Why Crowds Change Who You Are & The Mystery of How Life First Began- SYSK Choice

Most of us know that driving faster burns more gas. But just how much does slowing down actually save you? The difference is bigger than you might think. And if you drive around with a bike rack attached to your car, even when there’s no bike on it, you’ll definitely want to hear this. https://abc7.com/archive/9151803/ There is something powerful about being part of a crowd. At a concert or sporting event, thousands of strangers can suddenly feel connected, sharing an energy and sense of belonging that is hard to create anywhere else. But crowds can also have a darker side. How does a peaceful gathering turn into an angry or even violent mob? And does being in a crowd really cause people to behave in ways they never would on their own? Dan Hancox has studied the fascinating science and history of crowds and explains what really happens to us when we become part of one. He is author of Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World (https://amzn.to/40axzVW). Every living thing comes from something else that was alive. Plants come from other plants, animals from other animals, and you came from your parents. So where did the very first life come from? And if life managed to emerge here on Earth, why haven't we found evidence of it anywhere else? Astrophysicist Mario Livio explores what scientists know about the origin of life, what conditions made Earth so hospitable, and whether we really might be alone in the universe. Mario worked with the Hubble Space Telescope and is the author of seven books. His latest, co-authored with Jack Szostak, is Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life (https://amzn.to/4dSpSGY). If you use Venmo, you may be sharing more information about your transactions than you realize. Depending on your privacy settings, other people may be able to see details about who you are paying. Consumer Reports says there are good reasons you might not want that information publicly visible. Listen as I explain the potential problem and how to change your Venmo settings to make your transactions more private. https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-make-your-venmo-information-private-a6507250342/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Do you want to hear about visionaries creating a better world? People working in conservation, exploration, science and tech alongside storytellers imagining and creating a better future? I'm Alex Honnold, professional rock climber and founder of the Honnold Foundation, bringing you season six of Planet Visionaries. This season, I speak to guests like National Geographic photographer Tom Pechek and Anna Rattman, executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute, USA, in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Watch Planet Visionaries on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:31Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, the math behind how driving slower can save you real dollars. Then, the psychology of crowds. Much of what we think is true is not.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Essentially, everything that we've been told about crowd behavior is wrong. And when you hear phrases like mob mentality is based on late 19th century crowd theorists who didn't actually do any serious empirical work studying how crowds behave at all.

• 0:59Mike Carruthers?

  Also, something you need to know if you're a Venmo user, and the origins of life. We know life comes from other life, but how did it all begin? From nothing?

• 1:11Speaker 03

  It's not from nothing. I mean, the universe as a whole may have started from nothing. Life started from chemistry. So when we talk about origin of life is how does chemistry evolve into biology?

• 1:26Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know. There's probably no better endorsement for a company than this. I keep buying their stuff. That's exactly what's happening with me and Quince. It started with their clothes. I've bought sweaters, polos, pants, jeans, shoes, a belt. And Quince has become one of the first places I look when I need something new to wear. And my wife and son buy from Quince too, all the time. What keeps bringing us back is the quality and the price. Quince uses premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, merino wool.

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• 2:51Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:08Speaker 04

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 3:21Mike Carruthers?

  Hi. You know, I get those pictures that pop up on Facebook of it's from some group that sends out pictures of the good old days, days gone by. And there was a picture of somebody standing in front of a gas station and the gas was like 49 cents a gallon. Well, it's not 49 cents a gallon anymore, is it? So by now you've probably heard all the tips and tricks to improve gas mileage. And one of them is to slow down. And Consumer Reports did the math on some of this. And slowing down has a bigger impact than I think you probably would imagine. If you drive, and of course it depends on the type of car you drive, but if you drive,

• 4:02Mike Carruthers?

  say 65 miles an hour, you're getting about eight miles less per gallon than if you drove at 55. At 75 miles an hour, you're losing about 14 miles per gallon. So that's about 250 miles you've lost on an 18 gallon tank of gas. And this is surprising, I think, to most people that if you have a bike rack on your car, you really need to take it off when you're not using it. The rack alone, without a bicycle, the rack alone eats up about five miles a gallon. And if you add two bikes, you're losing up to 15 miles per gallon because it messes up the aerodynamics. And that is something you should know.

• 4:49Mike Carruthers?

  As you have no doubt noticed, people act differently in crowds versus when they're alone or in a one-on-one situation. Being in a crowd changes you. And I'm sure you've heard the term crowd mentality or mob mentality. There's no doubt that people change, or at least some people change and do things when they're part of a crowd that they would never do alone. People at a concert or a sporting event, people at a party or a celebration, or people in a mob. The crowd changes them. So what is it about crowds and why is this important for all of us to understand? That's what Dan Hancock is here to talk about.

• 5:32Mike Carruthers?

  Dan has researched this topic thoroughly and he's authored a book called Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World. Hi, Dan, welcome.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Hey, Mike, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 5:44Mike Carruthers?

  So everyone has had this experience when you're with a group of people, like in a theater, you're watching a funny movie and collectively you laugh at something that if you were watching that movie at home, you would never laugh at. You at a sporting event will stand up and cheer along with the crowd when the team scores a goal or hits a homerun or whatever. You would never do that if you were sitting in your living room, watching it on TV. The crowd has an energy, the crowd has a force, a power. And what is that?

• 6:17Speaker 02

  It's amazing, isn't it? It's, it's something that crowd psychologists call social identification, which is, you know, a jargony phrase, but what it describes is exactly that kinship with, with our fellow travelers, you know? We feel affirmed, we feel validated in our, in our beliefs or in, you know, even if that's our belief in what we, something that we think is funny that makes it so different. During the pandemic lockdown, the COVID pandemic lockdown, when we were denied these opportunities, and I don't know about you, Mike, but we, you know, I watched some online comedy performances from my favorite comedians and I watched football games that were taking place in stadiums with no, no crowd there in the building. And it was like a ghost spectacle.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  It was, it was just not even close to being the same as usual.

• 7:04Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, I remember here at some baseball games, watching them on TV during COVID that, you know, they, they put like fake cardboard people in the seats just to make it look like there were people there. Cause to watch a baseball game or a, or really any sporting event that normally has crowds and to watch it in an empty arena or stadium, there's, boy, there is really something missing.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  It's, it's so unsettling, isn't it? I mean, that's, it was, it was exactly that gap that really captivated me and I was, it made me want to understand what it was that we were missing. And it's, it is that kinship, it's that solidarity, it's, you know, laughing louder because the person next to you is laughing and you're enjoying that fact.

• 7:51Mike Carruthers?

  And yet we are also sometimes in crowds and we, we really don't connect. You know, if you're in a crowded subway or you're, you're with a crowd, but you really wish you weren't. So there's a crowd that doesn't do much for you.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think that this is a really key distinction that crowd psychologists make between what they would call a physical crowd and a psychological crowd. Sometimes these two things overlap and sometimes they don't. So if you're in, say, Penn Station in New York and overwhelmed and bewildered and maybe a little bit lost and everybody's stressed and pushing past you in an agitated fashion, you and everybody else there are not part of a psychological crowd. You are a physical crowd because you're in the same place, but you're not bonded together by some shared belief or shared, shared value. It's the, the sporting, the big sports game or the big concert for your favorite band.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  That's when you have that social identification with your, with your fellow travelers. That's when you get the crowd joy rather than just the slightly overwhelming feeling that there's a lot of strangers here and, and that you are, you know, perhaps feeling claustrophobic or, or bewildered or, but certainly not enjoying yourself, not having a good time.

• 9:10Mike Carruthers?

  I remember hearing someone talk about how, when you think about it, when you go to a concert, it's a pain in the neck. You've got to park and then you're gonna have to get your car out later when everybody leaves at the same time. It's a hassle. You gotta, I mean, it isn't fun in the sense, and the music never sounds as good as it did on the record, that you would be, in terms of enjoying the music, being at home would have been probably better. But there is something about going to that concert with fellow fans of whoever you're gonna go see that drives people in droves to go see them.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  There's a very strong argument that that's an evolutionary imperative that's driving us to that, to that concert, that drives us towards any crowd of like-minded souls. I draw on like the, on the books of Barbara Ehrenreich, who's a huge journalistic hero of mine. She wrote a great book called Dancing in the Streets in 2007, which, which made the argument that early human societies, when, you know, you initially had groups of cave dwellers in, in family groups, they left those caves for the first time and started bonding together in the first sort of micro civilizations, you know, groups of 20 to 30 people, larger than the family group.

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Because they needed, because they were better able to survive predators like saber-toothed tigers by being in larger groups. Well, how did they bond together? Well, language was part of that. The evolution of language was part of that. But she argues that actually, partying together, you know, banging one rock against another rock, dancing around the fire, was the way that early humans bonded. So, when we feel the drive to overcome those hassles and go to the rock concert, go to the sports arena where obviously our view is not gonna be nearly as good as if we were watching it on TV at home, like, that's another example of that, right? We do that because there is something innately human and innately necessary that

• 11:09Speaker 02

  we desire in being among groups of people that we share a bond with.

• 11:13Mike Carruthers?

  So, this is all very interesting, and I imagine everyone listening has experienced that crowd effect of, you know, being part of a crowd. But other than being interesting, what do we do with this? Why is this important? What's the big so what here?

• 11:28Speaker 02

  The driving argument that I've come to through years and years of reporting on crowd behavior, both, and, and crowd policing, and how people behave in, in protests and, and carnivals and festivals, but also riots, you know, I reported on the 2011 riots in England that were the biggest in our history. So, I've seen the dark side as well. And what I've learned from all of this is that, the, you know, the, essentially everything that we've been told about crowd behavior for the last hundred-odd years, is, is wrong, and it, it has a political agenda to it. So, when you, when you hear phrases like mob mentality, or the madness of crowds, or the idea that violence and bad behavior in crowds is contagious, you know,

• 12:13Speaker 02

  think of the angry mob in The Simpsons with their pitchforks, their flaming torches, and so on. That characterization is based on, on late 19th century crowd theorists who didn't actually do any work, any serious empirical work studying how crowds behave at all. What they were doing was responding to, to people who are protesting in the streets of the great cities of Europe, cities like Paris, with fear, you know, the, the people who wrote this crowd, these initial works of crowd theory, and told us all that crowds are deranged, animalistic, that we are in some sort of primitive state when we join a crowd. And that's why we give in to the quote madness of crowds. They were doing so because they

• 12:56Speaker 02

  were scared of, of the people that were pushing for democracy in the late 19th century, you know, the mass protests by working-class people and by women indeed as well, who were excluded from the vote. It was very much a agenda to delegitimize crowds, and to say that these, well, these people are insane if they're demanding democracy and universal suffrage. And unfortunately, those, those ideas continue to serve people in power, and it's, I would argue, it's why we continue to hear crowds demonized as mobs to this day. You know, crowds often do things that I disapprove of as well, but it doesn't, it does us no good to pretend that those, that people in crowds who are throwing bricks through windows are,

• 13:39Speaker 02

  are mad. You know, they're not. They have, they have a clear reason for doing it, and we need to interrogate what that reason is.

• 13:44Mike Carruthers?

  If the, if the conventional wisdom about crowd mentality and crowd behavior is wrong, what's right? What, what is, what is crowd behavior? What is crowd mentality?

• 13:55Speaker 02

  It's a great question. So, I would, I, the work being done in universities now by the sort of leading academic crowd psychologists, of which I am not one, you know, I'm a journalist, but I've spoken to a lot of these people, says that actually crowd behavior is a lot more dynamic, it's a lot more varied, and it's a lot more diverse than this idea that there is one homogeneous mindset among, among a crowd. So, take, you know, protests, or indeed the riots in, in London in 2011. There were people doing, you know, criminal things during those riots. They were smashing windows and they were looting. There were also people within the crowd trying to persuade the, the more violent ones not to trash, trash shops,

• 14:38Speaker 02

  or, or loot shops, or smash up cars. So, there's, there's a, it's what crowd psychologists call self-policing. Now, they may not win that argument, but the, but the idea that all crowd behavior is homogeneous is, is provably untrue, you know, that a lot of, there is always going to be competing instincts within any crowd. Another example I like to point to is in, in the mosh pit in a rock show. That looks like very unappealing behavior to a lot of people, you know, throwing, young people usually throwing themselves around, hurtling themselves into each other in, in the name of dancing. As soon as someone falls to the floor in that environment, everyone stops and picks that person up. It's the first thing you learn, if you're into rock or punk or rap music. So, I would say that crowd

• 15:23Speaker 02

  behavior is, is dynamic, it's diverse, it's varied, and there are frequently conversations going on within the crowd about how that crowd behavior should evolve and what the next step should be.

• 15:35Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about crowds and how people's behavior changes in a crowd. My guest is Dan Hancock. He is author of a book called Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World. A big thank you to today's sponsor, Vinted. I think most of us have what I call someday clothes. I'll wear that someday. That'll fit better someday. Someday, I'll have a place to wear that. Meanwhile, it's been hanging in the closet for three years. Vinted offers another possibility: Sell it. Every day, people can sell clothes they're no longer wearing and make some extra money. And they've made the process pretty painless. Take what

• 16:19Mike Carruthers?

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• 17:45Mike Carruthers?

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• 18:25Mike Carruthers?

  So Dan, in a crowd, doesn't somebody kinda have to lead the crowd? Doesn't somebody have to be the first one to throw the brick through the window if it's a riot or something? Somebody has to go first and then it does seem, and I think you said that, you know, that this idea that it's contagious is wrong, but it doesn't look wrong. It looks exactly right. Somebody throws a brick through the window and then all of a sudden there's 20 bricks in the window.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, the key distinction in terms of the idea of crowd contagion is that in original crowd theory, the argument would be that anybody joining that a crowd of rioters would immediately become susceptible to all of its worst behaviors and be a victim of that contagion. So Gustave Le Bon, the founder of crowd theory in the 19th century, this French eccentric aristocrat, argued that even the most civilized man upon joining a crowd becomes a barbarian. They become, you know, devoid of all of their usual rationality and sense. What crowd psychologists today are finding is that if you are someone who is predisposed to throwing a brick through a window and you join a crowd of rioters and you see the

• 19:38Speaker 02

  guy next to you throw a brick, then you are disinhibited by having joined that crowd of rioters in order to do the thing you wanted to do. That's not the same as contagion. That's not the same as me or you, you know, people, civilized gentlemen who would not never throw a brick through a window, joining a crowd, we would maintain our sense of propriety and order and our sense of what is right and wrong. So it's the distinction between contagion and becoming disinhibited enough to do what you would do, what you would like to do.

• 20:13Mike Carruthers?

  One of the situations that I think stumps a lot of people, when a team, a sports team wins the championship, there's a celebration in the town, in the city where that, and it very often turns into trouble. The cars get burned, overturned, windows get, and I never understood that because this is supposed to be a celebration, kind of a city spirit thing, and it turns ugly and I don't know why.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's such an interesting example. I think I'd really like to get more stuck into that particular type of crowd behavior. I feel like it's particularly common in the United States and Canada from what I've seen. We have trouble at football matches in Europe. I mean, Britain was famous for that historically. That's changed dramatically in the last 30 years, I would add, and actually we have very, very, very few arrests in, ever, in British football matches these days. The idea of a celebratory moment becoming one of violence is intriguing. I don't have any easy answers for you, I'm afraid, Mike. Like, it's something about the catharsis of that victory. I mean, it's also going to be about alcohol, let's be honest.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  Like, that's certainly part of it, that drunken behavior leads more directly to reckless behavior, that there's no doubt about that. I think there's something about the raised levels of adrenaline, the raised levels of alcohol consumption, and then perhaps, and frustrations from other parts of people's lives being unleashed in what ought to be a celebratory crowd moment and becomes a riot. I mean, the difficult truth that's connected to this, actually, Mike, is that, is that people get joy out of riots. It's an unpalatable truth, but that is something that successive pieces of like serious crowd psychological work have uncovered, that people find joy in a riot.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  The deep-seated psychological motives for that is something that's much harder to unpack, but it must speak to some sort of need to vent frustrations as illegitimate as we may see the violent venting of those frustrations.

• 22:27Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't that interesting? Because you would think if you're celebrating a team victory that you would get joy from that, not you would get joy from, let's cause a lot of trouble and break a lot of things. But I think you're right. I mean, you see it all the time, that that's, because very often when the camera shows those people rioting, there's big smiles on their face.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Absolutely, huge smiles. You know, I think of the Woodstock 99 documentary, which, you know, I was, I was over in the UK when Woodstock 99 happened, but I was very much into a lot of the music that was being played as a teenager in London. And for people who haven't seen it, the Woodstock 99 festival descended into absolute carnage and chaos and, you know, people breaking stuff and setting fire to these giant trucks that exploded. And, you know, the reasons for that are many and varied. It was mostly that the organizers of that festival denied the festival goers water and shade and food, and they were driven slowly a bit crazy.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  But there's a moment towards the end of the documentary where this guy who's now in his mid-40s and experienced that like cataclysmically bad and badly run festival, and at the end of this, this three-hour documentary, which you, you know, you're watching with your jaw wide open, this guy says, you know what? It was still the best time I ever had. He was remembering, you know, the thrills and albeit kind of chaos of his youth.

• 24:03Mike Carruthers?

  But hasn't anybody, you know, the next morning gone to the jail and asked the people who got arrested, what was that about? I mean, and get an answer? Like, well, you know, I just got carried away. I mean, what's the excuse for why we did what we did?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  It's often boredom gets cited quite a lot, a need for just to see something happen, even if that thing is, you know, in London, a double-decker bus going up in flames. In riots, people cite things like inequality. There are often political motives that come out that, you know, they feel that they haven't got a stake in society and so why not burn it all down? And occasionally people would just, you know, say that they happen to be passing by and it was sort of almost opportunistic, that there was no great thought process that went into it. Now, it's not the same as it being mindless, you know, those people still have control over their senses and when we describe bad behavior in crowds as mindless, we're kind

• 25:04Speaker 02

  of letting those people off the hook, I believe. But there's a real range of answers to that question. I think they're all completely fascinating. What motivates someone to take part in a riot?

• 25:14Mike Carruthers?

  Do you think, or is there any evidence, that when we see that happen at a celebration that turns bad, that people, some of the people came there for that purpose? Or was it spontaneous, let's burn the bus? Or is it, hey, there's a thing downtown, let's go cause some trouble?

• 25:34Speaker 02

  I think what we find is it's going to be a mixture. So there'll be, you know, there'll be people who, for whom this was always part of the plan, that they were kind of geared up for it. You know, when we had these far-right sort of fascist riots, they were quite small in scale, but they were nonetheless terrifying in Britain earlier this summer. Some of those people had experience of being part of far-right street movements. They had previous criminal convictions for violence and for, and for fighting with the police and, or indeed like racist attacks. So, you know, I feel like there's a small minority for whom like this is their set of normal behaviors and they're, and they're always going to be first in the pool, as it were.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  And then you'll get, you'll get the more casual people for whom, you know, maybe they need to be in that, in that spot and they need to be a bit drunk and they maybe need to have had a bad week and that's enough, along with that identification with their fellow sports team fans, in order to motivate them to, to, to do the bad thing, to do the thing that carries risk for them and to transgress the social norms, which say you don't throw a brick through a window, you don't set fire to the double-decker bus.

• 26:49Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I think all of us have heard of that term, crowd psychology or mob mentality, and kind of have an inkling of what it's about, but it's really good to get a deeper understanding of what it is, what it means, and some of the myths about it. I've been speaking with Dan Hancock's and the name of his book is Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Great, Dan, good to have you on.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me, Mike. I really enjoyed it.

• 27:18Speaker 05

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• 29:17Mike Carruthers?

  Here's a question you may have thought about, as have many others. How did life originate? Right? Because we all know life comes from other life. You came from your mother and father. New plants come from other plants. Life cannot just spontaneously exist. And so if that's true, how did the first life come to exist? How did life of any kind first originate? Of course, religions offer an answer, but what about science? And here's another question. If you look around the Earth, you see life is plentiful. We have all types of animal life, plant life.

• 29:58Mike Carruthers?

  We have huge life forms, and life so small you can't see it with the naked eye. Life is everywhere on our planet. So why is it not everywhere anywhere else? Or at least as far as we can see? People theorize that the universe is so vast that there must be life elsewhere. But if there is, we haven't found it yet. It seems beyond Earth, life is rare. Why? Here to take a scientific look at these questions is Mario Livio. He's an astrophysicist who has worked with the Hubble Space Telescope. He is the author of seven books. His latest, which he co-authored with Professor Jack Szostak,

• 30:43Mike Carruthers?

  is titled, "Is Earth Exceptional: The Quest for Cosmic Life." Hi Mario, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 30:54Mike Carruthers?

  So let's start with that first question. Where did the first life come from? Because how could life just originate from nothing?

• 31:04Speaker 03

  So it's not from nothing. I mean, the universe as a whole may have started from nothing. Life started from chemistry. Namely, on the early Earth, there were all kinds of chemical compounds, and there were certain conditions. So when we talk about origin of life, is how does chemistry evolve into biology?

• 31:30Mike Carruthers?

  And the answer to that question is?

• 31:32Speaker 03

  After the last few decades of research, we already know some of the things. For example, RNA, which is very, very important. It's one of the building blocks of life. We know how to make two of the bases of RNA. We know how the phosphates and the sugars are done. And out of the four bases that make RNA, we know how two could have been made from chemistry on the early Earth. Similarly, if you look at proteins, the building blocks of proteins are amino acids. There are 20 such amino acids.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  What researchers have managed to do is to show that from the same type of chemistry that makes the building blocks of RNA, you can make 12 at least of the 20 building blocks of proteins. So basically, we know how to make some of the building blocks of life, or how Earth could have made some of the building blocks of life from chemistry. We still don't know for all of those.

• 32:43Mike Carruthers?

  And when did we think that might have happened?

• 32:46Speaker 03

  You know, the earliest life forms that we find on Earth are about 3.5 to 3.7 billion years old. So life on Earth probably started around that time. Possibly a little bit earlier, maybe, you know, as early as 4 billion years ago. The Earth itself is about 4.6 billion years old. So, you know, relatively speaking, quite early on in the life of the Earth, life on Earth already appeared.

• 33:17Mike Carruthers?

  So given that life outside of Earth seems to be very rare, we can't find it. And given that the conditions for life on Earth are so particular, it has to be just so in order for life to exist, it makes people think perhaps this was the work of a god, of some force that created life. Because it just seems so impossible for it to have just happened on its own by accident.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Indeed, we still don't know to tell for with absolute certainty whether or not the emergence of life is inevitable, given the right, you know, chemicals and the right conditions. Or is it some sort of a fluke chemical accident that is extraordinarily rare and happened here, but maybe not has not happened elsewhere? From here to jump to the conclusion that, you know, somebody must have done that, that requires a different type of thinking.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  And, you know, of course, religious people, you know, might think this way. But what scientists are trying to do is to see whether or not, just, you know, given that the chemistry was there, that life could have happened by itself.

• 34:47Mike Carruthers?

  And I think it comes as a surprise, at least to some people, that we have not discovered life beyond Earth. I think people believe we have.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Yes, there have been a few claims in the past that life has been discovered, in particular on Mars, for example. There were the Viking experiments. Those were landers that landed on Mars. And there was an experiment there which originally was thought to show that there is some life form in the Martian soil. But today, almost nobody believes that. Then there was a meteorite that arrived to Earth from Mars, at which there was a claim that maybe some fossils of life are found inside it.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Again, those are thought now not to represent life. So, so those, so we didn't find life on Mars. There is also a claim about something that may have been created by life on Venus. That is also still very non-conclusive. And biosignatures in planets around other stars, none so far has been convincing that there is life on those planets.

• 36:11Mike Carruthers?

  So you often hear the argument that because the universe is so big, because there are so many stars, so many planets, there has to be life somewhere else. It's just statistically impossible to imagine that's not true.

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Yes, you're right. Many people say that.

• 36:30Mike Carruthers?

  What do you say?

• 36:31Speaker 03

  However, however, I will say that it is still statistically possible to imagine that there is no life. But, you know, look, I would like to think that there is life elsewhere. You point out correctly that there are many planets a bit like Earth in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Perhaps maybe even as many as a billion such planets. There are many, many galaxies in the observable universe. They number probably in the trillions. So you could say, well, with trillions of galaxies and a billion planets in each one of them a bit like Earth, surely there must be life somewhere.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  And the answer is, there might be, but surely is not the correct answer. Because we don't know yet what is the probability for life to emerge, even if the conditions are right. And, you know, if you say there are a billion planets like Earth in the Milky Way, we don't know yet whether the probability of life emerging is smaller or larger than one in a billion. So we cannot tell, you know, that surely life must have emerged somewhere. Although, I must say, I would like to think that perhaps life did start elsewhere.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  Because, you know, I'm a great believer in what has become known as the Copernican Principle, which basically says that we are nothing special. You know, starting with Copernicus, you know, he showed that in the solar system, we're not at the center and so on. And many others have shown, continuously shown, that neither Earth nor life on Earth are something particularly special. So it's a bit arrogant to think that we are the only ones out there. But we cannot say with certainty that we're not.

• 38:38Mike Carruthers?

  When you say that there's nothing special about us or about Earth, then why can't you find life anywhere else? That, that, in fact, the fact that there is so much life on Earth and every other planet that we can find is barren, makes us pretty exceptional.

• 38:56Speaker 03

  Bueno, ya sabes, hay muy pocos planetas, relativamente hablando hasta ahora, que en realidad hemos podido estudiar. Ves, para saber si hay alguna forma de vida en otro planeta, en particular un planeta extrasolar, necesitamos poder determinar la composición de la atmósfera en tal planeta. Bueno, estamos apenas empezando a poder hacer eso usando el JAMES WEBBS TELECÓPO DE ESPACIO. Así que no podemos decir que, oh, ¿cómo no encontramos vida? Todavía no teníamos el equipo científico correcto para poder encontrar vida.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Solo estamos llegando ahí ahora. Si en otro, diría, 10 a 20 años, hay un telediscípulo de planta llamado Telediscípulo de Mundo Habitable, que probablemente será lanzado alrededor de 2040. Ese telediscípulo quizás sea capaz de caracterizar la composición de atmósferas de algunas decenas de planetas extrasolar. Si no encontramos ninguna vida entonces, entonces al menos seremos capaces de decir algo estadístico, es decir, decir, aha. Incluso si las condiciones son correctas,

• 40:22Speaker 03

  ya sabes, las probabilidades de la aparición de vida son más pequeñas que, digamos, un porcentaje o así. En este momento no somos capaces de decir esas cosas.

• 40:32Mike Carruthers?

  Así que para que la vida exista en este planeta, hay ciertas condiciones que tienen que cumplir, ¿verdad? Necesitamos luz y aire y agua. La vida no puede existir sin esas cosas. ¿Es la suposición de que esas condiciones deben estar en otro lugar para que la vida exista? ¿O podría haber vida en otro planeta en algún lugar que no tenga esas condiciones, que tenga condiciones completamente diferentes?

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Sí, así que tienes razón sobre algunas de esas cosas. Por ejemplo, pensamos que el agua líquida es un obligatorio absoluto porque necesitas un solvente donde toda la química tiene que empezar a tomar lugar. Ahora, se hacen experimentos mientras hablamos de la posibilidad de otros tipos de solventes, pero resulta, al menos hasta ahora, que ningún otro solvente es tan bueno como el agua. Así que pensamos que el agua líquida en la superficie, en una superficie rocosa de otro planeta, es un obligatorio absoluto. Ahora, ¿podría la vida en sí ser completamente diferente?

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Por ejemplo, la vida que conocemos está basada en carbono. ¿Podría haber vida que no esté basada en carbono? Así que, de nuevo, se han hecho experimentos, en particular, por ejemplo, silicio, que es el más cercano al carbono en términos de sus propiedades químicas. Bueno, resulta que sí, es el más cercano, pero realmente no permite la misma cantidad de reacciones químicas que el carbono permite. Así que mientras diga que no sabemos con certeza que no puedes tener vida basada en silicio, diría que las probabilidades de que eso sea más pequeñas.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Y de manera similar, otras propiedades de la vida en la Tierra están siendo probadas si otras cosas pueden pasar, como, ya sabes, las membranas de las células y así sucesivamente, diferentes tipos de membranas, o tal vez incluso no membranas en absoluto. Así que todo esto está siendo investigado, pero en este momento no hemos encontrado una manera realmente buena de hacer complejidad en general y la vida en particular más que, ya sabes, necesitando agua, carbono y un par de otras cosas.

• 43:01Mike Carruthers?

  Así que, ¿es la creencia científica general que la vida es, supongo, un accidente? Que solo fueron ciertas condiciones que se cumplieron y ahora tenemos vida?

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Bueno, señalé que, primero de todo, no es una cuestión de creencia. Todo necesita ser confirmado por experimentos y investigaciones. Sabes, si, si encontramos después de investigaciones extensivas, que sabes, solo pasarán, como dije, aproximadamente dos décadas o más de ahora, no encontraremos vida, incluso en planetas extrasolar que parecen tener todas las condiciones correctas para que la vida haya aparecido, entonces, ya sabes, tendremos que decir que, no diría que tal vez un accidente, pero seguramente que es raro y tal vez incluso un accidente

• 43:57Speaker 03

  en el sentido de que las condiciones que necesitas son tan específicas que son muy raramente satisfechos.

• 44:06Mike Carruthers?

  Así que hablamos de ello al principio, pero no estoy seguro de que comprenda completamente la respuesta. ¿Ha habido vida, ¿ha habido biología creada de la química en el laboratorio en este planeta?

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Bueno, no en el laboratorio. En el planeta, la biología, pensamos que la biología emergió de la química en la Tierra temprana. En el laboratorio, los investigadores han logrado crear algunos de los bloques de construcción importantes hasta ahora, es decir, partes de RNA, algunos de los bloques de construcción de proteínas, membranas que pueden crecer y dividirse. Así que muchas, muchas de las características de la vida han sido producidas en el laboratorio, pero no todas hasta ahora. Pero, ya sabes, los investigadores que trabajan en eso

• 45:04Speaker 03

  piensan que dentro de, ya sabes, otra década o así serán capaces de producir en el laboratorio todos los bloques de construcción de la vida y en particular, ya sabes, que serán capaces de producir algo que es una célula viviente.

• 45:22Mike Carruthers?

  ¿No es eso un poco aterrador?

• 45:24Speaker 03

  No para mí, debo decir. Mira, quiero decir, esto no es Frankenstein, ya sabes. No están creando algún tipo de monstruo. Hablamos de crear algo que se asemeja a una célula viviente, una célula viviente.

• 45:44Mike Carruthers?

  Bueno, así es como todos empezamos, incluso Frankenstein.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Sí, eso es correcto. Así que en algún punto, ya sabes, la gente tendrá que desarrollar reglas éticas y así sucesivamente de lo que puedes hacer y lo que no puedes hacer. Pero en este punto es realmente el bloque de construcción más básico de la vida.

• 46:06Mike Carruthers?

  Entiendo que no hemos descubierto vida en ningún otro lugar y...

• 46:10Speaker 03

  No todavía.

• 46:11Mike Carruthers?

  No todavía. Pero, ¿hay un sentido de que lo haremos? No solo una esperanza, pero basado en lo que sabemos, parece probable que si seguimos mirando lo suficiente largo, lo suficiente lejos...

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Sabes, definitivamente hay una posibilidad de que eso suceda. Y como dije, si no sucede, al menos seremos capaces de poner algunos números estadísticos reales sobre cuán raro probablemente sea la vida, lo que es interesante en sí mismo. Por supuesto, es más interesante si en realidad encontramos vida. Ten en cuenta que hay un tipo de vida que no hemos mencionado aquí, que, ya sabes, algunas personas piensan que tal vez eso es lo que está sucediendo, que es que la IA está empezando a desarrollarse, la inteligencia artificial.

• 47:05Speaker 03

  Así que en algún punto, tal vez sean máquinas las que se convierten en ciudades civilizaciones realmente inteligentes y tal vez la inteligencia biológica es solo una fase relativamente breve en la evolución de la complejidad. Si ese es el caso, entonces, tal vez incluso toda la vida inteligente en nuestra galaxia, si existe, es en realidad dominada por algún tipo de máquinas y no por cerebros secos como los nuestros.

• 47:42Mike Carruthers?

  Bueno, no me gusta eso en absoluto.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Ya sea que nos guste o no, si es donde van las cosas,

• 47:49Mike Carruthers?

  No me gusta.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  No tendremos ningún control de eso.

• 47:52Mike Carruthers?

  Sabes, es tan interesante porque recuerdo ver cuando era muy joven, vi ese mapa que te mostraba dónde está la Tierra en la galaxia Milky Way y nos veíamos tan insignificantes. Nos veíamos y, ya sabes, te piensas, bueno, estamos como en el centro del universo o al menos el Sol es o algo así. Y cuando ves la gran imagen y estamos en ese pequeño角落 de la galaxia que nadie, ya sabes, ni siquiera miraría dos veces...

• 48:21Speaker 03

  En las suburts galacticas, básicamente.

• 48:23Mike Carruthers?

  Correcto, sí, que es muy humillante. Es como, ¿quiénes somos? Pero, pero por el otro lado...

• 48:29Speaker 03

  Estoy de acuerdo contigo.

• 48:30Mike Carruthers?

  No podemos encontrar a nadie más como nosotros. Así que tal vez somos excepcionales. Realmente, te hace doler la cabeza.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Tienes razón, es fascinante.

• 48:39Mike Carruthers?

  Es divertido hablar de esto y ciertamente te hace pensar. He estado hablando con Mario Livio. Es un astrófisico que ha trabajado con el Telediscípulo de Espacio Hubble y es coautor de un libro llamado ¿Es la Tierra excepcional? El探險對宇宙生命 Y hay un enlace a ese libro en las notas de la entrevista. Gracias por venir hoy, Mario.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Muchas gracias por invitarme.

• 49:04Mike Carruthers?

  Vi que Consumer Reports está muy preocupado y alertando a la gente de que si usas Venmo, parece que mucha gente usa Venmo, la configuración de privacidad predeterminada permite al mundo exterior ver a través de tu lista de contactos, tus amigos, tu historia de pago, a quién pagas, cuánto pagas. Información íntima que puede ser explotada por scammers, secuestradores, divorciando esposas y simplemente cualquier persona que quiera snoop. Imagino que hay alguna razón por la que hacen eso, pero en cualquier caso, debes saber que puedes cambiar esa configuración y hacer que tus transacciones sean privadas. Necesita un poco de trabajo y en las notas de la entrevista he vinculado un artículo que te lleva paso a paso a través del proceso

• 49:47Mike Carruthers?

  para hacer que tus transacciones Venmo sean privadas. Y eso es algo que debes saber. Sabes, mucha gente que escucha podcasts también escribe reviews. Por eso, es por eso que tenemos, creo, más de 5,000 reviews solo en Apple. Pero siempre nos gusta obtener más porque ayudan y solo te tomaría un momento para escribir una rápida review de este podcast, con suerte, adjuntar cinco estrellas y decirle al mundo. Soy Mike Herbrothers. Gracias por escuchar hoy a algo que debes saber.

• 50:47Speaker 06

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