#423 - "Sent Them Map to Earth" Alien Contact, NASA Moon Base & Uncontacted Tribes | Nadia Drake

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Nadia Drake is an award-winning science journalist who specializes in space exploration, astrophysics, the search for alien life, along with jungle and wildlife reporting for National Geographic. She is the daughter of astronomer Frank Drake who founded SETI and is best known for the Drake Equation. https://www.nadiadrake.com SPONSORS https://dupe.com - 100% free to use. Stop wasting money on brand names and start saving. https://takeultra.com - Use code DANNY for 15% off. https://nobltravel.com - Get 46% off your entire order. https://hims.com/danny - Get access to personalized & affordable care for hair loss, ED, weight loss, and more. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS https://www.nadiadrake.com https://x.com/nadiamdrake https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/has-nasa-already-found-life-on-mars *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - The Voyager missions of the 1970s 06:49 - We need new rocket propulsion 11:48 - The Drake Equation & finding ET intelligence 17:26 - Searching for life in our solar system 20:56 - The pentagon pyramid on Mars 24:10 - Nuclear element found on Mars 27:16 - Why NASA stopped looking for life on Mars 32:41 - Putting humans on Mars 38:17 - The Order of the Dolphin 42:18 - Self-replicating autonomous probes 44:21 - Golden record time capsules 54:39 - Nadia's obsession with spiders 01:02:09 - Uncontacted tribe murdering local children 01:12:55 - First contact with intelligent life 01:17:14 - Other species of humans 01:26:23 - Scientists vs. science communicators 01:31:53 - The science funding problem 01:35:42 - The Particle Physics feud 01:39:18 - World's most powerful telescopes 01:45:32 - Studying interstellar objects 01:47:51 - NASA's Moon Base program 01:53:35 - China's new reusable rocket booster 01:56:44 - Nadia's take on UFO disclosure 02:07:46 - WSJ alleges UFOs are hazing rituals 02:16:58 - Best movies about alien contact 02:19:53 - Evidence of life on Mars 02:27:48 - Earthrise & Apollo 8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility, that's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal. At Humana, our Medicare Advantage plans are easy to understand and easy on your wallet. Like offering more benefits than you'd get from original Medicare alone. And including dental, vision, and hearing coverage in every plan.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  And the best part is, every plan has a $0 or low monthly plan premium, which makes it easier to save, too. So this Medicare planning season, plan well with Humana. Learn more at gethumana.com. Humana is a Medicare Advantage HMO and PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:07Danny Jones?

  All right, Nadia, thanks for coming. It's awesome to meet you.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  It's great to meet you, too. Thank you.

• 1:11Danny Jones?

  You were just telling me off camera that you just got back from JPL?

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15Danny Jones?

  What were you doing there?

• 1:16Speaker 02

  The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

• 1:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  NASA's-

• 1:19Danny Jones?

  Jack Parsons Laboratory.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  We'll go with that, too. The center of the universe.

• 1:24Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  I was there interviewing folks who have been working on the Voyager mission since the 1970s, which is a very cool thing to do. If you don't know what the Voyager mission is-

• 1:38Danny Jones?

  I don't. At least I don't remember.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  I'm gonna tell you. So in 1977, NASA launched two spacecraft to go explore the Outer Solar System. And Voyager 1 is the spacecraft that has a big milestone coming up this fall. It was actually the second one to launch, but it flew by Jupiter and Saturn and returned images of the planets and of their moons that showed us so many surprising things about what the Outer Solar System is like. And Voyager 2 went to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. And so it's still the only spacecraft that has visited Uranus and Neptune. And since then, the two have actually left the solar system.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  They're interstellar right now. And they've been operating for nearly 50 years. So they both launched nearly 50 years ago. If you can imagine spacecraft-

• 2:32Danny Jones?

  That's wild.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Isn't it? It's like, you think about what other pieces of technology we have that last for that long, and there's not much.

• 2:41Danny Jones?

  Can we still communicate with it now that it's interstellar? Really?

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they're both still chatting with Earth. And what was really cool was while I was there in Mission Control, both of the spacecraft were actually chatting with Earth. So you could see the animations of them.

• 2:56Danny Jones?

  And what kind of data do they get from it now that it's out of the solar system?

• 2:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they're studying the interstellar medium and what that's like. And it's at this point mostly just what cosmic rays and energetic particles are doing, because a lot of the instruments that they have had on the spacecraft, they've had to turn off over 50 years. Yeah, because the power supply is dwindling and you have to shut things down. But the thing that's really cool is that this November, Voyager 1 will be one light day away from Earth, which means that-

• 3:27Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Bingo. Every time we send a signal to the spacecraft, it takes 24 hours to get to the spacecraft. And then when it sends something back to Earth, it takes 24 hours to get back.

• 3:39Danny Jones?

  So it takes a light day.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  A light day.

• 3:41Danny Jones?

  That's far.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. And I mean, it's also really, I think, a great way to demonstrate how big space is.

• 3:51Danny Jones?

  And it took 50 years to get that far?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  50 years to get one light day away.

• 3:56Danny Jones?

  That's bonkers.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. It is.

• 3:59Danny Jones?

  And it's just moving based on its trajectory? So it's not burning any fuel? Once it got out of our orbit, it's just been on a trajectory the whole time?

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. It will be forever farther and farther and farther away from Earth.

• 4:15Danny Jones?

  So what's the plan with the next Voyager?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  What do you think?

• 4:23Danny Jones?

  I mean, I can't even imagine.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  I'm so, this is one of the big questions that I'm working on answering right now, because when the Voyagers were launched, it was such an audacious mission. This idea that every 176 years, the outer planets are aligned in such a way that you can send spacecraft by each of them just by using gravitational-

• 4:46Danny Jones?

  176?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Every 176 years.

• 4:49Danny Jones?

  That's wild.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  So it was like a once in however many generations that is chance in 1977 to go visit all four planets before that alignment goes away and doesn't come back until like your great-grandkids are alive.

• 5:05Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  And thinking about how much we didn't know about the solar system at that point and what it took to actually get those spacecraft built and off the ground in time, because there's a hard deadline. You know, what are the big questions today that would be the next Voyager mission? It may not be a mission, it may be a question.

• 5:28Danny Jones?

  So there's no, are there actual ambitions to do another one?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Hmm, there's, people have pulled up plans, well, they've designed plans for something called the Interstellar Probe. So the idea would be that instead of designing spacecraft to visit the outer planets, and then if we're lucky, cross the boundary into interstellar space, that you would intentionally design a spacecraft to go to the next star system or somewhere. So that's the idea with the Interstellar Probe. But I kind of wonder, and you can stop me when I'm rambling. The way I like to think about Voyager is that together the two probes,

• 6:14Speaker 02

  colored in our solar system with such an array of unexpected worlds and findings, things that we never could have imagined. And here I'm thinking about Jupiter's moon Io, which is the most volcanic place in the solar system. So when Voyager 1 flew by, it saw these plumes erupting off of this tiny little moon that nobody had thought was going to be super volcanic, but it is. It showed us Europa, another moon of Jupiter that has a surface that is bright. It's white. It looks really young. And that was the first hint that there may actually be an ocean tucked beneath the crust on Europa.

• 6:53Danny Jones?

  Because of the color?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Because the surface is so young.

• 6:56Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh, okay.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So it's continually getting resurfaced. And things that are, that have very old surfaces in the Outer Solar System, they're very cratered. So they have that like record of impacts that goes back billions of years. But Europa doesn't look like that. So like those, Saturn, the rings were a revelation. Uranus and Neptune as well, like the really weird moons that orbit these planets.

• 7:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  So when I think about that, I'm like, what is the next mission? Or set of missions that we could do that expand our understanding of the galaxy in the same way? Because that really helped us to understand our solar system and how surprising it is.

• 7:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  So if you think about other planetary systems, other stellar systems, what can we do to try and color those in with the same kind of detail that we did here?

• 7:48Danny Jones?

  I think we need a new type of propulsion. We gotta figure out something better than just blasting fire and chemicals out the back of a rocket, you know?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Nuclear propulsion, for example?

• 7:58Danny Jones?

  I don't even know. Maybe nuclear. Nuclear's still like, I don't know. I feel like there's got to be some crazy breakthrough in propulsion or, you know, just ways to get around without combustion.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Anti-matter annihilation.

• 8:12Danny Jones?

  Maybe. Maybe like anti-gravity or something crazy. We need to figure out how to build our own UFOs, maybe.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  That would be cool.

• 8:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I feel like that would solve a lot of problems.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:25Danny Jones?

  Because it's really expensive to build all those rockets and explode them. And I'm sure it's not good for the environment to blast all that, you know, rocket fuel into the atmosphere and-

• 8:34Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 8:36Danny Jones?

  It'd probably be less dangerous if we could figure it out. And we could probably travel farther if we don't have to just rely on getting out of Earth orbit and just rely on the trajectory. We could actually like, you know, move, move around and who knows? I don't know what I'm talking about.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  I want warp drive and I want the Star Trek future.

• 8:56Danny Jones?

  You were actually, the other day, we had a guy in here who is the, he's the head of the Electrostatics Division at NASA currently. And he's working on this. He's working on this with another guy.

• 9:11Danny Jones?

  It's not, it's not electrogravitics. They're not calling it that, but they're using electrostatics. And they've already created measurable force with this.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  In the lab?

• 9:23Danny Jones?

  In a lab, yeah. And they've measured it and it's, um,

• 9:27Danny Jones?

  I believe it's like, I forget how they, the scientific terms for all this stuff, but, essentially it can create enough force to propel its own thruster that they've created.

• 9:41Danny Jones?

  And if it was on like the moon's gravity, it would be able to get around fine. It's just, it's, it's their biggest hurdle right now is figuring out how to defy Earth's gravity. But it's really interesting that they figured it out, you know?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:53Danny Jones?

  At least on a micro level.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is interesting.

• 9:57Danny Jones?

  So like, and he's not being funded by, this is like his side project. He's doing this like in his garage. You know, they have, they built their own lab, him and this other guy that, um, the other guy he's working with is Andrew.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Andrew Origema.

• 10:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah, something like that. Anyways, so that guy worked for, um, Blue Origin.

• 10:18Danny Jones?

  Aerospace genius wizard. And they both are working together on this and, but like, they're not being funded by NASA. And then this is just like complete side project. So I was like, why wouldn't NASA fund this? Like if I was NASA, I'd give you guys a billion dollars to figure this out.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  I have that question.

• 10:33Danny Jones?

  They already did figure it out. They don't want to tell anyone.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Wouldn't that be cool? I don't think that's true.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  We can hope though. It's, you know, talking about the money involved here. I know a billion dollars is a lot of money.

• 10:49Danny Jones?

  Not for rocket people.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  But it's not.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  It's not on like the scales at which we're discussing.

• 10:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Budgets and things and billionaires, you know? It's like a billion dollars for a hundred people on this planet that wouldn't even notice.

• 11:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no. And the, on the scale that we're talking about with the stuff that these people are dealing with, it's not even a,

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:12Danny Jones?

  It's, makes no difference to them.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  It's just kind of frustrating. It's like, we have to fight so hard to get money to do these things that can be so transformational. And it's just, it already exists. It's already there.

• 11:25Danny Jones?

  So, um, for people that aren't aware, like, what is your specific background in all this stuff? Like, what are your, your creds? If you want to put it that way. Yeah. For the people who love creds.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Well, let's see. I'm a science journalist, so I've spent, um, the last 15 years diving into different science and exploration, um, adventures and topics and have ended up serendipitously specializing in covering space exploration and astrobiology. So, um, my background academically is in the life sciences. I did a PhD in genetics and then went to second graduate school for science communication. And from there ended up, uh, my first job right out of the program was as the astronomy reporter at Science News. Which happened because the person who'd been in that job previously had retired after 20 years.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  So the position was open for the first time in 20 years and I showed up as an intern and they said, we hope you like writing about astronomy because that's what you're going to be doing. I was like, well, I have a background in life sciences, but let's try it and see what happens.

• 12:41Danny Jones?

  And, uh, did you ever figure out your dad's equation?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  And there's that part two.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  So I grew up with Frank Drake, the father, we like, I like to call him the father of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and of me.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  So I got to learn a lot from him as I was growing up about

• 13:06Speaker 02

  what it's like to be a pioneer in a field that really for a lot of the last 60 years has been fighting to achieve scientific legitimacy. What's that like? How do you bring people on board? How do you keep your excitement and enthusiasm for an endeavor that, um, a good chunk of the science community might think is a waste of time.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  And the Drake equation, um, it's funny, like the first time I actually kind of sort of conceptualized what that was, was when I took one of the two astronomy classes that I've ever taken as an undergrad. And the class was called Search for Life in the Universe. And I was like, I cannot fail this class.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  This, this cannot be the outcome here. But it was the first time I really had thought about the Drake equation, what it's trying to do, how it works. And of course, since then, it's been on my mind pretty much all the time.

• 14:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  I haven't solved it.

• 14:09Danny Jones?

  It's a very complicated equation. Well, I guess it's not that complicated, depending on how good you are at math.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  It's not that complicated.

• 14:15Danny Jones?

  But the problem with it is that like, a lot of the variables in the equation, we don't know the real answers to. Is that right?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. Yeah.

• 14:21Danny Jones?

  And, um, the, the, at the time that, this was in the sixties, I believe.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  1961.

• 14:31Danny Jones?

  That they were observing these, a couple of stars that are pretty close to us. We weren't even aware that they had planets at that point. Is that true? That's true?

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, we didn't find the first exoplanets until the nineties.

• 14:42Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, isn't it? It would take 30 more years.

• 14:46Danny Jones?

  How far we've come since the nineties.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:48Danny Jones?

  And we didn't even know there was exoplanets out there.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Right. We thought there probably were. So in 1960, dad had done Project Osmo, the first scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And you're exactly right. He targeted two nearby sun-like stars that he reasoned if those stars had planets in orbit around them, like our sun does. And if those planets were anything like Earth with civilizations that were anything like ours, then like us, they might also be producing distinctly artificial radio waves. And he'd calculated that the telescope that he had was powerful enough to detect those radio waves if they were as strong as what we emit.

• 15:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  But we didn't have any evidence for exoplanets in the sixties, right? It was just a guess. Which, when I think about the Drake equation, which came about the next years, you know, it's seven variables. They're all multiplied together. So the math is actually easier, just multiplying seven variables together. But dad only kind of knew the value for one of those variables in the 19, in 1961. And the rest of them were total question marks. Which is, you think about what sort of insight, creativity, vision, curiosity, whatever word you want to use, it takes to formulate something like that.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  I think it really was ahead of its time in many ways.

• 16:15Danny Jones?

  Absolutely. And the fact that he came up with it on a whim, on the way to a meeting.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:20Danny Jones?

  It's insane.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:23Danny Jones?

  You know, sometimes that's what you need, just like insane pressure to come up with those aha moments like that. And then one of like the craziest variables of it is, is, um, I believe it's how, how long a, an advanced civilization will last. Is that right?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  So the last variable is L, which I think is the one you're referring to. It's the average length of time that civilizations are detectable. So it's not just the lifetime of a civilization. It's how long can you detect them for? And it's an average, which means that you by definition have to have more than one civilization before you can even try and guess what L might be. So dad used to call that the most vexing variable.

• 17:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Because it's, it's the least knowable. Like you really, some of the others we can predict and some of the others we have found the values for since dad wrote the equation, but that one is like,

• 17:24Speaker 02

  who knows?

• 17:25Danny Jones?

  Online shopping has gotten ridiculous. You find something you love and you have to end up leaving it behind because the price tags are insane. And you're left wondering, does anyone make an alternative? That's why I use dupe.com all the time. You can take basically anything you're thinking about buying and you paste the product link into dupe.com or even just upload a photo and it searches for similar products at different prices. I mean, look at this array of masculine comfort. Where else in the world can you find a gorilla couch? And even compare prices on them. There's a lot of the same quality and very different prices. Dupe works for clothing, shoes, jewelry, electronics, and tons of other stuff. You can even just describe what you need, like noise cancelling headphones for traveling and let Dupe research the options. It's completely free and you don't even need an account. Using dupe.com is insanely simple.

• 18:10Danny Jones?

  Just go to D U P E dot com and paste any product URL, upload a photo and it'll instantly show you similar items for way less. There's also an app and a browser extension if you want to make it even easier. No account needed, totally free. Start saving money with dupe.com today. One of the craziest things to me about the search for extraterrestrial life is that like, you would imagine that because of Earth and the way Earth is teeming with life and has been for so long, that we would be able to find it in close proximity to us. But it doesn't seem to be that way.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:47Danny Jones?

  You would imagine like, I mean, I know, I know there are some astronomers that believe that uh, life could have originated even on Mars and like moved here afterwards. But like, wouldn't there be some fossils up there or something? I don't know.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  That's what we're looking for.

• 19:04Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. I think, um, a lot of people would suspect that if we live in a biological universe,

• 19:17Speaker 02

  that life, signs of life would be nearby. On Mars, perhaps the icy moons in the outer solar system, nearby exoplanets. And it's true that we haven't found anything definitive yet, but we've only really just started looking. So in a sense, I think it's, it's very premature to say that it's not there.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  I was just working on a story about life on Mars. And how confounding it is to be looking for a thing that you have a very hard time defining in the first place. So if someone asked you, what is life?

• 19:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  How would you answer that question?

• 19:59Danny Jones?

  What is life? Something that is a multi-celled organism? Or a single, even a single-celled organism? Just some kind of an organism?

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Something cellular. But I can think of things that would be cellular that would not necessarily fit the definition of life.

• 20:19Danny Jones?

  Really? Oh, okay. Like, what's an example?

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Well, so a lot of people would say viruses. And then they would say viruses aren't actually cellular because they're not, they don't have a phospholipid bilayer that they're enclosed in. They're wearing a protein coat instead.

• 20:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  But, you know, I think what we mean by cellular is something that's really separated from its environment, it's autonomous. There's a, there's a difference between it and not it. And not to get too far down the road into what is life, which is a question.

• 20:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, it's interesting. Like viruses, yeah, I would consider a virus to be some sort of a life form for sure.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  But most biologists would say no.

• 20:55Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Because on their own, they don't do anything. They're inert. So you think of them as like a hard drive that needs to be plugged into a computer before it does anything at all, before it turns on.

• 21:07Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  And so.

• 21:09Danny Jones?

  Right. Well, it's like an alien.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. They.

• 21:13Danny Jones?

  Like, how do we know what life is outside of the context of the Earth? You know, maybe it's something that is, is just a, an alien concept of life that we don't understand yet.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we're limited in what we can say because we have one example so far. And so, so folks looking to get back to Mars, folks looking for life on Mars are really struggling with, okay, so we have sent a rover to Mars. Specifically to look for ancient biosignatures.

• 21:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  But we don't know what those are gonna look like.

• 21:47Danny Jones?

  Well, if they found a pyramid.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  That would be, that would be a thing.

• 21:50Danny Jones?

  And they found, there was a bunch of anomalies they found on Mars, right?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Such as?

• 21:56Danny Jones?

  The, uh, on, uh, the anomalies, like that pyramid structure. There's like a structure that looks like a pyramid. There's a couple, like, very interesting looking structures on Mars.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  Geology can do really interesting things, too.

• 22:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  So I think the, the views around those are, well, that's interesting, but it's not

• 22:17Speaker 02

  not even pointing in the direction of life. Although, wouldn't it be cool if it was? I mean, it's like, yeah.

• 22:24Danny Jones?

  But it's like the only thing on Mars that looks like that, at least that I've seen photos of, you know? So, I mean, if I was, if I was them, I would be looking at that closer, right?

• 22:34Speaker 02

  I think they have.

• 22:35Danny Jones?

  Measuring it, or they have?

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think they have. But, you know, there's like, there's stuff on Earth, too, that looks super weird.

• 22:42Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  What's the thing? It's like the eye in the desert.

• 22:45Danny Jones?

  Oh, the eye of the Sahara?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, which I think is a totally naturally occurring.

• 22:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Thing.

• 22:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I believe, uh, some people, geologists I've spoken to, they think it's the, uh, like the tip of a, an ancient buried volcano or something. That's like underneath the surface.

• 23:03Danny Jones?

  Some people think it's Atlantis.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Also.

• 23:08Danny Jones?

  Very interesting looking, looking anomaly, for sure.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I mean, the thing I like about anomalies is.

• 23:14Danny Jones?

  Pull up the, um, the Mars, the picture of the anomaly on Mars.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  The pyramid?

• 23:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah, they pictured it. Sedonia, that's what it is. The Sedonia D and M Pyramid. So it's like a hexagonal pyramid, right?

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Is that one of those things, though, where if you look at it from a different angle?

• 23:32Danny Jones?

  So.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  It starts to look quite normal?

• 23:37Danny Jones?

  I don't know. See if you can find different angles of it, Stephen.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  It's like, do you remember the face on Mars?

• 23:44Danny Jones?

  I do remember the face on Mars.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is not a face at all. It's just geology.

• 23:49Danny Jones?

  It's, it's not a face at all?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  It's not a face at all. Yeah. And it's the same thing. It's like, if you look at it with a different, you know, incoming light angle of incidence.

• 23:58Danny Jones?

  That one. It just looks like a face from that angle.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  I know.

• 24:01Danny Jones?

  Right? Looks a lot like a face.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  It does. But we're also so predisposed to see faces.

• 24:06Danny Jones?

  That's true. But like that, that pyramid, though?

• 24:09Speaker 03

  This is the face.

• 24:10Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's the face. Interesting.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. See?

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Trying to find the, if they recreated the pyramid from a different angle. Like 3D scan.

• 24:21Danny Jones?

  It's very interesting.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  It is.

• 24:23Danny Jones?

  That pyramid.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  It is.

• 24:26Danny Jones?

  We don't have any ancient, like, hex, uh, uh,

• 24:31Danny Jones?

  wait, it's a five-side pyramid, right?

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a good one.

• 24:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah. We don't have any pyramids, like ancient pyramid structures that have five sides. All of ours have four sides. Right?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  I'm not even sure I see five sides there.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, this side seems like it's like made up.

• 24:46Danny Jones?

  Just tracing it, yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  I see, I see lines that are trying to indicate that, but.

• 24:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 24:53Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm gonna be pretty skeptical about that.

• 24:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  I mean, I wish, you know, it's like, gosh, I wish, I wish we had convincing evidence of

• 25:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  life on Mars in any form. It would be the coolest thing.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  But not so far.

• 25:10Danny Jones?

  We do have the evidence of that element, right? There was a, a nuclear material that was found on Mars that is also exists on Earth. But the only place that you find it on Earth is in, around the vicinities of when they were doing nuclear tests with detonating nuclear bombs. It's called, I can't remember the name of that.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  114?

• 25:40Speaker 02

  I'm unfamiliar with this observation.

• 25:42Danny Jones?

  What is the name of that nuclear, uh, the nuclear element? Or maybe it was, um, like an isotope.

• 25:51Speaker 03

  Yes, an isotope.

• 25:51Danny Jones?

  A nuclear isotope that was found on Mars that is the exact same isotope we only find on Earth where we've done nuclear tests.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Xenon 129.

• 26:00Danny Jones?

  129 was the first part of it?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Xenon.

• 26:03Danny Jones?

  Xenon 129, yeah.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not familiar with that observation.

• 26:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Hypothesis of ancient thermonuclear event. This is hypo, hypothesized that the Martian atmosphere contains, oh, the atmosphere of Mars contains this unusually high amounts of xenon 129.

• 26:25Danny Jones?

  There's so many interesting things, you know, we just can't really piece up the puzzles to, you know, all the puzzle pieces together yet. It's because we haven't, we don't know enough.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:32Danny Jones?

  So we're all just like, oh, maybe it's that. Maybe it's that.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  You're right, though. It is pieces of a puzzle that need to be put together

• 26:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  as they fit together. And it's, I mean, it's been for me as a journalist, a little bit frustrating to see how long it's taking.

• 26:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  But then, you know, I understand the realities of science funding, which are getting worse. And policy and just how long it takes to put together a big mission to go look for life on Mars. And, oh, it's also the 50th anniversary of the Viking landings this week.

• 27:07Danny Jones?

  The Viking landings?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, the first two spacecraft to land on Mars safely.

• 27:12Danny Jones?

  No way.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  In 1977, yeah.

• 27:14Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So I've been thinking about that, too. And in 19.

• 27:19Danny Jones?

  We did so much stuff in the 60s and 70s. It's crazy.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  We, oh, 1977, yeah. 76, sorry. I'm like, what year is it? In 1976.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  We sent two spacecraft to look for life on Mars that might be alive today.

• 27:38Danny Jones?

  Dang, look at that thing.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  In the 1970s.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Looks badass.

• 27:42Danny Jones?

  The Viking one, thing does look badass.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. And we haven't done that since. And it's not like, like, most people would suggest that neither Viking found conclusive evidence of life on Mars, but it was ambiguous.

• 27:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  I mean, it was ambiguous enough that people still talk about it. So why haven't we gone back?

• 28:03Danny Jones?

  Well, we do have, like, pretty

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Something similar.

• 28:06Danny Jones?

  Advanced rovers there now, though, right? Taking like high-resolution video and photos.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So since then,

• 28:16Speaker 02

  I may get myself in a little bit of trouble here, but I would say NASA kind of pulled back from doing really ambitious life detection experiments on Mars and said, okay, partly because the results from Viking were ambiguous at best and not indicating that there's life on the surface today, as people would say. But they got, I, the agency, I would say, got a lot more conservative and said, well, okay, we're not gonna look for life right away. We're gonna first see if we can find evidence that there was water on Mars at one point, which, you know, is like the running joke now is, oh, we found water on Mars again. Okay, yes. So now we know that three and a half billion years ago, Mars was a much more habitable planet.

• 28:58Danny Jones?

  There was lots, how many, there was like oceans even more than the, than the Earth, right?

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Oceans, rivers, lakes. It had a thicker, more insulating atmosphere, had a global magnetic field that shielded the planet's surface.

• 29:12Danny Jones?

  Absolutely been, been habitable for life.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's the idea. That's what people suspect is like ancient Mars. If life had arisen on Mars, it probably would have been then. And then what happened to anything that was alive three and a half billion years ago was the planet went through the evolutionary process that gives us what we see today, which is a very different world.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  So NASA became a lot more conservative, I would say, and kind of stepped back from doing real life detection work until it landed Perseverance on the surface in 2021. And that's the rover right now that's looking for ancient biosignatures. That's going around.

• 29:54Danny Jones?

  Perseverance.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Perseverance.

• 29:55Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  And it's drilling these rock cores, which in theory will be picked up and returned to Earth where we can study them in labs here and yeah, and maybe say something definitive about whether life.

• 30:07Danny Jones?

  That thing's not as impressive looking as the Viking.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  It's fricking huge.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  That thing drives around. Viking was stationary.

• 30:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that guy's going on a planetary odyssey.

• 30:18Danny Jones?

  The top, the top one above that, it looks pretty cool.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then you can see there's an image of the sky crane that is putting the rover on the surface. So this is.

• 30:28Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is like, that's real. I mean, this is an illustration.

• 30:33Danny Jones?

  It's a rendering of what actually happens.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's real technology that, that JPL developed, which we can use now to put heavy things on.

• 30:42Danny Jones?

  And what does that sky crane do after it drops it off?

• 30:45Speaker 02

  It, it yeets itself.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  It yeets and then face plants.

• 30:51Danny Jones?

  Oh, no.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:54Danny Jones?

  Oh, so, but, but the Perseverance rover will never leave Mars.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Perseverance is going to spend the rest of its life on Mars, but hopefully some of what it's collected can be brought back here because it's found some really interesting tantalizing stuff. And I want to know if.

• 31:10Danny Jones?

  How do we get that stuff back here?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  That's a good question.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  They didn't have a plan for that?

• 31:16Speaker 02

  They did have a plan for that. NASA had a plan for that. And, and what it's called Mars Sample Return, very creative name. The science community said, this is actually our number one priority planetary science mission that we want to have funded. And so that went through all of the stages that it needs to go through to become the number one priority flagship mission. And then it got so big and so expensive that Congress defunded it last year. So right now there's no plan.

• 31:46Danny Jones?

  We got wars to pay for, okay?

• 31:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:47Danny Jones?

  We can't be wasting our money on this Mars bullshit.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Coming back to the point, it's, I mean, $10 billion is a lot of billions, but it's $10 billion.

• 31:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's one day of the straight being open of Hormuz.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, like, let's put it in perspective. How much money did Elon make when the SpaceX IPO happened?

• 32:10Danny Jones?

  A lot, right?

• 32:12Speaker 02

  More than $10 billion.

• 32:13Danny Jones?

  Was he a trillionaire now?

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, let's put it in perspective.

• 32:15Danny Jones?

  I heard, I saw on the news this morning that they were getting ready to launch another starship test, or do a starship test today.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Today?

• 32:22Danny Jones?

  I think so, right?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Um.

• 32:24Danny Jones?

  See if it was today.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  I know it was scheduled for, I think, last week and it was delayed.

• 32:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, it was delayed?

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, but maybe it could be today. I don't know.

• 32:34Danny Jones?

  I started using Ultra pouches a while ago and something amazing happened. I stopped feeling on edge all the time. My heart rate suddenly didn't spike anymore and I started getting way better pumps in at the gym. That's because nicotine is vasoconstrictive and I had to learn the hard way that nicotine is absolutely horrible for pre workouts. Ultra is a nicotine free pouch with zero nicotine and zero caffeine. I still get the same pouch experience I like, the flavor, the burn and the little kick, but without feeling jittery, on edge, or dealing with a crash afterwards. I'll usually throw one in before a workout or when I'm studying for a podcast. What really surprised me was how much steadier I feel. And it's way healthier when you're not putting things like nicotine and caffeine into your system late into the day. I've been really digging the tropical

• 33:15Danny Jones?

  flavor. It's strong and it's one of my favorite fruit combos. Ultra is the unlimited guilt free pouch delivering instant focus and mental clarity without nicotine or caffeine. And new customers can use the code DANNY to get 15% off at takeultra.com. That's spelled T-A-K-E-U-L-T-R-A dot com for 15% off with the code DANNY. After you purchase, they're gonna ask where you heard about them and please help support our show and let them know we sent you. What are your thoughts on putting humans on Mars? Like, putting a civilization on Mars?

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Hmm, like using it as Planet B?

• 33:54Danny Jones?

  Oh, they're doing it from Texas today.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's where Starbase is.

• 33:57Danny Jones?

  Interesting. 5:00 PM Central Time.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Oh, we'll see what happens. Um.

• 34:07Danny Jones?

  Optimistic, pessimistic?

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Oh, um, meh?

• 34:20Danny Jones?

  Do you think it's a good idea? Do you think it's a bad idea?

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Well, I think the answer, my answer to that question depends on the why. Why are we doing it?

• 34:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  What do you think?

• 34:31Danny Jones?

  Um, I don't want to go to Mars. I don't want to die on Mars. I'll tell you that. I don't think it was a great idea to send people to the moon, if they did send people to the moon.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  They did.

• 34:45Danny Jones?

  I mean, I think it was just a big PR stunt, just to get people more fired up that we're better than Russia. Not optimal. I think it's better if you want to get, do tests and do research. It's easier to send robots and it's a lot safer. I don't see the point of sending people there. I don't know how people are going to survive there. I don't think, I mean, obviously you know more about evolution than I do and genetics and stuff like that. So we evolved to be on this planet, under this gravity and the pressure and the amount of UV light we get and all that, all that stuff is like, very important to how we survive and how we thrive. And I don't think that we will do well on Mars, especially the radiation part of it, too.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I'm out.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  You are correct. And, you know, air that we can breathe is kind of a nice thing to have, too. So, yeah, the why for me is, is a really important question to answer in a way that makes sense. And I don't think that because it's there is really a good enough answer.

• 35:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I agree with you there.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  I think it needs to be a little bit more intention, I think, before you want to go and park a bunch of meaty humans on the surface of another planet. And like, we still don't really truly understand what, if anything, is alive on Mars today.

• 36:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Don't we want to figure that out before we go? I mean, I kind of do. I kind of do. The moon, I can see, you know, that was the space race. It was the Cold War. It was, you know, jockeying for superiority on planet and off. And so we did learn a lot, actually, about the moon from sending astronauts there, from the moon rocks and the geology that they could do. But, but your point about rovers and robots being also good at doing that is true. And they're getting better. You know, robotic technology, exploration

• 36:46Speaker 02

  is getting better all the time. My counterargument would be if we did send humans to Mars with the goal of doing science experiments, like looking at these potential ancient biosignatures, like doing experiments similar to what Viking did, then it would be a lot easier to get those answers because you'd

• 37:05Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you'd have a human there with a suite of instruments. Presumably you'd be able to send the stuff that you want to actually use to make those analyses and observations.

• 37:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  So I think that would be ultimately quicker, but.

• 37:18Danny Jones?

  Well, what I heard, and I don't know how realistic it is, but what was explained to me was that if we wanted to actually go to Mars, put like, you know, a large group of people there, we would have to first figure out how to manufacture our own stuff there and use the natural resources, the native materials and resources that exist there already to produce and make everything that we need there, right? We need factories on Mars. We can't just like lug luggage full of stuff, multiple cargo ships to Mars.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  Well, we kind of can, but the big problem right now is we can't get back off the planet. So like, so we could send you to Mars tomorrow, you just wouldn't be coming home. So one of the big things that we'd need to figure out is how to make the fuel for the return trip, actually, on the surface.

• 38:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, we need new propulsion.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, going back to your point. Yeah.

• 38:13Danny Jones?

  That seems like the most important thing, you know?

• 38:17Speaker 02

  It's, it's important.

• 38:19Danny Jones?

  For all of this stuff.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  For all of this stuff. Physics, you know, the tyranny of the rocket equation is a term that exists because it does. It's like you need, and you were talking about it, too, the gravity well of Earth is a lot deeper than the gravity well of the moon. Mars is in between, but you still need to make a certain amount of fuel on the surface of Mars if you want to power a spaceship to get off the planet. And a spaceship that would be able to carry the mass that it would need to carry if humans are on board. So it's, it's non-trivial.

• 38:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 38:59Danny Jones?

  Maybe we could figure out a way, if they, maybe we could drill for oil on Mars. There's maybe there's oil deposits underneath. Chevron can make their own rocket and send it up.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  The extraction industries go interplanetary. Yeah.

• 39:15Danny Jones?

  Um, your dad worked close with John Lilly, is that right?

• 39:21Speaker 02

  Oh, the Dolphins.

• 39:22Danny Jones?

  The Dolphin guy. They called themselves the Order of the Dolphin or something?

• 39:25Speaker 02

  The Order of the Dolphin. Yeah. So the meeting that Dad had in 1961 where he came up with the Drake Equation, which was the meeting agenda, he'd invited John Lilly to attend that meeting, along with 10 other people. So Carl Sagan was there.

• 39:42Danny Jones?

  Carl Sagan, yeah.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  John Lilly. It would have been a blast, right? Melvin Calvin was there, biochemist. He actually won the Nobel Prize during the meeting. So, yeah.

• 39:52Danny Jones?

  While John Lilly's blasted on ketamine.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  He was certainly an interesting choice, but the reasoning, I think, was actually pretty sound. One of the factors in the Drake equation is F sub i, which is the fraction of ecosystems whose creatures evolve intelligence, however you want to define that. That's another whole can of worms. But Dad had thought about inviting John Lilly because he was curious about intelligence and dolphins, cetaceans, you know, other animals.

• 40:28Danny Jones?

  He famously got a huge grant from NASA to study dolphins, study the brains of dolphins.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think his work has fallen out of favor in the last couple of decades. I think that's a fair way to put it. But they did call themselves the Order of the Dolphin. They had little pins made and...

• 40:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Lots of interesting dolphin research was going on.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:51Danny Jones?

  You know, because they're super intelligent. They're just so much different than us.

• 40:55Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. And it's interesting to think about, if you're considering the icy ocean moons in the outer solar system, Europa and Cetus, places that have these global oceans, where we think all of the ingredients necessary for life to evolve exist. If they do have super intelligent creatures, like I like to think about Europa encephalopods.

• 41:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Let's get some really cool, smart, gigantic octopi in that sea.

• 41:25Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  How would we ever know without going there? I mean, it's not like they're going to be probably building technologies that are detectable by us, but they would...

• 41:35Danny Jones?

  Right. And like, what are the chances they're going to evolve to be like bipedal hominids, right? Maybe it's a completely different way of looking at it. You have to look at it through a completely different lens. I had a guy on here a couple of years ago now, who was a contractor for NASA, and he was explaining this to me, which kind of blew my mind. He said that if there was advanced extraterrestrial life, and they wanted to hop from planet habitable planet to habitable planet, like across solar systems or across the Milky Way or whatever. He said, all they would have to do is find planets with liquid

• 42:17Danny Jones?

  water. Because they can optimize, because every planet has different pressure, right? Like Venus has like insane pressure. And they all have different atmospheres, like temperatures in the atmospheres. You know, some of them have, you know, lots of comets and, you know, debris hitting the earth, volcanoes, whatever it is. He goes, all you gotta do, you go in the water, you're not going to be hit by asteroids, you're not going to have to deal with the climate, you're not going to have to deal with volcanoes, and you just dial in the depth to get the right pressure, because liquid water only exists between like 30 degrees and 200 something degrees Fahrenheit. So it's like, it's the optimal place to go

• 42:59Danny Jones?

  if you are an intelligent species that has the ability to hop around to different planets. You'd just be in the water.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Hmm. I mean, why not?

• 43:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  It's just the planets are far apart, but there's your propulsion problem again.

• 43:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Why not? I mean, I think the also, another interesting idea that has come up a couple of times in the last week, for whatever reason, is the idea of self replicating autonomous probes that travel throughout the galaxy and they, they are self replicating. So they can basically exist in perpetuity, make more of themselves. And I could, I mean, if you were a super intelligent civilization, why wouldn't you do that? I mean, we did it kind of with the Voyager probes. They're not self replicating, but we are doing the same things right now. We're building spacecraft and sending them out on interstellar trajectories and they're going to probably outlive Earth.

• 43:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. You think?

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Um, there's some, yeah, there's some simulations about how long the Voyagers will be intact. And, you know, Earth has, what, another 5 billion years before the sun makes life really uncomfortable here?

• 44:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but well, the Earth will still exist, right? Not just human civilization might not exist anymore.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on how big the sun gets. So there's questions about when the sun is in its dying stages, it's going to balloon into a much larger star than it is today.

• 44:35Danny Jones?

  And just burn up.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  How big is that? And is Earth going to get totally toasted? Or are we just going to be a little bit crispy?

• 44:42Danny Jones?

  Yikes.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  So, I mean, Mercury is screwed. Venus is pretty screwed. Earth and Mars are kind of on the hairy edge of we don't really know. And so we've been studying other stellar systems where this process happens to try and figure out how screwed Earth is. But the simulations about the Voyager probes suggest that they're going to be a little banged up in 5 billion years, but they're still going to be around.

• 45:07Danny Jones?

  That's fascinating.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they each have those golden records on them, which the golden records, gold inert, doesn't react with anything, which is why they're made out of gold. So the golden records are going to be around for a really long time.

• 45:20Danny Jones?

  And the golden records are?

• 45:23Speaker 02

  They're another Papa D project. I think he was the technical director, I forget his title. But the golden records are, they're basically time capsules that were put together. It's literally a phonograph record with instructions for how to play it. And there's sights and sounds of Planet Earth.

• 45:43Danny Jones?

  Whoa.

• 45:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So if you play this record, you'll hear music, you'll hear greetings. My mom's voice is on the record.

• 45:51Danny Jones?

  What?

• 45:51Speaker 02

  She's speaking the Arabic greeting. Yep. You'll see images. Dad was the one who was in charge of selecting the images that are on there. And then, it's a really cool, Carl Sagan came up with the idea. I think it was him.

• 46:06Danny Jones?

  This is on the...

• 46:08Speaker 02

  On both Voyager spacecraft.

• 46:10Danny Jones?

  On both Voyager spacecrafts.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then if you, I'm just going to nerd out for a minute. If you, do you see that asterisky looking thing?

• 46:18Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  That's a map that points to the location of Earth, both in space and in time.

• 46:25Danny Jones?

  What?

• 46:27Speaker 02

  It's like the coolest thing ever, right?

• 46:31Danny Jones?

  So how does that, how do you translate that?

• 46:35Speaker 02

  It uses pulsars. Do you know pulsars are rapidly rotating corpses of stars that were once larger than the sun?

• 46:44Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  And they each rotate with a very characteristic frequency, a spin rate.

• 46:50Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  And so, simply, the spin rates of those pulsars are encoded in the lines that point to them. There's a binary notation in there. You can't quite see it in this image, but there's a binary notation that tells you the spin rates of the pulsars. And then, the idea was if, if a civilization ever intercepted the Voyager probes, well, they'd have to have pretty good technology to do that. So they probably are pretty good astronomers, and they've probably figured out what pulsars are. And they act like signposts that point back to the solar system. Because if you think about designing a map in space, it gets tricky quickly.

• 47:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  What is out there that you can use as a signpost?

• 47:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  Stars are pretty not good. Constellations are a big no go.

• 47:39Danny Jones?

  Constellations are a no go?

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, because they look different from every perspective.

• 47:44Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  And they're evolving too. Everything in space is moving. Everything is rotating around the galaxy, the core of the galaxy. So...

• 47:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  But aren't we traveling through the arm at a different rate than everything else? Like, as you move outside, isn't it like a soup that just kind of mixes together over time?

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:05Danny Jones?

  Through the arm of the Milky Way?

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so it has multiple spiral arms.

• 48:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  And we're in, what's our arm? The Sagittarius, Perseus? I can't remember which one. But the whole galaxy is rotating. And everything in it is moving through, like on its own trajectory too, which is why...

• 48:24Danny Jones?

  There's a nice one in the middle.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:26Danny Jones?

  With labels.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Where are we? The sun. That's helpful.

• 48:31Danny Jones?

  The sun, that's where we are.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  That's a blurry spot right there.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  We are right there. So everything is moving at its own pace and trajectory, which is why, you know, in, what is it, 10,000, 20,000 years, the North Star is not going to be Polaris anymore. It's going to be Vega.

• 48:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  So when you think about trying to make a map to Earth, pulsars worked pretty well because they have these fingerprints that you can find. Anyway, that's what Dad did. But that's the golden record.

• 49:04Danny Jones?

  That record is amazing. I've seen photos of that, but I'd never...

• 49:08Speaker 02

  What do you think about it?

• 49:09Danny Jones?

  Understood what it was.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  What do you think?

• 49:11Danny Jones?

  I don't know. I'm kind of scared because I don't know if I want the aliens to find us. Because who knows if they're going to be nice? Maybe they're just going to come turn us all into food or something.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  I keep hoping they're vegetarian. But what about the idea?

• 49:27Danny Jones?

  That's wild. I mean, it's really cool. Very cool. So, okay, go back to the big photo of it, Steve. So the top, so on the one, on the, on the top side of it with all the little diagrams and things like that, on the top right, that's supposed to be music?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  On the top, so the top has instructions for how to play it. So the thing on the left is a diagram of the record and you can see the stylus. And then those, those notches are also binary, which I think is telling you the rotation rate.

• 49:57Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  And then there's the waveform. And what it's telling you that the rectangle with the square, no, sorry, the rectangle with the circle in it, is if you've set it all up correctly and you're playing it as it should be played, the very first image you're going to see is that circle.

• 50:16Danny Jones?

  Oh my God. So they have to build a record player?

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically. Well, they put a stylus in there.

• 50:23Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? Oh, perfect.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:25Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:27Danny Jones?

  I would love to hear it. Is there, are there any duplicates?

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can, um, the music is online.

• 50:32Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 50:33Speaker 02

  The voices are online. Yeah.

• 50:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, you gotta find this, Steve. Find the golden record on YouTube.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  So there is a whole team that, a whole small team of people, it was like six people, who were given not very much time to put all of this together in the summer of 1977. And, um, I think a couple of them, their jobs were to select the musical pieces. Uh, my mom was doing a lot of the help with recording the greetings in different languages and helping with the images. Yeah.

• 51:10Danny Jones?

  How many different languages did she do the greeting?

• 51:13Speaker 02

  Oh, I think there's like three dozen, maybe?

• 51:17Danny Jones?

  Three dozen languages?

• 51:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. The last one says, hello from the children of planet Earth. And it's Carl Sagan's son who recorded that.

• 51:26Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 51:29Danny Jones?

  Are you playing it, Steve?

• 51:34Danny Jones?

  If you want to hear it, you can put the headphones on.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  Please tell me this is real. This doesn't sound like-

• 51:42Danny Jones?

  It sounds so sci-fi.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  We're gonna skip forward.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  Are those the mud pots, maybe?

• 51:56Danny Jones?

  It's raining. Is this the sound of rain? Thunderstorm.

• 52:14Danny Jones?

  Go forward, Steve.

• 52:23Danny Jones?

  Go to that first little jump. There you go.

• 52:27Danny Jones?

  Wow. So all the sounds of nature.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. So sounds of Earth.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh.

• 52:36Danny Jones?

  How long is the total record?

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Um, long. Hours.

• 52:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Why couldn't they invent that technology back in the seventies, huh?

• 52:48Danny Jones?

  Go back, go back, Steve. You can find the one of the voices.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Um, it's gonna be on a different, so this is-

• 52:53Danny Jones?

  It's gonna be a whole different YouTube video.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah. This video is only the sounds of Earth.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:57Danny Jones?

  So you got greetings in 55 languages.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  I was incorrect.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  Hoynis potestae, chairete.

• 53:07Danny Jones?

  Whose voice is this?

• 53:07Speaker 04

  Erenikos prosfilus elelithamen filoi.

• 53:11Speaker 05

  Pas si felis ida dja toduj.

• 53:15Speaker 06

  Got way homea. Chukka way. Ping on, gin hong, fai lo.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  Adanish lu shulmu.

• 53:22Speaker 06

  Zdravstvujte, privetstvuj vas.

• 53:26Speaker 05

  Sawat di ka sahai nae torani pohn. Pokrau nae torani ni, ko song mitajit ma tung than tukon. Tapiyatuna lila astiqaa fin nujum.

• 53:35Danny Jones?

  That's your mom?

• 53:36Speaker 05

  Yalayta yajmauguna zaman. Saluter la toata lume.

• 53:42Speaker 07

  Maro ram ram ponce. Hama athe laji khushi ha. Tuma ote laji khushi rejo. Hello from the children of planet Earth.

• 53:51Danny Jones?

  That's Carl Sagan's son?

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:53Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:55Danny Jones?

  That's wild.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  I think it's, it's such a, I thought it was a really beautiful thing to do. And you know, aliens are not going to speak any of those languages, but what a great way to, no. Except math.

• 54:11Danny Jones?

  They'll be able to just look at that thing and just download all the information right off it. Be like, okay, I see what they're trying to do.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  There's, um, they put whale song on there too, which-

• 54:22Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 54:22Speaker 02

  It's just, yeah, it's, I love thinking that there are whales on the golden record because I love whales and I think they're just fascinating and-

• 54:29Danny Jones?

  Airports are already annoying enough. You're trying to juggle your coffee while taking your laptop out of your backpack. Meanwhile, TSA is giving you a cavity search while your phone is half-dead. And your luggage isn't making this process any easier. Most luggage is basically just a box on wheels. Noble has engineered your carry-on so it actually helps you. There's a flip-out cup holder built into the side, a charging port for your phone, and a front laptop pocket so you're not digging through your entire bag in the security line. The 360-degree wheels glide like butter, and Noble ditches the zipper for a locking latch system. It keeps the case closed with a stronger grip. It looks great. It's clean, it's minimalistic, and it actually feels like something premium, not some disposable luggage

• 55:10Danny Jones?

  garbage. Every suitcase comes with a 100-day money-back guarantee, free three-day express shipping, and a lifetime warranty. Upgrade to luggage that looks better, lasts longer, and travels smarter. Head on over to nobltravel.com for up to 46% off your entire order. That's spelled N-O-B-L-travel.com for up to 46% off. After you purchase, they're gonna ask where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. You have an obsession with spiders, too.

• 55:41Speaker 02

  Oh, I do. Yes, I love spiders.

• 55:43Danny Jones?

  Why are you so fascinated with spiders?

• 55:45Speaker 02

  They're so clever.

• 55:47Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, so many reasons. Spiders, well, have come up with so many ways to manipulate silk. When you think about it, there's like eight or nine, seven or eight different kinds of silk that spiders can make.

• 56:00Danny Jones?

  Uh-huh.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Often the same spider uses different kinds of silk for different tasks. So you would use one kind of silk to line a burrow, another kind of silk to snare prey. Um, the different ways in which they've come up with to catch prey, uh, if you just watch them, it's astonishing. I think it's astonishing.

• 56:22Danny Jones?

  Crazy how fast they can build their webs.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Yes. They're so fastidious about it, too. They fix them every night. It's like, come on. It's so much work.

• 56:30Danny Jones?

  In my backyard, there's this area, but like between two hedges, probably like almost, it's probably more than the width of this entire table. And the friggin' spider builds the entire web overnight. I knock it down the next morning, it's there the next day.

• 56:42Speaker 02

  It's there, yeah. Are these the, like, the really cool garden spiders?

• 56:45Danny Jones?

  They're like, uh, they're like, they're so tiny. They're like little circular ones.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 56:49Danny Jones?

  They're like, uh, kinda spiny looking?

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 56:51Danny Jones?

  Like spiky looking backs?

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 56:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:57Danny Jones?

  What is that thing?

• 56:58Speaker 02

  That is an amblypigid. It's a, it's an arachnid, but it's not a spider.

• 57:03Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Um, a tailless whip scorpion. They are very docile, even though they don't look good. And they react really well to, what I would say is probably a pretty strange situation for a bug, which is like finding itself on a human face.

• 57:19Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Like, I probably wouldn't like it if someone did that to me. But these guys, they just kinda roll with it. Um, they'll sort of scamper around and then they, they just chill.

• 57:31Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  That one, uh, stuck a leg up my nose.

• 57:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, nice.

• 57:37Speaker 02

  In the process of scampering, which was pretty uncomfortable because they have these little barbs on the end.

• 57:42Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  But they're, um-

• 57:45Danny Jones?

  We have a baked-in fear of spiders and snakes, for good reason, probably, right? Good evolutionary reason. Probably because they've killed so many people.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  I'm not so sure it's baked in as much as learned.

• 57:58Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 57:59Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. And I think we learn it really early. But you have kids.

• 58:06Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  Have you asked them how they feel about snakes and spiders and bugs?

• 58:10Danny Jones?

  Um, my, well, my one kid, every time he sees a bug, he's like, a bug, a bug, mommy, a bug. Um, I don't know about snakes. One of my kids is not scared of bugs at all, but I don't know about snakes.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  I saw my dog jump when it saw a spider.

• 58:29Danny Jones?

  Yes, dogs and cats.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Well, the spiders move so-

• 58:33Danny Jones?

  The cats love snakes, though.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Erratically.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Snakes are really cool.

• 58:39Danny Jones?

  I hate snakes.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Why? They're so cool.

• 58:41Danny Jones?

  Oh, God, they give me the goosebumps. I just-

• 58:44Speaker 02

  I love watching them move.

• 58:45Danny Jones?

  No, I can't.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Snake evolution, it's one of those things where it's like, I guess life decided that life as a tube is a good idea.

• 58:55Danny Jones?

  Right?

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:58Danny Jones?

  I, I, I, I hate snakes with every fiber of my being. I just cannot deal with snakes. I don't know what it is. I have a phobia of snakes.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  They're so cool.

• 59:09Danny Jones?

  I can handle spiders. I can handle any other bug.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  Right? You're, so you're fine.

• 59:13Danny Jones?

  There's snakes here. There's definitely snakes here. We got like a lot of black snakes. There's some coral snakes and there's some-

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:18Danny Jones?

  Not many rattlesnakes, but, um, lots of water snakes, but it's not common, you know, like the, like you see in the West.

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Spiders. You have cool spiders here, too.

• 59:29Danny Jones?

  We do have lots of spiders.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:31Danny Jones?

  We have lots, lots of interesting wildlife here in Florida.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 59:34Danny Jones?

  Especially, especially the Everglades.

• 59:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. Not all of it is native.

• 59:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  It's where you, it's where you get your big snakes.

• 59:42Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, yeah. I just think spider, you know, there's this species in Peru that will hang from a tree and hold a net out like this and just like drop it on insects as they go by. And it is, it's so cool looking because the silk that they use to build their net, um, it has this like blue kind of, not iridescence, but when you shine a light on it, it's actually a different color than some of the other silk. And then-

• 1:00:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  I think, um- You have nephila in Florida, the golden orb weavers. They're like, they're big, kind of meaty spiders.

• 1:00:22Danny Jones?

  Oh, garden spiders?

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, we have tons of them. They're beautiful.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  They're gorgeous spiders. In Peru, there's a species that builds a web where the silk is actually, it looks golden in color. And it's this really strong silky thread that's not even that sticky, but things just get caught in it. And it's so, the webs are so big. You know, like here, if you're walking-

• 1:00:47Danny Jones?

  Maybe they're made to catch humans.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  They almost caught me.

• 1:00:50Danny Jones?

  Greedy humans love gold.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  There was a spider that almost got me and that spider was probably like, I'm so glad that didn't happen. Cause here it's like you walk down a trail first thing in the morning and you're catching like spider webs with your face, but they're not that big. This one there is like, I almost walked in this thing. It was about this big. And, and the silk is, it's just gorgeous. It's so pretty. Yeah.

• 1:01:11Danny Jones?

  Hey, what was that animal? It was kind of like a spider, maybe not, that Carlton Ward was taking photos of in the, in the Everglades. Remember that?

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:01:25Danny Jones?

  Was that, I want to say it was like some sort of a spider or maybe, maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was like some super rare flower or a plant that, an animal that looked like a flower?

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:01:40Danny Jones?

  Go to Carlton Ward's website and I'm sure you can find it there. Very interesting. Carlton Ward's, he's a, he's like a wildlife conservationist photographer based here in Florida. And he puts these trail cameras all over, all throughout the Everglades where they're, he puts like motion sensors with these cameras that are in waterproof housings. Yeah. What's that thing?

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  That's an orchid.

• 1:02:05Danny Jones?

  Okay. That's not even a spider. It looks like a spider.

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Orchids mimic a lot of things.

• 1:02:09Danny Jones?

  It's a specific type of orchid though, right?

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  Ghost orchid.

• 1:02:12Danny Jones?

  Ghost orchid. There you go.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Did you see the movie Adaptation?

• 1:02:15Danny Jones?

  I don't think so.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  It's a fun one.

• 1:02:18Danny Jones?

  Is it?

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a real trip.

• 1:02:21Danny Jones?

  Adaptations?

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  Adaptation. It's based on the book by Susan Orlean, which is about the ghost orchids.

• 1:02:30Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  That's why I thought of it. But it's also kind of a masterclass in storytelling.

• 1:02:36Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Danny Jones?

  I'll have to write it down.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  There's a cool twist that happens about halfway through the movie, which a lot of people- Adaptation. I think there's a period at the end of the name.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  And a lot of people don't like the way the movie ends, but I think it's brilliant.

• 1:02:52Danny Jones?

  Really? What is that? Did somebody paint something?

• 1:02:58Danny Jones?

  Ghost orchid care, low light, high humidity.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  Artwork.

• 1:03:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So when you were down in the Amazon doing a bunch of stuff, like you wrote about an uncontacted tribe.

• 1:03:16Danny Jones?

  What was that? What happened there?

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Peru. So I like to go, I haven't been there in a little while, but for a while I was heading down a couple of times a year to report on weird bugs. So spiders that make spider looking decoys in their webs, which is, that's what actually brought me down there the first time. Weird bugs, illegal gold mining. And then in 2015,

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  there's a group that started emerging on riverbanks. They'd actually been showing up kind of frequently for a couple of years before that. But in 2015, they killed a teenager in one of the native communities that's sort of near where I was going.

• 1:04:03Danny Jones?

  They killed a native teenager?

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this area of Peru is, it's in the south. Here we go, east and west.

• 1:04:12Danny Jones?

  I have a friend who lives down there.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Southeast, near Manu National Park.

• 1:04:17Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Madre de Dios is the state where things are going on too with illegal gold mining. And this group of the uncontacted tribe, and I'm putting it in quotation marks because they have been in contact.

• 1:04:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  So I'll go with isolated, isolated tribe. Folks will say like people living in voluntary isolation.

• 1:04:40Danny Jones?

  They're living in another, another time.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  They're, yeah. They're living a nomadic lifestyle in the forest by choice.

• 1:04:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  Colloquially, they're called the Mashcopiro. And so they'd started showing up in this area pretty commonly on riverbanks. They were flagging down boats, asking for clothing and supplies and food. And also within the area, there's a number of native communities. So they started showing up as well where the communities are, doing the same things, like asking for stuff, occasionally turning violent.

• 1:05:19Danny Jones?

  Why did they kill the child?

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  Because he was there.

• 1:05:25Danny Jones?

  Just because he was there?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. So sometimes, so 2015, they were pretty unpredictable. People didn't really know which interactions were going to lead to violence and which were not.

• 1:05:37Speaker 02

  There had been a guide who was killed in a different community a few years before. And it had gotten to the point where the Peruvian government was like, we need to actually do something to manage this interaction. This, not first contact, but you can kind of think about it in a first contact way. Like, how do we manage a situation? Keep everybody safe?

• 1:06:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah. How do you do that?

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  It's really hard.

• 1:06:02Danny Jones?

  Going in there with like the military or something like that.

• 1:06:05Speaker 02

  It's really hard.

• 1:06:06Danny Jones?

  Not get impaled by a seven foot spear.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. That. But also the folks who have been living in the forest, they don't have immune systems that are capable of dealing with even like the common cold, something that wouldn't necessarily knock us around could be lethal for them. So you have to think about that too. It's like, how do we keep them safe? How do we keep everybody else safe? How does this work? And so I'd had contacts with an NGO that was working with some of the native communities where the Mashcopiro were showing up. And they offered to take me in with them as they were doing work with the communities. And so that's how that story came about is I just had a chance to be on the ground in Peru,

• 1:06:50Speaker 02

  going into these places that were impacted by the emergence of the Mashcopiro. And it was interesting because when I got on the ground there and started talking with the people who were working the situation, so much of what had been reported in the popular media was incorrect.

• 1:07:10Danny Jones?

  Like what?

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  Well, there had been these stories saying like, oh, they don't speak a language that anyone recognizes. It's a totally different.

• 1:07:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's what I've heard too.

• 1:07:21Speaker 02

  It's not.

• 1:07:21Danny Jones?

  From people who live there.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  It's not. It's like, it's a, it's a form of yine. So there's a lot, there's a lot of languages in the jungle too that are still surviving, but you're kind of on their way out. So yine is one of them and-

• 1:07:37Danny Jones?

  How do you, how do you pronounce it?

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  Yine. It's Y-I-N-E.

• 1:07:41Danny Jones?

  Yine. Okay.

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  And the tribe speaks a version of yine that's just like a couple of centuries older than modern yine. And so it's a little bit like, if you and I were speaking with someone who was talking to us in old English, we would not understand all of it, but we would understand enough.

• 1:08:04Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  And so the folks down there said, oh, we, we understand about 80% of what they're saying. So they learned things about them, like, oh, they, they named themselves after plants and animals. They do live a nomadic lifestyle. They've figured out how to make booze. It's like-

• 1:08:21Danny Jones?

  How did you figure all this out?

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  I was doing interviews with the people who've been talking with them.

• 1:08:25Danny Jones?

  Oh, to the people who've been talking with them?

• 1:08:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I was-

• 1:08:28Danny Jones?

  So my understanding of it is that like everyone who's tried to make contact has been killed or like chased away?

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  That's not true with this particular group, but it is true with some others.

• 1:08:41Danny Jones?

  There's some other tribes that do do that. Yeah.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  I think the Andaman Islands has a group that does that. But these, the Mashco, so they, we also learned they prefer to be called nomole, which means can or brothers or cousins. Mashco means like wild savage. So you can imagine why they may not like that title so much. They prefer nomole. They actually will have conversations with the government officials who are there kind of managing the situation. They'll talk with people in the native communities. No. So they're speaking that version of yine. So everyone-

• 1:09:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, so the people have to learn how to speak yine?

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  So in the native communities, they already do.

• 1:09:24Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  And for them, Spanish is the second language and most of them don't speak English at all. So.

• 1:09:31Danny Jones?

  Got it.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:32Danny Jones?

  So is it, so is yine very similar to Spanish or Portuguese?

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  No, it's so different. It's like, yeah.

• 1:09:38Danny Jones?

  Where did it originate?

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  That's a good question.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, the Amazon Basin has a lot of these native languages and I don't know where they came from.

• 1:09:52Danny Jones?

  Interesting. I'd be curious.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a really interesting part of the world. Really beautiful, rich in

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  pretty much everything except money.

• 1:10:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Speaker 02

  But just, just a beautiful part of the world and the source of so much conflict because there's all of these different pressures that are colliding.

• 1:10:14Danny Jones?

  So what, when they talk to, when the government officials talk to people from this tribe, what do they learn from them? And like, what do they want? And what are they currently doing?

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  So I'm not too familiar with the current situation. I know that

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  there have been reports over the last couple of years of more violent interactions happening. I think a couple of loggers who'd been encroaching on the protected territory were maybe killed. I can't remember if they were killed or just really harassed, but apparently the, the N'molé, the Mashko, don't like loggers coming in and taking down the trees. Which you can imagine why.

• 1:10:57Danny Jones?

  Only anybody who lives there likes that.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  Nope, no, except the loggers.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  But so they, the government has these folks who just kind of patrol the rivers and make sure that interactions are managed if they happen. And they've been speaking with the N'molé, the Mashko for a while. And I think it's still an open question about why they've started emerging over, we're going to call it the last decade now. Like, what is it that started to drive them out of the forest?

• 1:11:29Danny Jones?

  Right. And wanting to approach modern civilized human beings.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so they're, they're asking for pots and pans. They're asking for clothing. It's, it's stuff. Like, they want the stuff. And if you don't give them the stuff, they get angry. And that's when you start seeing these giant arrows coming out.

• 1:11:47Danny Jones?

  That's so interesting. They're, they, they're coming to us for gifts. Or are they trying to trade them? They're just trying to ask for gifts?

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  Taking stuff.

• 1:11:57Danny Jones?

  And they're not being kind.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, but why, like, why would they, you know?

• 1:12:04Danny Jones?

  I mean, I don't know.

• 1:12:07Danny Jones?

  I would just imagine that would be human nature. If you wanted something, like, I would imagine trade is, even with a, with a super ancient culture, the trade would be a very basic, fundamental way of doing things, right? So like, maybe, do they not understand trade?

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  I did read a story

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  this week where a group of them had given a gift to one of the government women who was pregnant. They made her like a baby toy.

• 1:12:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  And gave it to her.

• 1:12:41Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think a lot of it is

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  if the story about why they're living in isolation is true, which is that they were driven into that lifestyle during the rubber boom of the late 1800s, early 1900s. It was a really bloody horrible time for the indigenous communities there. So they were kind of, they were slaughtered essentially. So they were driven into the forest by these people who were coming in

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  for extraction purposes. And so, you know, they're driven away by fear and violence.

• 1:13:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  You know, who knows what stories they've been passing down?

• 1:13:21Danny Jones?

  Right. They have a, yeah, they could just have like a, a terrible experience with civilized human beings.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Civilized.

• 1:13:29Danny Jones?

  That's been passed through generations and generations and generations.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, you show up, you, you get a little demandy fear

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  is probably a motivator for some of that behavior.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  And then on the other side, it's everybody's afraid, you know? And I, I was thinking about when I was doing this reporting that

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  first contact

• 1:13:59Speaker 02

  even on earth between humans is so risky. And there's a lot of folks who've done this kind of work in Brazil for years who will tell you how difficult it is to do this and keep everybody safe. You imagine what happens the first time we may meet aliens? First contact here is tricky enough to manage.

• 1:14:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  What happens when it's not a human on the other side of that interaction?

• 1:14:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah, what happens?

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Danny Jones?

  You gotta, I got, you gotta imagine there's some like people high level somewhere who have gamed that out.

• 1:14:40Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Danny Jones?

  Probably at NASA.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Maybe. Yeah, it's one of those things that, just like how people will respond to news that we found aliens, you can study that. You can study that ahead of time. It's not like, we can ask the question and we can actually answer that question. The first contact is a little bit like that, too. It's like, it's something that you can study there, you know, to an extent, because the other half of that equation is a big question mark.

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:15:15Danny Jones?

  Well, it's a new, it's kind of a new phenomena, right? Where there's no more first contact on earth with other intelligent life. Like, it used to be like you'd go find intelligent life somewhere else and they were the same species as you, just in a different, living in a different world or different part of the world. And you never knew they were there. And now like, everything is ubiquitous and you can do a video call with somebody in New Zealand and like, connect with them in two seconds. So it's like, there's no

• 1:15:45Danny Jones?

  like, that would be a crazy thing to happen today, to where we discovered intelligent life, whether it's on the earth or not, that we weren't aware of.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think about that

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  kind of in the context of animal intelligence as well.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Elephants,

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  primates, cetaceans,

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  crows, crows and ravens.

• 1:16:17Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  So smart.

• 1:16:19Danny Jones?

  Crazy smart.

• 1:16:20Speaker 02

  Cephalopods. You know, there's like this whole cast of

• 1:16:26Speaker 02

  species that have what we would say is intelligence and we have a hard enough time talking with them. So there, there's also people who are studying communication with cetaceans in particular and using that as a blueprint for how we might approach communicating with an alien civilization. Because it's just hard.

• 1:16:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Also, like, all the other intelligent life, I mean, all the other life on this planet seems to be in this like symbiosis with nature, right? And we seem to be the only species that is not.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  We're the ones perturbing it.

• 1:17:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Danny Jones?

  Like, we don't, we're not, we're not, we're not in this cycle of nature that all the, every, every other animal is, where they like, sort of depend on the environment and the environment depends on them. We're not. We just like pave over everything and blow shit up.

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  That is unfortunately what we're doing.

• 1:17:25Danny Jones?

  It makes me feel like maybe we weren't originally from here.

• 1:17:30Danny Jones?

  Maybe we are the aliens.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  If you're referring to life on earth, maybe sharing an origin with Mars life?

• 1:17:40Danny Jones?

  Maybe.

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  I think that's an open question, but I think there's good evidence that humans evolved on earth.

• 1:17:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Sure. Yeah, maybe we did evolve on earth, but like, maybe, I don't know. I don't know. It just doesn't seem like we fit here, you know?

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  I think we fit for a long time, though. Like, we were, we were pretty, pretty good.

• 1:18:00Danny Jones?

  I mean, yeah, it's very clear we evolved here, right? Very obvious. We're very adapted to this environment.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we fit for a long time.

• 1:18:08Danny Jones?

  There's like so many species, like how many hundreds of species of primates are there? You know, like, how many different species of monkeys are, are, are out there? And how many species of humans? There's only one species of, one type of Homo sapien. There's only Homo sapien. There's nothing else. Everything else has this wide variety to it, except for us.

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have been really good at getting rid of competitors. I'll put it that way. It's like, you see that today, too, though. We've done a really good job getting rid of predators in most places here in the United States, right? You know, there are no longer pumas out on the East Coast, except for here in Florida, where you have the one population of Florida panther that's like, so inbred, it's not clear if it's gonna continue to survive.

• 1:18:56Danny Jones?

  They're starting to thrive again. They're starting to, the, the population is starting to grow. I think it's up to

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  It's like a hundred, 200?

• 1:19:01Danny Jones?

  I think it was 200 now, yeah.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Good.

• 1:19:03Danny Jones?

  It was in like, the teens. And now it's back up to 200. They're doing a lot of, a lot of work, even like the, the slimy politicians are doing good stuff, trying to, they're at least working with the conservationists, trying to, because the problem with Florida is there's these toll roads that go from coast to coast. And they block the corridor. There's this natural wildlife corridor that goes from north to south. And that's what was screwing it up for the, for the Florida Panthers. So there

• 1:19:30Danny Jones?

  there's a big pushback against all that stuff now where they're leaving, they're leaving the corridor open for the panther and they're, they're doing a lot of work to protect it.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  That's great. I'm happy to hear that.

• 1:19:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, because we haven't been that great.

• 1:19:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:43Speaker 02

  Elsewhere.

• 1:19:44Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45Danny Jones?

  For sure. And, you know, just like, I don't know.

• 1:19:50Danny Jones?

  I, what, what are your thoughts on, on the possibility of, and I think it was Adam Frank who had this theory that essentially there could have been other previous iterations of human beings to us. Like, right now, we have like every, all of our history is based on essentially like,

• 1:20:14Danny Jones?

  like, like the, the written record that we have and the geological record and we corroborate it with different things. And you know, going back to the Stone Age, but he thinks it's possible that millions and millions, possibly billions of years ago, there could have potentially been an advanced human species on earth that got wiped out by some sort of cataclysm and we got reset, sort of.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  The asteroid reset?

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  So billions of years, I think that might be implausible.

• 1:20:46Danny Jones?

  Find these, his exact hypothesis.

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  So I think it's like, I think he's pointing to 380 ish million years ago.

• 1:20:53Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  Something like that.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  And I don't, I think it's plausible, but I struggle with how

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  It's not complete, but the fossil record exists. So if we can see evidence for the fossils of that time, where's the evidence for the technologies and the other things? How come that's not preserved? And I know Adam has an answer to this because-

• 1:21:22Danny Jones?

  Do you find the name of his hypothesis? It's very famous.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  The Celerian hypothesis.

• 1:21:25Danny Jones?

  Is that what it's called?

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:26Danny Jones?

  Let's, let's see what it actually is, because I know I butchered it.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:21:31Danny Jones?

  It's a scientific thought experiment proposed in 2018 by Adam Frank and Gavin Schmidt, named after the fictional reptilian race from Doctor Who that predates humanity. The hypothesis explores the fascinating question, if an advanced industrial civilization lived on Earth millions of years ago, would we even be able to tell? Right. And what he's saying is that all the evidence would be gone within millions of years, right? There'd be no, there'd be no signature of it. With plate tectonics and volcanoes and all of that stuff, like metal.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06Danny Jones?

  You know, there'd be no toasters left.

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do struggle a little bit though, because even though, right, you know, we're reading it right here, it says the fossil record is incredibly sparse for complex life.

• 1:22:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:23Speaker 02

  It's true. Okay. It is true that Earth has done a pretty good job erasing a lot of its early history, just through plate tectonics and geology.

• 1:22:35Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  That's true. It's also true that life has like completely taken over and covered the planet.

• 1:22:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  So, and yet we still argue still about the earliest evidence for life on Earth and how, how long ago that was. It's still really hard to pull that out of the rock record.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  And so I just,

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  I think it's a plausible idea, but I struggle with why we would see no traces.

• 1:23:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, who knows? Right now, the earth is, is the earth inside one of the arms of the Milky Way? Or is it outside one of the arms?

• 1:23:16Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:23:16Danny Jones?

  We know there's like huge differences, right? And like what the earth's climate is between when we're in the, in the arms or outside of the arms, depending on the cosmic rays and stuff like that. And like, all the variability with like sun burps and belches, you know, the, the sun activity and all that. So, you know, at one time, the Sahara was supposed to be like lush and green. And like, now it's a desert. And one time, the ice caps weren't even there. And now we have the ice caps. So like, I don't know, like, imagine how little land there was at certain times, if not none, and the different climates, who I just, it's hard to really imagine. It's hard to know. I think, I just think it's, it's so crazy that like,

• 1:23:58Danny Jones?

  all the people that are doing all the research with this stuff and like writing the textbooks and all that, it's like, we're in this mindset to where like, there has to be a right and a wrong answer, right? Like this is the correct answer, or anything else is craziness, kookiness. But like, we really have such a vague picture of the past. We, people can't even agree on what like different words meant in ancient languages, going back hundreds of thousands of years ago. People that dedicate their lives to it, they all disagree. And I've noticed that too with like archaeologists, they all disagree on certain things. And you know, you, you name the, you name the scientific vertical, and I can find you tons of people that don't agree on anything.

• 1:24:43Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 1:24:44Danny Jones?

  So like, it's just, it's just such a funny human thing when it comes to like science and like academia and the, uh, the just appeal to authority. The fact that, you know, human beings do that is very interesting. You know, there doesn't have to be, like, it doesn't have to be this way or the highway. Like, it's, it's just learn how to say you don't know. But that doesn't work with the system we live in, you know? Like, you gotta, you have to be able to learn stuff. We have to, we have to tell ourselves a story of the past. And that's a very human thing.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:21Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, I'm, I'm with you. I think being able to say, I don't know, is really important, especially in science. But I think science is also, disagreement is a whole part of the process.

• 1:25:35Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  It's not a bad thing. It's like, you want people to be looking at data and interpretations and really rigorously evaluating what you're saying, because that's how the process works.

• 1:25:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  Right? We like to say, science is self-correcting.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  Because when it's working well, it is a self-correcting process. It's also true that science is a human endeavor, and so it's fallible. It's vulnerable to the same things that, everything that we do-

• 1:26:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  Is vulnerable to. And so, yeah, there's these kind of competing dualities there.

• 1:26:18Danny Jones?

  Most guys don't notice how much their hair supports their confidence until it starts to go bye-bye. And then suddenly you notice you're investigating your hairline every time you look in the mirror. The problem is, there's so much conflicting advice about what actually works and how far you need to go. But Hims makes it simple. They offer convenient access to prescription hair loss treatments, including chews, orals, medications, serums, and sprays, all through a 100% online process. Prescription strength ingredients like finasteride and minoxidil can help prevent further hair loss and regrow hair in as little as three to six months. You can get a personalized treatment plan, flexible subscription options, and 24/7 provider support without constantly scheduling office visits. For simple online

• 1:26:59Danny Jones?

  access to personalized and affordable care for hair loss, ED, weight loss, and more, visit hims.com/danny. That's hims.com/danny for your free online visit. H-I-M-S.com/danny. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Individual results may vary. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Yeah, I always find it interesting also, like, the difference between, like, it's something I've just thought about recently, is like, the difference between people who understand the stuff that's, you know, behind the ivory tower of the science labs and the people who actually talk about it publicly. Like, I wonder, like, I wonder if there's a huge difference there?

• 1:27:43Danny Jones?

  You know, because imagine the people that only stay in the labs, working on the, you know, with their nose to the grindstone, working on stuff and studying stuff, who don't pay any attention to like, the media, or the news, or reading anything that comes out publicly. Like, are those two separate worlds? I wonder that sometimes. Like, what is, like, is there any crossover? I'm sure a lot of people, there is crossover, right? There are people who do both. But there's a lot of people who only do one or the other. So I always like, wonder like, what, what's going on there?

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  Well, that's partly why I have a job.

• 1:28:24Speaker 02

  It's our job to talk to the people who are in the labs-

• 1:28:26Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  And then bridge that gap.

• 1:28:28Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  But it's true also that scientists actually going into science communication, doing their own sci-com is becoming a lot more common right now, uh, for a couple of reasons. But one, we've all seen what's happening to journalism in this country, and science journalism is no exception. So in a sense, if you're a scientist and you want to talk about your work and tell your stories, it's almost better for you to develop the skills to do that.

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  Which it is a different skill set, in a way, than being a scientist.

• 1:29:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  There are a lot of similarities, but-

• 1:29:05Danny Jones?

  It's very rare you find somebody who, it's, it happens. It's happened with, you know, I've met those people before. But finding somebody who really like deeply understands something about something, and is also very good at communicating it. It's usually one or the other.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Well, you know, have you had Adam Frank on?

• 1:29:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's like, he's one.

• 1:29:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's great.

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  He's great. But yeah, I think there's, the stereotype is like, the scientist in the ivory tower, isolated, or like on the mountaintop, looking through the eyepiece of the telescope.

• 1:29:42Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  And not really paying attention to anything else. I think that's changing quite a bit. I'm also grateful that I've had the opportunity to go and talk to all of the people that I have. It's like, you know, my job, what I do is I go and I find the experts and I ask them a lot of questions. And learn a lot of things and talk to a lot of people who disagree with one another and gather this entire body of information and then figure out how to synthesize it in a way that makes sense, but and tells a good story and is, you know, an accurate representation of controversies and debates and what we know. And it's true that ambiguity in science is this really uncomfortable thing.

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  Because of what you said, it's people think there's a right and a wrong answer, while forgetting that science is a process.

• 1:30:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  Right? It's iterative. And that's okay. And that's the way that it's supposed to be. And I think a lot of the general public doesn't understand that, which is why, when you see something like, oh, science got it wrong, it's like, we shouldn't trust these people. It's like, no, that's exactly what science is supposed to be doing.

• 1:30:52Danny Jones?

  Right. The problem with humans is we need religion.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Danny Jones?

  And you have people that work in science labs who don't believe in God, but their religion is like their institution. And you have the same thing with people who are, again, the opposite of that. People who live online on forums, who believe every crazy, kooky conspiracy theory under the sun. That is also their religion. That's human nature. You know what I mean? So that's a problem. And like, that's the price you gotta pay-

• 1:31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22Danny Jones?

  For like, freedom of speech. But, you know, it's a price I'm willing to pay. You just gotta be able to, you gotta be able to do the hard work to cut through the bullshit.

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  You gotta cut through the bullshit. And, and, you know, the standards of evidence for the two groups that you just described are slightly different. Right?

• 1:31:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  Which I think is-

• 1:31:43Danny Jones?

  Equal bias, though.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, although it's like, I keep thinking about looking for life beyond Earth and how if you if you speak to the scientists who are doing this work, they're like, yeah, I mean, like, we're optimistic. We hope there's something out there. But science doesn't rely on hope, right? Hope doesn't really have a place in the scientific process. It's just what are the data telling you? And I remember in my PhD, I was doing a set of experiments that were giving me data that I didn't like because it didn't make my life easy. And I didn't have an easy explanation for it. And it meant I was gonna have to do more work. And it was like, the whole thing was gonna take longer. Nobody likes that in grad

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  school. And my advisor looked at me and he said, you know what? The data are what they are. And it's your job to make sense of it.

• 1:32:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Speaker 02

  So I think about that a lot.

• 1:32:43Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  And how as we develop sharper tools, new ways of seeing things, I mean, look at what AI is doing. It's like, the data are gonna be changing.

• 1:32:53Danny Jones?

  Well, here's the problem, too, is like, you gotta make it interesting. You gotta jazz it up, make it sellable, make it sexy, or else we're not gonna get any money to fund this. And that's another problem with all of this stuff, is that science is inherently intertwined with money and private organizations and private companies that make trillions and trillions of dollars. And those people have no moral compass, you know? I don't care how moral or, you know, godly you think you are, like, the people that are probably funding you, you can't control what they're doing. You just need, you just rely on that money to do the best thing you do the best work you possibly can.

• 1:33:30Speaker 02

  Everyone has a price.

• 1:33:31Danny Jones?

  So and that's, that's the thing, like, if you want to make your work interesting to somebody who's got deep pockets or some corporation that's gonna fund your lab for you to have, continue your work, you gotta make it interesting. You gotta, you gotta sell it to some level.

• 1:33:47Danny Jones?

  So that's another inherent bias that gets in the way with some of this stuff, for sure.

• 1:33:52Speaker 02

  It is. And I think there's

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  science for the sake of doing science, finding knowledge for the sake of learning something new is underrated, you know? It's what you're saying. What's the application? How does this change my life? How is, how is this particular, whatever I'm developing going to make your life better? And it's like, well, sometimes, sometimes it's just gonna make life better because it means that your understanding of the universe is richer.

• 1:34:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  And that you have a better understanding of the context in which you, a human, and planet Earth exist. And why is that not valuable? It's the kind of basic research, the research for the sake of research, for just deepening our understanding.

• 1:34:36Danny Jones?

  Curiosity.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  The childlike curiosity. It's like, you know, you think about the boundary between what we know and don't know, and continually trying to push that boundary back and expand the volume of stuff that we do know. Like, why is that not a worthy endeavor on its own? Why does it all have to be moving towards some future?

• 1:34:57Speaker 02

  Utopia is the wrong word, because that's not the direction we're going in, but

• 1:35:01Danny Jones?

  Police state?

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  You know, future utility. I just, it's, it's depressing sometimes.

• 1:35:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And also, science is like, also, you know, from what I've learned from a lot of scientists I've talked to here is that it's very stove piped to where there's not much interdisciplinary outreach, right? So a lot of people, these people stay in their one lane, you know, and they never really deviate out of that, look past it, look up above the

• 1:35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:29Danny Jones?

  The maze.

• 1:35:30Speaker 02

  I would say, oh, go on.

• 1:35:32Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, I was just gonna say, like,

• 1:35:35Danny Jones?

  it's important to have a big picture, understanding a lot of this, of a lot of these topics that we're talking about, you know, like, people that are geologists or archaeologists, like, some of them have no idea, like, what the, the people that are like translating the languages of those cultures were doing, and vice versa. So it's like, it's really interesting. Or like, the

• 1:35:59Danny Jones?

  the people who are studying, like, the DNA of the people that were back then, and doing like, the carbon dating and all that stuff. It's so, like, the lanes are so narrow, and they have their blinders on. And I think it'd be very interesting if, like, they were able to all communicate and collaborate on stuff.

• 1:36:16Speaker 02

  I think there's been a little bit of a move toward escaping the silos.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  In some fields more than others. You know, it's like, over

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  some, some number of years covering science, I can tell you, there are some fields that are definitely more contentious, where there's a lot of infighting. And the joke kind of is

• 1:36:37Danny Jones?

  The archaeology one's huge.

• 1:36:38Speaker 02

  Archaeology is one of them. Paleomathropology is another. Particle physicists can be brutal.

• 1:36:44Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Danny Jones?

  I heard particle physics is all fake. You can't see it. How do you know it exists? There's a big feud going on. You write about that, actually. Now, it's, I actually remember, there's a, there's a huge feud between Michu Kaku and Eric Weinstein. And Eric Weinstein believes that particle physics and string theory is all like a dead end.

• 1:37:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's, that's an ongoing debate.

• 1:37:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  String theory, I think, is having like, a little bit of a resurgence.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  I don't think particle physics is fake. I think it's in trouble. Because it's not, I think, at this point, clear where the field is going and what their, their next big thing is. It's like, they built, you know, the LHC, or you're at the particle collider. Well, it found the Higgs boson really early on. It's like, okay, now what do we do? We're gonna keep trying to figure out what other new particles we can find, or ways that we can revise the standard model. And we've done that, and now what?

• 1:37:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:51Speaker 02

  And so, you know,

• 1:37:52Danny Jones?

  What's the goal here?

• 1:37:54Speaker 02

  Particle physics tells you, I would say, about the most fundamental fabric of reality, even though it's really hard to conceptualize. It's like, you know all these things, and it's really hard to conceptualize, but that's the field that gives you that information. And so when they say the next thing is, we have to build an even bigger collider.

• 1:38:16Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:38:16Speaker 02

  It's like, okay, like, yeah, I can see how a bigger collider would lead to new physics and a new understanding of physics, but

• 1:38:24Speaker 02

  $16 billion?

• 1:38:26Danny Jones?

  Didn't they make a black hole or something? Like, they made like, a little miniature black hole, I heard?

• 1:38:32Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:38:33Danny Jones?

  Thought I saw, I thought I read that somewhere.

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  That would be interesting. I don't think that would be a good thing.

• 1:38:38Danny Jones?

  At CERN.

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:38:43Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:38:43Danny Jones?

  Maybe we should look that up, Steve.

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  Look that up.

• 1:38:46Danny Jones?

  Yes and no is the answer.

• 1:38:49Speaker 02

  Yes and no.

• 1:38:50Danny Jones?

  CERN has not definitively created a miniature black hole, but they have conducted experiments designed to see if it is possible to create a black hole.

• 1:38:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:58Danny Jones?

  God damn it, Instagram lied to me.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  Shocking.

• 1:39:02Danny Jones?

  CERN has run experiments specifically with the CMS and ATLAS detectors, scanning the debris of high-energy proton collisions for signatures of these micro black holes. So far, they have not found evidence. So they're trying to create a black hole. That's nice.

• 1:39:15Speaker 03

  Trying to.

• 1:39:16Danny Jones?

  That's great.

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  I mean,

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  Is it dangerous?

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  I have some ideas for things we could put in one of those.

• 1:39:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:25Danny Jones?

  All the world leaders, we could throw them in the black holes.

• 1:39:29Speaker 02

  In some cases, things may be people.

• 1:39:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Also, feel free to go to Mars anytime.

• 1:39:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:37Speaker 02

  You just gotta stay there.

• 1:39:38Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, no coming back.

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  No coming back. I was gonna say, though, that astrobiology is one field that's like, super interdisciplinary, where

• 1:39:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's, I think, a recognition that if we want to understand life's origin, which is a big part of the field, too, as well as its distribution throughout the cosmos, you have to have a really good understanding of chemistry and geology, and biology, and physics, and, you know, planetary processes, and all of these things that come together to make a living world, which we still don't really have a good understanding up here. And so I think people are much more used to working together and kind of crossing those boundaries.

• 1:40:18Danny Jones?

  I thought it's very, I think it's very interesting, interesting how that we have that new telescope in, where is it? Peru? Or is that huge badass? Or maybe Chile?

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  Chile.

• 1:40:26Danny Jones?

  We were looking at it yesterday?

• 1:40:27Speaker 02

  Chile.

• 1:40:28Danny Jones?

  And that's the one that's discovered the three interstellar objects that have been moving through our solar system?

• 1:40:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:33Danny Jones?

  That's crazy.

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34Danny Jones?

  Since 2017, I think it's been installed?

• 1:40:37Speaker 02

  Well, if you're thinking of Vera Rubin, which is the new one that just came online within the last year or so.

• 1:40:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, no, maybe.

• 1:40:46Danny Jones?

  So there's now, that's now the most powerful one?

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:49Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:40:50Speaker 02

  Vera Rubin is new in Chile.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  Really, really cool. It's, yeah, it's, it's ability, I think, to survey the solar system, the small bodies in the solar system is like unprecedented.

• 1:41:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is it. This is what we were looking at.

• 1:41:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:08Speaker 03

  That's a massive

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  Massive.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  It's like, spits out like, what, 11 terabytes per image?

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And it does the whole sky, like, all the time.

• 1:41:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Wow.

• 1:41:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:19Danny Jones?

  It's kind of shaped like the Sphinx.

• 1:41:23Speaker 02

  Kind of looks like a shoe.

• 1:41:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:41:27Danny Jones?

  So, so what's so great, this thing can image our solar system and beyond?

• 1:41:32Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

• 1:41:36Speaker 02

  It's an example kind of of what I was saying of like, each time you build a new thing, you're going to find new stuff that makes you revise what you thought you already understood.

• 1:41:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  And that being a really good thing for science.

• 1:41:50Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:41:50Danny Jones?

  Is it true, Steve, did we, we looked, I remember we looked this up recently. Every picture they take in this satellite, they have to get cleared by the Pentagon before it can be made public. You know about that?

• 1:42:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's so sensitive.

• 1:42:06Danny Jones?

  They find a UFO. They don't want people seeing it.

• 1:42:08Speaker 02

  It's not UFOs. It's spy satellites.

• 1:42:11Danny Jones?

  Spy satellites, right?

• 1:42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Danny Jones?

  UFOs.

• 1:42:14Speaker 03

  Spy satellites.

• 1:42:16Danny Jones?

  Or spy satellites.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  Say they're, they're IFOs.

• 1:42:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  They just don't want them to be IFOs.

• 1:42:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that's, that's the thing with this, with this telescope is that the images before they're released, they have to remove instances of classified satellites.

• 1:42:35Danny Jones?

  Classified stuff. Just satellites, though.

• 1:42:38Speaker 02

  Stuff.

• 1:42:38Danny Jones?

  Don't worry, nothing else.

• 1:42:40Speaker 02

  Just satellites. Again, I would be psyched if there were something else up there.

• 1:42:45Danny Jones?

  You ever heard of, uh, what's that guy's name, Steve? The guy who hacked NASA?

• 1:42:50Speaker 03

  Gary.

• 1:42:51Danny Jones?

  McHenry McKinnon, have you heard of him? This guy hacked NASA. In the 2000s, I believe. And.

• 1:43:01Speaker 03

  Twenty.

• 1:43:02Danny Jones?

  I forget the reason why. He was in the UK.

• 1:43:05Speaker 02

  What did he find?

• 1:43:06Danny Jones?

  Young kid and was like a super genius. And he was like bored, I guess, one night and he was trying to hack. He was trying to breach like Pentagon computers and seeing if he can get it breached, like one of the computers of the Pentagon and he had no luck. And he's like, screw it. I'm going to try NASA. So I guess he watched an interview with somebody who was talking about a specific building at NASA in relation to UFOs on like some, some crazy documentary he watched or whatever. So like, he's like, you know what? I'm going to try to find that building. So in his search, trying to find the, hack the database, he was typing in queries for that building. And he, he tried a bunch of computers and couldn't get in any of them. Finally found one. He was able to breach, got into the debt on the desktop

• 1:43:51Danny Jones?

  of that computer and he found a folder and he double clicked the folder, but he had like a dial up connection. It was like super slow. And it was like loading, like bar to time and it was taking forever. And finally he got like two thirds down the screen. And it was a picture of the earth from like low earth orbit. And there was this like metallic cigar shaped object that he had never seen before. And there was also the name of the, the file that that was in was called

• 1:44:25Danny Jones?

  extraterrestrial officers or something like this.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  Is the image available?

• 1:44:32Danny Jones?

  No, because he couldn't screen. No, he never took the, he never, he just saw it with his eyes and he explains it. Cause this was in like long time ago. This was probably before they had the ability to screenshot on a computer.

• 1:44:45Danny Jones?

  And so anyways, that was his story, right? Kook, right? Who's going to believe this guy? The US, the United States pursued probably one of the most aggressive extradition campaigns against this guy in history, like on the level of Julian Assange.

• 1:45:05Speaker 02

  I mean, he hacked into.

• 1:45:06Danny Jones?

  And he finally won it like last minute, just re, I think he not too long ago finally won that case because he had like a really badass lawyer over in the UK who was fighting the US. And they went in front of a judge and basically they said that like he has Asperger's or like some other like mental things going on to where he like, he would be, it could become extremely suicidal. Cause they wanted him to go to prison for 80 years. The US wanted to lock him up for 80 years for this. And they eventually won and he gets to stay in the UK. So that's nice.

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  Well, that part's good.

• 1:45:36Danny Jones?

  But if he made that all up, why the hell?

• 1:45:40Danny Jones?

  It makes you will go, it makes you go like, you know.

• 1:45:43Speaker 02

  People have their reasons.

• 1:45:44Danny Jones?

  Going on here?

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. People have reasons to do things that we don't always have to understand.

• 1:45:51Danny Jones?

  I want to understand it.

• 1:45:54Danny Jones?

  I pay these damn, I pay the taxes for NASA. I want to know what the hell they're trying to put this guy into prison for 80 years for.

• 1:46:01Speaker 02

  Well, hacking into a computer system, a government computer system, probably even, especially back in the early 2000s.

• 1:46:07Danny Jones?

  I know what year that was, by the way.

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  2002.

• 1:46:09Danny Jones?

  2002? Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:46:11Speaker 02

  It wasn't like it was happening every day like it is now.

• 1:46:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah. But what were we talking about for Gary McKinnon? Oh, the spy satellites.

• 1:46:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:20Speaker 02

  And Ruben and interstellar asteroids and.

• 1:46:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the interstellar objects are also very interesting.

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  This whole class of thing that we're going to learn a lot more about because we built something new that can see them now.

• 1:46:32Speaker 00

  Care Now Urgent Care. Quality care that fits your schedule. We're open seven days a week with extended hours and no appointment necessary. So you can get the care you need when it works best for you. Use our web check-in from the comfort of home and we'll send you a text when it's your turn. At Care Now, we're dedicated to helping you feel better fast. Visit carenow.com to find a clinic near you.

• 1:47:02Speaker 00

  Network freedom and flexibility. That's what you want in a healthcare plan. With a Humana Medicare Advantage PPO plan, you can see any doctor in the country who accepts Medicare, including specialists. No referrals, no kidding. Learn more at gethumana.com. See any doctor who accepts Medicare and is willing to bill Humana. Humana PPOs may not be available in all areas. Benefits and costs share may vary. Humana is a Medicare Advantage PPO organization with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in any Humana plan depends on contract renewal.

• 1:47:32Danny Jones?

  So.

• 1:47:32Speaker 02

  It's cool.

• 1:47:33Danny Jones?

  What's the idea? We need to send a probe out to land on one of those interstellar objects to like study it?

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  I mean, that would be cool. Um, yeah, I've seen that proposal.

• 1:47:42Danny Jones?

  Cause we did it with an asteroid, right?

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  We have.

• 1:47:44Danny Jones?

  Benu?

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  Multiple, multiple and comets. Yeah. So it's like, it's not out of the question.

• 1:47:51Speaker 02

  But I think typically we don't see these interstellar objects coming in until it would be way too late to launch something.

• 1:47:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  You should check me on that though. But it would be really cool. I mean.

• 1:48:04Danny Jones?

  The last one, the three, three Atlas was in our solar system for months, right? That's still not enough time.

• 1:48:12Speaker 02

  Remember.

• 1:48:13Danny Jones?

  We have to be out there, ready.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  I don't remember. I don't, the orbital dynamics guys, the ones who like do the calculations to figure out how to intercept the stuff. Which I think is probably all done on a computer now, but it's, it's like, it's like magic to me. It's like, how do you put together these trajectories that get you to where you want to go? Where there's such a small margin of error. It's like, you're either going to impact the planet or miss the planet. But you have to just do it perfectly to pull into orbit.

• 1:48:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  How do you do that?

• 1:48:40Danny Jones?

  That stuff is crazy.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  It's, yeah, it's cool.

• 1:48:43Danny Jones?

  Like figuring out exactly where it's going to be aligned with your trajectory when you shoot out of earth. And they have to go like, they have to, when they shoot the rockets and stuff, they have to like refuel in earth's orbit, right?

• 1:48:55Speaker 02

  We have not, that's what we're working on for something like the moon base is doing on orbit refueling. Cause, and that would also help with getting to Mars and things like that, too.

• 1:49:07Danny Jones?

  I thought that we had to do that for the Artemis missions. We had to refuel in the earth's atmosphere.

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

  That's the idea, but we don't have the technology yet.

• 1:49:15Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's a few things that need to happen for that.

• 1:49:19Danny Jones?

  Why is that? That we have to start refueling in earth's atmosphere to get back to the moon? Is there a conventional, I mean, I might've heard this before. I just, it's escaping me right now.

• 1:49:27Speaker 02

  I think it has to do with the amount of mass that's going up. And if you think about like having.

• 1:49:35Danny Jones?

  It's crazy. Also, just side note, that 95% of a rocket's mass is fuel.

• 1:49:39Speaker 02

  I know, right? The tyranny of the rocket equation is real.

• 1:49:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:43Speaker 02

  That's why you can't go to Mars and come back from Mars on the same tank. Cause you just, you're going, it doesn't work.

• 1:49:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  But yeah, the Artemis program slash moon base, you've heard about moon base?

• 1:49:57Danny Jones?

  Maybe.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  This new proposal from NASA to build a base on the moon.

• 1:50:03Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:50:04Speaker 02

  And do it by like 2030, 2028, 2030.

• 1:50:09Danny Jones?

  I saw something about Elon basically saying like, I'm pulling back from Mars and I want to focus on the moon now. Maybe that was similar to what that moon base thing was.

• 1:50:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, the moon bases is a new NASA initiative that we'll see if it goes, how it goes.

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  First step is the next Artemis mission in the cadence, which is Artemis three, which used to be the moon landing, but they've added an intermediate mission. So now the moon landing is Artemis four. Artemis three is going to practice rendezvousing with the.

• 1:50:39Danny Jones?

  The last one was two.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:41Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:50:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. There's moon base.

• 1:50:44Speaker 03

  Moon base.

• 1:50:44Danny Jones?

  Wow, what a cool website.

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:46Danny Jones?

  That's a crazy cool, that's a really good looking video. That must be AI.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  It's real. No, it's not real.

• 1:50:56Danny Jones?

  So Moon Base is humanity's first lunar outpost, a place where astronauts will live, work and explore near moon's south pole through a series of crude and uncrewed missions. NASA and its partners will build the infrastructure needed to support the enduring human presence on the moon, unlock new scientific discoveries and prepare for future exploration on Mars. Wow. Scroll down.

• 1:51:20Danny Jones?

  They got a whole trailer for it.

• 1:51:25Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:26Danny Jones?

  What is that thing?

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

  Oh, here's your timeline.

• 1:51:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, look at that.

• 1:51:31Speaker 02

  There we go. Yep.

• 1:51:34Danny Jones?

  All right. So now until 2029, so for the next three years, secure reliable access to lunar surface and experiment. Between 2029 and 2032, we want to establish initial moon base operating capability.

• 1:51:56Danny Jones?

  2023 and beyond is activate. Oh, man, it's really hard to read that, bro.

• 1:52:02Speaker 03

  Achieve semi-permanent crew presence. Okay, so 2032 is when they're planning to actually keep people there.

• 1:52:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:10Danny Jones?

  They want to, between now and 2029 is when they want to secure access to the lunar surface and experiment. So sometime between now and the next three years, they want to start experimenting there. But I guess.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  You see, if you look on the right, though, you see the number of launches and landings that are planned for each phase. There's a lot.

• 1:52:31Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. 25, 27, 29?

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  25 launches between now and 2029. 21 lunar landings. Not all of them are crude.

• 1:52:41Danny Jones?

  I mean, they do launches almost every single day at the Cape.

• 1:52:44Speaker 02

  They do.

• 1:52:45Danny Jones?

  It's crazy.

• 1:52:45Speaker 02

  Starlink. Yeah, I know I get the alerts. Yeah, but this is a little bit different.

• 1:52:52Danny Jones?

  Right. For sure, if you got people on them.

• 1:52:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're good at low Earth orbit.

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  But we haven't had a lot of luck recently getting stuff to the lunar surface with the eclipse program. So it's ambitious. It's ambitious.

• 1:53:12Danny Jones?

  Well, we did it, what, six times in a row with no flaws 50 years ago?

• 1:53:19Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:53:20Danny Jones?

  We'll figure it out eventually.

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:24Danny Jones?

  We'll get there.

• 1:53:24Speaker 02

  We'll get there.

• 1:53:25Danny Jones?

  And what's this thing, you also wrote a story all about, um,

• 1:53:29Speaker 02

  What did I do?

• 1:53:29Danny Jones?

  I mean, the New York Times, you wrote something about like rules or laws on the moon? Because you think that the boot prints are still there?

• 1:53:36Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah. Yeah, there's this question about how to, and if we should preserve the landing sites that are already there. So not just Apollo, but you know, what Russia's put down, now what China's put down. There's still hardware on the moon from all of those things in addition to soft things like the boot prints. And this question of.

• 1:54:00Danny Jones?

  Charlie Duke's family photo that he left there? That would have burned up in a second, by the way. It was 250 degrees in the sun.

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  Well,

• 1:54:09Speaker 02

  there's a lot of stuff on the lunar surface, bags of poop.

• 1:54:14Speaker 03

  We'll preserve that as well.

• 1:54:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:54:15Speaker 02

  It's preserved up there.

• 1:54:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. But yeah, the, the idea that right now, there's no legal protection for any of those sites. And so it's really just a question of behavioral norms, whether you're going to go in and mess with them. Or if you're going to respect what's there and treat it like an archaeological site.

• 1:54:35Danny Jones?

  Well, if they want to go down towards the poles, then they won't even be, right? Or was that, they want to go down lower, right? A completely different area of the moon.

• 1:54:41Speaker 02

  So the target is the South Pole now because the idea is that's where the resources might exist to support a moon base or continued exploration onto Mars. So the target is the South Pole. So yeah, I guess in theory, no one's going to be landing anywhere near the Apollo sites, but you could see that happening in the future. If travel to the moon becomes as routine as it has become to low Earth orbit, where you don't just have government agencies going up, but you have commercial companies as well.

• 1:55:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

  The idea is you need some kind of a framework to

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  guide behavioral norms and principles on the moon, just as we do here on Earth.

• 1:55:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah. If you got people from different countries that are up there 24/7.

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, and I'm not going to say we do a great job on this planet either. So it's like, it was actually nice to see China launch and land a rocket booster. I don't know if you saw that video, but they.

• 1:55:42Danny Jones?

  I saw that.

• 1:55:43Speaker 02

  They did recently. And I thought that was, they did it remarkably fast. It worked really well. I think it was the first time. And it's a nice change from just letting their boosters like do an uncontrolled reentry through Earth's atmosphere, where then suddenly you have everybody along the path looking up and going, is this thing going to hit my house?

• 1:55:59Danny Jones?

  Is this it?

• 1:56:01Speaker 03

  This is from 13 days ago.

• 1:56:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Speaker 03

  I'm not going to watch the whole fricking minute, but.

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  It's really impressive.

• 1:56:10Danny Jones?

  So this is a reusable rocket?

• 1:56:12Speaker 02

  Yep, there it is. It's coming back down. And they did it the first time. That we don't have.

• 1:56:17Speaker 03

  Well, good for them.

• 1:56:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I thought so.

• 1:56:20Danny Jones?

  Elon just really ramped up his security.

• 1:56:24Danny Jones?

  It's like those damn spies stole all our, our blueprints.

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

  They're using a completely different system.

• 1:56:30Danny Jones?

  Are they?

• 1:56:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's being caught in a net.

• 1:56:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, it's in a net. We will do a net. It will look so much different. They will never suspect we stole it.

• 1:56:40Speaker 03

  Why is it smoking off the top?

• 1:56:43Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:56:46Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:56:47Danny Jones?

  They definitely made it look quite a bit different.

• 1:56:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  But I think that's an improvement over the uncontrolled booster reentries that have been going on.

• 1:56:57Danny Jones?

  So we dropped them, or SpaceX catches them in this like little squeezer, like crab claw thing, right?

• 1:57:05Speaker 02

  For Starship.

• 1:57:05Danny Jones?

  For Starship.

• 1:57:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, so that's in Texas. And then here on the other coast, it's just a come back down. Yeah.

• 1:57:13Danny Jones?

  It lands on a barge over here.

• 1:57:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. There may be.

• 1:57:17Danny Jones?

  I wonder why we don't have the crab claw here.

• 1:57:18Speaker 02

  There's also a.

• 1:57:19Danny Jones?

  Oh, there it is. It's not even a claw. It's just like two.

• 1:57:22Speaker 03

  It's on the towers.

• 1:57:23Speaker 02

  It's on the towers.

• 1:57:24Danny Jones?

  That's fricking crazy looking. It does move in.

• 1:57:30Danny Jones?

  And then you can see the thing moving on the bottom.

• 1:57:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:35Danny Jones?

  That's nutty.

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  I, you know, people are really clever.

• 1:57:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:43Speaker 02

  Like we've done, we've done a lot of really clever things.

• 1:57:47Danny Jones?

  Did you see that they, I read, or somebody told me that they were using for the Artemis rockets, they were reusing the space shuttle engines for the Artemis rockets.

• 1:57:57Speaker 02

  On, um, on the SRBs, on the, on the boosters. Are they SRBs? On the two boosters, they have some of the engines that flew on the shuttle program.

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  And then they recovered them and refurbished them and off.

• 1:58:11Danny Jones?

  It's crazy that they're like, we're still reusing all that stuff from back in the day. They need to just remake the Saturn V.

• 1:58:17Speaker 03

  Doesn't that present a problem though? Because there's only so many of those engines and you know, how many launches do they, does Artemis take? And then what happens when they run out of those engines?

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  Well, I think they, so they've been recovering and reusing them. I don't actually know what they're doing with the ones that are coming off of the Artemis stack, though. That's a good question. I should know that, but I don't.

• 1:58:41Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 1:58:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:42Danny Jones?

  So, um, what is your view or do you pay any attention to this whole like UFO topic?

• 1:58:52Speaker 02

  I do pay attention to it. I will say I haven't really been following the recent data releases because I don't think there's been much in there that's been like rising above the noise.

• 1:59:09Danny Jones?

  No, all the stuff that was released in the quote unquote UFO files that Trump released, all that stuff was publicly available before.

• 1:59:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:59:17Danny Jones?

  The only difference is it's like now it's on the web, the White House website and it's like official, but all that stuff has been out.

• 1:59:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember there being a lot of discussion about the Apollo era.

• 1:59:28Danny Jones?

  It's kind of similar to when they released those fake Epstein binders and they were showing them like this, like woo hoo, we got the Epstein binders. It's kind of like that.

• 1:59:37Speaker 02

  Well, you know, in principle, initially, and you know, I served on NASA's UAP independent study team, so I went.

• 1:59:44Danny Jones?

  What was it called? The UAP what?

• 1:59:46Speaker 02

  The UAP independent study team.

• 1:59:47Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:59:49Speaker 02

  Couple of years ago. So initially, when I heard that this was going to happen, I kind of went, oh, God.

• 1:59:58Speaker 02

  Here we go again. And then I thought, you know, it's actually

• 2:00:01Danny Jones?

  Look at this shiny object over here, people.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  It's actually, it's a fine thing to do. Like, put the things out there, let people evaluate them, give them the information that they need, if they want to, to, to have a look on their own. I don't think there's, I don't think that's a bad thing to do.

• 2:00:21Speaker 02

  I think what's inevitable and disappointing is that the people who want to find the proof in those files are always going to say, well, it's in the stuff that you didn't release, right? And that's just the way it's going to keep going. So ultimately, I'm not sure what we're trying to accomplish here.

• 2:00:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a very counterintuitive idea

• 2:00:44Danny Jones?

  to want to rely on the government to release the secrets. Because that's the nature of the government is to keep secrets. They're not there to give you all the secrets. Like, if you want to get all the truth from these people, like, what are you doing?

• 2:00:58Speaker 02

  Well, and that's assuming that there are secrets there, which in this case, it's like, we know that a lot of what's not being released has to do with military applications.

• 2:01:06Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 2:01:06Speaker 02

  That makes sense. Like, yeah, you probably don't want to let the entire world know about our sensor capabilities. Just keep that to yourself. That's fine.

• 2:01:17Speaker 02

  You know, I'm curious about why, actually, I'm not curious. I, I have a good understanding. I think of why the idea that the government is hiding intentionally knowledge about aliens has been so persistent. I mean, it's a very sticky, tenacious idea. And it makes sense. It's like, people are really interested in whether we have been visited by extraterrestrials, whether just spacecraft or, you know, squishy alien bodies themselves. It's a really compelling question that we want to know the answer to. And so I get why it continues to stick.

• 2:01:56Danny Jones?

  And a question that the founders of NASA were fascinated by, you know?

• 2:02:01Speaker 02

  I mean, who isn't?

• 2:02:02Danny Jones?

  Right. It was like, one of the big things that they were interested in is that kind of stuff. You know, not just doing seances in the woods, but they were, you know, like NASA was started by occultists and Nazis who were fascinated by UFOs and, you know, extraterrestrial life and that,

• 2:02:23Danny Jones?

  whether that's real or not, or if it's like some sort of crazy limited hangout, like, the fact that you have people in Congress and like decorated military people and I don't really, the Congress people, they don't do it. They don't like, I don't give that much credence, the fact that they're talking about it. Cause those people are kind of just like influencers, but like some of the other people, like Dave Grush and some of these other like older, long time military intelligence people are coming out and talking about this stuff. And even like the Air Force, Navy, the Air Force and the Navy pilots who are talking about this stuff, that stuff, I kind of like, I can't ignore that, you know? The fact that all these people are trying to talk about this and,

• 2:03:10Danny Jones?

  you know, explain it to Congress, what they've seen and get it declassified, like it's, I feel like there's something there. I just don't know what, but I'm definitely more inclined to believe that it's like top super secret military stuff that is probably being controlled by private contractors, like big aerospace contractors, you know?

• 2:03:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's a couple of directions to go in. The first that I wonder about, because it's what we do in journalism, is like, we follow the money. So the folks in Congress who continue to bring this up, like what's in it for them? Kind of question, like where, you know, who's, who's actually

• 2:03:58Speaker 02

  making bank by continuing these conversations? Cause there's got to be some return on it for someone.

• 2:04:08Speaker 02

  And it may not be monetary, but in what form is it power? Do you get reelected if you continue to stoke these fires? I don't know. But it's like, you know, follow the money, who's benefiting?

• 2:04:20Danny Jones?

  Sure. Definitely with Congress, Congress people.

• 2:04:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:23Danny Jones?

  See that.

• 2:04:24Speaker 02

  Who's benefiting?

• 2:04:29Speaker 02

  The testimony, and it's a little bit why I asked, like, if, if the image from the guy in 2002 is available? The testimony that's, that's hearsay is just hearsay until you produce evidence. So that is, I mean, it's interesting and it raises that same question. Like, why would somebody make this up if it's not true? But again, like, people have reasons to do things that we don't have to fully understand or agree with.

• 2:04:53Speaker 02

  But until you produce that evidence.

• 2:04:55Danny Jones?

  You can, a satellite can take like a 4K photo of you sitting in the park, having a picnic, like in full resolution. But we can't, we can't get better than a Nokia photo of a UFO.

• 2:05:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, so as part of the NASA team, like we heard from the pilots and some of those folks about what they'd seen. And it's like, yes, these are very compelling stories. And the witnesses are credible and they're all describing something that they can't readily explain.

• 2:05:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:30Speaker 02

  That's fine. Like, we see things that we can't explain all the time. And it's, most of them will stop there and they'll say, like Alex Dietrich, who saw the Tic Tac, she says she's aggressive, aggressively agnostic about what it is that she saw. It's providence, whether it's terrestrial or not, aggressively agnostic. But she knows that she can't describe what she saw.

• 2:05:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:05:57Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 2:05:58Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:06:00Speaker 02

  I have no problem with that. I just, it's the leap from, I can't explain this to therefore it must be otherworldly in origin.

• 2:06:08Danny Jones?

  Well, here's the problem. When the government gives you no answers or no analysis and just gives you like crazy little, like bits and pieces of evidence that are crazy and has no fundamental, there's no like rational explanation for it, nor do they provide a rational explanation for it. You're going to get people speculating crazily, you know?

• 2:06:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And it's, again, it's like such a compelling idea that we would have evidence of alien visitors already. Like, how cool would that be? I get why people cling to that idea. Like, I get it. I just wish that we were using critical thinking skills a little bit more when it comes to evaluating reports and then remembering that like,

• 2:06:57Danny Jones?

  I think it's all part of their strategy too, right? Like flood the zone.

• 2:07:01Speaker 02

  Flood the zone. Yeah. Make so much noise.

• 2:07:04Danny Jones?

  Make so much noise to where they can't separate the wheat from the chaff. And it's going to be so easy to call people crazy.

• 2:07:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I think there's also, where was I going with that?

• 2:07:18Speaker 02

  I'd had a thought and it just went, poof.

• 2:07:20Danny Jones?

  Critical thinking.

• 2:07:21Speaker 02

  Critical thinking.

• 2:07:22Danny Jones?

  People being able to

• 2:07:25Danny Jones?

  understand what's going, what's going on. Well, like, if you, if you start to like peek, do any kind of homework on this stuff and you realize like how, how credible some of the witnesses are for this stuff. Like, not just the Navy pilots, but there's also

• 2:07:42Danny Jones?

  Air Force officers who were in charge of managing the nuclear Minutemen missiles like in Montana and Malmstrom Air Force Base and who report a lot of them in different countries, in Russia and in the US. I don't know if there was any in China, but they all report like weird orbs coming and shutting down their nuclear missiles. Like, what, you know, and those guys, those guys aren't kooks. Those guys are like the tip of the spear when it comes to being psychologically sound. Like, they have to go through, they have their fingers on the nuclear button.

• 2:08:18Speaker 02

  I mean, we hope.

• 2:08:19Danny Jones?

  So like, you know, if these guys are, are, are testifying that this is all happening to them and they're seeing this kind of stuff and, you know, multiple officers on multiple Air Force bases. There's like a famous one at Vandenberg where something similar happened at the Vandenberg Air Force Base. It's, it's something there, you know? And you, you want to think it's, it's our military probably. Like, I think that's like the most logical explanation for it, like maybe testing stuff or whatever.

• 2:08:50Danny Jones?

  But like, there's also like, uh, accounts and journals written from sailors on ships in like the 1600s talking about this stuff. So, I don't know.

• 2:09:03Speaker 02

  It's all, I think it's all really interesting.

• 2:09:05Danny Jones?

  It is for sure.

• 2:09:08Speaker 02

  I remembered what I was going to say, which is that I think a lot of people don't understand why images and some testimony is classified here. Because, you know, the assumption is like, oh, it's classified because it shows us something that's like, we would not be able to handle seeing. And it's like, no, it's classified because the sensor that took the images classified. And it could be an image of absolutely nothing. It could be an image of me. And it would still be classified because of what made the image and not because of what it shows.

• 2:09:39Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:09:40Speaker 02

  And so that's, that's something that I think a lot of people don't understand.

• 2:09:47Speaker 02

  There was also a story in the Wall Street Journal, I think maybe it was last summer. And I don't know if you read it, but it's the one that was basically saying that the call is coming from inside the house when it comes to UFOs. Because it, the whole thing started off as like hazing within the Air Force.

• 2:10:05Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I remember this one very well.

• 2:10:08Speaker 02

  In the, in the 50s and 60s and it's like,

• 2:10:10Danny Jones?

  Hazing rituals.

• 2:10:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, where, where like newbies were hazed by being told about UFOs and all of

• 2:10:18Danny Jones?

  Well, they were saying, they were saying it was either hazing rituals or they were wheeling out an EMP in front of the nuclear sites and, and testing out a, a novel EMP weapon on their own nukes.

• 2:10:33Speaker 02

  I don't know why that story didn't get more play though, because it was well reported.

• 2:10:39Speaker 02

  And it connected the dots in a way that actually makes a lot of sense.

• 2:10:42Danny Jones?

  So.

• 2:10:45Danny Jones?

  I heard from people who were analyzing that story that know that know stuff about these types of things that testing an EMP device on a nuclear weapon is like super dangerous and not anything that's like practical. It doesn't really make sense. And also, I think one of the things that Jesse Michaels pointed out about that article was one of the authors on that New York Times article, or maybe, I don't know if it was an author, if it was a source that was used. It might have been the author. It was a Wall Street Journal article about the hazing and the EMPs used on the nuclear sites. It's like a UFO psyop thing.

• 2:11:27Danny Jones?

  He did the homework on the lady who was the author of that Wall Street Journal article. And he looked up her LinkedIn. And her job, one of her recent jobs was, or maybe it was her current job, you have to double check me on this, was the head of Psychological Warfare Operations at Northrop Grumman.

• 2:11:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:11:58Danny Jones?

  So do with that what you will.

• 2:12:00Speaker 02

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 2:12:02Danny Jones?

  I'm gonna use the restroom quick. Quick break. This was the article you were referring to, I think, right?

• 2:12:07Speaker 02

  Yes. Let me put my phone on.

• 2:12:10Danny Jones?

  So, okay.

• 2:12:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's multi-part, right? I think there's a couple.

• 2:12:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I believe there was a two, a second part to this.

• 2:12:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:12:17Danny Jones?

  But part of this was basically talking about the, um, it might not have been this one, but the people at the nuclear bases trying to, you know, say that what they saw was not legitimate. It was a hazing ritual or an EMP. Robert Solis, yeah, I just said, I just saw his name. There, I just saw Robert Solis's name.

• 2:12:38Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I typed in, uh, was it EMP?

• 2:12:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 2:12:42Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no, no, no.

• 2:12:44Danny Jones?

  Solis?

• 2:12:45Speaker 03

  EMP. Show me. Okay, maybe not.

• 2:12:51Danny Jones?

  Okay, anyways, find that lady. There you go. Robert Solis, 84, was Air Force Captain sitting in a walk-in closet-sized bunker, manning the controls of 10 nuclear missiles in Montana. And basically, the story is, all of his missiles got shut down, and that's never happened in his life. He's never seen anything systematically go offline like that. And the second that happened, he got a call from the security officer on the top, because he was underground, the guy on top, like at the entrance of the Air Force Base, uh, called him. He's like, "Boss, we got this crazy big light in the sky that's hovering above us. We don't know what to do. What do we shoot it?" I think one of them actually shot it. And, um, that's like, that's when everything went offline. And then the next

• 2:13:36Danny Jones?

  day, he told me, he goes, he goes, "The next day, Boeing showed up at the Air Force Base and brought everyone in for interviewing and made us, made them all sign NDAs." And he goes, "I refuse to sign the NDA."

• 2:13:49Speaker 02

  Hmm, good. I like that.

• 2:13:51Danny Jones?

  So.

• 2:13:51Speaker 02

  What happens if you scroll down?

• 2:13:55Danny Jones?

  Scroll down?

• 2:13:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:57Danny Jones?

  That's Robert Solis right there.

• 2:13:58Speaker 02

  That's him, okay.

• 2:14:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:14:07Danny Jones?

  So it says he was interviewed by Kirkpatrick about the events. The point I wanted to make, though, is find out this lady, Sue.

• 2:14:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:14:13Danny Jones?

  Sue. Where does it talk about Sue?

• 2:14:16Speaker 03

  Oh, shit.

• 2:14:17Danny Jones?

  Come on, type in Sue.

• 2:14:21Speaker 03

  Uh, wait, wait, wait.

• 2:14:22Danny Jones?

  Go, G-O. What's her last name?

• 2:14:23Speaker 03

  Sue Go, right there.

• 2:14:25Danny Jones?

  Sue Go. Okay. "In this statement, a Defense Department spokeswoman acknowledged that Arrow had uncovered evidence of fake classified program materials relating to extraterrestrials and that briefed and had briefed lawmakers and intelligence officials. The spokeswoman, Susan Go, said the department didn't include that information in its report last year because the investigation wasn't completed, but expects to provide it in another report scheduled for later this year." So Jesse Michaels, uh, what does it say? "The department," so this is a quote from Sue, "she said, 'The department is committed to releasing a second volume of its historical record report to include Arrow's findings

• 2:15:05Danny Jones?

  on reports of potential pranks and inauthentic material,'" Go said. Okay. Maybe she's right, maybe she's wrong. Jesse Michaels did a great video breakdown, and he referenced a bunch of these specific news pieces that she's been referenced in. So he Googled her, he found, he tried to find out who she was. And we found her LinkedIn. This is her, this is her LinkedIn, right here. Hello, Sue.

• 2:15:32Speaker 03

  There she is.

• 2:15:33Danny Jones?

  Now, punch in a little bit and scroll down to her experience. Right there. Associate, I mean, do, I mean, this is neither evidence or non-evidence of any wrongdoing. I'm just pointing this out. Uh, "She provided expert advice to the DOD and other US government agencies on strategic communication, organizational change, psychological operations, and information operations, policy, concept, doctrine, plan, and strategy development and implementation."

• 2:16:02Speaker 02

  I mean, that seems.

• 2:16:03Danny Jones?

  For Booz Allen Hamilton.

• 2:16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that seems like a pretty normal job description to me, though.

• 2:16:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, psychological operations.

• 2:16:09Speaker 02

  It's interesting that that's in there, but the rest of it is like, kind of bog standard. Yeah, that's what you would do if you're on a comms team.

• 2:16:16Danny Jones?

  Well, I mean, the consensus among rational minds seems to be that this stuff is being developed by companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, um, because they are the ones that have the biggest contracts, and they are the ones that are immune to FOIA requests. So if this stuff is being held secret, it would make the most sense to hide it underneath one of those, underneath all those corporations, to let them compete to develop this stuff.

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  To the point about follow the money, they do have the biggest contracts.

• 2:16:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:50Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:16:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:51Speaker 02

  So there's that.

• 2:16:53Danny Jones?

  And there's also, um, six or seven trillion dollars missing from the Pentagon budget since 9/11, unaccounted for.

• 2:17:03Speaker 02

  That's, now we're talking about real money.

• 2:17:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:06Speaker 02

  Instead of just.

• 2:17:07Danny Jones?

  So where did that money go?

• 2:17:09Speaker 02

  I don't know. Follow the money.

• 2:17:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah, a lot of money.

• 2:17:13Speaker 02

  It's, yeah. Again, I think this idea that the government is hiding evidence of aliens is sticky and compelling. I'm not convinced.

• 2:17:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:27Speaker 02

  I know a lot of the people in that story.

• 2:17:29Danny Jones?

  I'm not convinced it's aliens either.

• 2:17:30Speaker 02

  I'm not convinced.

• 2:17:31Danny Jones?

  But I'm, I'm, I'm pretty much there. I'm, I'm, I'm almost ready to cross the line to be like 100% convinced that they do have some sort of advanced propulsion that is not known to, like, the mainstream science.

• 2:17:51Speaker 02

  To me, that's a lot more plausible.

• 2:17:52Danny Jones?

  And I think, I think that one of the major problems with disclosing that is it would disrupt the economy and us being relying on fossil fuels and all this, the motor vehicle industry, everything, right?

• 2:18:09Speaker 02

  Contractors.

• 2:18:10Danny Jones?

  And also, on top of that, if it became evident that they were hiding this stuff for 50 years, people could be, they could have their heads on the chopping block, they could go to jail. So there has to be some sort of like a blanket immunity given to these contractors.

• 2:18:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:27Danny Jones?

  For hiding this stuff.

• 2:18:28Speaker 02

  It's really tricky. And I think, and it's like, we can speculate a lot about what's actually going on. But typically, when I have conversations about the conspiracy theory aspects here, it's like, we're not going to resolve that right now.

• 2:18:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:18:49Speaker 02

  Right? But let's talk about what we're actually doing to try and find signs of alien life, because that's also really interesting. And there's a lot that, that people can learn. I don't necessarily want to do that now, but I do want to ask you if you saw Disclosure Day, the movie.

• 2:19:04Danny Jones?

  I haven't.

• 2:19:05Speaker 02

  You haven't? I watched it yesterday because I thought we might talk about it.

• 2:19:07Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? Tell me about it. Was it good?

• 2:19:10Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:19:11Danny Jones?

  I thought, I found it was very interesting that it came out around this, like, right after they released these UFO files.

• 2:19:18Speaker 02

  The timing is, yeah, interesting, coincidental, I'm sure. So I thought, without spoilers, the message of the movie was actually a really good one. I really, really liked that. It was definitely like Spielbergian action thriller types of things. It wasn't exactly the movie that I was expecting to see. But I, I really love what they ended up doing, without spoilers.

• 2:19:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he's been, Spielberg's always been obsessed with aliens.

• 2:19:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I guess, maybe, maybe mild spoiler here. Um, one of the things that I think the movie really asks us to consider is how much we learn about ourselves as we're looking outward and trying to find signs of life. It's like, how much do we actually learn about ourselves in the process? And what can we do with that knowledge?

• 2:20:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:20:20Speaker 02

  And I think that's really interesting.

• 2:20:22Danny Jones?

  Did it, did it beat Contact?

• 2:20:27Danny Jones?

  There's no alien movie beats Contact.

• 2:20:29Speaker 02

  What about Arrival?

• 2:20:31Danny Jones?

  Which one was that?

• 2:20:32Speaker 02

  Arrival is the one with, um.

• 2:20:34Danny Jones?

  With the shadows going up against the glass?

• 2:20:36Speaker 02

  The cephalopods.

• 2:20:37Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:20:37Speaker 02

  The one with the language learning changing.

• 2:20:39Danny Jones?

  That one was okay. That one was good, for sure. But I don't think it was on the level of Contact.

• 2:20:45Speaker 02

  What do you like about Contact? Everything, but.

• 2:20:49Danny Jones?

  It's just like more of a human story, you know? Like, the arc of the story and the way it ends is just like, so deep, you know? And it's just also a classic, probably one of the first ones, movies I've seen on that subject ever.

• 2:21:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:03Danny Jones?

  So it's just one of the ones that sticks with you.

• 2:21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:21:05Danny Jones?

  And it's like, also, and I haven't seen Disclosure Day yet, but I feel like the best ones are the ones that don't show the aliens. Hello, I'm Chris Richards, general manager at Safr Volkswagen Richmond.

• 2:21:17Speaker 07

  I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend Happy. Hi, I'm Happy Harry Turner, special finance manager at Safford Credit dot com. If you're in an open Chapter 13 bankruptcy, recently filed a Chapter 7, or you've been turned down because of credit challenges, don't give up. For nearly 30 years, I've helped people get reliable transportation when others said no. Visit Safford Credit dot com. Remember, I'm not happy unless you are.

• 2:21:46Danny Jones?

  Check engine, ABS or maintenance light on? Take the guesswork out of your warning lights with O'Reilly Veriscan. The service is free and provides a report with solutions verified by ASE certified master technicians. And if you need help, we could recommend a shop for you. Ask for O'Reilly Veriscan today.

• 2:22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, in a way. Yeah, although I did love the.

• 2:22:17Danny Jones?

  It's a little more to the imagination.

• 2:22:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, contact.

• 2:22:22Danny Jones?

  But, you know, also.

• 2:22:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:24Danny Jones?

  Independence Day is one of the best as well.

• 2:22:27Speaker 02

  I just watched that a few months ago, too. I hadn't seen it in a long time and I was really excited to see it again.

• 2:22:34Speaker 02

  It is, there's, there's some pretty good movies out there that have to do with aliens.

• 2:22:40Speaker 02

  But yeah, you should check this one out.

• 2:22:42Danny Jones?

  I will.

• 2:22:42Speaker 02

  See what you think.

• 2:22:43Danny Jones?

  I will.

• 2:22:43Speaker 02

  Let me know.

• 2:22:46Speaker 02

  It's a great story. It's a really interesting story.

• 2:22:49Danny Jones?

  What did you just say? You have, what's coming out tomorrow? You're, you're publishing something tomorrow?

• 2:22:54Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, we have a story about life on Mars coming out tomorrow.

• 2:22:57Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:22:58Speaker 02

  And kind of what we started off talking about.

• 2:23:03Speaker 02

  What, what's some of the evidence that we have that points in that direction? Both from the Viking landers and from the search for ancient biosignatures? And how much evidence like that would it take to convince us? So it's a little bit like.

• 2:23:21Speaker 02

  We often will say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, which is something that you'll hear invoked with respect to UAP, UFO a lot.

• 2:23:33Speaker 02

  But on Mars, we're looking at it a little bit differently. Like, how much ordinary evidence would we need to prove something extraordinary? You know, how much really compelling, if not convincing, observations, each of them on their own? How much of that would you need before you can say? Yeah, there's a really good chance that all of this is telling us that Mars was an inhabited world. So it's kind of looking at standards of evidence. Sort of challenging people to reconsider whether extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is what we need on Mars? When, you know, life on Mars may not even be an extraordinary claim.

• 2:24:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:24:11Speaker 02

  If we think that we live in a biological universe, or if we think that we live in a universe where like physics and chemistry and geology behave the same way,

• 2:24:23Speaker 02

  then we would expect that there was an origin of life on Mars. Because ancient Mars and ancient Earth were so similar.

• 2:24:31Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:24:32Speaker 02

  Did I just say that right?

• 2:24:35Speaker 02

  And so if there wasn't an origin of life on Mars, then we are fundamentally misunderstanding something about what we think is our own origin and how life originated here.

• 2:24:45Danny Jones?

  Right. Like where we seeded from Mars.

• 2:24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's an open question is, do Mars and Earth, if there is life on Mars, does it share an origin with Earth life? Do we have that same, you know, single genesis? And then Pants Bremir, whatever you want to call it, was responsible for distributing life on both planets.

• 2:25:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Then ancient aliens would become a real thing.

• 2:25:12Danny Jones?

  They'd get the last laugh. Y'all made fun of us for so long.

• 2:25:15Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah. But if it's not so extraordinary to think that life evolved on Mars, then do we have what we need?

• 2:25:23Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:25:23Speaker 02

  Already. And I don't think we do, but it may not be that far off.

• 2:25:27Danny Jones?

  Right. I think, I mean, it seems like we would be closer to that than even proving that life existed on Earth millions and millions of years ago.

• 2:25:37Speaker 02

  Four point, what are they at right now? 3.8 billion years is like the oldest agreed upon time.

• 2:25:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just as crazy of an idea.

• 2:25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:47Danny Jones?

  That there could have been civilizations past that. The problem is, it's just like not, it's already that, that, the answer to that is already printed, right? Like, we already know the answer to that. We don't really know the answer to ancient Mars yet.

• 2:26:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:26:01Danny Jones?

  So the story's yet to be written.

• 2:26:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And it's, I mean, it's fun to kind of hitchhike along as scientists are writing that story.

• 2:26:13Speaker 02

  I just am impatient and I want to know the answer. I want to know what this.

• 2:26:17Danny Jones?

  Me too.

• 2:26:18Speaker 02

  I want to know how it ends. I want to know how that story ends.

• 2:26:20Danny Jones?

  Me too.

• 2:26:20Speaker 02

  I want to know it like now, preferably.

• 2:26:23Danny Jones?

  Right. I need it right now.

• 2:26:25Speaker 02

  So that's all. I need it right now, too.

• 2:26:28Speaker 02

  That's all. It's like, anyway, that's, that's kind of what, what we're thinking about starting tomorrow online.

• 2:26:35Danny Jones?

  Fantastic.

• 2:26:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:26:36Danny Jones?

  What, what, what, any other future projects that you're looking forward to doing or working on?

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's see. So we've got, this fall, we have the Voyager milestone that we were talking about. So I'm working on kind of an onstage presentation about that, about the mission, about what the next Voyager is, which is why I love that you asked that question.

• 2:26:59Speaker 02

  That'll be really fun. I'm doing that with some colleagues in Switzerland, so that'll be overseas.

• 2:27:06Speaker 02

  Still working on a book proposal about looking for life beyond Earth.

• 2:27:09Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:27:10Speaker 02

  How we're doing that.

• 2:27:12Danny Jones?

  Fantastic.

• 2:27:12Speaker 02

  What it teaches us about ourselves, which is important.

• 2:27:17Danny Jones?

  Do yourself a favor and stay far away from the UFO world.

• 2:27:22Speaker 02

  I mean, it has to go in there, right? Like, you have to put it in there.

• 2:27:27Speaker 02

  And it's okay, because I think it's, it's actually a great teaching tool.

• 2:27:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:30Speaker 02

  You know, it's like if we wanted to harness the power of the scientific method to figure out what it is that we're seeing up there, this is how we would do it.

• 2:27:38Danny Jones?

  Either that or a big waste of time, one or the other. Or both.

• 2:27:43Speaker 02

  But as we've said, every time you start looking

• 2:27:48Speaker 02

  at stuff using a new set of tools, you're going to learn new things.

• 2:27:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:27:51Speaker 02

  So if we go and we, and when this is what we're

• 2:27:57Speaker 02

  supposed to tell NASA whether they should do or not on, on the study team was like, if the agency does want to address the question of UAP, how should it do that? And what can we learn? And so if you can imagine like all of the Earth observing satellites that NASA has, that NOAA has, you start asking them like, okay, so there've been sightings reported here, here, here, here, here. Like, what kinds of data can we get from around the time of that sighting? We're going to learn new stuff because we're looking at the Earth. And, you know, we're using tools and we're looking at either our Earth or the sky in different ways. It's like, we learn new things all the time. So it's, it's not really, it's kind of a win-win.

• 2:28:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:28:42Speaker 02

  But I didn't explain that very well.

• 2:28:44Danny Jones?

  No, I, I understand what you're saying. Like, the, the development of technology is going to help us answer a lot more questions, for sure. But, yeah, I mean, like,

• 2:28:54Danny Jones?

  I still find it very interesting. I think there's like a very human aspect to this stuff as well. And, you know, like when you hear the stories of the astronauts coming back and experiencing that like overview effect and how it like rewires their brains and their view of everything and

• 2:29:11Danny Jones?

  there seems to be like a very like deeper layer to this stuff, like a consciousness shift to understanding this stuff, something that can't be understood with, you know, basic material physics and, and like material matter and technology. Like, I feel like there has to be like a, I don't know. I, I just feel like there's another kind of like squishy layer to all of this stuff that we're going to have to understand to really get a grip on it. You know, I don't, I don't know, I don't know if we're going to get all the answers to all of this stuff, like the stars and whether UFOs are real and how all of this works

• 2:29:57Danny Jones?

  just with developing better telescopes or better satellites or all of that stuff. It's just, I don't know, there's something to like the human story of, you know, what happens to these people and like what they experience when they, when they go to these places. At least some of them, maybe not all of them, but for sure, like Edgar Mitchell and some of the other people that went to space or went to the moon.

• 2:30:28Danny Jones?

  I feel like we need to listen to them more about this stuff. Because, you know, all these guys, a lot of these guys got really interested in weird stuff after they did that, you know?

• 2:30:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. I wonder, though,

• 2:30:41Speaker 02

  how much of that is a result of just a new perspective? I think about Earthrise, the image from Apollo 8, that really was the first time that we had an image of our Earth rising over the limb of the moon and it was actually taken by a human. And how that like kickstarted the environmental movement because it showed our planet in its cosmic context for the first time. And then the pale blue dot image from.

• 2:31:14Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, that one's crazy.

• 2:31:15Speaker 02

  Right? You know, from Voyager and.

• 2:31:18Danny Jones?

  That one, it was near Saturn for that, right?

• 2:31:20Speaker 02

  It was beyond Neptune.

• 2:31:22Danny Jones?

  Find that pale blue dot image, dude, it's insane.

• 2:31:24Speaker 02

  It was taken on Valentine's Day. And how that shows our planet as just like one member of the solar neighborhood. It's just a world among worlds, but it's our world and it's special and.

• 2:31:38Danny Jones?

  Yeah, look at, so look at the one with Saturn in the foreground.

• 2:31:42Speaker 02

  So that's from Cassini. That one's really good, too.

• 2:31:45Danny Jones?

  Click on the big version of it, Steve. It's a big photo.

• 2:31:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's Cassini's pale blue dot. And that, that spacecraft was at Saturn.

• 2:31:54Danny Jones?

  So that is Earth.

• 2:31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:31:56Speaker 03

  Wow. Holy crap.

• 2:32:00Speaker 02

  And just how, like, even, even you and I sitting here, all of us right now are just like, that's amazing. And then, and then you think, and I also think about this in the context of, you know, how, how excited you get when you see your house from the plane, if you do?

• 2:32:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:16Speaker 02

  You're like, oh, that's my town. That's where I live. That's, you know, I'm trying to figure out, oh, there's Main Street. That's the coffee shop. Like, here's the route in and out. It's like, you're just seeing this place that you know so well from a completely different perspective. And it's exciting and it, it asks, it forces you to ask new questions and. Think about things. And so I just wonder if that's a whole part of it, too. Like you were saying, it's a human story. It's humans going, pushing themselves to go into unfamiliar places. And what happens to you when you do that?

• 2:32:46Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. A hundred percent.

• 2:32:51Danny Jones?

  So this was Voyager, this was not Voyager, this one?

• 2:32:53Speaker 02

  That's Cassini. Yeah, that was a spacecraft that was orbiting Saturn until-

• 2:32:56Danny Jones?

  That image of Saturn looks so insane.

• 2:32:59Speaker 02

  It's so pretty. Cassini is also a really, really cool mission.

• 2:33:04Speaker 02

  When I was at JPL, I was chatting with the woman who was leading that mission. She's now also leading the Voyager mission.

• 2:33:10Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:33:11Speaker 02

  And I was like, you know, I used to think Cassini was my favorite mission. But now it's Voyager. And she was like,

• 2:33:18Speaker 02

  me too.

• 2:33:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. But yeah, the pale blue dot, which if you go back to the,

• 2:33:28Speaker 02

  the other selection of images, the one, Carl Sagan described it as a mote of dust suspended in the sunbeam. That one.

• 2:33:39Speaker 02

  And I think that's actually just like stray light from the camera. But it's a nice poetic description. But that one like really rocked people. And if you look at the entire solar system family portrait,

• 2:33:51Speaker 02

  you know, it gives you a sense of how fragile the planet seems, how small it is, how insignificant, but how important to each of us it is.

• 2:34:02Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:34:02Speaker 02

  And, you know, Carl says, everyone you ever know, everyone you've ever loved, every war that's ever been fought,

• 2:34:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:08Speaker 02

  has taken place on that pale blue dot. That mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. And it's like, yeah, like that's a shift in perspective.

• 2:34:18Danny Jones?

  Very. That is a crazy way to think about it. Well, Nadia, thank you so much for doing this. That's a great way to wrap this up.

• 2:34:25Speaker 02

  You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

• 2:34:27Danny Jones?

  My pleasure.

• 2:34:29Speaker 02

  It's been wonderful chatting with you.

• 2:34:30Danny Jones?

  Where can people find more of your work and all that stuff?

• 2:34:34Speaker 02

  Oh, well, I need to update it because it's way out of date. But NadiaDrake.com is the website that I have. And I will update it soon.

• 2:34:46Danny Jones?

  And your new, and your new, your new thing coming out tomorrow on Mars? Where's that going to be?

• 2:34:51Speaker 02

  ScientificAmerican.com.

• 2:34:52Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:34:53Speaker 02

  And then, yeah, that's coming out tomorrow.

• 2:34:56Danny Jones?

  Cool.

• 2:34:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:57Danny Jones?

  We'll, we'll make sure we link it all below for people.

• 2:34:59Speaker 02

  Awesome. Thank you.

• 2:35:00Danny Jones?

  My pleasure. Thank you for coming.

• 2:35:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:35:03Danny Jones?

  Good night, folks.