Latif Nasser

Wait, you're listening?

Darwin, in fact, never said that.

At that moment of fear, I just let fascination creep in.

Questions like, why are we here on this earth?

What are we related to?

And to a large extent, it is a grand scale accident that we're here.

Evolution has oddly contingent pathways.

It would never run the same way twice.

Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick published an extraordinary book called Life Itself.

in which he argues from a scientific point of view that life could not have got started on this planet.

To cut a long story short, he suggested it was sent here by an alien civilization from the other side of the universe.

One of those spaceships crashed into the early Earth.

Its cargo of bacteria spilled out and eventually became us.

And that's honestly how Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winner, saw the beginning of life on this planet.

The internet is a dumpster fire.

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Hey, this is Radiolab, I'm Latif Nasser, and today we have a story for you that gets at the satisfaction of knowing.

There are lots of moments in life when you are a piece of someone's story, just a little part of it for a moment, and you never get to see how that story shakes out or what impact you actually had.