Nebula in a Box

We've all heard about panspermia, in which the building blocks of life theoretically travel to Earth from elsewhere. But from where, exactly? In this episode, Julie and Robert glimpse inside the nebulae of creation. Also, Robert talks about "The Blob."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Julie Douglas.
First of all, before I get going, I apologized my
voice sounds a little weird on this particular episode. I
recently had some oral surgery to get some losing teeth out,

(00:24):
so I found a little mealy. Now that's why, Julie
tell me this. Have you seen a little movie called
The Blob? Oh, my goodness, very long time ago. Yeah,
I had the classic black and white. No, I guess
it was in color the Virgin I saw his color
as anyway. Steve McQueen in an early role acting, yeah,
acting opposite a little ball of interstellar good that falls

(00:45):
to Earth. Inside of this meat cute little meteorite, an
old man pokes it with a stick, cracks up in
like an egg, and then he pokes it with a stick,
of course, because that's what you do when you encounter
potentially volatile substances from another world. We can't help ourselves.
We need to know. So it crawled down his arm
and starts eating it, and then it eats more and more,
and it just grows and grows into this colossal life

(01:06):
form that everyone has to deal with. And if you
haven't seen it, do check it out. Awesome the music
by Bob bat I believe, are you kidding? Buck Rat
did that? Yeah? Yeah, it's a nice little gem of
the turn. When you do that, I feel like I
need a martini. Yeah, it is definitely a Martini worthy
that of music. But the idea of this movie that

(01:27):
is central to what we're gonna talk about here, and
they're not central, but you know, we're kicking off with
the idea that life could come here sort of accidentally
from another world and then grow into something big. And
we have talked about this in roundabout ways. We talked
about what happens when a star dies, right, and we
talked about star dust all this stuff that rejects into

(01:48):
the universe and how those are the building box. But
what remains is this question of how exactly here on
Earth did these chemicals become complex organisms. So we're gonna
talk a little bit today about this. And there's a
great article by Andrew Grant and I believe it's called
Cosmic Blueprint for Life that details some of what we're

(02:11):
going to talk about today. So let's fast forward back
to the star way before we even get to the
blob days and the old man Uh losing his arm
to space Shelley distantly both in time and space. A
star dies, Okay, it runs out of its nuclear fuel
and it becomes unstable. All right, there's no longer enough
fuel to keep up this colossal creation that is a star.

(02:33):
It's this enormous engine, and if it doesn't have fuel
to burn, it becomes unstable and it collapses or it explodes.
This is where we get things like black holes, but
it's also where we get supernovous So in this case,
the star explodes, and when it does, it expels a
shell of stearing hot atoms. This includes things like hydrogen, carbon, oxygen,

(02:55):
and some of those rogue atoms float into nearby gas
clouds and they stick to the fine grains of dust there.
Now it's very cold here, we're talking negative degrees fahrenheit,
and there this process called acretion begins to take place.
I think we've discussed this before, and we definitely discuss
it in one of our Stuff to Blay your Kid's
Mind episodes we did. We talk about gravity and how

(03:15):
it stirs things to lie. So you have these particles,
they float around, They float around and onto each other,
and it's like a snowball rolling down a mountain. Two
particles come together to form a slightly bigger particle, and
then they pull in other particles. Their mass is growing,
their gravitational pull is growing, and eventually we end up
with a very young star that is being born out

(03:37):
of this ejected material. So the simple items of hydrogen, carbon,
and oxygen become complex organic molecules, and it's these carbon
bearing compounds that become the raw material for life, and
planets eventually actually form from these materials. We say all
of this because again we're trying to get to well,
how exactly then did life on Earth here occur? Because

(04:00):
we understand how the planets formed, but us sitting here
as crazy complex beings that came from these rudimentary, single
bacterial cells. How did this happen? So this brings us
to a little concept called panspermia, which is ja, yeah,
in a nutshell, we're talking about the blob scenario, the

(04:21):
idea that life could travel to another planet in the
form of say, a meteorite. So we can thank Fred
Hoyle for this. He was a British cosmologist, and he
actually wrote in nine fifty seven science fiction novel called
The Black Cloud Right which actually informed his ideas on spermia.
The novel which I haven't read, but it's a great
example of great scientific minds are very much have science

(04:43):
fiction on their minds, and it dealt with intelligent dust
clouds in space. He ends up forming this idea of
pan spermia. Starting in the nineteen sixties, he writes a
series of academic papers describing how bacterial cells could make
their way from interstellar dust grains to comets and eventually
down to planet spike Earth. Okay, so it's the sixties.
People think he's nuts because nobody thought that pre bike

(05:05):
molecules or microbes could survive in the harsh vacuum of space.
You know, it was assumed that space was too cold
and too low density for any sort of molecule to form.
But now we know that's not the case. We know
that it's possible. For instance, the nine two pound meteorite
hurtled to the ground in Australia and they did some

(05:26):
analysis on it, and they found that the rock containing
millions of organic compounds, including amino acids a nucleo basis,
which we'll talk about in a little while. I don't
want to jump the gun there, but that's really exciting information.
And similar meteorites like the one that crashed landed on
Australia and comments would have blanketed the Earth with organic
chemicals from the time the Earth was born about four

(05:47):
point five billion years ago until the era when life
appeared a few hundred million years later. Okay, So for
everybody listening out there, the idea again is that this
material is hitching a ride on a comet or a meeting.
All right, crash landing on Earth and boom, we start
to get a proliferation of life. But there is another theory,

(06:07):
and that talks about how life could organically just or
spontaneously I suppose you could say, happen here on Earth.
And for this we need to turn to Stanley Miller
and Herald Urray. That's right. These are researchers who prepared
a closed system of glass flasks and tubes and injected
a gaseous mixture of methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water. And now

(06:28):
these are four basic compounds that were thought to be
abundant in Earth's primitive atmosphere, and then they applied an
electric current to simulate a lightning strike that would have
occurred on Earth in those primitive days as well, and
lo and behold, within a week they have produced several
prebiotic compounds which then produced amino acids. So this is

(06:50):
the same concept that we discussed in our Stuff of
Your Kid's Mind episode. We're talking about this early ancient ocean.
And then you have volcanic activity which is stirring electrical
activity in the atmosphere, lightning strike, life begins to bubble, right,
and there's like a little pool of water around that volcano, right,
frankenste scenario exactly exactly, which I love. So here's the
great thing. It produces amino acids and these are fundamental

(07:12):
units of proteins, really important, right if you want to
create some life. But it did not produce nucleo bases,
which we talked about being present on that comet in Australia.
These are the molecular building box of DNA and RNA.
This is the stuff that gets passed on the genetic
information to help propagate life. Also, the researchers simulating early
atmosphere with gases containing hydrogen. They used hydrogen, which reacts

(07:36):
easily as opposed to carbon dioxide, a gas that's far
less reactive but was probably much more plentiful at the time.
So people kind of said, I'm not sure, this is
a really interesting experiment, but it doesn't quite stimulate the
actual conditions of Earth, what we think what was going
on in primitive Earth at that time. So we end

(07:57):
up looking outward again for potential signs how life ends
up coming to be. In this case, let's look to
astronomer Loose Snyder. Now, Snyder knew that the chemical compounds
are die polar. They have a positively charged side and
they have a negatively charged side, and these charged particles
in motion release energy. So he theorized that some of

(08:18):
these would spin like batons and create a faint radio
wave signal, and that this would be perceivable from Earth
with the right equipment. This is such a cool idea
that someone seized on. This I think is just amazing
because this is a way to actually measure your model right.
And you also, I believe, said that each type of
molecule should have its own unique energy signature, broadcasting a
specific set of frequencies that could be detected and identified

(08:42):
by astronomers. So within a few years they identified dozens
of these things. They discovered interstellar formaldehyde in ninety nine,
and since that point astronomers have identified more than one
and fifty molecules in deep space, mostly by using radio telescopes,
and this is interesting to space. Chemicals that were found
just the past few years include the sweet which is

(09:03):
a sugar glycoli hide which I just fluttered but to
get the idea, the fragrant which is ethel formate which
smells like rum, and the explosive fulminic acid. Use some
debtonators and weirdly enough gold flagger. I don't know how
that worked out there, right, do you where? Okay? So
this is just really interesting that they figured out these

(09:24):
energy signatures and they were able to pinpoint all of
these different molecules. The whole field of astrochemistry kind of
rises from this, right. And so then there's another astronomer.
His name is Jay Mayo Greenberg of the University of
Leiden in the Netherlands, and he found that there weren't
just free floating gas molecules in space as they had
observed in the nebula. The reason why we're talking about

(09:45):
this too, is because we're trying to get to this
idea of where again are these compounds beginning and how
are they getting to the Earth. So if you look
at the nebula and you say, well, here are these
chemicals that some of which can create the building block
here on Earth, how is that actually happening? What sort
of interplay? It's one thing they have to figure out
how they hits the ride here, but where did they

(10:06):
come from to begin with? Right, So you're thinking about
these floating gas molecules in space, and then he begins
to ponder the dust and the nebulas, as well as
the microscopic grains of carbon and silicon, and then he says,
what would happen if interstellar gas molecules like from Aldehad
collided with frigid grains of dust. They'd freeze their instantly,
he decided, and they'd create another kind of environment which

(10:29):
there would be chemical reactions. Again, these chemical reactions are
really important, okay, because this is what's happening. This is
that Frankenstein moment to a certain degree that's creating life.
And he's thinking about the starlight also interacting with this,
and he begins to think infrared telescopes could help us
with this, and he was thinking, Okay, let's point them
at some dust clouds, and he actually finds dips at

(10:51):
specific frequencies corresponding to molecules including methanol, ammonia, and water ice.
So what we need here is an experiment, right, what
we need here is a in a box. And I'm
surprised we didn't do this one for stuff to blow
your kid's mind. It sounds so easy. He turns to
a man by the name of Lewis Alamandalo. He is
a Berkeley PhD Graduate in low temperature chemistry, so perfect

(11:13):
person to turn into this. And Almondalo recreates the kinds
of reactions that might take place and with these microscopic
icy grains, and this Zali does it. First of all,
he gets the equipment together to chill a shoebox sized
chamber in a near vacuum, so he pressurizes it to
within several degrees of absolute zero, so vacuumized as cold

(11:34):
as possible. Then he uses a plasma lamp to fire
beams of ultra violent light into that chamber, and this
is supposed to mimic the radiation that's present in a
planet or star forming region of a dust cloud. And
then he adds a gases mixture of simple molecules to
mimic the same composition that you would see in those
interstellar clouds. Then he sets back and he watches the

(11:55):
magic happen, or the science as it were. That's right.
What does reveal is that not only that some chemicals
reactions really do occur, it's extremely low temperatures because again
remember back to the nineteen sixties people five, it's way
too cold for anything really to be happening. So he
plays out this idea that yes, actually chemical reactions can
occur at extremely light temperatures minus fo degrees fahrenheit, but

(12:18):
also that these reactions produce other reactive chemicals, thereby providing
the spark really important for molecular hookups here. So this
nebula in the box experiment has been done over and
over again and recently has yielded intricate molecular rings containing carbon, nitrogen,
and hydrogen fatty acid like molecules that's so cool that

(12:39):
look and behave like the membranes protecting living cells and
nucleic acids or nucleotides. The primary components of RNA in DNA.
So again we're getting back to this idea of chicken
and egg, although in this case it's more like, is
that the nebula is that the comet? Or did it
happen here on Earth? Could these reactions be happening in
these interstellar us clouds and these very chilling environments, right,

(13:02):
and being ejected out in the form of a comet
in landing here on Earth sort of kind of ready made,
you know, sort of like your microwave meal ready for
Earth out of the box. In a way, this kind
of drives with the blob because at the end of
the blob they learned that they can't quite actually kill
the blob, but what they can do is that they
can freeze it with I think they were using fire extinguishers,
which was weird. No, surely not, that wouldn't make scientific sense.

(13:25):
But at any rate, they chill this thing down. They
strapped to a helicopter and they take it to the
North Pole. But he does not kill it. It just
preserves it. So even here we see the idea that
the life interstellar life would be able to sustain very
low temperatures. Well, and there's an Emory University astro chemist
by the name of Susannah Witticus Weaver, and she threw
a series of models and experiments has demonstrated that ultra

(13:48):
violet radiation can break chemical bonds and split molecules into
highly reactive fragments called radicals. And this is important because
again in this nebula, you're seeing the possibility that these
more complex chemical reactions can be happening. And there's a
possibility that again, is that this is the spark of
life happening. All right, we're gonna take a quick break
and then we're gonna get back to all this. So

(14:10):
hanging there one second and we're back. The realmifications here
are not all just either far off in time or
far off in space. For instance, we can look at
the moon Titan, one of the Saturn's moons, and here
we see the based on some of the research, we
definitely see the potential for these organic compounds. Is this

(14:31):
the one that has the atmosphere that is similar to
the Earth, but it's like in slow mo Yeah, it
has a thick methane tinged atmosphere and it's reminiscent in
early from early Earth atmosphere and it has pools of
hydrocarbons on its surface, the only known bodies of liquid
on any other world than our own. So astrobiologists and
astro chemists have been very interested in Titan for some

(14:53):
time now. Yeah, because the idea again is that this
is a snapshot of what the Earth may have looked
like billions of years ago, and that we can begin
to observe, although slow mo, these reactions, and this is
what they're trying to get at. They want to know
what's going on four billion years ago. That's why they're
creating a nebulent a box, and they want to know
where did this material come from. We know that some

(15:15):
meteorites contain a menial acids in nucleo bases, But the
idea is did they get scooped up those molecules from
dust clouds and then created them later on their interplanetary course,
or were they again ready made out of the box
as soon as they landed here, Which leads to this question,
how common could life in the university. That's what we

(15:36):
really want to get to, right, Yeah, that's the big question.
It's life. Is it just a sort of a one
in a billion fluke? Is there a higher potential for
life on other worlds as we continue to expand out
into the galaxy, are we going to be surprised or
are we going to be disappointed by the presence of life? Well,
and Andrew Grant says that if meteorites create most of

(15:57):
the direct chemical precursors of life are still or system
might be an unusual case if we're dependent on the
meteorites for really creating the chemical reactions. Right, but but
but but if dust clouds can manufacture these molecules on
their own, and we know these dust clouds are all
over the place in space, right, then life should be

(16:17):
prevalent throughout the universe. I mean that kind of racks
my world right there. Yeah, who knows how complex life
we're talking about the world like Titan. Things are going
to develop at a much slower pace on a world
like that, And certainly not every world is going to
have the Goldilocks type conditions that would be present for
life to develop. And then too cold, too hot just
right where also you have to factory in issues of

(16:38):
electromagnetic shielding, how long a window are you looking at
for life to develop without a catastrophic impact event occurring? Right? So,
assuming that your planet had a nice position with a son, right,
I'm not talking about the Earth, but a planet, and
you had everything sort of in place. The idea is
that any one of these dust clouds out there could
give you the material to create life on one of

(17:00):
those planets, if it has the correct conditions to support it.
We come from a carbon based bias, so that's a
whole other issue. Okay, So we should know more about this,
I would say probably within the next decade. There's the
Atacama Large Millimeter sub Millimeter Array that's short ALMA in Chile,
and that's a network of sixties six radio dishes that

(17:23):
will provide unprecedented resolution and sensitivity when it becomes fully
operational later this year. There are two space based infrared observatories.
There's the European Space Agencies Herschel Space Observatory and NASA's
James Webb Telescope scheduled to launch in So that should
allow astronomers a better way to peer into these nebula

(17:44):
and try to figure out what's going on. Yeah, especially
the gold Schlager nebula. Very interested. You want that you
have that little smile in your face on newcent was
coming up there but these radicals that we were discovered,
just to see how those little dudes are actually acting
out the ability to like take a much closer look
at this and get closer to this answer about how

(18:05):
life came to be here on earth. Pretty cool. Yeah,
mind blowing stuff to be sure. All right, Well, let's
call over the robot and see what kind of listener
mail we have for today. Here's one from Andy Andy
Writson and says, Hi, Robert and Julie, and he's responding
to our Lucid Dreaming episode, which we've received a ton
of comments from. And he says, I wanted to tell
you that the night after I listened to the episode

(18:27):
about Lucid Dreaming, I did, in fact Lucid dream It
was a fantastic moment for me, since I've always been
utterly fascinated by Lucid dreaming, but it never seriously attempted
any technique. In the dream, I realized I was dreaming
and had to concentrate to not wake up. I told
my friend in the dream that this was a dream,
and then demonstrated by making a little red ball appear
and disappear in my hand. I don't remember what happened afterwards,

(18:50):
but it was still a fantastic feeling. I'm gonna credit
you guys for that, so thanks all the best. Andy, Well,
that is awesome. I still have not lucid dreamed my
knowledge that I can remain member, and it didn't occur
after we did the podcast either. So the idea that
we could cover this topic and maybe grease the wheels
a little for someone else to experience lucid dreaming, I
think that's awesome. Yeah, we have gotten so many cool

(19:12):
Lucid dreaming emails, a lot of them having to deal
with flying and how to control I mean for someone
who lucid dreams like myself. I've just been like wow
that there's so many different issues that are being brought
up that we'd probably do separate podcasts on I don't
know that people would want exclusively a podcast about flying
and lucid dreams, but it's it's pretty fascinating stuff. And
then here's another one from Debbie. Debbie writes them about

(19:34):
lucid dreaming and she says, Hi, Robert Knejulye, first off,
I love your podcast. Being a psych undergrad, I really
get a kick out of all the brain related podcasts.
So Thanks for being so entertaining. Second, I just listened
to Lucid Dreaming podcasts and that was great. It brought
up a question that I've never really thought of before.
While researchers are still pretty up in the air to
the exact purpose of dreaming, there has been some pretty

(19:55):
interesting studies that suggests that it may be a way
to consolidate our daily activities and help to either build
memories both somatic and century, and or to deal with
emotional distress strain. We discussed this in a in an episode.
I just wondered if all these lucid dreaming advocates who
want us to stop wasting our dream time by using
it for virtual reality entertainment could lead to us losing

(20:18):
something that we need and use to help our memories consolidate.
Just an idea that popped into my head while listening.
It made me think of the scene from Donnie Darko
where Donnie and Gretchen present the glasses that show a
baby beautiful pictures when they sleep so they aren't exposed
to darkness, to which the teacher asked them if they
don't think the darkness is there for a reason. Thanks

(20:39):
again for the total brain trip. Of a podcast, keep
up the great work, guys, and Debby, by the way,
is one of our many Australian listeners, so that's pretty awesome.
And finally a little bit of listener mail related to
one of the episodes we did about toilets and uh,
toilets of the future. Yeah, toilets of the future, I believe,
and we were able to participate in a mystery here,
so him who's also from Australia, another one of our

(21:00):
awesome Australian listeners, Wrightson and says, Dear Robert and Julie,
I just finished listening to your podcast about toilets, and
i'd like to thank you both for answering a toilet
related mystery that I have been carrying around with me
for fifteen years. I used to work at a place
where a half a dozen males shared one bathroom cubicle,
always a tough situation. There was one particular work colleague
that would leave behind shoeprints on the toilet seat and

(21:23):
I could never work out whine. My theory at the
time was that he was smoking in the cubicle and
standing on the seat to surreptitiously blow the smoke out
of an air evant. However, I was never satisfied with
this theory, as the prince consistently faced away from the
cistern in the opposite direction of the air pant. Having
listened to your podcast and remembering my colleague was Vietnamese,

(21:44):
it now occurred to me that he was probably squatting
on the top of the bowl. Mental case closed, Tim Australia.
I love that. That's great that we helped solve a mystery,
and also I do love the idea of squat toileting.
I think we yeah, yeah, I don't know that we
did a whole punk us on that, but you talked
about how in the West we're pretty much doing it wrong. Yeah,
there's not a lot of innovation going into toilets. We

(22:05):
kind of got to a certain point. We have this
elaborate throne that we sit on that makes no sense
from an evolutionary standpoint, and we're like, it works good enough.
We'll tinker with water management later on. But for the
most part, this is good. But in many other cultures
they're still very much in a squat based system where
they're they're squatting and you know, if your boys are

(22:25):
pushing it on your gut, which is supposedly giving you
more support. There's less straining, and they think medical problems
that result from the way we sit on the phone
in the West because there is straining. So yeah, it
makes more sense to do the squat squad and that's
why you see some very very low billets in many
Eastern countries. There are also some seats that we I

(22:45):
think we discussed in this podcast where it's like a
Western South toilet seat, but with optional foot rests. Right,
you can get a platform. This I think is so great.
Didn't you say you tried to introduce this to I
really like. I sent this article to my family and I
I was like, this is that we ever everbody needs
to get a platform on them tolilet and got crickets back.
We bought into it. One day it'll come and then

(23:07):
they'll all be saying, oh, we should have listened to Juli. Yeah, well,
maybe I should leave the charge by actually getting a
platform on It's a good idea. I could try it out.
So there you have it. If you would like to
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(23:28):
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(24:15):
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