Welcome back to 5AM StoryTalk’s podcast — a place to talk about stories in all their forms, the craft that goes into them, and the role that art plays in our lives. Today, I'm joined by friend Dr. Kevin Peter Hand — planetary scientist, astrobiologist, and director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab’s Ocean Worlds Lab. When we discover life in our solar system, there’s a very good chance this guy will have played a direct part in that.
Kevin and I are going to cover a lot in this conversation such as:
His work with the Ocean Worlds Lab and the search for life within our solar system — especially on the icy moons of Jupiter and beyond.
Carrying this work out in such a politically turbulent time that challenges even the optimism of someone who operates at galactic timescales.
Why humankind is on the verge of one of the most important scientific revolutions in its history (aka, why the search for life elsewhere in our galaxy matters so much).
The intersection between science and art/creativity in his life and the life of most scientists.
The roles of science and art in understanding anything about our existence (aka, why science is not good at explaining the meaning of anything).
The potential value of bad science in art. You might get a kick out of his answer.
As dire as some of what we discuss is, Kevin offers consistently profound observations about our existence, science, and why our future might not be as evolutionarily bleak as I often feel it is.
The best way to enjoy this free conversation is to click on the podcast play button right now and just listen to an unabridged version of it in all its incredibly intimate detail. If you prefer to read these chats, don’t worry, I’ve got you covered; scroll down to the article below, which has been trimmed for length and edited for clarity.
A bonus episode, exclusive to 5AM StoryTalk’s wonderful paid subscribers, is now available here. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, you’ll get more than 30 more minutes of us discussing a seminal piece of art from his life – Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
5AM StoryTalk is an ongoing arts conversation, but that doesn’t mean it is or even should be limited to artists and what they think about storytelling and our culture. What I want to do is periodically mix things up by inviting non-artists to join me for broader discussions about their important work – work that intrigues or excites me – but also how their areas of study have shaped the lens through which they see and understand art and what’s happening in our world today.
First up is Dr. Kevin Peter Hand, whom I’ve known for more than a decade now. His research focuses on the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in our solar system with an emphasis on Jupiter’s moon of Europa. From 2011 to 2016, he served as Deputy Chief Scientist for Solar System Exploration at NASA’s JPL; and from 2015-2023 he was Project Scientist for NASA’s Europa Lander mission concept. These days, he’s the director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab’s Ocean World’s Lab. His book, Alien Oceans: The Search for Life in the Depths of Space, was published in 2020 — and is an excellent read.
Kevin isn’t just a lab rat, though. He’s a real-life adventurer, which we’re going to talk about because I’m never jealous at all when I see pictures of him in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, at the North Pole, climbing the glaciers of Mt. Kilimanjaro, or at the bottom of the ocean. The bottom of the fucking ocean. He’s made nine dives at the last count, including one as the scientist onboard James Cameron’s 2012 dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench – the deepest point on Earth. When I wrote my novel Psalms for the End of the World, he was the first person I turned to when I wrote a chapter that sent some of my characters to the wreck of the Titanic.
Together, we’re going to talk about his work, adventuring as a researcher, and how the current state of everything challenges the optimism of even someone who operates at galactic timescales. But as dire as some of what we discuss is, Kevin offers consistently profound observations about why the search for life elsewhere in our galaxy continues to matter so much, the roles of science and art in understanding anything about existence here, and why humankind’s future might not be as evolutionarily bleak as I often feel it is. You might get a kick out of our conversation about the potential of bad science in art, too.
In the bonus episode, Kevin will be back to continue the conversation for 5AM StoryTalk’s paid subscribers. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, you’ll get more than 30 more minutes of us discussing a seminal piece of art from his life – Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The film played a formative role in Kevin’s life, more so than a more obvious film like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – and we’re going to try to unpack why together. I thought this was going to be a much more academic look at the film, you might say, but it turned into a deep discussion about how to emotionally communicate incredibly complicated ideas to audiences, especially younger audiences. We even end up contrasting the emotional difference between Close Encounters and another favorite film of Kevin’s, 2016’s Arrival, from Denis Villeneuve and my friend screenwriter Eric Heisserer. I look forward to hearing what Eric thinks about what we talk about.
And now, let me introduce you to my friends Dr. Kevin Peter Hand…
COLE HADDON: It's great to see you, Kevin. It's been too long. How are you doing?
KEVIN PETER HAND: Yeah, great to see you too, Cole. Seems like another lifetime. Another planet. Another universe. I'm doing okay. Strange times. But, yeah, fortunate to be doing what I'm doing and living the life that I'm living and trying to keep perspective on that.
CH: Before we get into who you are, what you think, where you're from, all that, I want to ask you when the last time the universe blew your mind was. Something that surprised you, something you saw, something you learned, it doesn't matter. Just blow my mind too.
KPH: How about, three hours ago? At this time, I'm principal investigator of one of the instruments on the Mars Perseverance Rover, a spectrometer called Sherlock, which also has a great camera along with it. And so being a part of the Perseverance mission on Mars means that when I wake up in the morning, I can log in and see the latest images and data that's downloaded. And just a few hours ago, our team was having our weekly team meeting to figure out everything we're doing this week. In the group chat for the mission, somebody had posted the latest images.
And these images – they're already on the internet – there's an image of this rock that had all of these spherical features on it. If you imagine a bunch of beads that you would use, say, for a wrist bracelet or a necklace – imagine a bunch of those beads sort of compressed together to make a rock about the size of, I don't know, maybe a cantaloupe.
It's just a jaw dropping image taken from the rover looking at this rock on Mars, and we don't really know what it is. We think it might be these glass spherules made when a meteor hits a rocky surface like Mars and just ejects glass that then crystallizes or solidifies into these round spheres.
So yeah, my answer to your question is: about three hours ago, when I saw this picture of this bizarre rock on Mars that had a bunch of us scratching our head. And we think that rock is connected to some sort of impact on Mars, perhaps billions of years ago, perhaps millions of years ago. We just don't know, but it sure was fun looking at it.
CH: I think what's interesting about that observation is just the fact that I suspect you're not going to be able to answer that question. And it's just one of 10,000 questions you probably encounter every year that isn't going to have an immediately obvious answer about Mars's Nature. Is that accurate?
KPH: [Laughs] Well, so, “immediate” is the operative word there. Nothing that I do is immediate. And so, just this one example, the big picture for what we're doing is eventually getting these samples back to Earth. And that's been a many, many decades-long endeavor. All of the missions in which I've been involved with have taken decades of planning. Typically not decades of building, but a handful of years or so to build, and then get to the launch pad and stuff.
But yeah, so with this particular rock we may direct the rover to go over and take a closer look, and we've got instruments on board, and we can examine it more closely. And then, we do have a collection of rock cores that are in the underbelly of the rover right now. We also dropped off a few set of cores on the surface of Mars as kind of a backup cache. Eventually we'll return some of these rock samples to Earth to look for signs of past life on Mars, to allow us to do a very detailed age dating of the rocks to better understand the, the formation history and evolution of Mars, and its place in the solar system and relationship to Earth.
So, nothing immediate, but, you know, I operate on astronomical and geologic timescales – so, when you kind of scale out to those timescales, immediate has a different meaning.
CH: Well, it's interesting because we'll also be talking about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, later, which is a film that blurs the line between faith and science. Listening to you, so much of what you do does require some degree of faith – or patience, I guess, is another way to describe it. But faith that it will pay off someday, that that there's a promised land at some point in the future.
KPH: Yeah, and I've worked on projects that have been mothballed or cancelled due to budgetary or administrative or just the winds change on timescales much shorter than the lifetime of any of these missions. Sometimes the winds are all blowing in the right direction, and sometimes those winds change direction rapidly and all you can do is your best while the wind has got your sail. When a storm hits, you’ve just got to endure. It's one of those things where if I look back, would I have made any different decisions about how I've dedicated my time? No, because I think it's essential that one operate from a place of educated optimism. Meaning that I want to operate from an optimistic and hopeful place about us moving forward with big projects, with grand ideas, whether that's saving the planet or making grand discoveries about the solar system and beyond.
You want to operate from a place of hope without being naive. And so, kind of educated optimism, I think, is where I approach things with various ups and downs that I've had to face throughout my career. In retrospect, if I'd known that something was going to be mothballed after nearly 20 years of dedication to it [laughs] then I might have spent my time differently. But at the time, even if there's a small chance that something great happens, it's worth that sacrifice – especially on the human time scale. These missions, these big science endeavors, they're the cathedrals of our day, and so they're generational.
CH: Well, I think that's what I was probably thinking about when I asked that question. Cathedrals you just said are generational. These are investments in the future, the same as when you plant a tree. So much of your work doesn't pay off in your lifetime. It is an investment in generations to come, and the species’ – our civilization’s – tomorrow, which hopefully there is one.
KPH: That's one of the key factors. You're familiar with the Drake equation, right?
CH: Yes.
KPH: The last factor in the Drake equation – and that equation allows us to kind of estimate how many intelligent, communicating, technologically advanced civilizations might be out there in the galaxy – that last factor is L, or the Lifetime of that civilization. And, you know, who knows? Maybe here on Earth, that lifetime of our civilization is not going to be very long. But hopefully, with science and art and all these things, we can kind of stay on a course that allows us to live longer, to behave in a more altruistic way that gives humanity a chance at lasting for thousands, if not millions to billions of years.
CH: I've often joked that we haven't met another species, another civilization from somewhere out in the stars not because they've all destroyed themselves, but because we're the problem. We're the trashy neighbor with the grass growing up too high and the beat-up car in the driveway.
KPH: [Laughs] No, you're giving humanity way too much credit. We're not even at that level here on planet Earth. We are an anthill in a Galactic National Park. We're eight-and-a-half kiloparsecs out from the center of the galaxy. Parsecs are 3.26 light years. So, we're quite a ways out from the center of the galaxy.
If the center of the galaxy is inhabited and kind of Downtown Manhattan, we're way up in far northern Canada. And we are in potentially what the galactic civilization has partitioned out as a galactic national park. We don't even rise to like the level of a neighbor who the other species want to avoid. We're an anthropological curiosity.
CH: But now I'm imagining that we're the national park that nobody really wants to go to. We're number 348 on the list of national parks that nobody ever passes through.
KPH: We first started discovering exoplanets back in the ’90s, and now we know of many, many exoplanets. It's sort of more common for a star to have a planet than not to. and we're still trying to figure out the sort of demographics of size and types of planets around stars. But at least right now, our solar system kind of stands out with regard to the number of planets that our sun has. And so I can imagine that – you know Arches National Park? Beautiful park, and you want to go and see the arches. Maybe at a Galactic National Park level, we're kind of that solar system where it's like, “Ooh, wow, look, they've got this gas giant, they've got some nice rocky planets, and a couple of ice giants. It's a really pretty solar system. Oh, and by the way, there's some biology on one of them and maybe on some of the moons of the outer solar system of that of that massive gas giant.” [Laughs] So, yeah, in my kind of optimistic vision for long-lived civilizations, I like to think about how we might be viewed by some grand civilization that's billions of years older than we are.
CH: Okay, so my guests are typically artists of some kind, which means most of my listeners have some idea about the work that they've done. You're a scientist. It's a bit like uncharted territory for what I do. So, maybe before we continue the conversation, you should talk a little bit about what you do. For example, you're an astrobiologist and a scientist. A lot of people might not know what that means.
KPH: Yeah, we kind of dove right in there on galactic civilizations. So, let me come back a step. So, I'm a planetary scientist and astrobiologist studied physics and astronomy with some mechanical engineering and robotics and chemistry and geology and biology smattered in there. My research focuses on the search for life in our solar system. And I specifically focus on these alien oceans, these worlds of the outer solar system, these moons of Jupiter and Saturn and possibly even Uranus and Neptune that are covered in ice. These moons are covered in ice and beneath their icy shells we have good reason to predict that vast, potentially global, salty liquid water oceans exist. These are oceans that exist today. These are oceans of H2O, water that you know and love and depend on and if we've learned anything about life on Earth, it's that where you find the liquid water, you almost always find life.
As a result, these ice covered ocean worlds of the outer solar system are prime places, in my opinion, and in many of my colleagues’ opinions, these are prime places to search for life beyond Earth. And in particular, these are places to search for extant life – life that is alive today. That's an interesting contrast.
I mentioned my work on Mars. I love Mars, and I think Mars is an incredibly important place to study with respect to past habitability and the prospect of past life on Mars. On Mars, we're looking at rocks that are billions of years old with the question of an excitement about searching those ancient rocks for past life on Mars.
Whereas on a world like Jupiter's moon Europa, if we found organic compounds or evidence of something intriguing on the surface of Europa, that could well be an indication of life actually alive today on Europa. Now that said, there, there could be life alive in the subsurface of Mars. But then, imagine that life on Mars is based on DNA. Mars and the Earth are very close together and they've traded material through the eons and, and so if we found DNA based life on Mars, that may have some connection or may have been seeded by life on Earth or vice versa. Whereas if we go out to Europa and find DNA-based life, that to me would indicate some biochemical convergence towards the DNA biochemistry.
So that's kind of a quick synopsis. My overarching goal is to search for life beyond Earth to see whether or not a second origin of life has occurred in our own backyard, our own solar system. And as amazing as it would be to find life beyond Earth, I think it's important to emphasize that even if we don't find life, that answer is equally profound. Now, if we search our solar system, if we search all these exoplanets and find not a hint of life beyond Earth, that means that biology on Earth is some sort of biological singularity. That something occurred here that that we have yet to understand, yet to explain.
CH: That sounds more like an existential answer about our potential uniqueness. But, if you found life, why does that matter to humanity today? What is the relevance? I guess if people are asking, why are we spending this money on this on this massive effort, why not spend it on just moving to the Moon or Mars?
KPH: Yeah, so that's a great question. A really important question with lots of different threads there. You know, why not spend money on trying to cure cancer or solve climate change or any number of different things? Let me kind of unpack that in a few different ways.
First off, the word that used there was massive. It's not a massive effort just for perspective. NASA's annual budget is in the range of $25 billion per year. That covers everything from earth science to astrophysics and heliophysics and planetary science and aviation innovations and human exploration and the development of new satellites.
Typically, people think that NASA's budget is comparable to the military budget. DOD plus Pentagon plus several other roll ups in there, you're looking at 1 to 1. 2 trillion dollars. So, 25 billion versus 1 to 1. 2 trillion. Another sort of benchmark that I like to use: in this day and age, to build a mile of highway in a, you know, multi-lane urban setting is about a billion dollars, right? That's like end to end clear rebuild, not a repave and revamp. So, in any case, that gives you some scaling for DOD Pentagon, et cetera. That's a massive budget. When it comes to, say, climate change research, and let's spend money on that instead – 100%. I do some climate change research, but to be clear, the verdict is in. We, we know the story of our changing planet. We can continue to do work on it and, and I will continue to do work on it, but what's needed from an action standpoint is not another science manuscript talking about how hot the planet is getting. What's needed is policy, action, and change. That's, that's the difference that needs to be made.
Cancer research is actually quite well-funded. The NIH is typically funded at about $35 billion per year or so, about 10 billion more than NASA. And then there's obviously tons of foundations and private efforts. And by some metrics the research can't quite keep up with the funding because there are a lot of threads to explore. And it's incredibly exciting seeing what's happening these days with mRNA research and possible cures for cancer. Okay. So then let me finish with your main question, the “so what?” Because that was, that was at the heart of your question initially, right?
CH: Yes.
KPH: And so, if we were to wake up tomorrow and see a little alien waving hi to a Mars rover or get a signal from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence effort, that's not going to change the way you make your coffee in the morning or shorten your commute or lower your taxes or do anything that has immediate repercussions that make you happier. But what it will do is the following…
I'd like to harken back to, to Galileo. Think about Galileo turning the telescope to the night sky. The telescope was initially a military instrument, and anybody who had a telescope was looking for ships on the horizon and trying to provide some advanced warning of ships coming in. Galileo turned the telescope to the Moon instead, and to Venus, and, and eventually to Jupiter he discovered the moons of Jupiter, and night after night, he charted the revolution of those moons around Jupiter. And with that, he put the final nail in the coffin of Aristotelian cosmology – the idea that the Earth is at the center of the universe, and everything revolves around the Earth. He opened the doorway to the Copernican Revolution, the idea, of course, that the Earth orbits the sun and the planets orbit the sun, and the sun is a star, and the stars that we see could be home to planets of their own. And in the decades after Galileo, with folks like Newton and others advancing physics, we've come to appreciate that worlds and wonders beyond Earth, the laws of physics also apply there.
And then with the advent of spectroscopy and using spectrometers on our telescopes, we could study the composition of stars and planets. And we would come to appreciate that the principles of chemistry work beyond Earth. And then with the advent of the space age and sending our robotic spacecraft and astronauts to the Moon and, and Mercury and various places in our solar system, we would come to understand that the principles of geology work beyond Earth.
But when it comes to that fourth fundamental science, I think – physics, chemistry, geology, and biology – when it comes to the science of biology, when it comes to the phenomenon of life, the stuff of us, we have yet to make that leap. We don't actually know whether or not biology works beyond Earth, whether it works independent of life on Earth, whether or not biology is a universal phenomenon. Or if the life on Earth that we see here is some sort of biological singularity. And that's a really profound change in our understanding of the universe in which we live.
If there is life beyond Earth, then we live in a biological universe. If we don't find life beyond Earth, then life here on Earth is some sort of singularity the existence for which we don't yet understand.
So, there's a revolution that we are on the footsteps of. It's a revolution in biology. Physics went through a revolution. Chemistry and geology had their own forms of revolution. But we are at the at the doorstep of a revolution in biology. And the way to advance that revolution is to search for and figure out whether or not we are alone.
CH: That was a great answer. This might be a good place to pivot to the fact that, that this is primarily an arts and culture podcast. And so, one of the things I wanted to ask is, do you think science alone is adequate to explain our place in the universe? Or do you think art and artists have a vital role in this regard too? Are they necessary to communicate things that perhaps science can't for most people? [Laughs] You don't have to say it is just because I'm an artist.
KPH: No, but let me do a very science-y thing here, and question the premise of your question. So, you said “adequate to explain our place in the universe”. What do you mean by explain?
CH: I think we've obviously relied on God for years. Some people look for understanding, and then science happens, and quantum physics happens – which makes everything sound nuts. Is there a limit to the ability of science to help 99.5 percent of people on the planet articulate their own place in the universe? If we're not going to rely on God anymore, if that's a waste of time, is there a place for arts there, the poetry of existence, in some way to explain those bigger ideas?
KPH: So, let me answer the latter by simply saying yes, and we can unpack that more. But let me return to the initial part of the question. I think the premise is kind of flawed in that science is not actually good at explaining the why of the universe, science is good at perhaps revealing the what and the how.
Okay. I drop a pen. Falls. Thousands of years ago, we didn't know why, we didn't know what was causing it to, to fall. Fast forward to now, and we have a theory of gravity, and we know that mass in the universe will draw things to it and we've got lots of equations to make predictions and to explain what we observe. If you were to ask me, why gravity? Or, why quantum mechanics? Or, if the universe is made of strings, why is the universe made of strings? I mean, I could potentially give you an answer of, “Well, if it wasn't for gravity, then this bad thing would happen, and life wouldn't be possible,” and we could get very anthropic with our answers.
But the truth is, is that even with a complete explanation, a unified theory of every aspect of the fundamental forces, scientists would still not be able to answer a why. We would be able to provide the why of the equations and the formalism, but what's behind that all? That's not what science is good at or particularly designed to answer. You know, science is a process for developing and testing hypotheses, etc. When it comes to our place in the universe…well, let me, let me throw this back at you. Do you think it's useful to test hypotheses associated with our place in the universe? Because that's ultimately what science is useful for, is developing a hypothesis and then iterating on that. So, give me a hypothesis for our place in the universe.
CH: I don't know if care anymore. That might be a middle-aged thing, but I've just reached this point where I think, I don't know – if we're in a simulation, that's fine, whatever. I'd like to understand that, but the experience of it is what is what I spend 90% of my life on. How do I explain the experience of what we're doing, this conversation? Facts are important, but I also find facts are a very poor way to achieve understanding for the average person. And I think that's probably where my question comes from. And with regard to art, most of us will never grasp even 20% of what you do about the universe. It's not relevant to most people's daily consciousness and yet…it is. People might not be able to articulate it like you do, but has to explain it to them, and I think that's where poetry, if art comes in, has a role. I've rambled a bit through that. Did any of that make sense?
KPH: Yeah, totally, totally. And let me pull a thread in there, which is that I think where science has been so important is in the emergence and stability of societies and civilization. Now obviously we've got various rough patches. no doubt. And I won't, you know, dive into the modern epic, but in the long arc of civilization, science allows us to move away from myths and fictions that get in the way of medicine and our ability to heal each other and to innovate in ways that improve the quality of life over the long arc. So, you know, critical thinking, science are essential to civilization.
When it comes to meaning for me? When I was in high school – you'll find this interesting – I was actually voted most artistic. I made a specific decision about going the science path versus going the art path. And some of that boiled down to the pleasure of finding things out, to borrow a phrase from Richard Feynman. I'm one of those people that when I do a math problem or even a Sudoku or something like that, I get a little endorphin release of solving a puzzle or doing fundamental research and building things and conducting experiments. I also enter that deep kind of meditative Zen state of enjoyment when I am painting or drawing or working with wood. And so, the connective thread here, for me at least, is that art and science converge in the realm of creativity. Nothing is more important for a scientist than creativity. Some people might say, “Well, that's, that can't be true.” But when I talk with students, I say, “You know, as a scientist, you're only as good as your most recent original idea and your original thought that builds upon the foundation of the science that's been published before.”
Creativity without any reins – creativity without discipline is – is useless. We're all creative beyond our ability to put it into motion. We have many more ideas than time. But as a scientist, the challenge is to learn the discipline, whether that's math or chemistry or something like that, to then constrain your creativity to be useful in the scientific process.
As an artist, I’ve got to imagine you got a similar thing. Knowing you a bit, you're incredibly creative, but if you did not have the discipline of knowing how to put pen to paper, to put fingers to keyboard, your creativity would be useless. And so, you know, I find meaning in creativity and in new ideas coming somehow into my brain – be that scientific or artistic.
CH: It's a fascinating answer. You went to in a direction I didn't anticipate, so part of part of what you were just discussing connects to another question I wanted to ask. I think of you as a science educator as well as a communicator. You're incredibly articulate at being able to bridge these gaps, just as you did between art between creativity/art and the sciences. Are inspires many people to become scientists as well. I experienced that with some dinners that you and I had, where scientists went down that path because of a film that changed their lives. What I’m trying to get at is, how do you feel about films and TV using shitty science, but still inspiring people to pursue careers in STEM and whatnot? Is it just a price that the science community in the world has to pay to create new scientists?
KPH: As you know, I've consulted on a, a wide variety of things. And whenever I start working with a producer, a director, a showrunner or a writer's room, etc., I always start out with the question, “What do you want science to do in your story?” Because sometimes the allegiance to getting the science right can really compromise the story. You can have great science, but if you haven't developed your characters, then nobody's going to enjoy the story.
Because, as you know better than me, obviously when you're telling a story, you’ve got to get characters that folks want to buy into. Meanwhile, if you portray the science so poorly that it's going to be a distraction, people are going to be so distracted by the absurdity and sort of the offense to their rational thinking that they're not going to pay attention to the characters.
So, there's a real sweet spot there where the science is written and portrayed in a way that kind of subtly engages the viewer without them necessarily knowing it and without beating them over the head with it, and the science motivates the story and helps the development of the characters. I think there are some great examples of that. 2001: A Space Odyssey is obviously the all-time classic. But, you know, even with various detective TV shows, or the serials with cops and detectives trying to solve a crime case, I feel like those shows have gotten more sophisticated over the years. Talking about DNA evidence and and various techniques, and I think a lot of those shows have shown a nice way in which science helps make the story more interesting – and also imparts on the characters, be they lab technicians or cops or detectives, kind of another layer of their development. So, yeah, I think there's definitely room for improvement, but I don't like to see people go so far overboard that it compromises the storytelling.
CH: There's saying I have about storytelling, that facts are great, but they often get in the way of the truth, which is what maybe you were referring to just now and maybe what I was getting at with that earlier question about science and art that, yeah, sometimes to tell a story that achieves a greater truth, the facts do have to be bent a little here or there. Yeah, sometimes the science is horribly wrong, but the end result is, somehow, Nichelle Nichols playing Uhura creates a whole new generation of women in the sciences.
KPH: Yeah, 100%. There's definitely the component of kind of fun popcorn-y movies that inspire kids at a young age, and that's incredibly important, and I definitely benefited from that.
CH: Well, we're going to come back in a moment and talk about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I want to ask one more question – which perhaps is, I'm guessing, more of a downbeat question that I should’ve asked earlier. But how do you feel about the state of science education at the moment and the future of space exploration in the U.S. and the world general? It feels like a fairly grim time. Are you optimistic?
KPH: I have to be optimistic in part because of what I was mentioning earlier – you know, educated optimism, informed optimism.
But also, it's important to appreciate that given what I work on, I think on timescales that are typically longer than most people. So how do I feel about the next year, the next two years, the next four years, the next ten years? Those are oscillations, if you will, that I have a hard time tracking these days as everyone does – and so my optimism is cloudy at best in that sort of short-term timescale.
But on the longer term timescale – and I do think this is a more complicated topic than maybe we really want to dive into – but I write a bit about this in my book Alien Oceans. Shameless plug.
CH: Plug away.
KPH: But I do think Darwinian evolution at some level selects for altruism. And over long timescales, we see that with the emergence of groups and societies and civilization. It certainly can all come crashing down, but I guess I put a lot of faith in the emergence of altruistic behaviors at different scales. And let me just give you an example of this. If you go down to the bottom of the ocean – as I've been fortunate enough to do in a Russian submersible – and to see these hydrothermal vents, these hot springs at the bottom of the ocean that are spewing out gases and minerals that microbes love to chew on.
Down at depth, you cannot do photosynthesis. And so, the microbes, the base of the food chain, are doing chemoautotrophy. They're eating some of the gases and rocks that come out of the, the hydrothermal vents. And the ecosystems down there, which have zoarcid fish, and tube worms, and crabs, and mussels, and all sorts of larger organisms, and shrimp – those organisms have developed symbioses with various microbes. And those microbes work to detoxify some of the waters. The riftia tubeworms have got these microbes that help clean out the sulfur in the water and the shrimp wear these little backpacks of microbes that help protect them from toxins in the water. And so down there, you see that Darwinian evolution is not just about survival of the fittest and predator and prey. You see it's also about mergers and acquisitions. It's about developing partnerships. It's about symbioses. And that selection effect that you can see directly around hydrothermal vents has gone over all parts of our tree of life. Our own mitochondria and ribosomes, that the organelles within our cells were, once upon a time, independent microbes that then through a process of mergers and acquisitions that led to the complex cells that we now depend on.
So that's altruism, that's symbiosis, that is a form of kind of Darwinian altruism where it's like we can get more done together through that mergers and acquisitions and partnership process.
And here we are now with a civilization of seven – I forget what our latest population number is – but let's call it seven billion. [Note: It’s over 8 billion now.] We are a global civilization of seven-billion people, and we are teetering on the precipice of stability and instability. We have gotten here through altruism and symbioses manifest in our various forms of government, our various partnerships, our various collective agreements And yeah, on the short term timescale, we're in a turbulent period. But on a longer term timescale, I'm optimistic we will we'll make it through.
CH: I'm glad I asked that as the final question now, because it didn't go nearly as dark as it would have if somebody asked me, “How are you doing right now?” [Laughs]
KPH: [Laughs hard] I can go dark if you need me to go. Don't doubt my ability to go dark in that shorter timescale.
As for you reading at home, come back for the bonus episode in two days where Kevin and I will be discussing Close Encounters of the Third Kind at considerable length and in some pretty astonishing detail. There’s going to be so much for storytellers to learn from this conversation, I assure you. I hope to see you there!
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