In this episode, I chat to astronaut Chris Hatfield, who was on board the International Space Station for almost a year. We talk about the effects of being in space, what it's like to be in the vacuum of space, and how to stay healthy when you're floating around in space for so long. It's a fascinating conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did recording it. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was produced by Mark Phillips. We were mixed and produced by Matthew Boll. Special thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. Check out our sponsorships and promo codes for 10% off your first pack of Monster Energy drinks, available in Vanilla, Mocha, Salted Caramel, and Mocha Mocha Spice, and Chill it down to just $2.99. If you like what you hear, please consider pledging a pledge of $5, $10, $15, $20, $25, $50, or $50 or $100, and we'll send you a free Monster Energy drink of your choice! We'll see you next week! Cheers, Caitie! Caitie and Caitie xoxo - The Good Life Podcast - Caitie's Goodbye Caitie Gooding - Goody's Goody Goody - Sarah Goody xxx - - Sarah Goodley - Sarah's Badie x - Goodie xxx - Badie X - Thank you for listening to this episode of The GoodLife Podcast - Sarah's Goodie XOXO - Thank you, Sarah Gooding xxx Sarah Goodey - Goody XOXOXO Sarah Goode - Rachel Goodey - Thanks for listening and GoodieXO - Please rate and review us out! Thanks to Caitie XO and GoodyxOz and Sarah Goodee xOz & Sarah Goodie - XOXOz xOZee - xOXOz Thankyou, Sarah & Sarah xOxOZYOZ xOYZOZO and Sarah & Sarah XOY
00:01:37.000I mean, you lose the calluses on the bottom of your feet.
00:01:39.000It's kind of disgusting because your feet are like a snake up there, but the bottom of your feet are shedding because you never use the bottom of your feet.
00:01:45.000And you build up calluses on the top because you're always tucking your feet underneath things.
00:01:50.000So when you come back, you even have to grow the calluses back at the bottom of your feet.
00:01:54.000And the thing that takes the longest is your skeleton body.
00:01:57.000I lost about 8% of the bone across my hips, but it's grown back.
00:02:01.000And within about a year of landing, I'll hopefully be back to normal.
00:02:06.000It takes one year for your body to fully recover.
00:02:08.000It took about four months before I could run normally again, where my body would get the blood out of my feet and pump it properly back up to my head.
00:02:16.000About four months, which is almost as long as I was up on this trip.
00:03:55.000We do one hour of cardiovascular and one hour of resistive every single day, seven days a week for the whole half a year that you're up there.
00:04:02.000And we've determined that's the best trade-off between getting useful work done, you know, because it's a big multinational laboratory, and keeping your body healthy.
00:04:13.000When they first started going up there, did they not do anything?
00:04:16.000No, we've tried a bunch of different things.
00:04:17.000The Russians even tried a suit they call a penguin suit.
00:04:21.000Which is like a set of coveralls, tight-fitting coveralls that's full of elastics, so that every time you bend your elbow or twist your body or something, you're fighting the resistance of the suit, because they thought then you could sort of get it for free.
00:04:37.000You need to actually heavily force your body to exercise.
00:04:40.000And if you do that, then you can stay in shape.
00:04:42.000But we started out with a resistive exercise device, and then it was the improved iRED.
00:04:48.000And now we're on ARED, which is the Advanced Resistive Exercise Device, as we've learned, you know, how to make it better so that we can return to Earth healthy.
00:04:57.000Or, you know, when we go to the Moon, more importantly, when we go to Mars, because it takes about half a year to get there.
00:05:01.000Well, this is one of the problems we need to solve.
00:05:04.000The Mars is really that next level trip, right?
00:05:20.000Sailing up and down the coast with insight of land.
00:05:23.000You know, we haven't headed across the body of water, even to go to the moon, as far as habitation goes.
00:05:29.000So, right now we're just sailing up and down the coast of the world, figuring out how to beat osteoporosis, how did the radiation, the psychology of it, what to make the hull out of, how do you make a toilet that works, a closed environmental system.
00:08:24.000A really interesting discovery about three weeks ago, Curiosity, that big rover that, That is driving around on Mars right now has some pretty good equipment on it and it discovered just in the last few weeks that in every cubic foot of dirt on Mars there's a quart of water.
00:09:20.000And there's just a, how do you build a perfect closed-loop environmental system so that you don't We have constant losses.
00:09:28.000Because the space station, we only, I think it's about 92% of our water we reclaim, but we constantly need that little trickle from Earth of new water because it's not perfect.
00:09:38.000There's a lot of stuff we don't even know what we don't know yet.
00:09:42.000And that's, I think, why we'll sort a lot of that out on the Moon before we launch to Mars.
00:09:47.000To me, watching the footage of the rover and the images that it sent back was almost surreal.
00:09:55.000It was hard for me to wrap my head around the idea that they sent a robot to another planet, and it's roaming around taking pictures and sending them back, and we're looking at them.
00:10:48.000And huge kudos to the JPL guys and everybody who came up with it.
00:10:51.000And the stuff it's teaching us about how planets work and what is the past and the future for that planet Mars and therefore...
00:11:01.000It gives us a lot better understanding of what's normal and what we can expect on Earth.
00:11:06.000Yeah, huge kudos to those people indeed.
00:11:08.000I mean, they did an amazing, amazing thing.
00:11:10.000And just one of those, in my opinion, one of those paradigm-shifting moments where when, you know, we're back here on Earth and we're watching those images, you're like, wow, they can do this now.
00:11:22.000I'm an astronaut, and, you know, I've been in space twice, and I gathered my family around to watch that thing happen because it's so...
00:11:28.000It is right on the edge of what we can just barely do.
00:11:31.000It's such a brave thing to do and such a capable probe, a capable extension of us all to put down on the surface and it's teaching us about Mars.
00:11:40.000Did you ever pay any attention to the face on Mars or any of that craziness before?
00:11:54.000Especially in weird shadowy images like those images were.
00:11:57.000I mean, they were some really unique things.
00:11:59.000There's a rock near my house that's a square rock.
00:12:01.000And when I have a friend who believes in a lot of conspiracy theories and he believes in the face on Mars and a lot of different stuff, and I said, I'm going to show you something, man.
00:12:17.000Not perfectly square, but if you looked at a blurry picture of it that was taken from space, you would swear, this is the building block for a pyramid.
00:12:24.000This is clearly made by an intelligent species.
00:12:27.000Yeah, the same one that built the pyramids.
00:13:19.000But if we can find it on Mars, and we know there's life on Earth, then there's life everywhere.
00:13:23.000And that would be a pretty important thing to figure out.
00:13:26.000Or the possibility that life actually started on Mars and some sort of an impact from an asteroid, panspermia, sent it hurling towards Earth?
00:13:34.000Yeah, but I'm not sure that's a logical conclusion.
00:13:38.000You know, if life can start somewhere, then it can start in two places, right?
00:13:42.000And so it doesn't have to miraculously be panspermiad from one planet to another.
00:13:46.000If it formed on Mars and there's life on Earth, then it's a more logical conclusion to think that it just formed in two places, I think.
00:13:54.000When you sit in that space station and you're floating above Earth, much as you were saying that your colleagues started referring to Earth as a separate individual entity and you guys were separate from Earth, did you look out when you're looking at the vastness of Everything.
00:14:53.000They guessed right in 1968 or whatever it was.
00:14:55.000Because when you're inside the spaceship, it looks like that.
00:15:00.000The difference is when you go outside.
00:15:02.000And then it's like the difference between sitting in your living room looking outside and hanging on a cliff or hanging on a half-dome or somewhere where it's an entirely different perspective, even though it may look at the same thing.
00:15:20.000The world is no longer nicely underneath you like Sulu, but it is this huge hanging, spinning mass next to you, and the universe is what's around you, and you are You are part of it.
00:15:35.000We aren't used to having the universe under our feet or all around us and feeling that you're in it, not just sort of below it, looking up at it.
00:15:46.000And that's when you really see that the world is just in the neighborhood and that it is a ball with the moon being a ball and the sun's over there.
00:15:57.000You really get that feeling when you're out on a spacewalk.
00:15:59.000I've heard several astronauts talk about that feeling and that moment when they are outside of a spacecraft looking at the universe itself and saying that it changed them forever.
00:16:40.000But then again, if you look a little further out, there's, you know, how could Mars be random?
00:16:44.000And how could all the other planets, how could Saturn, the way it looks, be just a random event?
00:16:50.000And the unlimited number of stars that are out there.
00:16:53.000And the planets we're seeing around other stars directly.
00:16:56.000I don't know how to resolve it in my mind.
00:16:58.000I didn't find the meaning of it all by being on a spacewalk.
00:17:03.000If anything, it just deepened my dumbfoundedness at the immensity of it and our tiny little part of it.
00:17:12.000I've often thought that questions, pondering questions like the randomness of the universe or just the reality that we know about subatomic particles and the idea of the universe being this fractal thing and impossible and never-ending, I think it's almost like walking up to a mountain and going,
00:17:30.000yeah, I could see how that could be picked up.
00:17:33.000But you can't really pick it up yourself, so you're just like, man, I guess it could be random.
00:17:43.000The universe itself seems to be this incredibly complex thing that has...
00:17:50.000Not just laws, but very clear directions that things move into.
00:17:54.000It constantly is complexifying from the Big Bang till now and the idea of black holes eating matter and creating a singularity and that.
00:18:04.000Possibly these new astrophysicists and string theorists guys are saying that they think that inside every black hole may in fact be a completely different universe.
00:18:16.000You know, on the top of the space station, we have an experiment put there by a Nobel Prize winning physicist named Sam Ting.
00:18:25.000And it's from CERN, from the big particle accelerator that's under Switzerland and France.
00:18:33.000And what it's doing is collecting subatomic particles of the universe.
00:18:37.000And it's got layer after layer of detector, so it can try and figure out what they all are as they come ripping through.
00:18:44.000And it's collected trillions and trillions of them.
00:18:46.000It's been up there for the last couple of years.
00:18:48.000And the reason is, we don't know what the universe is made of.
00:18:51.000We can only account for 5% of the universe with the known particles that we have.
00:18:57.000We don't know what 95% of the universe is even made of.
00:19:01.000And so we call it dark energy and dark matter.
00:19:04.000And we're trying to indirectly prove that those exist based on the proportions of the subatomic particles we're collecting up at the top of the space station.
00:19:50.000As far as humans that have ever lived, we're the most informed, the most technologically capable.
00:19:55.000But much like when we look back at the Renaissance era, or look back at Galileo being imprisoned because he dared question the idea that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, We're going to make fun of us.
00:20:07.000Someday, they're going to make fun of us like these dummies.
00:20:10.000They didn't know what Clark Gluon Plasma was.
00:20:12.000They had to use a particle accelerator to prove that the Higgs boson existed.
00:21:38.000Was so that we could carry this huge telescope.
00:21:40.000And they weren't automated back then, so we needed a crew to be able to operate the telescope.
00:21:44.000That's why the payload bay was the size that it was, and why the shuttle could lift the amount that it could lift.
00:21:50.000It was to meet all those requirements.
00:21:52.000That all immediately stopped being the reason for the space shuttle to exist, but the design was already set.
00:21:59.000What that gave us, though, was a vehicle that could carry, gosh, 40,000 or 50,000 pounds up in a payload bay that's the size of a city bus and then bring it back and land it gently on a runway and carry a crew up to seven.
00:22:12.000So it's like a space station all on its own.
00:22:20.000And when things are amazingly complex, they're really expensive and hard to operate safely.
00:22:24.000And we lost two crews, you know, as a result of the complexity of it.
00:22:28.000The Soyuz is designed to take three people and a tiny bit of gear up to the space station, dock, stay there for half a year or longer as their lifeboat, and then at the end of time get back in and come back home again.
00:22:49.000The two of them are magnificent vehicles, but built for way different purposes, and both very carefully evolved to do what they do exquisitely well.
00:23:01.000And I'm lucky to have flown them both.
00:24:09.000So inside, it's this incredibly powerful push in your back, like a dragster, but like one that's gone off the road.
00:24:19.000The vibration of pushing through the air.
00:24:22.000It's like a tuning fork kind of vibration.
00:24:25.000This enormous, powerful, jaws-of-a-dog kind of ride, straight up.
00:24:31.000But then, after two minutes, the stage that got you above the air is all out of fuel.
00:24:38.000Explodes off because you don't want to carry all that dead weight with you anymore and then you use the remaining engines for the next six minutes or six and a half to accelerate out horizontal basically to five miles a second and and so for the last six minutes it's like a long liquid drive heavy steady pushing like someone with their fist in your back pushing you faster and faster and faster a smoother ride because you're above the air and after just under nine minutes like 8.45 or so You're
00:25:08.000exactly the right place, the right direction, and the right speed.
00:25:12.000The engines shut off, and you're in space, and you're weightless.
00:25:18.000It's 8.42 on the shuttle and just under 9, like 8.55 for the Soyuz.
00:25:23.000What's the maximum g-force you experience during that push?
00:25:26.000The shuttle's about 3g, and in fact, when you hit 3g, the throttle start coming back because it was only built for about 3.5g, so three times your normal weight.
00:25:34.000So if you weigh 200 pounds, you weigh 600 pounds in there.
00:26:17.000The airplane limits the amount of G that it can pull.
00:26:20.000And it'll give you about 8G. About 8G. That's all it'll give you.
00:26:25.000Because otherwise you could structurally damage the airplane.
00:26:28.000So there was a paddle you could actually, if you were going to hit the ground...
00:26:32.000You could hit this paddle that would override the G-control system and snap it into your lap and just give you whatever the aerodynamics would give you.
00:26:38.000And we've had people pull 12G. But the Soyuz, if you come into the atmosphere the wrong way, can pull 20 or 22G on the way home, which is just wicked.
00:26:49.000And that happened once in the Russian experience.
00:27:22.000It's sort of like a prolonged car crash.
00:27:26.000You know, people pull 20G in a car crash, but it's instantaneous.
00:27:29.000If you fall into the atmosphere the wrong way in a Soyuz, then as you hit the thick atmosphere, it's almost like crashing into something super high G-peak for maybe 30 seconds, and then you come through that G-peak and slow down.
00:27:42.000And it's survivable, but I wouldn't want to ride it.
00:28:25.000And I realized because this smile, this big stupid smile was on my face so much that my cheeks were cramping up because it was so much of a thrill to go.
00:29:15.000And then you've got a bunch of things you can do, you know, various shutdowns and aborts.
00:29:19.000And people probably don't know, but the shuttle, as it launched up the east coast of the U.S., we kept abort landing runways all the way up the coast.
00:29:28.000You could land at Cherry Point, or you could land in New York, or you could land in Newfoundland, or all those places.
00:29:32.000And so as you're ticking up the coast, you're constantly going, okay, if we have a failure now, we're going to abort this way, we're going to turn around, we're going to land in Bermuda, we're going to land here, we're going to land in...
00:29:41.000And, you know, practice those like crazy.
00:29:44.000And then you get to a certain point, and then you would land in North Africa or South France or in Spain.
00:29:49.000And all those windows, all those tick points, all those thresholds you have to get through, that's what we're hyper-aware of.
00:30:46.000During launch that happened on Apollo as well.
00:30:49.000On the way back to Earth, We've had serious problems with the Soyuz where you have to take over and try and fly manually or come in ballistically which means it loses its ability to steer on the way home and you just start spinning the vehicle and then it just comes in like a pure meteorite.
00:31:06.000You pull about 8 or 9 G on a ballistic entry and that's pretty tough after six months of weightlessness to suddenly if you're a 200 pounder now you weigh 1600 or 1700 pounds and that's pretty hard on the body.
00:32:48.000But, you know, you got all this stuff to do and people are there to meet you and you're trying to just ignore those symptoms and pay attention to what, you know, what's going on.
00:33:05.000And if the flight went well, and we work hard enough that they almost always do, there's a great sense of satisfaction because it's like the final step in an extremely complicated process where you have done everything right or enough things right that you can have that for the rest of your life.
00:33:25.000So there's a tremendous feeling of joy and pride and accomplishment when you get back to Earth.
00:33:33.000I have always been fascinated by space, and if you look up, you can see the lights here are covered with stars.
00:33:41.000But what drives me nuts is how little we actually get to see of the stars because of light pollution.
00:33:49.000I was at the Big Island, and I went to the Keck Observatory, and there's a station where the telescope is, and then below that, at like 9,000 feet, there's this visitor station.
00:34:08.000When we were driving up there, I was worried that it was too cloudy.
00:34:12.000I was like, oh, this is going to be terrible.
00:34:14.000We wanted to go and see the stars, and we picked a cloudy night, but we drove through the clouds.
00:34:19.000And then when you get above there and you realize that the entire Big Island, they have special diffused lighting to make sure that they don't emit light pollution, the view is life-changing.
00:34:30.000Must be like one one millionth of what you experience on the space station.
00:34:36.000But for me, it was a real life-changing moment.
00:34:50.000But even crazier when you're actually experiencing it, you can see the Milky Way.
00:34:55.000And I remember thinking, God, we have to figure out a way to stop light pollution.
00:34:59.000Because I think just that, just being able to look up and see that, would change people's perceptions.
00:35:05.000And would probably make people way more enthusiastic about space.
00:35:10.000People, you know, of course the vast majority of people live in cities and the places that have the worst light pollution of the cities.
00:35:15.000I had a similar experience to yours when I was an F-18 pilot.
00:35:18.000I would get it up to High altitude, you know, going on across country, especially in the north, put on the autopilot and shut off every light in the cockpit and let my eyes adjust.
00:35:28.000And you're already up at 40,000, 45,000 feet.
00:35:30.000And so there's almost no atmosphere above you.
00:36:00.000But, I don't know, even if you try and work on light pollution, people are indoor creatures in cities and they have street lights and they drive around in cars.
00:36:08.000I don't know how you get people to notice the universe around them.
00:36:13.000I think it would help if they could just see it.
00:37:04.000And my son, who ran the social media for the flight to a large degree, sent me a note saying, hey dad, Mount Etna is erupting, you know, in southern Italy.
00:37:12.000So I'm a good dad, took a picture of Mount Etna.
00:37:15.000But seeing the superheated lava and the smoke and the steam coming out of the earth was a really, especially when you're looking at the world as a ball, It was a really clear reminder of the fact that most of the planet is superheated lava and magma and where it's so hot that the rock is liquid and plastic,
00:39:06.000It's really hard for people to change, too.
00:39:08.000Once we have a pattern that we follow, it's very difficult.
00:39:13.000Especially if we found a way to make it work for ourselves.
00:39:16.000In spite of all the pollution, we still rock it that way.
00:39:20.000In spite of all the stuff that we throw into the ocean, it's still kind of happening, basically on a daily basis.
00:39:26.000Well, you can't Yeah, once you built the structure, it's real hard to change, of course.
00:39:31.000And you can't just suddenly starve millions of people or kill millions of people just because you decide to change energy sources.
00:39:35.000It has to be gradual, and we will be weaned off fossil fuels, but they've got to get a lot more scarce before we're going to bother, just because of its human nature.
00:39:43.000Well, the ultimate use of fossil fuels is a rocket.
00:39:47.000I mean, that's the ultimate display of it, shooting into space with a giant plume of fire behind you.
00:40:02.000Now, when you think about what's possible for the future, when they start talking about all these different propulsion methods that will someday be available, what if any of them appear viable?
00:40:14.000Yeah, you're asking me to predict physics inventions of the future, which, gosh, I wish I could do that.
00:40:25.000To me, the obvious answer is every single molecule that exists, every complex molecule and atom was put together in a blast furnace of a place with almost unlimited heat and pressure, which is the center of a sun.
00:40:41.000And it stored that energy in every single atom and molecule that exists.
00:40:46.000And we have yet to find a good way to get that energy back out.
00:41:07.000But we haven't found a clean way to release the energy that gives us nuclear power.
00:41:14.000We can do it, but we're still, you know, we're kind of cavemen about it, and we haven't got a clean way.
00:41:19.000So I'm certain that at some point we will figure out how to, whether it'll be cold fusion or just fusion itself.
00:41:27.000But if you read what they're doing in the various laboratories around the world, Even the experts think, well, we're probably 50 years away from being able to contain fusion so that it becomes a net positive power source.
00:41:39.000But when the experts are saying it's 50 years until we can do it, who knows?
00:41:43.000There was a recent article in one of the science magazines that the volume of nuclear waste could be reduced by 90%.
00:41:53.000They've shown that they can mix plutonium-contaminated waste with blast furnace slag and turn it into glass.
00:42:01.000And it reduces its volume by 85% to 95% and effectively locks in the radioactive plutonium, creating a stable end product.
00:42:13.000I mean, the nuclear waste thing is a huge issue, obviously.
00:42:17.000I mean, they've done a lot of weird things like dig holes in the ground and buried in there in Nevada and, you know, and what's going on now in Fukushima is very disturbing.
00:42:24.000They're trying to figure out how to contain it.
00:42:37.000Necessity is the main mother and we need to, sometimes we don't think we have the necessity Yeah, nuclear waste is a big problem, but you know, fossil fuel waste is a huge problem as well, and neither of them are perfect.
00:42:48.000Even solar energy has waste, you know, because you have to build all the solar panels and you have to collect all the rare earth metals.
00:42:56.000We have to find as best a trade-off as we can and still be able to try and sustain as good a standard of living for as many people around the planet as possible.
00:43:08.000We feed more people now than we ever have, right?
00:43:16.000There's so many variables, obviously, but I'm always very excited when I see something like this that is like, my faith in the crazy humans has been restored.
00:43:27.000These nuts have figured out a way to fix an issue or at least reduce an issue significantly by as much as 90-plus percent.
00:43:36.000The fossil fuel thing to me is a weird one because obviously I enjoy it.
00:44:05.000Everything else, well, and of course, space shuttle's retired, but we only flew the space shuttle 135 times.
00:44:11.000I mean, you couldn't even measure, compared to everything else, the pollution that it injected.
00:44:15.000But if it had gotten to the point where it was like air travel.
00:44:18.000Yeah, well, you wouldn't want, you know, thousands of those launching every day, you know, but that wasn't a possibility and wasn't what it was going to do.
00:45:03.000And that's just an interesting thing to hold up the mirror and look at yourself and say, hmm, okay, that's what we decide is all right.
00:45:11.000There's also a matter of a very statistically significant number of years of your life that you lose by living in a smog-filled environment.
00:46:33.000You mentioned earlier that with Galileo inventing the telescope, he was, you know, tortured for pointing out that we weren't the center of the universe.
00:46:45.000And with every invention that's come since then, we've been able to prove more and more conclusively just how far from the center of the universe we are and also how huge the universe is and billions of years old and more vast.
00:46:57.000The numbers are so big, they're incomprehensible, both in numbers of stars and number of galaxies.
00:47:04.000And within the last few years, using the great-great-grandchildren of Of Galileo's telescope, we are seeing planets, directly seeing planets around the nearby stars.
00:47:16.000So we've basically shown that every single star has planets.
00:47:21.000And so there's an unlimited number of planets out there.
00:47:25.000And so to think that with an unlimited number of chances that we are the only life in the universe, to me, is just a natural extension of thinking that We're the center of the universe.
00:47:35.000It's an arrogance-egotism thing based on belief instead of fact.
00:47:39.000But it's also, I think, arrogant and egotistical to think that we're so fascinating and we're so revelationary and so special that somehow...
00:47:50.000Weird, big, black-eyed monsters with no hair on their bodies are sneaking around staring at us because we are so special.
00:48:00.000I mean, it's fun science fiction, and it makes for great entertainment, but it's not real.
00:48:07.000Well, I've heard that the archetype of the doctor, the alien with the large black eyes and the strange big head, that what it may very well come from is the actual birth experience for children.
00:48:21.000The first time the eyes are outside of the womb, they don't have clear vision, and they see the bright light of the operating room, which is the first time they've ever been exposed to something like that, and it's an incredibly traumatic experience.
00:48:32.000They recognize the eyes, which are enormous in front of the head, This face with a white mask on it, featureless.
00:48:41.000And that this is most likely what the archetype of the experience, these medical experiments that supposedly go on with these aliens, that that's the origin of it.
00:49:07.000And I think the justification is, one of them is that the baby doesn't remember it.
00:49:11.000And I'm always like, how do you know the baby doesn't remember it?
00:49:13.000Just because they don't have a point of reference or context, it's very possible they remember it.
00:49:17.000Well, the scientific answer to the alien abduction experience and these cold, hard medical examinations, emotionless medical examinations, may very well just be the birthing process.
00:49:32.000And then the incredible feeling of helplessness that they have is basically their body doesn't move yet and that these intense memories are burned deep, deep, deep into our consciousness.
00:49:43.000I think it also just comes from a fear of being alone and a fear of being immortal.
00:49:48.000And if we can somehow convince ourselves that neither of those two things are true, then it's a great comfort to folks.
00:49:56.000And to think that there's other life out there and it's holding us as super special and it's been here before and it's going to be back, it's a nice seductive thought process to go down.
00:50:41.000So I am convinced there's life in the universe.
00:50:45.000You know, just on the statistics of it, it just makes sense.
00:50:47.000It's just egotism to think that we're that special.
00:50:51.000But I think it's also just egotism to think that we're so special that we're the object of great secretive fascination by higher beings.
00:50:58.000Well, I think you're very humble, and so you look at us and say that it wouldn't be that interesting.
00:51:02.000But I say to you, imagine if we found out that there was a planet just outside of our solar system where there were some people that were there, they were just like human beings, but they were like human beings from like the 1300s.
00:51:15.000They just hadn't figured anything out yet.
00:51:16.000We would be like, holy shit, they have guns, they figured out the wheel, their light and their city's on fire.
00:51:32.000But I mean, if we found some people just from a thousand years ago, a thousand years in our past, we would be absolutely, incredibly fascinated.
00:51:39.000I think if we found some being somewhere that had harnessed the power of fire, if we went back 40,000 years ago, I think we'd find it incredibly fascinating.
00:51:47.000So the stuff that we can do, I don't buy it.
00:51:51.000I think if I was an alien, I would be so fascinated by these freaks, these pink monkeys with bang sticks and the internet and religions and all the freak show stuff that we have down here on Earth.
00:52:02.000I think we would be the most wonderful freak show of all time.
00:52:06.000I've often said that if there is intelligent life in the Earth or outside of Earth, I think that Earth is probably the Tijuana of outer space.
00:52:15.000Which explains why all visitations come in the middle of the night.
00:52:18.000They're hammered and they want to see a show.
00:52:40.000They inhabit every little spot in the ocean.
00:52:42.000Find a little floating thing poking out of the ocean where some plants are growing on it, boom, there's a whole sea of people living there.
00:52:50.000You know, go to Hawaii, this little tiny spot.
00:53:00.000I think we would be probably one of the most fascinating things to observe because we're so incredibly advanced and yet so contradictive, so hypocritical, so ridiculous, so easily led, so easily tricked and fooled.
00:53:13.000We have access to instant information, but yet we choose to believe some of the most ridiculous things of all time.
00:53:20.000I agree with you, though, that I find the evidence of us being contacted by aliens incredibly uncompelling.
00:53:27.000And the people that I talked to, I did a sci-fi show called Joe Rogan Questions Everything, where I met with a lot of these UFO guys, and I felt like I was talking to religious fanatics.
00:53:38.000It's just like talking to a religious fanatic.
00:53:40.000It's just they feel like they're too clever for the Quran.
00:56:51.000That stuff you've read on the internet, or maybe the television show that you watch, or maybe the sports team that you idolize, or it may be some new invention somewhere, or some area, your huge belief into some particular subset of what we know or what we don't know.
00:57:05.000Everybody should be doing that, as long as they're pushing themselves to something that they're interested in, they're trying to get the best out of the things that they're naturally inclined towards and make the most of it.
00:57:27.000But don't spend all of those efforts in taking your particular set of interests and your beliefs that have given you this area and try and force them on other people.
00:58:28.000And there's this thing that happens, this confirmation bias, where they don't want to look at anything outside of something that confirms their idea.
00:58:36.000They don't want to look at it objectively.
00:58:38.000I think having a belief system is important.