from data, which is pretty—people don't think about this that much. If you told someone 100 years ago that would be possible, that would be really mind blowing.
So one, it's an error. Two, it's the result of a biological process. And three, it's the result of an inorganic process, chemical or geological previously unknown. So we're not going to be very good at putting probabilities on this ourselves because we're not really in the field. But I don't even know, do you even want to try?
Aaron: Well, I'll just throw out, not putting a number on it, but kind of some context for that paper in nature. So they're putting a pretty high probability on category number two, is that it's the result of some sort of biological process. Not because they have a compelling argument for why it is that but more that they've looked real hard at number three—could there possibly be some sort of inorganic process that would result in what we're observing. And they've exhausted all of the ways they can think of it.
And so, they kind of published this paper in the context of, “We can't come up with an explanation other than biological life. If you can, please, please tell us.” And throwing that out to the scientific community.
Max: Yeah, right. I feel like at this point, I would be more inclined to accept the—what principle is that—the [09:06] crime roll principle. Like don't put anything close to zero percent on this. I think all three are very possible but the fact that they're putting this out to the scientific community, you're going to see lots of alternative explanations come forward. And if none come forward over a period of time then that result being a biological process becomes higher and higher. And the implications of that are, we'll talk about the implications of that, but that would be pretty far flung implications.
Aaron: And I think this could be a huge motivator for either increasing investment in exploration of our near planets or perhaps maybe diverting some of the resources from Martian exploration, which certainly is not the prime motivator. But one of the motivators has been, we think there might be trace signs of life there to go explore that. If we think there might be a payoff of a similar magnitude on Venus, then maybe we should start sending robotic missions there as well. So yeah, that could be very cool.
Max: I mean, I feel like it's a lot harder. Like you said, it corrodes the—we have vehicles driving around on Mars. We're not gonna have vehicles... well, can we have vehicles driving around Venus? I think we do have something but it's so...
Aaron: So there would be two things on that front. I don't know when the last probe was sent to Venus but they have sent probes. And it is very much I believe one of those scenarios that you can send it in but it will eventually kind of burn up in the atmosphere. Not just because of friction like when we deorbit satellites, but because of the corrosive nature and the harsh environment.
However, if we step back to Mars for a minute, there is a mission that is en route to Mars right now, which has a small helicopter as part of it, which will be the first time that we've tested flying—essentially an aircraft—on another planet.
And if they can learn some lessons from that, we may be able to extrapolate to having some sort of atmospheric craft for Venus, which it also sounds like the signs of life are not on the surface of Venus. The surface of Venus being close to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. That they suspect, if there is this sort of biological process occurring, that it's up at like 50, 60 kilometers into the atmosphere, where it's more between room temperature and boiling water.
Max: So, that's Venus cold.
Aaron: Yes. So if we were looking to explore the origins of this particular phenomenon, we wouldn't want to be going down to the surface anyway. So certainly not an easy challenge. But I would put money on the folks at JPL being able to come up with a way to do it.
Max: Is there anything in your area of expertise where you would know something about designing aircraft on other planets? Because I know you know something about designing aircraft, but…
Aaron: Not really. So there's a related meticulous question about the Martian helicopter. And folks are pretty bullish about it in general. However, there is a significant non zero chance that it fails completely because we were very limited in ways we can test for how aircrafts will behave.
Max: On Mars or Venus?
Aaron: For Mars. They’ve done some testing, you can maybe test in vacuum but it's not exactly vacuum. And how do you test and reduce gravity? And they tried to do some proxies but there's serious limitations on how much they can prove it out beyond actually going and doing it.
Max: Yes, we do know something compared to an average person.
Aaron: I think they were putting the odds at something like mid 60% for success of the Martian helicopter. That may have been partially mitigated by the caveat and you could do a basic breakdown on this. In order to get to the point where you launch, and try, and fly the aircraft off of the rover, you got to get there. So you got to build in all the chances of failure of the mission up to that point as well.
Max: Hmm. What is the name of that mission?
Aaron: That is an excellent question.
Max: Oh my god, I'm gonna try to look at it. I'm sorry about these notifications. I can't turn them off, new computer.
There it is. The first interplanetary helicopter on its way to Mars—NASA's ingenuitive Mars helicopter launched with the purse variance rover on... so it launched on July 30th. Scheduled to land in February of next year. So we'll maybe revisit that in February. So that will be fun.
Oh my god, this URL is so crazy. Lots of percent 20s. But hey, that's what we're talking about. I'm glad that we're talking about things that are happening outside the planet today because the planet is so messed up.
Aaron: Here we go. I found a meticulous question. And the community prediction is at 80% chance of success. And apparently, I put it at 85. But for our listeners, that question is closed so it's too late to get a forecast now.
Max: Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, right. So let's talk about why it would be a big deal if we found life on Venus. Well, first of all, finding life outside of Earth would be a big deal. But let's say we found it on Venus instead of Mars. I feel like there's an extra big deal in that because the conditions are so harsh. Or, I mean, harsh, maybe it's not the right word because that's just harsh relative to us, right? I mean, if you're Venu-tian then Earth might look pretty harsh. But it's so different, that it means that the ability for life to survive in different environments, the intelligence of it, is way higher than we could have imagined.
Aaron: Well, yeah. We have a handicap in this kind of analysis because we are aware of a single case where we found life. And so it's unclear whether that means that life can only exist in a very narrow set of circumstances, which Earth falls within or if we’re just one among the many cases.
Max: We keep finding life on Earth in more and more extreme environments on Earth.
Aaron: That was the other piece that I was gonna get a comment on that. I know we've said that these conditions on Venus are fairly extreme, and I don't know if we've mentioned, but it sounds like it's an abiotic process, most likely. What I want to say is it's not necessarily oxygen based.
So there are organisms on the planet Earth that have non oxygen based cycles. There are some microbes and bacteria that live in undersea volcano events where there are pretty extreme conditions, both in terms of pressure and temperature. But I don't know, off the top of my head, how that compares to the conditions on Venus.
So whether this would be an order of magnitude difference or if this is in that same band but we are questioning whether life could kind of originate there. Or if it has to originate in a much more moderate condition and then it can kind of adapt into the more extremes. So there's a lot of unknowns there. It's hard to generalize from a case of one.
Max: Right, right. Yeah. So I guess the point I want to make, the way I'm thinking about it is—Okay, we see life with more and more extreme conditions on Earth, is it going to come to a point where it's like, well, you could get to this extreme but no more extreme than this? Will we at some point find the limit? Or we at some point say, “Oh no, we're actually going to keep finding life in more and more extreme environments.” Well, I don't know. What is the status of life and like, say, Antarctica. Is the snowy surface of that all lifeless? It’s probably not, right?
Aaron: It’s certainly not. Although it is—I know they work hard to keep from “contaminating it” with too much outside influence. But even if humans hadn't made their way to Antarctica, I mean, there are penguins there.
Max: Well, sure. I'm talking about though, kind of like microbial life.
Aaron: There must be. Yeah.
Max: Yeah. So it gotta be everywhere.
Aaron: Sorry. The word I was looking for wasn't abiotic, it was anaerobic.
Max: Anaerobic. Okay. Like aerobics working out your breathing in oxygen?
Aaron: It’s the non oxygen phase.
Max: Okay, okay. It makes you look at aerobics a whole new way.
Alright, so let's also talk about what that means in terms of life in the galaxy in general or life nearby. So, first of all, one thing that we could find is that life is just so extremely rare. And it turns out that every time we find evidence on Mars, and Venus, and all these places, it turns out to be a false alarm, which is possible. That's still a possibility there. And so if it turns out that these are all false alarms, the more and more we find that to be the case, the more it looks like, “Wow, life is very rare.” In which case, it might not be very common in our galaxy. Even if life exists elsewhere in the universe, you'd have to travel really far and it would be unlikely to get that.
Now it could also be that life is very rare but it exists in many places in the solar system because of the panspermia hypothesis. That is a strange one. But that one says that okay, life is extremely, extremely rare, but it originated one place in the solar system and somehow could travel from planet to planet, to moon to asteroid, within the solar system. I kind of find that hard to believe. But that has not been falsified has it?
Aaron: Yeah, I mean, it's tough to disprove. But there's been a lot of discussion of that, in particular, in the context of our explorations of Mars. The concern, well if we find signs of life on Mars, does that mean that life actually originated there? Or is it just that somehow life from Earth managed to make its way to Mars in the form of comets or some sort of ejecta? We know that there...
Max: Or like a volcano?
Aaron: The moon was basically split off from Earth during a large collision. So who's to say, with all that material was thrown off, that some of it couldn't have ended up going into an orbit that eventually took it to Mars?
Max: So it's got to be something like a very simple life bearing molecule?
Aaron: Right. Well, yeah. We're not talking about Gremlins hitching a ride.
Max: Yeah. I was thinking of chipmunks building a little rocket ship. Maybe about three feet tall?
Aaron: As adorable as that might be, that seems highly unlikely.
Max: Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know about that one, I would have to look into that.
Aaron: And the other thought there is that even if you give some credence to this hypothesis, it makes it difficult to determine the directionality of that as well. Who are we to say that there wasn't at one time life on Mars? And that's where the life on Earth came from?
Max: Right, we are all Martian.
Aaron: That the back bacteria on there has since died out but that was the source for the seeding of Earth.
Max: Right. Alright. So the third hypothesis here, which is the craziest one is—let's suppose that we discover... I don't know if this can be proved definitively, but let's say we have independent creation of life on both Earth and Venus or even on both Earth and Mars. And we discovered that it's very likely to have been created independently. That is a very—the implications of that are hard to—overstate the implications of that. Because if life was started independently in two different places in the solar system that means it is unimaginably abundant in our galaxy. It's like Star Trek, you go to almost every star...
Aaron: And possible counter to that would be, and I think you can poke holes in this pretty easily, but what about the possibility that okay, yeah, so life can fairly easily spawn in our solar system. But there's something special about our solar system that makes it unique among all the stars.
Max: But like, what ?
Aaron: I guess much of our search for life in the galaxy is based around looking for earth-like planets, which I think is a fundamental starting point for that is looking for soul-like stars as well.
Max: And we found both.
Aaron: Yeah, so I guess the question is how narrowly do you define the band of properties around the special case that is our solar system to distinguish it from others? I think that constraint kind of quickly falls apart. I would find it much harder to believe that there's something uniquely special about our solar system that makes it impossible for life to have occurred around other stars.
Max: Yeah, I still think it's possible that we won the life lottery. Like life is very uncommon and somehow we won the lottery. If it's shown that life can be independently created, then we know there are a lot of planets, we know there are a lot of earth-like planets, sun-like stars. So it's almost crazy to think about.
So okay, three possibilities. Let's see what we can say about subjective probabilities on those. I'm not saying Bayesian and I'll say subjective because I don't know how this would update it. But certainly it would mean independent creation I think goes up now.
Aaron: So just setting some baseline rules. We're talking about these three possibilities, presumably they have to sum up to less than or equal to 100%.
Max: Right. So one is no life elsewhere in the solar system. Two is life in the solar system with a single origin caused by panspermia. And three is independent creation of life on various planets or moons count-like bodies in the solar system. So, right now, I mean, I feel like—can this get answered in our lifetime? I don't know. I feel like the only one that could be falsified in our lifetime is the no life elsewhere.
Aaron: And even that is a challenge because we're working hard to try and answer that question on Mars and that's one of the easier ones to address. That was the other thing I wanted to throw out there about Mars versus Venus question, is, I'm not familiar enough with orbital mechanics, but I know a big challenge for Mars is that it takes somewhere between 18 months and three years to do a trip to Mars depending on where you are in our orbit cycles. I don't know if a mission to Venus would be convenient from that perspective.
Max: I believe, short.
Aaron: I think so. I think they may be closer. But there's more complexity to that question than just how close the orbits are.
Max: I mean, I was under the impression that they're way closer and also the planets are way closer in size. Although that doesn't help when you have a planet engulfed in flaming sulfur or whatever. The worst possible.
Okay. So yeah I think with this discovery, the Bayesian posterior for independence creation of life has ticked up. I don't know exactly where it is. But it looks like the discoveries over the last 20 years has caused—if there were a betting market—would cause the probability for independent creation of life to tick upward and upward. Now, that doesn't mean that it's a, you know, sometimes you have discoveries going in one direction and then all of a sudden it all gets overturned. But that appears to be the direction that we're going in here, which is exciting. I don't know, terrifying?
Aaron: Yeah, well, and part of it is kind of the difficulty of proving the null hypothesis here that the more information we gather, the more opportunities we have for finding promising data. Whereas when we continue to make observations that don't suggest the presence of life, that doesn't really push the probability down so much as it continues to keep us kind of at our steady state level. That's already been kind of baked into our predictions at that point, I would say.
Max: Yeah, so I don't know what my subjective probability on independent creation is but maybe, I know, I put it, I probably would not put it at 50%. I might put it in a bit lower 20%. But I'm just pulling that number out of nowhere.
Aaron: It's the one I most want to be true.
Max: I guess so. But yeah, I mean, it's like, I feel like I want it but then I'm like, “Do I really want it?” I don't know, right?
So if there's life everywhere then there's this concept of the Great Filter, which I have to mention because it's always a good discussion to have it like one, two in the morning. Which is like, well if life is everywhere, where are all these intelligent civilizations that we can’t see anymore?
Aaron: So yeah, the Great Filter is really just an extrapolation off of the Drake Equation, right?
Max: Right. And the Drake equation is the one that's like, what's the probability of an intelligent species on another planet? And like one of them when he made it was like, well, what percentage of stars have planets? And for all they knew at the time it could be like one out of a million. Well, now we know it's almost all of them. So that changes over time quite a bit.
Aaron: Yeah. Oh, sorry. I think the Drake equation is involved but I guess, is the Fermi paradox the other? I think that's just a restatement of the...
Max: Yeah, it's the Fermi paradox.
Aaron: If there is intelligent life, why haven't we seen it?
Max: Right, right. And so the idea is, well, this is a great filter that prevents life from getting to a certain area. I don't know where it is. Is it the fact that maybe like simple life is easy but the multicellular level is near impossible and we won the lottery on that? Is it that most civilizations blow themselves up? Is it that there's a very brief period that we're in now and then you get so far advanced that you’re not even—we don't even know what to look for? It's so advanced type of a thing. All that's an open question.
Aaron: Yeah. I mean, you could make a great case for discovering how to split the atom and entering the nuclear age is a form of the great filter. That no civilization can be expected to survive long enough past that to actually get off their planet.
Max: Yeah, I don't buy that one. Yeah I know...
Aaron: It makes for an interesting discussion.
Max: I feel like it's too mired in current events. And it's like, on the geologic scale, we wouldn't find evidence of that—I guess we wouldn't at this point. But we would eventually find evidence of that. I just feel like the hypothesis is too wrapped up in, like, basically, physicists looking at current events, and trying to fit it in there, and trying to make a political statement.
Aaron: It's hard not to because we have little to draw on in terms of the extinction of intelligent species. Again, we've got a kind of a sample size of one issue here. And you can try and draw some analogies, and say, “Well, nations or forms of government have only lasted how long without undergoing complete collapse, or revolution, and reformation? But to extend that metaphor to life itself is a pretty, pretty thin cloth to work with.
Max: Yeah. I happen to think there's probably some filter before us and some after us. You know? And I think, before us meaning like, “Okay, what if the dinosaurs didn't die out? Would there be intelligent life?” Maybe not. I don't know. Probably not. So it's maybe just the evolution of it is very, very hard. And then also, I feel like, where's humanity in a thousand years, not even a million, you know? Assuming we're still around. It ends up becoming such a different form of biology. Maybe it's not biology at all, maybe it's just machines.
Aaron: Because civilization as we know it only goes back, what was it? About 10,000 years ago when we started domesticating animals and taking up stationary—stationary agriculture isn't the right term for it, but basically building cities and farms as opposed to being hunters and gatherers. 10,000 years is like nothing. I don't even know how we would extrapolate that, especially when you look at where we were 100 years ago compared to where we are technology wise.
Max: Right, right. I mean, it is kind of staggering. And the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, I believe does have an earth-like planet. That was one of the biggest findings over the last few years. So that's pretty crazy, only four light years away.
Aaron: Yeah. And I don't know if they've explicitly put it in terms of the great filter but I know that many of the people who talk about establishing offworld colonies—going to Mars, building a moon colony, going to other stars, eventually—they're looking at this from the perspective of we don't want all our eggs in one basket. Because if right now, if we screw something up on Earth, whether or even if it's not something in our power, if another dinosaur killer comet comes along, there are no back up copies.
That if we've got a Mars colony, a moon colony, and we start going beyond out of the solar system, that perhaps that is a way of getting past the great filter. So when we nuke the earth or whatever happens, that's not game over. It sounds a little wacko to talk like that. But that's certainly something going on in the back of the minds of people like Elon Musk.
Max: But if people establish colonies off world over the next hundred, two hundred years, then this idea of civilizations inevitably blowing themselves up I feel like just becomes so much less likely. I just feel like it's not inevitable. I mean, we've seen it's not inevitable. Even if it happens tomorrow it's like, well, we lasted 80 years with splitting the atom. So could somebody have lasted 300? Why not?
Aaron: Yeah, but it's a probability game. Because to get to whatever the development is that basically insulates you from the downsides—how long does that take and what are the odds of getting there without falling victim to the downsides. But yeah, it is. That becomes very much a political current events discussion, whether it's in terms of nuclear war, and the geopolitical concerns there, or climate change, and the issue surrounding that, they all kind of tie back into that same route.
Max: Yeah. All right. What are the—I have a bullet point here. What's the practical implications? I'm kind of drawing a blank. I just always like to see these stories especially during times when we're so focused on the current time and place, and it becomes difficult to expand our minds.
Aaron: So I would say in the short term, little or none. I would be so excited. So we're recording on the 26th right now of September. I believe we have a presidential debate coming up on the 29th. This episode will be released before that. My mind would be blown if they talk about this in the presidential debate.
Max: We already know the topics, so I don't. Although knowing Trump and Biden, you never know.
Aaron: I think I would feel pretty comfortable in betting a hundred to one odds that it's not going to be a topic of the debate.
Max: So let me tell you the spaceforce. We're gonna send them to Venus, it's gonna be unbelievable.
Aaron: But if we're looking a few years, maybe a decade out, I think like we said, there could very likely be a resurgence in probes, and other exploratory, other robotic and scientific exploration to Venus pursuing this. And I think, as a lifelong space geek, that would be super cool. Exactly what form that takes remains to be seen.
Max: Yeah. All right. This is kind of an unrelated science topic but it's also related to genetics and genealogy, which is another interesting thing. And another thing that can kind of bring us all together with the realization that the world is often a lot more multi-ethnic, diverse, complicated than one might assume.
And so this is an article in The New York Times, which I think their science section is still good, is it? I mean, sometimes. I can't keep up. But I just thought it's interesting that the Vikings, there was a DNA study on the Vikings. And it looks like they were not just kind of Nordic people, they were almost real pan-European people. It includes, well, maybe it's not too surprising. That includes Germans and Slavs, but also includes Mediterranean people as well.
Aaron: Yeah. And I was surprised that this was as surprising as at least the New York Times took it to be. Because we do have evidence of Viking expeditions, perhaps more for trading than for raiding, having made it to the Mediterranean. But it was unclear how much that was kind of one offs versus something that happened fairly frequently.
And certainly our popular culture conception of Vikings is purely something of Scandinavia—Euro classic blond-haired, blue-eyed, six foot six, wears horned helmets, and carries a sword or an axe. Though, the horned helmet thing I think has been somewhat debunked in pop culture. But the other stuff? That's very much what our perception is, not necessarily accurate. I mean, they call that a couple of things. One being that there were probably a lot more farmers than Viking Raiders, or at least farming was a key part of their lifestyle.
Max: Not everyone could be a raider.
Aaron: And that certainly, you don't hear epic sagas of Eric the farmer. It doesn't make for a great tale. So it's easy to focus on the more...
Max: Eric The Podcaster.
Aaron: But also genetically, they were more diverse in moving away from that blond-haired, blue-eyed stereotype. And I think interestingly, that there was more mixing with other cultures. For one they call out, I think it's the Sámi. I'm very likely mispronouncing it. But that's a group that is even further north than the classic Vikings, famous as a kind of reindeer herders up in Lapland. As well as you said, folks from modern day Russia, and the other Baltic states, and down into mainland Europe, and even the Mediterranean.
People got around back then. It wasn't easy. There weren't airplanes, there weren't cars, but boats got around pretty well. And you could still walk overland pretty far. It's easy to dismiss that people actually did that because it would be unbelievable for anyone other than a college student on a gap year to hike across Europe.
Max: One thing that you learned from genealogy that—maybe it's not surprising for a lot of people but it's something to think about is just how connected we all are. If you go back 1,000 years, I think it's something like 1,000 years, maybe a little more, most of the people—if I traveled in time 1,000 years in the past, most of the people living there are going to be—either my direct ancestor, or sibling, or cousin.
So even people who are far outside of where I would think my genetic ancestry comes from, just because if you go back in time your number of ancestors increases exponentially until it fills up the whole of humanity. And so, it doesn't mean that we're not genetically diverse, we are, but we all have little bits of everything. I mean, look, I do genealogy. Most of my ancestors are Eastern European Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, but I'm sure if I go back 1,000 years, there are some Vikings in there.
Aaron: Yeah, I've only heard the second or third hand so I don't know if there's research to back this up, the genealogy work. But I think someone told me that like all Ashkenazi Jews are sixth cousins or closer.
Max: Really? That’s what—do you believe that?
Aaron: Ah, it seems plausible.
Max: Well, wait a minute though. So you have some ancestors who are Ashkenazi Jewish, right? So that means that we would be six cousins or closer.
Aaron: It seems very plausible because six cousins is pretty far when you really map it out.
Max: I guess so. I don't know. I have some six great grandparents but not all of them. Ah, yeah.
Aaron: But kind of focusing back on the Scandinavia piece where the genealogy is particularly fascinating is Iceland. And I don't know if you're too familiar with this but Iceland is pretty small. And it was only colonized not that long ago, during this Viking Age. And the people that colonized it was a fairly small group. So not only do they have really good records on this going back, like all the way to the original colonizers, they know what everybody on the islands relation is to everybody else.
And in the modern world, they have essentially a dating app that helps you identify when you match up with somebody, are they too closely related for this to be, because it's a serious concern in a community that—inbreeding is not the right term for it. But for a long time they had a limited genetic pool there. And it's fascinating from a genealogy and research perspective because they have such excellent records going all the way there.
Max: So it's not enough to make sure they're not like a sibling or cousin.
Aaron: I think it’s because a lot of those family trees kind of converge, and divide, and converge, and divide. So it's not necessarily as clean as a classic genealogy.
Max: Interesting. Interesting. All right, we have a few more bullet points here. I don't know if we want to get to them. That it just reminded you of I think this is your bullet point.
Aaron: Oh, yeah. So there was talk about getting down into the Mediterranean and people from—darker skin people having a presence in this genetic study. And it reminded me of the Varangian Guard, I'm probably mispronouncing it, but which is kind of a neat pull out from history that during the Byzantine Empire, which the Eastern Roman Empire after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
Max: Let's see, when would this be like?
Aaron: Kind of centered around 1008 AD.
Max: I see the ninth and 10th century.
Aaron: Yeah, okay. So long after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which was sacked and what like 476 somewhere around...
Max: Oh god, we could go turn to a history podcast.
Aaron: But this guard, this was an elite guard unit that specifically served the emperor of the Byzantine Empire. And it was primarily made up of Vikings, of Norse individuals. So they traveled all the way down from Scandinavia and Northern Russia to, you know, modern day Turkey in the Middle East, to serve as the elite guards for the emperor.
And kind of a neat tidbit related to that is that so many productive males in their prime we're running off to the Byzantine Empire to seek their fortune and serve in the guard that they changed the laws in some Scandinavian countries that you could not inherit while you were serving in—I think the term was in Greece, which was how they referred to the Byzantine Empire at the time.
Max: Sure, so it’s a Greek Empire.
Aaron: If you were off serving in the Varangian Guard and your father passed away, you could not inherit his lands and his wealth. So it was to try and get some of those people to actually just stay home. They didn't want to lose their best and their brightest.
Max: Another interesting find was that the old Viking warrior grave was shown to be a woman.
Aaron: I thought that this was super recent. And it turns out that they’ve done some...
Max: 2017.
Aaron: Yeah, that was when they did the DNA confirmation. A few years before that the—so the backstory is that I think it was in like the 1890s they discovered this.
Max: 1899.
Aaron: And they said, “Oh, it's a Viking warrior. We can tell for all the artifacts, yada, yada, yada.” And then I think in the early 2000s, they went back and did some further examination of the skeleton and said, “This kind of looks like it might have actually been female.” And there was a lot of controversy because female Viking warriors are a myth. It's all just sagas and modern politics. But in 2017, they were able to successfully extract enough DNA to definitively confirm that this person in this grave was in fact a woman.
Now, there's still some controversy over whether all the artifacts they found buried with this woman actually confirmed she was a warrior. And there's a theory that she’s not just a warrior, but in fact a warrior and a strategist. So there's some controversy about that but there are several leading scholars in the field who say that this does confirm the existence of not just female warriors but female leaders among the warrior group. So that's kind of cool that it's not just a mythology, that there is a real instance.
Max: That is really fascinating. I feel like to wrap it all up today, I feel like there's kind of a theme here where you look at the world and you look at the discoveries that are being made and it just seems like the world often surprises us. There's something uplifting about the stories that we have today where it's always science has a way of kind of fighting against our human narrow minded nature and sort of saying, “No, actually the world is a really interesting, crazy, diverse place.” And I don't know, these stories are making me happier this year than any of the other stories.
Aaron: It's a good reminder to really think twice before you put your probability of something being at zero because reality has a way of surprising you. That it may be extremely unlikely, but is it really zero? So that may serve us well in our daily lives if we remember, that the unexpected can still happen.
Max: Yeah, alright. So we haven't talked about what we want to do next week. I don't know if you have any thoughts, whether we can return to some tech topics, see what's happened in the machine learning world. We could—I still have more threads to pull on topology. I want to talk about the different shapes of spaces. Again, I need to hear some feedback from the audience to get that or we can kind of do another news report, just more general news.
Who knows? We could be doing anything next week. I have some pretty cool guests for October but I'm taking a little break this month and we're just gonna hang out. So do you have any preferences, Aaron?
Aaron: I don't know what the future holds. So I'll have to give some thought on that.
Max: Yeah, we'll see what happens with us here. Alright, that was a lot of fun. Have a great week everyone.
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