Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Prepare to have your mind blown as we delve into the complexities of relationships, explore the cutting edge of science, and celebrate the bizarre and beautiful absurdity of the world around us. This is The Last Show with David Cooper.
Chapter 2: What fictional microorganisms are featured in Project Hail Mary?
The sci-fi blockbuster in theaters, Project Hail Mary, has star-eating microorganisms in it. They start mowing down on the sun, dimming it, and potentially sending the Earth into an ice age. Sounds totally implausible, right? But it might not be as far-fetched as it sounds.
Chapter 3: How does computational biology relate to understanding extraterrestrial life?
I'm here to discuss what life could look like out there in the cosmos with computational biologist at Argonne National Laboratory, Nick Chia. Nick, welcome into the show.
Thank you so much. Glad to be here.
I got to ask, I know the word computational and I know the word biologist, but I smack them together and I get a bit confused. Like, what is your day-to-day job look like?
Chapter 4: What are the scientific plausibilities of star-eating microbes?
Well, my day-to-day job is understanding life through simulation, right? So you think about all the things we know about life and all the things we don't know about life. And if I have to figure out how life works in an environment we've never seen before, I don't have a basis for that. I don't have a way to go out into space and sample life because we haven't found alien life yet.
So I have to simulate it. I have to figure out what the possibilities are, imagine them and put them into a computer.
Do you look, I mean, maybe not you personally, but does your field look to sci-fi for creative ideas or is it kind of the other way around? Sci-fi looks to the work you do to try to figure out what life could look like out there, how strange and different it might be.
Chapter 5: How do real extremophiles survive in extreme environments?
I think it goes both ways. It's a really creative endeavor. I think a lot of us are inspired by sci-fi growing up, reading. For me, it was Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. And at the same time, I can tell you that many of the scenarios that are inside of the Project Hail Mary are real scenarios in astrobiology that haven't been thought about.
Okay, well, let's get to just those. Sci-fi versus biology. How close did this movie get? The organisms, they're called astrophage. They absorb sun energy.
Chapter 6: What challenges exist in simulating alien life forms?
They store it efficiently. From your perspective, is this at all even scientifically plausible?
One caveat we have to just get out of the way here is these microorganisms are have a magic mechanism for turning mass into energy and directing it, right? So we haven't figured that out yet. We haven't figured out how to turn mass into energy just at the snap of our fingers, but these microorganisms can.
Chapter 7: How does the concept of life differ in sci-fi versus biology?
That aside, that one magic caveat aside, everything else is very realistic.
I'm trying to put that in lay terms. I'm thinking of like Einstein's equation, E equals MC squared, where energy equals mass times some huge number, speed of light squared. It's that equal sign, life doing the equal sign operation that we don't quite understand.
Right. Life just just in this case can just magically do it. So imagine like, you know, fusion is now forget fusion. We don't even need fusion anymore. We can just immediately turn mass into energy. All all energy problems in the world solved.
Now, it is a stretch, but some microbes actually live off of extreme energy sources, things like radiation, chemicals, deep sea thermal vents. So, yes, it's a huge leap to go from a thermal vent to a star. But theoretically, maybe. Possible?
Chapter 8: What are the implications of life forms that could consume stellar energy?
So survival definitely... I mean, okay, so yes, absolutely. So there's a lot of extremophiles, right? I'm going to throw some names out, right? But there are organisms... Well, I'll try not to. But there are organisms that live... and breed at 130 degrees Celsius, you know, deep under the sea. So it's super high pressure, super high temperature. There are organisms that eat radioactive waste.
Fun fact, you think about radiation damaging the DNA. One trick those microbes have is that they shatter their DNA into thousands of pieces and reconstruct it at will.
I can do that. I just don't want to. But feeding directly on stellar radiation, I mean, how could that even work? I guess the answer is we don't know.
Right, right. I mean, there's some chemical and physical limits, right? Why don't they just boil off or why don't they just burn? But if you can accept that they can turn mass into energy and energy into mass, then you think if the sun has a lot of heat and light energy, they're converting it into mass is a way to think about that.
Interesting. And then, of course, there's the energy storage. I hope I'm not giving away too much. But like in the movie, the way they power these interstellar spacecraft is using the microorganism itself as a sort of engine being like, hey, we discovered this thing that can store energy from the sun. If we use it in an engine, we can burst out huge amounts of energy and go from star to star.
It's brilliant. Yeah. I mean, if you have that vehicle for just at will deciding, I want energy now, I want mass now, and directing it, right? They also show they know how to direct it. It's not just energy. It's that they can direct that energy where they want. Then you can solve so many problems, right? Just like they use in the movie.
Now, are we often too Earth-centric? Which is to say, are we often, when we imagine aliens, even in science fiction, we kind of picture them as humans, and this is a much better portrayal, like an exotic microorganism that looks nothing like what we've seen on Earth. It eats stars. It sort of colonizes solar systems.
Is this the kind of big, wild thinking we need to do when we try to pretend or imagine what could be out there in the cosmos? Or is it going to be green men that are basically humans with bigger heads?
No, it's actually one of the things that I think in the field we work very hard at is to try to make sure we imagine realistic scenarios and we're not just sort of scenario adjacent to ourselves, right? Yeah. And that's one of the wonderful things. I don't want to give away the movie, geez, but there's another alien species. Very cool.
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