[music] I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome our guest today, author Jaime Green.

She's written The Possibility of Life, Science, Imagination and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos.

She is a successful and much accomplished science writer, essayist, and teacher.

Jaime, a pleasure to finally host you here on The Open Mind.

Thanks so much for having me.

Now, you originally published this book a couple of years ago, right?

Mm hmm.

Yeah.

2023.

And what I want to ask you, as we explore the possibility of life in 2025 outside of Earth.

What struck you most in response to the book that's happened since you published it?

Hmm.

That's a really interesting question.

I've been really pleased by how people have realized that as much as it's a book about space and what might be beyond Earth, it's very much a book about life on Earth as well.

I didn't really intended that way as I was writing it, but, you know, this is the only planet we know of with life on it.

And so in order to understand the different ways that life might be on other worlds, it all really comes back to understanding life on this world.

And I think that when we're looking for life on other worlds, yes, there is scientific value to that.

But the reason people care about it so much is because it's about understanding our world more deeply.

And when you write about life on earth.

What do you want to impart to the scientifically engaged and also informed?

But maybe not as engaged reader and viewer about the nature of life on Earth starting there.

Well, one crucial fact.

One crucial element of it, its not that I don't think people know this, but we maybe don't think about it is the fact that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor that you can trace it back, trace it back, trace it back.

And there is one single celled organism, probably something like a bacterium that is the ancestor of every single living thing on Earth.

It wasn't necessarily the first living thing.

Life was trying things out, you know, different kinds of evolutionary experiments.

But we all share this common ancestor, which I think is very profound, but also very scientifically interesting, because it means that for all the diversity of life on earth, all the weirdness, it's one example of life.

And so when we're trying to imagine what life might be like on other worlds, we don't have examples to extrapolate from or triangulate from.

We have literally one example which, like statistics wise, gives you basically no information.

One of the things that's transpired since your authorship of this book is the still unexplored and unexplained, robots in the air, or whatever they may be.

Drones, UFOs, that were spotted as 2024 closed, and that continue to be identified by a lot of pilots, commercial pilots and seeing unusual things, thinking about the book in the context of these, appearing phenomena, whatever they may be.

What can you tell our viewers uniquely about, the possibility of life in whatever has been seen in New Jersey and elsewhere in the skies.

Well, I don't know that there's anything unique that I have to offer.

Other, you know, astronomers have pointed out that some of the sightings were bright stars or planets seen through trees.

Some of the sightings were airplanes.

I think that, you know, on the one hand, UFOs, I see them as pretty separate, a separate field from the search for life on other worlds.

Because, first of all, they're on our worlds.

They're more about technology than about biology, and they seem much more a technological military question.

You know, what are these things that we're seeing?

And one of the reasons that the preferred nomenclature for them was shifted from UFOs to UAP is that we don't know that they're objects.

We know that they're phenomena.

We're seeing lights.

We're seeing movement.

We don't know that there's a ship there, and especially when you're looking at sensors, but also even just the human senses, registering something a phenomenon does not mean that there's an object there.

And so I do see it as pretty separate field.

And in terms of the scientists who study it, it's very separated.

They're just distinct fields, even though they both have to do with how we imagine aliens and life beyond Earth.

So that's the main thing.

But I do think that, we can learn a lot about what we hope for and what we fear through these encounters.

The ways that people interpret a light in the sky are very shaped by culture, by what we've been told lights in the sky might be.

And also by our relationship with the scientific world.

The fact that people are seeing a bright light in the sky, that in several cases has been identified as a star or a planet because, Jupiter and Venus have both been really, really bright for the last few months.

It's not just about ignorance, but it's also about the fact that every personal experience of the world and every element of scientific engagement with the world is necessarily filtered through our experience and our consciousness, our biases, our preconceptions, and our hopes and fears, as well.

Well, you do have something unique to contribute.

I can assure you that.

Because this passage struck me, as gold.

“It wasn't all celebration and camaraderie, though.” You write, “The cosmos could also be terrifying.

The sky had once been a closed dome, but now was an infinite blackness.

We once lived under God's gaze.

Now is he even still existed, his attention was spread across infinite worlds.

Writing in 1714, English essayist Joseph Addison was as frightened by the night sky as I was as a child.

I could not but look upon myself with secret horror, as a being that was not worth the smallest regard of one who had so great a work under his care and superintendency.

I was afraid of being overlooked amidst the immensity of nature, and lost among the infinite variety of creatures.” And then you go on to ask the question, what would it be like to live with the confident knowledge, as many did during the enlightenment, that aliens existed?

Yeah.

You are framing it majestically as you do in this work.

Thank you.

But that synopses is how we feel when we take a step back as just being a speck.

Mm hmm.

I don't know if Elon Musk thinks about it that way, that we are just a speck of nature.

No.

I'm going to guess that a lot of his, motivation is about not seeing himself as a speck, seeing himself as important, as central to history.

That's my guess.

But, the natural majority affinity or opinion would be that realization.

And I ask you this in the context of exploration of Mars or, the continued pursuit of life outside of Earth.

How do you assess what's motivating that pursuit?

And where we should fit in to a mission of conscientious, and enterprising, and evolutionary exploration.

Yeah.

It's really interesting that you ask that because, like you said, the book came out almost two years ago.

And what I'm working on now is even more aligned with that question about, you know, how we think about humanity is on the verge of becoming more than a single planetary species.

We've already fully turned orbit into another Earth environment.

I wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine about that last year.

And, you know, Elon Musk and others think that Mars is our destiny, right?

And in a lot of those perspectives, you hear people replaying patterns from history, sometimes critically, sometimes without really thinking about it.

We use words like colonization and frontier.

And I don't know if Elon Musk has said Manifest Destiny, but people certainly talk about it that way.

People talk about exploration and expansion as this fundamental human drive.

And I think anytime we start making assumptions about what humanity as a whole is, we should pause and ask ourselves like, well, what am I basing that on?

Am I basing that on all of humanity?

Am I basing that on the culture that happens to be dominant right now?

Am I basing that on fact or am I basing that on what I want?

In the case of Elon Musk, I would guess that what he wants is more power and more dominion, and there's a whole nother planet that gives him space to plant a flag, where no one has done that yet, right?

And so I think that we, even though space is brand new to us in a lot of ways.

We have a lot that we can learn from history about how we have expanded before, how we have made use of natural resources before, how we have created cities and states and civilizations.

And if we're not aware of those patterns, we are absolutely going to just, replay them because when the driving force is capitalism or greed or conquest, we know how that turns out.

Right now Los Angeles is being burned alive.

That is because of climate change.

That is because of intensive resource use.

And just because space is infinite doesn't mean that our access to it is unlimited.

And so I think that we need to be thinking about Mars, about asteroids, about orbit as an extension of the human environment, and to continue doing the apparently very hard work of coexisting within our environment instead of trying to dominate it, which inevitably leads to ruining it.

What did your research in writing this book and the work you're doing now lead you to think about these generations that have passed, considering the possibility of life besides the human species or the species that we know on Earth and the failure to see that come to realization or fruition?

Mm hmm.

Much like, flying cars, it does seem like finally, in our lifetimes, thanks to Musk and others, whether you want them or not, we're probably going to see some kind of autonomous, equivalent of a self driving or flying car in the next ten years.

It would be so groundbreaking, an event that it would be since the the recording of human history, you know, nothing else would compete if we did Yeah.

identify life on another planet or if life on another planet, identified us.

Do people think that its going to happen in the next decade or 25 years?

There are always people thinking it's going to happen in the next decade, in the next 25 years.

People were saying that in 1980.

People are saying that today.

It's sort of.

Do they have maybe more justification in thinking that it's a reality?

-Saying today?

-No, no.

The only difference is that we know now how common planets are around other stars, which is a relatively new discovery.

The first planet around a sun like star was found in, I think 1995.

And before that, the consensus was that that planets around other stars were probably pretty common, but we had no way to know.

It was entirely possible that our solar system was a total fluke.

And in some ways, it does seem to be we haven't found many solar systems that seem to have this many planets, planets that resemble Earth, etc., but we now know enough to know that there are so many planets around other stars that if you look at any star in the sky, odds are it has a planet, and that increases the probability because life needs somewhere to be.

And planets are the only place we know of so far that can, you know, even in our speculation, that can really host life.

So that is one credit towards the life is common side of things.

-Other than that, -But...

I mean, there are people can make really strong arguments for life being common.

People can make really strong arguments for life being rare, and no matter what, they are basing it on their interpretation of what we know and a lot of guesswork.

Because like I said, we have one example of life.

So we know that there's life on this planet.

There's no way to know from that if it's common or rare, if it arises easily, if it's a big fluke.

Maybe microbial life is really common, but evolving into complex organisms is extremely rare.

There's no way to know how hard or easy these things were, because all we know is that it happened once.

Right.

You know, for some reason, my gut is telling me that so much of life, now has, imitated art, in our politics especially.

But, I feel like it's going to happen.

I just, you know, the whole idea of, the Independence Day, I mean, you were alluding to the scenes out of LA, which literally look like Terminator the movie Terminator.

Mm hmm.

I just have a sense.

And this is maybe something just for me to contemplate, but I'm curious what your reaction is.

Just my sense is that, within the next ten years or so, there's going to be some sort of remarkable finding.

And I think it's going to be life on another planet.

Maybe it's 20 years or 25 years, but I just I almost feel like just instinctually Im predicting that I don't know what that says about anything, but.

I don't know, but I think it says a lot more about your worldview, your instincts.

You know, your referencing these movies.

This instinct is clearly shaped by the stories that we tell.

But so many alien stories are not really stories about what life on other worlds might be like, their ways of understanding life on Earth, you know, like independent Day, all of these conquest stories about a violent, impossible to understand alien species coming to Earth and trying to eliminate us, take over the planet, enslave us, or whatever.

Those stories are ways of reshaping and understanding the history of colonialism on earth.

Like the beginning of this was The War of the Worlds, which has explicit reference to conquest by Europeans of other nations.

And it's like absolutely, essentially saying like, alright, how do you like it when it happens to you?

You know, there are stories about alien conquest that are like that.

There are stories about alien conquest.

Like one book that I write about in my book, The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell in the foreword or the afterword or something.

She talks about how the book was inspired by the 500th anniversary of Columbus's voyage to the New World, where she wanted to imagine a story about what if you know the quote unquote conquesters, the visitors, came with the best of intentions.

How might they still disrupt, in this case, the planet that they were visiting?

Other science fiction stories, like Coming Out of Africa, are being written by people who have lived the legacy of colonialism and are trying to reimagine and retell it and understand it better through that storytelling.

So I especially think the alien stories that are about conquest and violence and a big imbalance of power are ways of exploring the meaning of the history, of those sorts of conquest and power dynamics on Earth.

Right.

And one theme of those movies is if they don't kill us all, they humble us, to recognize the wrongness of our mindset towards them.

Right.

Or they unite us.

You know, now that there's this big other outside of Earth, all of a sudden we realize that humanity is really, we're all the same.

We love each other.

We have to come together in support.

You know, we have to be unified.

And we set aside our differences to fight this new external evil, which is something that we see in science fiction.

It's also something that we see in the rhetoric of scientists who are searching for life on other worlds.

Carl Sagan used to talk like this, saying, you know, once we learn that there's life on other worlds, and once we see how truly different it is, we'll realize that our differences on Earth are so minor.

And that's another way that the story of aliens becomes a kind of wish fulfillment.

It's like we need something to unify us.

We need something to make us realize that we're not enemies on Earth, that we're actually all kin.

And wouldn't it be great if some external force did that?

And maybe it wouldn't have to conquer us.

Maybe it could show up and, like, teach us the secrets of, endlessly renewable energy also, which is another thing that Carl Sagan talked about.

You know, wouldn't it be nice if that happened?

Right.

And also, whether or not other terrestrial climates offer, antidotes to illness.

And thats been a common theme in the rationalization of billion dollar investments in, exploring, what the surface of any of these planets might offer and, chemicals that, are unknown to our periodic table that might, help us, that's certainly been a selfish but also humane, rationalization of the expenditure, when we don't send it to, vital social services or to establish a safety net here.

Mm hmm.

Most of the discussion now about extraterrestrial navigation does not really focus on the earthly benefit that that, adventure might, result in.

Right?

Mm hmm.

I don't know if we've just given up on that possibility, that, you know, the properties that we would find on another planet would help us live better here.

But it was one of the more convincing arguments that I heard for years.

When we saw the NASA administrator testifying for more funding.

Yeah.

I mean there's definitely still talk of things like space mining, asteroid mining, mining the water and the, sort of remnants of ice on the moon, things like that, mostly to facilitate deeper space exploration, you know, can you, have a base on the moon to launch to Mars?

Which could be easier because of the lower gravity and things like that.

I think that there is a lot of pure scientific value in the knowledge to be found through space research.

It's not all, you know, hoping that by continuing to explore space, we also get things like velcro and Tang and ballpoint pens, which are said to be some of the, earthly benefits of Apollo and the shuttle program.

Although I think other than Tang, it's pretty apocryphal.

But also in terms of funding, you know, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but NASA's budget is some tiny, tiny fraction of defense spending.

So, you know, if we're saying, oh, we need more money for social goods, which I agree.

If we look at things that benefit humanity as a whole, I think knowledge and wonder and deeper scientific understanding personally, obviously, I am the person who thinks, as I wrote the book about it, you know, like, let's just sort of carve off a corner of the defense budget instead.

Because it's not exactly zero sum.

It's not like, oh, if we didn't have NASA, we could end homelessness, right?

Like we could end homelessness if we wanted to and still explore the planets.

But I think it's, you know, thinking about the benefits to humanity.

Some of them can be material, but there are other kinds of benefits as well that I think are are valuable too.

That makes sense.

I haven't heard, at least in recent memory.

NASA, aspire to that achievement and at least suggest that this will pay some dividends.

And we will find, new remedies or cures to cancer or anything else as a function of that.

It's hard to make that speculative... Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone thinks that there's going to be a cure for cancer on another planet, because the chemistry on a planet that doesn't have life on it is going to be much simpler than the chemistry here.

One of the things that life does is make complexity, complex molecules, complex structures, things like that.

There's actually, really interesting research by scientists who study the origin of life, suggesting that complexity may be the thing that differentiates living from non-living matter.

So, you know, we're not going to find like biological, active biological compounds on a non-living planet, but I just I do think that, if NASA is moving away from this idea of there will be tangible benefits for people on Earth, I kind of appreciate that because I do believe in the value of pure science, just like I believe in the value of the arts, that these are things that enrich our society and culture and make them better, and I think we should be giving NASA money just for that, personally.

Right.

And you say at the end, “Current thinking on the origin of life breaks into two main camps with a handful of alternatives on the fringes.

And in between, the predominant view is called RNA world.” The point that I would just make in response to yours is it is maybe not plausible, but possible that the life that we would discover, on a different planet totally perplexes us might be, you know, again, profoundly different from any understanding we have of any of our periodic table of elements.

Right?

And in that respect, life on another planet could possess something that we don't understand, but might help us.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not going to be made of different elements.

Our understanding of the elements is pretty comprehensive.

It's like that goes for the whole universe -that there are, -Right.

you know, we've found every element that can be made of every combination of subatomic particles.

But if life on another planet is very chemically different from life on Earth, we probably won't be able to interact with it chemically at all, because it's sort of like the keys won't fit in our locks.

So I don't, you know, there was also, a news story a couple of weeks ago about the dangers of researching mirror life.

So what this means is that all life on Earth is built of molecules, molecules sort of have a handedness when they get complex enough.

And so, like all of the proteins and all life on Earth are a certain kind of amino acid.

And scientists have been thinking about doing research with the mirror images of those molecules.

But there is the danger that it could sort of mess up Earth life, sort of like prions do.

Right.

Malformed proteins in the brain.

Anyway, point being, chemically different life could be harmful to us in that it could sort of mess up our systems or it could be unable to interact with us.

But I think as rare as life on another planet is, then the odds that it's chemically compatible and has stumbled into some sort of chemistry that happens to cure cancer.

That is not where I would be putting my cancer research money.

That's where I would be putting my like, let's learn about the diversity of the cosmos money.

Right, no.

Fair enough.

And, Of course it can confound us so much that it's just not even something we can put under a microscope and figure out.

Mm hmm.

Monsters and goblins.

But maybe that would never happen.

Jamie, thank you so much for your insight.

I encourage everyone to pick up, your beautiful book, -The Possibility of Life.

-Thank you.

Appreciate your insight.

And, a little creative conversation today.

Thanks so much.

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