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So while doing background research for this podcast, I watched a lot of videos made by people who are really good at explaining science.

And one of the people I enjoyed most was Joe Scott of the YouTube series Answers with Joe.

He covers all kinds of fascinating and weird science topics, including my personal favorite about whether octopuses are aliens.

And while he's not a scientist,

I really appreciate his way of making difficult concepts easier to grasp, like the rare earth hypothesis, which we talk about in this extra episode of Wild Thing. We also talk about tardigrades,

von Neumann probes, octopuses, of course, and the idea of panspermia, which is the hypothesis that life

didn't arise on Earth, but was seated here by asteroids that slammed into the planet in early

days. Those asteroids might have had little microbes or the chemical precursors for life on them,

which they'd carried from some other part of the galaxy. That's the general idea, yeah. Panspermy is the idea that life originated somewhere else and landed here one way or another, either purposefully or just by accident, yeah. Given your research on it and given the stuff that you've looked into and sort of explored, like what are your thoughts on this? Well, it's funny. I actually just did a video where I talked about some of the first

life that may have formed on the planet. And you're talking about like the last universal

common ancestor, Luca, which is basically the very first life that sprang up. There have been

bacteria found in rocks that have been locked away for like over 200 million years. So they were

able to survive that long

outside of the elements and outside of any source of energy or anything like that. People love to talk

about tardigrades, how they've taken tardigrades up into space and they survived. There's an Israeli

lander called the Beresheet lander that landed on the moon. Well, it more crashed on the moon than landed on the moon, but it got to the moon, so that's

something.

But it had tardigrades on it amongst all these, you know, instruments and tools and stuff.

And so tardigrades can survive, you know, in the vastness of space and the vacuum and the

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