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Welcome to the Kotky Ride Home for Tuesday, March 9th, 2021.

I'm Jackson Bird.

Can we find extracrestrial civilizations by searching the cosmos for their pollutants?

Are humans hardwired to be productive?

And what can we learn about leisure from hunter-gatherer

societies? Plus, a big uh-oh from HBO Max, and masks that are sure to freak out everyone

you encounter. Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

The search for alien life, once considered a thing of science fiction, has become more and more sophisticated and respected over the past several decades, and a new paper published last month in the astrophysical journal proposes a new strategy for searching for intelligent life, specifically for extraterrestrial civilizations,

searching for pollution.

Ravi Koparapu first had the idea when he saw reports about how drastically the levels of nitrogen

dioxide had decreased in urban centers around the world at the start of lockdown.

Nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, is a pollutant that's a result of things like combustion and

fossil fuel use, but also biological things like soil emissions and lightning.

Quoting Wired, the shutdown had shown what atmospheric scientists had struggled to accurately

...