September 18, 2012 • 28 mins
There's a very good question that no one has yet satisfactorily answered: Where did life on Earth come from? Some look to the Red Planet as the source of life here, which, if correct, would make us all Martians. Is there anything to this out there claim?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and I'm with Charles Bryant
and what we're doing Stuff you should know today? Oh yeah,
(00:24):
not the other one. Stuff you should not know. Nothing
you should know now we're out there inspiring podcasts. Yeah.
Who we heard about that today? Right, someone started podcast
in the Illinois Valley. I don't know where that is.
I don't think it's Illinois though, but they wrote about
it in the paper, right, Yeah, they got to write
up in the paper. Pretty cool. Yeah. Okay, before we
(00:45):
get started, buddy, we need to announce our upcoming New
York trip in Trivia night. Yeah. We talked to Mayor
Bloomberg and he, uh, he said that Friday, October twelve,
two thousand twelve is Stuff you Should Know day in
the five boroughs of New York City. That's right, and
we will be presented a not a key to the city,
(01:07):
but a key card to our hotel. At least it's
a set of lock picks to the city. That's right.
And uh, So we're coming for Comic Con. If you
have a Comic Con pass, you can come see this
podcast live and we're gonna have details on like what
room and what time and everything. Yeah. Plus it's cheap
even if you don't have a past, like like day
passes are not expensive. Yeah, even in this economy. It's
(01:29):
it's it's good. So we're gonna be podcasting live during
the day on Friday, and um you can check out
Facebook and Twitter for info on exactly where and when.
And then that night another stuff you should know Trivia Night,
which was a huge success, huge success in New York
last year. So it's just two years ago, right, yeah,
two years ago. Yeah. Uh about this time too. I
(01:52):
think it was October, wasn't it. Yeah. Um, So that's
a whole day, the whole day of your life in
New York City, packed with stuff you should know, featuring
Chuck and myself. So this is gonna be great. Uh
and I know it's just me, but I like saying myself. Um,
and we're gonna have details for sure on that. We're
locking down the menu hopefully as we speak, and um
(02:15):
locking down our all star celebrity trivia team as we speak.
If you're out there and you're an all star celebrity,
you want to play with us. I think that's a
great call out up. We're still assembling our team. Yeah,
a couple of the stalwarts are going to be out
of town, which is disappointing. So we're looking for for
comers as it were, Yes, as it were, And we're
also looking for commers to challenge us and uh and
(02:38):
and Duke get out on the trivia floor. It's gonna
be fun for free, that's right. And there will be
adult libations involved if you're into that. Probably if you're
into that, and Uh, that's about it. Anything else. I
think it's high time we started the episode. Thank you
for bearing with us. I guess everyone, Uh, let's see, Chuck.
I'm a little under the weather today. I know I'm fighting.
(03:01):
I I'm not I'm not gonna get sick. I'm just
it's like, man, that that one day where it's like
you're right before you're about to get better the worst day,
but you're just not going to get sick, you know
what I'm saying. So I don't have like five days
of sickness ahead of me. I've got bagel days of
sickness ahead of me. You're saying this like positive thoughts.
Is that the deal? Okay? Yeah? I found that my
(03:23):
mind body connection is really really strong, especially in the
horrible way where I'm like, I'm not gonna get sick.
I wonder if I'm getting sick though, Am I getting sick?
And then all of a sudden, I'm sick. It's like
I just talked myself into getting sick. But that sounds
like you just talk to yourself into getting well. So
I'm trying it out. It's mental gymnastics. Uh, sometimes it works. Yeah, um,
(03:45):
but I guess let me just go ahead and start
and get this one over with. Okay. I like this one. Yeah,
not bad. You realize that's half of an article I
sent you before that. You you're like, now, let's not
do this one. Yeah, the origin of life on Earth.
But didn't we do that? We never did that? Well
there was a reason. Wow, I believe it now. But
(04:06):
maybe we can do the other half. We'll do. This
is like part of a two part suite about where
life on Earth came from Mars. Maybe there's another way,
and this is my intro. There's another possible way, and
it's something called a biogenesis, and a biogenesis basically says
that all the proteins needed to form RNA. Somehow we're
(04:28):
present in the early Earth and the primordial soup, and
somehow they came together in a structure that was RNA.
And RNA is a pretty specific, weird little thing, and
that it can not only replicate itself, it can make
new stuff too, so it can build d N A,
(04:48):
but it can also replicate itself. It sounds like something
Ridley Scott movie, very much so. And they think that
RNA somehow came together and over the course of millions
of years, in all these different trials and errors, finally
started to form DNA, which kick started life. The origin
of life was just a bunch of proteins that came together.
(05:09):
There are a lot of reasons people pooh pooh this.
A lot of people a lot of creationists say, hey,
you know Occam's razor, which you scientists love so much,
do you think that's it? Or that somebody created us?
So the abiogenesis hypothesis, maybe theory by now has kind
of has some holes in it, but it's really interesting
(05:30):
and we'll talk in depth about that in another one.
This one is about the big rival to a biogenesis.
And it's called panspermia, which is a pretty pretty neat name.
What does that mean? Seeds everywhere? Yeah, seeds everywhere over
the place, panspermia. And it's from a guy in the
(05:51):
nineteen o six Swede whose name is pretty awesome, uh,
Savante Argennis, who wrote a book called Worlds in the Making,
and he coined the term pants fermia. But it was
um about fifty or so years maybe thirty or so
years before him, um that the idea of pants fermia
was first put forth by Lord Kelvin. Yeah, the famous
(06:15):
Lord Kelvin, British physicist, mega famous. I mean not many
people get a temperature scale named after him. No, there's not,
just the Tommy Celsius and Billy Fahrenheit man and Lord
Kelvin trimember that is. Uh. So his idea was that
(06:36):
seed bearing meteorites, which is kind of where we are
here with this, did we come from Mars? Potentially that
these meteorites that had uh life buried within them, or
at the very least you know, sitting on the surface,
had life there found its way to Earth and that's
where it all started, right, And it's pretty cool to
(06:57):
think that way back then. They were thinking of this
stuff back in the seventies. Yeah, man, you know, well,
I mean the super far off the space elevator came
from a Russian guy in eighteen. People were thinking back then.
They had a lot of time to um subjugate. The
other cultures may have been thinking even more, you know,
because they didn't know as much. All they did was
(07:19):
sit around and think. Well, if the Olympics taught me
anything the opening ceremonies, it's that they had a lot
more time to toil and think, and everything just got
better after the sod was removed when the Industrial Revolution
came about. You think that got better. I think it
got worse. Oh I see. It seemed to me that
(07:39):
it was the saving grace of um of civilization was
when the Industrial Revolution hit. Oh okay, I thought you
meant the opening ceremonies because they got much worse after
the Industrial Revolution. All of a sudden, people were texting
each other on screen, and it was it was like
these little romance stories playing out on the field. They
got so yeah, it did. Yeah uh. But fortunately the
(08:04):
Olympics had John Hodgman to defend it. He was the
sole person to defend it on Twitter. Boy could think
Twitter went around in the Atlanta Olympics. Yeah, I don't
remember that one, but you he was like, you remember
the Atlanta embarrassing He was like, it was like little
Richard driving around in a truck or something that we
had stainless steel pickup trucks driving around. We had like
(08:25):
line dancing and like Georgia peaches. It was just like,
oh man. But the point was it was big. It
may have been gaudy, but it was big. Right, No
one could out do Beijing. But they were saying they
weren't even trying to do outdo Beijing. They were trying
to do something different. But it's still it missed. Yeah,
it comes down. Yeah, Okay, So anyway back to it,
(08:49):
back to the Victorian era, um, and there their science thought,
uh the wow, we got so far off, it's ridiculous. Um.
But the point was the concept of pants permia is
that the Earth, prior to the arrival of life was
like a virgin Petrie dish, and then there was some
(09:10):
cosmic cough and like a little bit of cosmic spittle
infected this peatree dish, and all of a sudden, life
took off, that's gross pants. Bermia used to have a
more narrow definition back then, but now it's been broadened
out to the point where pretty much most scientists believe
that you can exchange life among bodies in our Solar system,
(09:33):
like it can happen. Yeah, well it's had proven to happen.
It was broader right back in the day, it was broader,
and then they now it's broader. Back then it was
more specific, it was broad narrow, and then when and
then it went back to the original broad version. Now
sciences started to kind of back up the what was
originally considered a flight of fancy. So what Lord Kelvin
thought was that asteroids brought life to Earth um and
(09:58):
and probably from Mars, maybe elsewhere in the galaxy, here
elsewhere in the universe, but the point was they arrived
via rock. Well, after a few years of consideration, most
people were like, that's not possible, Like an asteroid would
basically pulverize everything on it, there's heat involved, there's no way.
(10:18):
And so the Swede comes along sipante are hineous and
he says, no, these are just basically like little little
microbes traveling between the planets, right, Yeah, It's like you
don't even need the meteorite as the vessel. This stuff
is just going by what starlight? Uh yeah, that's kind
of a simple way to put it. In electromagnetic energy
(10:40):
in the other articles at starlight, which sounds a little
more fanciful or ether I think they used to call
it to that. Really. Yeah, so this is all great,
And then we find out in n when we launched
the Viking probes which to Mars, which I think we
goofed on this before, right, the Viking name or something. Yeah,
it seems like Viking one touchdown at uh Chrysa plinysa
(11:04):
Viking too on Utopia Plinysia. And interestingly, they took some
some atmospheric readings and they found that the same stuff
in the atmosphere of Mars was also contained inside these
meteorites from the nineteen eighties. Pretty cool, right, Well, they
figured out the signature of the atmosphere of Mars and
(11:26):
then they compared it and it was the same. Right,
And then they went back and said, well, wait a minute,
let's find out what other rocks have this specific unique
signature that we can locate on Mars and say these
are Mars meteorites. And they I think they had like
fifty thoud of them. Uh yeah, the ones they already had,
they like looked back into them and a hundred and
(11:48):
four of them came from Mars. That was kind of low,
I thought, Yeah, I was a little disappointed. But the
point is is these things show that rocks can travel
from Mars to Earth and survive intact. That was the
big part of it. So you have a little bit
of Lord Kelvin's original idea starting to come back into reality.
(12:11):
You know, just good for him. Yes, a scale and everything,
but they dug him up and shook his hand and
put him back. Uh. Shall we move on to um
A l H eight four zero one. This is one
of my favorite metior rites. This one. You remember this
one like caused a huge stir, Like Clinton came out
and I was like, there's life on Mars. Like we
(12:31):
found evidence. They found three different traces of what they
considered UM I guess microbial fossils from Mars, and two
of them were discounted, but another one was like a
chain of magnetite that was arranged in such a way
that it couldn't possibly have been created by anything but
an organism UM That I think the results are still
(12:55):
out on that one. I don't. The other two are like, no, no,
it's definitely in organic, Nick, But this one, the jury
is still out on whether it's possible it was created
by some sort of organic life that basically excreted magnetite chains. Uh.
So the cool thing about this is they studied, you know,
years later, they they've come up with all these different
(13:17):
issues of why this might not be able to happen.
One of them is the intense heat that would be generated.
Could the meteorite survive it? Could my life on the
meteorite or buried within it survive it? And they studied
at cal Tech, Yes, cal Tech, they studied a l
H eight four zero zero one. I wonder what they
(13:38):
call it. Probably the Allan Hails, the Alan Hills meteorite. Yeah,
probably so, because that's where it was found. So they
and that's what the l H stands were. Um. So
they studied this and they they figured out that inside
this thing, it actually never got hotter than a hundred
and four degrees And they did this through magic called
(13:58):
magnetic signature. They cut off a slice of it and
found its magnetic signature. Uh, couldn't heat beyond that, So
that means it never disappears. Yeah, it never got hotter
than a hundred and four. So that kind of put
that one into bed. Ye. So there's plenty of microbes
that can survive temperatures of a hundred and three or
(14:18):
a hundred degrees in fact a better. A lot of
them love that kind of temperature, love it. Yeah, they're
called um retirees, right. Uh. And then so so that
backs up Calvin a little bit. The fact that there's
rocks that we can say definitely came from Mars back
him up. Um. And then also getting back to the
rocks coming from Mars, the possibility, the probability of one
(14:43):
infecting the planet, I guess you could say the early
planet also came to be supported through further research. Um,
some guys from NASA was it NASA. They calculated that
as many as fifty bill in Martian rocks pummeled Earth
in the first five hundred years of the Earth's life
(15:10):
at Earth a decade, No within a decade, but over
the first five hundred million years while the Earth is
cooling and the prior just prior to the existence of
life on Earth, Mars rocks hit Earth Okay, so they're
saying the rocks can survive. There were plenty of them,
(15:33):
and we know that at least one traveled and did
not heat up over a hundred and for degrees. And
the NaSTA dudes also said that basically our inner solar
system all has sort of a similar suitable environment. So
exchange of life and the inner Solar system only is
(15:54):
you know, very much likely. Yeah, yeah, if you, if you,
if they care, If you look at Mars, the chance
that Mars um can send a rock to Earth is
way higher than it's It's pretty high, right, but if
you if you go outside of our solar system, the
chances start to plummet exponentially downward um to where if
(16:18):
you go outside of our Solar system elsewhere in our
galaxy um, even in the Milky Way, the odds are
like one in a billion that even a single rock
could have hit Earth in its first five million years.
It just doesn't happen. But apparently the interplanetary exchange between
(16:38):
Mars and Earth is a lot more frequent than you'd think.
We're also talking about how that hundred and four degree
internal temperature bacteria can survive that maybe even thrive Um
there are some bacteria too that have been studied that
have been able to survive UM basically trips on satellites
(16:58):
exposed to solarate viation much as they would be like
on a meteorite, and they've been found to survive pretty
pretty well as well. A lady name no, I'm sorry
a UM well, yeah, a microbiologist named Lynn roth Child
and her partner Rocco Mensinelli. I believe that's how you
(17:19):
pronounce that. Uh. They put some halophiles, which are salt loving,
which you'd find in UM the dead sea. Yeah, and
they can like these these buggers or survivors. Yeah, they
basically just scab over their cells and um survive like that.
And they found that after two weeks on a satellite UM,
(17:41):
ten of these bacteria had survived. Not bad. That's not bad.
So we know that bacteria kind surviving space. We know
that it could possibly hit your right on a rock,
and we know that plenty of rocks come from ours. Uh.
Jumping back a little. One of the initial things they
thought would be that, you know, if these asteroids or
(18:02):
if these things are colliding in space, it would just
disintegrate into dust. Basically, they found out that not that
is not necessarily true either. Um. They found traced trace
gases within meteorites that originated on Mars in the nineteen
eighties and basically figured out that if one of these
impacts happens, maybe the it's disintegrated in the middle, but
(18:26):
on the outer edges there could be like larger chunks.
They just get shot away. Right, So that's that's basically
where these things are coming from. Ok But some other
people said, all right, well, those ones that get shot away,
they get to escape Earth's gravity or mars Is gravity,
they would have to suddenly, in a less than a second,
be accelerated from zero to eleven thousand, five hundred miles
(18:50):
per hour thousand if you did that in a thousandth
of if you did that to human, the human would
become liquefied, of course. Okay, but the that's that doesn't
necessarily hold truth with bacteria. And we know this because
certain microbiologists have packed bacteria into bullets and fired them
and then studied the bacteria and found that they were
(19:13):
alive still they survived that UM trajectory, yeah, which wouldn't
be that fast though, it wouldn't be eleven thousand, five
hundred miles an. I guess as the fast as they
could get it there, right, I guess? Okay, well, at
least it was a good effort. Um. Oh the Gerda
Hornick microbiologist in Germany. She also sent organisms into orbit
(19:37):
for six years, not too bad in the nineteen eighties.
Basilli's uh subtillists. And this is pretty wacky because not
only did it survive, but when this thing started like
depriving itself or getting deprived of nutrients, it formed like
a shell, like a spore or shell on top to
basically protect everything underneath it. That's the one I thought
(20:00):
with nothing, That's the one I thought was scabbing over. Correct,
that was that one. Yeah, so you know, in the
cold dark, no water, no nothing, about thirty of these
things survived. That's survival. Okay, So then we have one
last factor, chuck time. Yes, so it's not like this
is a ten hour, two week trip like this can
(20:22):
take a really long time for a rock to escape
mars Is gravity and then basically make its way to
Earth millions of years that kind of time. Cane bacteria
survive that length of time? Sure, why not? Well, in
some really smart people at cal Poly isolated a living
(20:42):
spore from the gut of a bee preserved in amber,
kind of right out of Jurassic Park. How long ago
would that be? Been? Preserved in Nember to forty million
years and the bacteria is still alive. Yes, And that
is not even the most amazing one, the most amazing. No. No,
Russell uh re Land of west Chester University in Pennsylvania
(21:03):
extracted bacteria from a two hundred and fifty million year
old salt crystal. Living bacteria, Yeah, chapped inside liquid in
that salt crystal. So I think all the questions have
been answered, is like, it's not probable, but it's feasible
at least that these things could have taken place. So
it is possible that we are in our origin Martians.
(21:27):
That's right. It's still raises a question, Chuck, what's that?
Where did that life begin? Yeah? Jeez, that's it. Dial
it back even further. That's all I got. You got
anything else right now? That's all I got. So I
would recommend going to how stuff works dot com and
(21:50):
typing in are we all Martians? And will bring up
this article UM. On the site, you can also type
in origin life Earth in the search barineal up my
article on panspermia and a biogenesis. Actually, there was one
more thing we should have pointed out. What we said
that it can take fifteen million years for these meteorites
(22:13):
to to reach Earth, but we didn't point out that
that's not always the case. Sometimes these things find their
way to Earth in just a few years or day.
It doesn't always take fifty million years. Okay, Chuck Josh.
Before we go any further, we need to tell everybody
to go do some reading, too, sweet agreed o horror
(22:34):
fiction contest. That's right, as everyone knows, every Halloween for
the past couple of years, we read a horror story
and Jerry Jazz is it all up with sound design.
She does good work. And this year Josh had a
pretty awesome idea that sort of bad us on the
behind by calling for fans submissions, and we got a
lot of them. We got a hundred and four of them, uh,
(22:55):
and they had to be between three thousand and four
thousand words. So we read between three h four hundred
thousand words of these submissions, and we went through and
we picked out our favorite sixteen and it was tough.
There's some really good stuff in there. Um, but we
came up with the Sweet sixteen, and now it's up
to you guys out there to pick which one we
read for the Halloween episode. Um, we've entered the sixteen
(23:17):
into this fancy little bracket UM game. A widget on
the house Stuff Works website has this grossly inappropriate country
music that we can't disable. There's there were extensive emails
about whether or not we can just say what we can't.
We couldn't like put horror sounds or anything. No. I
wanted to so bad. So it's like this really scary
bracket game with like the it's crazy anyway, Um, there's
(23:43):
bracket's brackets up there. First you need to go to
UM type this into your favorite search engine blogs how
stuff works, uh Sweet sixteen here, and it'll bring up
this blog post that has a link to all sixteen
articles or um entries. Yeah. We're also linking to this
on our Facebook and Twitter, so you can do that too. Yeah. Uh.
(24:05):
And then you read the six team and then there's
a link on that same blog post that has um
the Brackett game. You can jump off to that and
vote for your favorites. And the round one and this
Friday Round two starts. Uh, I think that day, okay,
and then it keeps going and going until we come
up with the winner four weeks okay, and we will
(24:26):
read that on the air. It'll be awesome. And I
think we already have next year's picked out as well.
We do because we had what we thought was the
best one that was disqualified for certain reasons and uh
so we're just gonna clean it up and read it
next year. Yeah, it's not a winner in no way
is it a winner. In fact, it lost it lost
(24:47):
qualified right out of the game. But we still liked it. Yeah,
and the other sixteen are really great, so it's like
any of them are going to be really good. Yeah.
I'm not disappointed in the least me neither. I'm very
excited as a matter of fact. Okay, So go to
uh blogs how stuff works, um, and then sweet sixteen
horror Fiction something like that, and it'll bring up that
post that says, like, read this sweet sixteen horror fiction
(25:09):
entries here. I think there's an explanation for all right,
that was lengthy. And then jan Nick I call this
another trucker emails us. We've heard from a few truckers,
long haul truckers, and I imagine podcasts are pretty great
if you're sitting there with hemorrhoids driving across canvas. All right, Uh,
(25:32):
just listen to the White Color Crime podcast. Guys can't
help but think of my own experience. My last job
was working in the counter at a general auto repair shop.
There were two of us at the counter. Both handled
the phone's inventory, parts and cash drawer, just about everything
except turning wrenches. As we didn't have charge accounts with
all of our parts suppliers, we paid cash for some
(25:53):
of the parts right out of the till the part
said to be entered into the inventory as a cash transaction,
and the system would spa out a piece of paper
showing the transaction and then would get file the way.
A couple of weeks after the other guy quit, um,
I was now handling all the transactions and started noticing
some things. Every quarter we would audit the invoices and uh,
(26:15):
some of the invoice numbers were repeated, as well as
very unusual things like a distinct forward part number on
an invoice from the local Dodge dealer, something small as
one here. Uh. Some of them were photo copied invoices
and we didn't have the original, so we uncovered basically
that this guy was taking legitimate parts invoices, making color
(26:35):
photo copies using a razor blade. He would cut out
things like the invoice numbers, parts and prices and alter
another legitimate invoice by taping those numbers over the originals
and photo copying. So this dude was just like basically
manipulating his documents. Sounds like very easily. Uh. Since I
left the company a year ago, they have continued looking
(26:57):
through the files. I'm covering more and more forced invoices.
I don't know the exact figure, but this guy stole
a staggering amount of money from the business, and he's
gotten away with it up until now. Does it's just
in there? Yeah weird, I don't I mean, yeah, this
person doesn't work there anymore, so Justin doesn't work there.
I don't know if they're pursuing this anymore. That's I
guess this white collar crime. Sure it is not, you know,
(27:20):
it's not like stocks and bonds and things, but sure
that's white collar crime. Altering documents. I feel like it's
on the blue collar side of white collar crime. In
a part store, an auto parts store. Maybe that's what's
tripping me up. Um. If you are on the road
a lot and we keep you company, we want to
hear your thoughts. You can tweet to us Wait until
(27:40):
You're Parked uh s y s K podcast. You can
also join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you
Should Know, and you can email us at Stuff podcast
at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how staff works dot com
(28:06):
MHM brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and I'm with Charles Bryant
and what we're doing Stuff you should know today? Oh yeah,
(00:24):
not the other one. Stuff you should not know. Nothing
you should know now we're out there inspiring podcasts. Yeah.
Who we heard about that today? Right, someone started podcast
in the Illinois Valley. I don't know where that is.
I don't think it's Illinois though, but they wrote about
it in the paper, right, Yeah, they got to write
up in the paper. Pretty cool. Yeah. Okay, before we
(00:45):
get started, buddy, we need to announce our upcoming New
York trip in Trivia night. Yeah. We talked to Mayor
Bloomberg and he, uh, he said that Friday, October twelve,
two thousand twelve is Stuff you Should Know day in
the five boroughs of New York City. That's right, and
we will be presented a not a key to the city,
(01:07):
but a key card to our hotel. At least it's
a set of lock picks to the city. That's right.
And uh, So we're coming for Comic Con. If you
have a Comic Con pass, you can come see this
podcast live and we're gonna have details on like what
room and what time and everything. Yeah. Plus it's cheap
even if you don't have a past, like like day
passes are not expensive. Yeah, even in this economy. It's
(01:29):
it's it's good. So we're gonna be podcasting live during
the day on Friday, and um you can check out
Facebook and Twitter for info on exactly where and when.
And then that night another stuff you should know Trivia Night,
which was a huge success, huge success in New York
last year. So it's just two years ago, right, yeah,
two years ago. Yeah. Uh about this time too. I
(01:52):
think it was October, wasn't it. Yeah. Um, So that's
a whole day, the whole day of your life in
New York City, packed with stuff you should know, featuring
Chuck and myself. So this is gonna be great. Uh
and I know it's just me, but I like saying myself. Um,
and we're gonna have details for sure on that. We're
locking down the menu hopefully as we speak, and um
(02:15):
locking down our all star celebrity trivia team as we speak.
If you're out there and you're an all star celebrity,
you want to play with us. I think that's a
great call out up. We're still assembling our team. Yeah,
a couple of the stalwarts are going to be out
of town, which is disappointing. So we're looking for for
comers as it were, Yes, as it were, And we're
also looking for commers to challenge us and uh and
(02:38):
and Duke get out on the trivia floor. It's gonna
be fun for free, that's right. And there will be
adult libations involved if you're into that. Probably if you're
into that, and Uh, that's about it. Anything else. I
think it's high time we started the episode. Thank you
for bearing with us. I guess everyone, Uh, let's see, Chuck.
I'm a little under the weather today. I know I'm fighting.
(03:01):
I I'm not I'm not gonna get sick. I'm just
it's like, man, that that one day where it's like
you're right before you're about to get better the worst day,
but you're just not going to get sick, you know
what I'm saying. So I don't have like five days
of sickness ahead of me. I've got bagel days of
sickness ahead of me. You're saying this like positive thoughts.
Is that the deal? Okay? Yeah? I found that my
(03:23):
mind body connection is really really strong, especially in the
horrible way where I'm like, I'm not gonna get sick.
I wonder if I'm getting sick though, Am I getting sick?
And then all of a sudden, I'm sick. It's like
I just talked myself into getting sick. But that sounds
like you just talk to yourself into getting well. So
I'm trying it out. It's mental gymnastics. Uh, sometimes it works. Yeah, um,
(03:45):
but I guess let me just go ahead and start
and get this one over with. Okay. I like this one. Yeah,
not bad. You realize that's half of an article I
sent you before that. You you're like, now, let's not
do this one. Yeah, the origin of life on Earth.
But didn't we do that? We never did that? Well
there was a reason. Wow, I believe it now. But
(04:06):
maybe we can do the other half. We'll do. This
is like part of a two part suite about where
life on Earth came from Mars. Maybe there's another way,
and this is my intro. There's another possible way, and
it's something called a biogenesis, and a biogenesis basically says
that all the proteins needed to form RNA. Somehow we're
(04:28):
present in the early Earth and the primordial soup, and
somehow they came together in a structure that was RNA.
And RNA is a pretty specific, weird little thing, and
that it can not only replicate itself, it can make
new stuff too, so it can build d N A,
(04:48):
but it can also replicate itself. It sounds like something
Ridley Scott movie, very much so. And they think that
RNA somehow came together and over the course of millions
of years, in all these different trials and errors, finally
started to form DNA, which kick started life. The origin
of life was just a bunch of proteins that came together.
(05:09):
There are a lot of reasons people pooh pooh this.
A lot of people a lot of creationists say, hey,
you know Occam's razor, which you scientists love so much,
do you think that's it? Or that somebody created us?
So the abiogenesis hypothesis, maybe theory by now has kind
of has some holes in it, but it's really interesting
(05:30):
and we'll talk in depth about that in another one.
This one is about the big rival to a biogenesis.
And it's called panspermia, which is a pretty pretty neat name.
What does that mean? Seeds everywhere? Yeah, seeds everywhere over
the place, panspermia. And it's from a guy in the
(05:51):
nineteen o six Swede whose name is pretty awesome, uh,
Savante Argennis, who wrote a book called Worlds in the Making,
and he coined the term pants fermia. But it was
um about fifty or so years maybe thirty or so
years before him, um that the idea of pants fermia
was first put forth by Lord Kelvin. Yeah, the famous
(06:15):
Lord Kelvin, British physicist, mega famous. I mean not many
people get a temperature scale named after him. No, there's not,
just the Tommy Celsius and Billy Fahrenheit man and Lord
Kelvin trimember that is. Uh. So his idea was that
(06:36):
seed bearing meteorites, which is kind of where we are
here with this, did we come from Mars? Potentially that
these meteorites that had uh life buried within them, or
at the very least you know, sitting on the surface,
had life there found its way to Earth and that's
where it all started, right, And it's pretty cool to
(06:57):
think that way back then. They were thinking of this
stuff back in the seventies. Yeah, man, you know, well,
I mean the super far off the space elevator came
from a Russian guy in eighteen. People were thinking back then.
They had a lot of time to um subjugate. The
other cultures may have been thinking even more, you know,
because they didn't know as much. All they did was
(07:19):
sit around and think. Well, if the Olympics taught me
anything the opening ceremonies, it's that they had a lot
more time to toil and think, and everything just got
better after the sod was removed when the Industrial Revolution
came about. You think that got better. I think it
got worse. Oh I see. It seemed to me that
(07:39):
it was the saving grace of um of civilization was
when the Industrial Revolution hit. Oh okay, I thought you
meant the opening ceremonies because they got much worse after
the Industrial Revolution. All of a sudden, people were texting
each other on screen, and it was it was like
these little romance stories playing out on the field. They
got so yeah, it did. Yeah uh. But fortunately the
(08:04):
Olympics had John Hodgman to defend it. He was the
sole person to defend it on Twitter. Boy could think
Twitter went around in the Atlanta Olympics. Yeah, I don't
remember that one, but you he was like, you remember
the Atlanta embarrassing He was like, it was like little
Richard driving around in a truck or something that we
had stainless steel pickup trucks driving around. We had like
(08:25):
line dancing and like Georgia peaches. It was just like,
oh man. But the point was it was big. It
may have been gaudy, but it was big. Right, No
one could out do Beijing. But they were saying they
weren't even trying to do outdo Beijing. They were trying
to do something different. But it's still it missed. Yeah,
it comes down. Yeah, Okay, So anyway back to it,
(08:49):
back to the Victorian era, um, and there their science thought,
uh the wow, we got so far off, it's ridiculous. Um.
But the point was the concept of pants permia is
that the Earth, prior to the arrival of life was
like a virgin Petrie dish, and then there was some
(09:10):
cosmic cough and like a little bit of cosmic spittle
infected this peatree dish, and all of a sudden, life
took off, that's gross pants. Bermia used to have a
more narrow definition back then, but now it's been broadened
out to the point where pretty much most scientists believe
that you can exchange life among bodies in our Solar system,
(09:33):
like it can happen. Yeah, well it's had proven to happen.
It was broader right back in the day, it was broader,
and then they now it's broader. Back then it was
more specific, it was broad narrow, and then when and
then it went back to the original broad version. Now
sciences started to kind of back up the what was
originally considered a flight of fancy. So what Lord Kelvin
thought was that asteroids brought life to Earth um and
(09:58):
and probably from Mars, maybe elsewhere in the galaxy, here
elsewhere in the universe, but the point was they arrived
via rock. Well, after a few years of consideration, most
people were like, that's not possible, Like an asteroid would
basically pulverize everything on it, there's heat involved, there's no way.
(10:18):
And so the Swede comes along sipante are hineous and
he says, no, these are just basically like little little
microbes traveling between the planets, right, Yeah, It's like you
don't even need the meteorite as the vessel. This stuff
is just going by what starlight? Uh yeah, that's kind
of a simple way to put it. In electromagnetic energy
(10:40):
in the other articles at starlight, which sounds a little
more fanciful or ether I think they used to call
it to that. Really. Yeah, so this is all great,
And then we find out in n when we launched
the Viking probes which to Mars, which I think we
goofed on this before, right, the Viking name or something. Yeah,
it seems like Viking one touchdown at uh Chrysa plinysa
(11:04):
Viking too on Utopia Plinysia. And interestingly, they took some
some atmospheric readings and they found that the same stuff
in the atmosphere of Mars was also contained inside these
meteorites from the nineteen eighties. Pretty cool, right, Well, they
figured out the signature of the atmosphere of Mars and
(11:26):
then they compared it and it was the same. Right,
And then they went back and said, well, wait a minute,
let's find out what other rocks have this specific unique
signature that we can locate on Mars and say these
are Mars meteorites. And they I think they had like
fifty thoud of them. Uh yeah, the ones they already had,
they like looked back into them and a hundred and
(11:48):
four of them came from Mars. That was kind of low,
I thought, Yeah, I was a little disappointed. But the
point is is these things show that rocks can travel
from Mars to Earth and survive intact. That was the
big part of it. So you have a little bit
of Lord Kelvin's original idea starting to come back into reality.
(12:11):
You know, just good for him. Yes, a scale and everything,
but they dug him up and shook his hand and
put him back. Uh. Shall we move on to um
A l H eight four zero one. This is one
of my favorite metior rites. This one. You remember this
one like caused a huge stir, Like Clinton came out
and I was like, there's life on Mars. Like we
(12:31):
found evidence. They found three different traces of what they
considered UM I guess microbial fossils from Mars, and two
of them were discounted, but another one was like a
chain of magnetite that was arranged in such a way
that it couldn't possibly have been created by anything but
an organism UM That I think the results are still
(12:55):
out on that one. I don't. The other two are like, no, no,
it's definitely in organic, Nick, But this one, the jury
is still out on whether it's possible it was created
by some sort of organic life that basically excreted magnetite chains. Uh.
So the cool thing about this is they studied, you know,
years later, they they've come up with all these different
(13:17):
issues of why this might not be able to happen.
One of them is the intense heat that would be generated.
Could the meteorite survive it? Could my life on the
meteorite or buried within it survive it? And they studied
at cal Tech, Yes, cal Tech, they studied a l
H eight four zero zero one. I wonder what they
(13:38):
call it. Probably the Allan Hails, the Alan Hills meteorite. Yeah,
probably so, because that's where it was found. So they
and that's what the l H stands were. Um. So
they studied this and they they figured out that inside
this thing, it actually never got hotter than a hundred
and four degrees And they did this through magic called
(13:58):
magnetic signature. They cut off a slice of it and
found its magnetic signature. Uh, couldn't heat beyond that, So
that means it never disappears. Yeah, it never got hotter
than a hundred and four. So that kind of put
that one into bed. Ye. So there's plenty of microbes
that can survive temperatures of a hundred and three or
(14:18):
a hundred degrees in fact a better. A lot of
them love that kind of temperature, love it. Yeah, they're
called um retirees, right. Uh. And then so so that
backs up Calvin a little bit. The fact that there's
rocks that we can say definitely came from Mars back
him up. Um. And then also getting back to the
rocks coming from Mars, the possibility, the probability of one
(14:43):
infecting the planet, I guess you could say the early
planet also came to be supported through further research. Um,
some guys from NASA was it NASA. They calculated that
as many as fifty bill in Martian rocks pummeled Earth
in the first five hundred years of the Earth's life
(15:10):
at Earth a decade, No within a decade, but over
the first five hundred million years while the Earth is
cooling and the prior just prior to the existence of
life on Earth, Mars rocks hit Earth Okay, so they're
saying the rocks can survive. There were plenty of them,
(15:33):
and we know that at least one traveled and did
not heat up over a hundred and for degrees. And
the NaSTA dudes also said that basically our inner solar
system all has sort of a similar suitable environment. So
exchange of life and the inner Solar system only is
(15:54):
you know, very much likely. Yeah, yeah, if you, if you,
if they care, If you look at Mars, the chance
that Mars um can send a rock to Earth is
way higher than it's It's pretty high, right, but if
you if you go outside of our solar system, the
chances start to plummet exponentially downward um to where if
(16:18):
you go outside of our Solar system elsewhere in our
galaxy um, even in the Milky Way, the odds are
like one in a billion that even a single rock
could have hit Earth in its first five million years.
It just doesn't happen. But apparently the interplanetary exchange between
(16:38):
Mars and Earth is a lot more frequent than you'd think.
We're also talking about how that hundred and four degree
internal temperature bacteria can survive that maybe even thrive Um
there are some bacteria too that have been studied that
have been able to survive UM basically trips on satellites
(16:58):
exposed to solarate viation much as they would be like
on a meteorite, and they've been found to survive pretty
pretty well as well. A lady name no, I'm sorry
a UM well, yeah, a microbiologist named Lynn roth Child
and her partner Rocco Mensinelli. I believe that's how you
(17:19):
pronounce that. Uh. They put some halophiles, which are salt loving,
which you'd find in UM the dead sea. Yeah, and
they can like these these buggers or survivors. Yeah, they
basically just scab over their cells and um survive like that.
And they found that after two weeks on a satellite UM,
(17:41):
ten of these bacteria had survived. Not bad. That's not bad.
So we know that bacteria kind surviving space. We know
that it could possibly hit your right on a rock,
and we know that plenty of rocks come from ours. Uh.
Jumping back a little. One of the initial things they
thought would be that, you know, if these asteroids or
(18:02):
if these things are colliding in space, it would just
disintegrate into dust. Basically, they found out that not that
is not necessarily true either. Um. They found traced trace
gases within meteorites that originated on Mars in the nineteen
eighties and basically figured out that if one of these
impacts happens, maybe the it's disintegrated in the middle, but
(18:26):
on the outer edges there could be like larger chunks.
They just get shot away. Right, So that's that's basically
where these things are coming from. Ok But some other
people said, all right, well, those ones that get shot away,
they get to escape Earth's gravity or mars Is gravity,
they would have to suddenly, in a less than a second,
be accelerated from zero to eleven thousand, five hundred miles
(18:50):
per hour thousand if you did that in a thousandth
of if you did that to human, the human would
become liquefied, of course. Okay, but the that's that doesn't
necessarily hold truth with bacteria. And we know this because
certain microbiologists have packed bacteria into bullets and fired them
and then studied the bacteria and found that they were
(19:13):
alive still they survived that UM trajectory, yeah, which wouldn't
be that fast though, it wouldn't be eleven thousand, five
hundred miles an. I guess as the fast as they
could get it there, right, I guess? Okay, well, at
least it was a good effort. Um. Oh the Gerda
Hornick microbiologist in Germany. She also sent organisms into orbit
(19:37):
for six years, not too bad in the nineteen eighties.
Basilli's uh subtillists. And this is pretty wacky because not
only did it survive, but when this thing started like
depriving itself or getting deprived of nutrients, it formed like
a shell, like a spore or shell on top to
basically protect everything underneath it. That's the one I thought
(20:00):
with nothing, That's the one I thought was scabbing over. Correct,
that was that one. Yeah, so you know, in the
cold dark, no water, no nothing, about thirty of these
things survived. That's survival. Okay, So then we have one
last factor, chuck time. Yes, so it's not like this
is a ten hour, two week trip like this can
(20:22):
take a really long time for a rock to escape
mars Is gravity and then basically make its way to
Earth millions of years that kind of time. Cane bacteria
survive that length of time? Sure, why not? Well, in
some really smart people at cal Poly isolated a living
(20:42):
spore from the gut of a bee preserved in amber,
kind of right out of Jurassic Park. How long ago
would that be? Been? Preserved in Nember to forty million
years and the bacteria is still alive. Yes, And that
is not even the most amazing one, the most amazing. No. No,
Russell uh re Land of west Chester University in Pennsylvania
(21:03):
extracted bacteria from a two hundred and fifty million year
old salt crystal. Living bacteria, Yeah, chapped inside liquid in
that salt crystal. So I think all the questions have
been answered, is like, it's not probable, but it's feasible
at least that these things could have taken place. So
it is possible that we are in our origin Martians.
(21:27):
That's right. It's still raises a question, Chuck, what's that?
Where did that life begin? Yeah? Jeez, that's it. Dial
it back even further. That's all I got. You got
anything else right now? That's all I got. So I
would recommend going to how stuff works dot com and
(21:50):
typing in are we all Martians? And will bring up
this article UM. On the site, you can also type
in origin life Earth in the search barineal up my
article on panspermia and a biogenesis. Actually, there was one
more thing we should have pointed out. What we said
that it can take fifteen million years for these meteorites
(22:13):
to to reach Earth, but we didn't point out that
that's not always the case. Sometimes these things find their
way to Earth in just a few years or day.
It doesn't always take fifty million years. Okay, Chuck Josh.
Before we go any further, we need to tell everybody
to go do some reading, too, sweet agreed o horror
(22:34):
fiction contest. That's right, as everyone knows, every Halloween for
the past couple of years, we read a horror story
and Jerry Jazz is it all up with sound design.
She does good work. And this year Josh had a
pretty awesome idea that sort of bad us on the
behind by calling for fans submissions, and we got a
lot of them. We got a hundred and four of them, uh,
(22:55):
and they had to be between three thousand and four
thousand words. So we read between three h four hundred
thousand words of these submissions, and we went through and
we picked out our favorite sixteen and it was tough.
There's some really good stuff in there. Um, but we
came up with the Sweet sixteen, and now it's up
to you guys out there to pick which one we
read for the Halloween episode. Um, we've entered the sixteen
(23:17):
into this fancy little bracket UM game. A widget on
the house Stuff Works website has this grossly inappropriate country
music that we can't disable. There's there were extensive emails
about whether or not we can just say what we can't.
We couldn't like put horror sounds or anything. No. I
wanted to so bad. So it's like this really scary
bracket game with like the it's crazy anyway, Um, there's
(23:43):
bracket's brackets up there. First you need to go to
UM type this into your favorite search engine blogs how
stuff works, uh Sweet sixteen here, and it'll bring up
this blog post that has a link to all sixteen
articles or um entries. Yeah. We're also linking to this
on our Facebook and Twitter, so you can do that too. Yeah. Uh.
(24:05):
And then you read the six team and then there's
a link on that same blog post that has um
the Brackett game. You can jump off to that and
vote for your favorites. And the round one and this
Friday Round two starts. Uh, I think that day, okay,
and then it keeps going and going until we come
up with the winner four weeks okay, and we will
(24:26):
read that on the air. It'll be awesome. And I
think we already have next year's picked out as well.
We do because we had what we thought was the
best one that was disqualified for certain reasons and uh
so we're just gonna clean it up and read it
next year. Yeah, it's not a winner in no way
is it a winner. In fact, it lost it lost
(24:47):
qualified right out of the game. But we still liked it. Yeah,
and the other sixteen are really great, so it's like
any of them are going to be really good. Yeah.
I'm not disappointed in the least me neither. I'm very
excited as a matter of fact. Okay, So go to
uh blogs how stuff works, um, and then sweet sixteen
horror Fiction something like that, and it'll bring up that
post that says, like, read this sweet sixteen horror fiction
(25:09):
entries here. I think there's an explanation for all right,
that was lengthy. And then jan Nick I call this
another trucker emails us. We've heard from a few truckers,
long haul truckers, and I imagine podcasts are pretty great
if you're sitting there with hemorrhoids driving across canvas. All right, Uh,
(25:32):
just listen to the White Color Crime podcast. Guys can't
help but think of my own experience. My last job
was working in the counter at a general auto repair shop.
There were two of us at the counter. Both handled
the phone's inventory, parts and cash drawer, just about everything
except turning wrenches. As we didn't have charge accounts with
all of our parts suppliers, we paid cash for some
(25:53):
of the parts right out of the till the part
said to be entered into the inventory as a cash transaction,
and the system would spa out a piece of paper
showing the transaction and then would get file the way.
A couple of weeks after the other guy quit, um,
I was now handling all the transactions and started noticing
some things. Every quarter we would audit the invoices and uh,
(26:15):
some of the invoice numbers were repeated, as well as
very unusual things like a distinct forward part number on
an invoice from the local Dodge dealer, something small as
one here. Uh. Some of them were photo copied invoices
and we didn't have the original, so we uncovered basically
that this guy was taking legitimate parts invoices, making color
(26:35):
photo copies using a razor blade. He would cut out
things like the invoice numbers, parts and prices and alter
another legitimate invoice by taping those numbers over the originals
and photo copying. So this dude was just like basically
manipulating his documents. Sounds like very easily. Uh. Since I
left the company a year ago, they have continued looking
(26:57):
through the files. I'm covering more and more forced invoices.
I don't know the exact figure, but this guy stole
a staggering amount of money from the business, and he's
gotten away with it up until now. Does it's just
in there? Yeah weird, I don't I mean, yeah, this
person doesn't work there anymore, so Justin doesn't work there.
I don't know if they're pursuing this anymore. That's I
guess this white collar crime. Sure it is not, you know,
(27:20):
it's not like stocks and bonds and things, but sure
that's white collar crime. Altering documents. I feel like it's
on the blue collar side of white collar crime. In
a part store, an auto parts store. Maybe that's what's
tripping me up. Um. If you are on the road
a lot and we keep you company, we want to
hear your thoughts. You can tweet to us Wait until
(27:40):
You're Parked uh s y s K podcast. You can
also join us on Facebook dot com slash Stuff you
Should Know, and you can email us at Stuff podcast
at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how staff works dot com
(28:06):
MHM brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!