Star Wars Alien Necropsy, Part 1

In celebration of May the 4th, this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind ventures into a galaxy far, far away while also considering the science and biology of our home world. Join Robert and Joe as they break down six fantastic alien species from the Star Wars universe.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Lord Veda requires all of these necropsies to be completed
by the end of the day. The surgical droids says,
these are substantial specimens. We might require more time two episodes.
Even Lord Vader is not a fan of two parts.
He says, the anatomy of the alien specimens are quite involved,

(00:21):
and if we're to perform a complete analysis, will need
more time. Okay, fine, but the adults better be extremely infotaining.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind production of My
Heart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.

(00:46):
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And
you know, the last couple of years, Rob, you really
leaned into the holidays. But most of those holidays were
towards the end of the year, the wintertime holidays, the
hibernation holidays, thanks Giving, Christmas, of course Halloween. But we
do that all the time. And and I think I
get the sense that you are so strongly leaning into

(01:09):
the holidays that it has continued into the month of May. Yeah,
I guess I'm bringing that spirit, uh into May, especially
for today's holiday, Uh May the Fourth, as in May
the Fourth be with you, which is of course the
one day each year that everyone gets to go crazy
for Star Wars in addition to plan, addition to all
the other days. I guess. But um, but yeah, I

(01:31):
I you know, I don't know that even though I
think my son and I had gotten super into Star
Wars this at this point last year, I think we
kind of forgot about May the fourth being a thing.
Like May the fourth was never a thing when I
was a Star Wars fan as a kid that I
know of, so it kind of blew right past me. Um.
But but this time, I I kind of realized that
the last minute, Oh my goodness, May fourth is next week.

(01:54):
It's it's Star Wars Day. It's just uh, just open season.
We should do some Star Wars as content. You know,
I would have guessed, even as obsessed with Star Wars
as you were last year, and I guess continuing into
this year, uh, that May the fourth wouldn't be your bag.
I would I would expect that May the fourth would
kind of irritate you, would be one of those cute
little things that gets under your skin. Am I wrong? Um? No? No,

(02:18):
I mean I think I don't have any problem with it.
I mean, especially since there's like new stuff coming out.
I'm like, Okay, if that's if this sets the deadline
for for the Bad Batch animated series to come out
and makes them, you know, put it out, then I'm
glad that we have it. Otherwise stuff would just keep
getting delayed, right right, Okay, yes, just wedge you on
into our calendars. Yeah, maybe they'll come up with another

(02:39):
Star Wars holiday this year. Well, some to say that there's, well,
we have May the Fourth as it Made a fourth
be with you, and then some say there's Revenge of
the Fifth, which is tomorrow. But I don't know, Um,
I don't know how how crazy that. Maybe there's something
for the sixth as well. But I think I think
it's gonna be appropriate that it will continue after today,
because we originally planned for this to be one episode,

(03:00):
but then as we were working on the notes, we
were like, oh, wait a minute, we've got like, you know,
a fifty thousand pages of content or whatever it is
we've got now, so so this will definitely be at
least Tuesday and Thursday of this week. It is a
it is a week long Made the fourth, Yes, yes,
that is well, it should be. So Obviously we've talked
about Star Wars a bit here on the show in
the past, whether it be a discussion of you know,

(03:23):
the question could Jupiter be blown up by the Death
Star uh, and I think the answer was probably not.
We've also talked about the Mighty Sarlac, and we also
did a weird house cinema episode on e Walks the
Battle for Indoor. But in this episode, we're gonna take
the old my monster science approach to the some of
the aliens from the Star Wars universe, you know, using

(03:45):
some sort of some bit of fantastic biology and then
using that as a way to discuss real world terrestrial
biology and finding where things line up where they don't, etcetera.
Now standard disclaimer here we are Star Wars fans, but
we are not Star Wars experts. We're probably not going
to perfectly reflect cannon or legend uh with regards to

(04:10):
the Star Wars universe with accuracy. Here. We haven't read
every scientific meditation on Star Wars, and we don't know
the extended universe perfectly. But we'll do the best we
can here and we'll have some fun with the topic.
But we fully invite you to get mad about it. Well,
there's no reason to get mad about it. This is
all too too fun. But yes, certainly, um feel free
to write in if if you have any actually, he's

(04:33):
uh to share with us regarding the creatures we're talking
about here today. Well put, all right, Well let's start
with your first selection, Joe, what did you choose from
the the vast and exotic Star Wars universe? Okay, Well,
to set the stage, the film is The Empire Strikes Back.
It's that mid movie section, the chase where han Leia,

(04:56):
Chewy and C three po are on the run from
the impure Real Fleet in the Millennium Falcon. This is
after they have evacuated the Hawth base and there are
a group of star destroyers that are chasing the Millennium
Falcon and they chase it into an asteroid field. This
was one of my favorite parts when I was a kid.
I still love it today. There's a kind of it
almost becomes like a James Bond car chase or like

(05:19):
Smokey and the Bandit where you know, they're like the
scene where the cars are zipping around, you know, through
obstacles and around traffic, but it's in space and instead
of other cars and a bunch of barrels and just
street you know, uh, tomato carts in the way and stuff.
It is asteroids and of course this is extremely dangerous.
Their space rocks crashing all around and uh, the Falcon

(05:42):
eventually manages to evade its imperial pursuers and it hides
in a cave on a large asteroid. Yeah, this is
this is a great sequence in a just a great
Star Wars film. It's one of those like out of
the frying pan into the fire moments where actually it's
like into a third frying pan or front because everyone's
gotten out of hot. You've had that tremendous battle sequence

(06:04):
with all of its ins and outs. Then you have
the asteroid field, and then what happens next is, uh,
it comes from an entirely different direction. Well, that's one
of the great things about the story structure of the
Empire Strikes Back is that you know you're cutting between
the different characters and the things they're doing. But when
you're with han Leia Chewi and c three p O,
it's just one frying pan to another. Every time they

(06:26):
get to a new place, they think that they're finally
safe now, but then they realize that the floor is
teflon and things start heating up and it's just on
to the next crisis. But in this cave we get
some creature encounters. So first the Millennium falcon is swarmed
by a flock of nasty winged creatures with ring shaped

(06:48):
sucker mouths and there they look sort of like sulfurous
leech bats. These are called minox Han and Chewy seem
to be familiar with them like that they once they
see them, Hans says, uh, my Knox, yeah, yeah, like
he talks about them like they're very common nuisance animals

(07:08):
for space travelers. He says that they're chewing on the
power cables, like yeah, that's what they always do. And
so our heroes they leave the ship, they go outside,
go down the ramp and start walking around outside with
these little oxygen masks on while they're trying to blast
the My Knox off. But then they encounter and it's
another realizing you're actually in another frying pan moment when

(07:31):
it is revealed that the cave that they're hiding in
is no cave at all. It is a giant carnivorous
worm of some kind and they have essentially parked down
its gullet, and of course there's a great escape sequence
where they have to rock it out between its closing
jaws just in time. Is the teeth are coming together? Yeah,
and it's a fabulous looking creature to this big alien

(07:53):
whlish worm monster. Yeah, one of the best, This giant
worm creature on the asteroid. It is not named in
the movie. I mean they say what the minox are.
It's like it's like it's almost as if in Star
Wars that's like saying, oh rats, we've got rats here,
we've got my knox, but they never say what this
thing is. I looked it up and some plenty of

(08:14):
the Elder of the Galaxy has given its species of designation.
It is called an exo gorth or alternately a space slug.
And Robot got some pictures attached here for you to
look at. Of course, we've seen the movie, so we
know what it looks like. It's is this giant Uh
have have to be honest and say, somewhat phallic looking
worm comes up out of the hole. It's got the

(08:36):
big jaws clamping after the ship, so it seems to
be actively wanting to eat the space ship. Uh. And
then I found another image that I think is from
one of the Marvel Star Wars comics, and it's a
panel I I really don't know the context of how
this happens, but there's a panel in a comic somewhere
where a star destroyer flies into a giant Exo Gorth's mouth.

(08:59):
That doesn't look like it's going to end well for
for anybody involved there, but something that the the the
the ex it looks like that's that's too big of
a mouthful. Yeah. Now, there's something very interesting about both
of these alien species, the Minox and the Exo gorths uh.
And it's something that I've actually thought about for a
long time. I remember having this thought, maybe not when

(09:20):
I very first saw Star Wars when I was a kid,
but at some point it occurred to me that these
are the only aliens I can think of in the
Star Wars movies that are not found on a planet,
but in outer space itself, on the barren terrain of
an asteroid with no atmosphere, living in the vacuum. These

(09:41):
are vacuum dwellers. Yeah, And I think it was that
way for a long time. Eventually, they also introduced a
creature called a purgle that came around. I think it
was introduced in Star Wars Rebels, one of the animated series,
and I have a feeling it's going to show up
in some live action stuff in the near future. But
they're like a deep space whale like organism with its

(10:02):
kind of a squid, like a combination between a space
squid and a space whale. And they're capable of entering
hyperspace even but they're kind of they have a lot
in common with the design of the Exo Gorth. They're
kind of like the noble Exo Gorth. The picture you
attached looks mad, he's got like the downturned eyebrow. He
looks like he's he's looking for a fight. Well, they

(10:25):
they explore this kind of like whale like nature where
if you're if you're not treating them right, if you're
abusing them, then yeah, they can be quite dangerous, but
if you try to understand them, then you realize that
they have this very passive and beautiful nature. Oh, I
can see that. So it's like the you know, somebody
says about the dog, like, oh, he doesn't like strangers,
but when you warm up to him, you know he's a,

(10:47):
he's a real cuddlebug. Yeah. So anyway, for this entry
of our Aliens Star Wars Alien neck Ropsy, I wanted
to to think about the idea of vacuum dwellers as
a as a proposal as a concept. Uh. Now, Star Wars,
obviously it is not hard science fiction. You know, it's
not trying to create a scientifically grounded experience. It's a fantasy.

(11:10):
And that's fine. I mean, you've got no problem at
all with with soft science fiction and space fantasy. I
love that stuff. Uh. And there are plenty of elements
in this sequence that are really nothing like what we'd
expect to find in reality. So I wanted to mention
a couple of other examples of that before we get
back to the idea of a vacuum dwelling organism and
consider the plausibility of that. One example of how this

(11:33):
doesn't really resemble reality in any recognizable way is the
idea of how dense the asteroid belt in the Empire
strikes back is how it's just crammed with rocks that
are moving really close to each other and slamming together
all the time, And how this compares to the one
example of a real asteroid belt that we know about.

(11:55):
And this is a standard feature of sci fi movies.
It's not just Empire strikes back. I mean I think
a lot of times there are space battles in an
asteroid belt that is just a mine field, this densely
packed obstacle course of of giant boulders that are going
to smash into your ship and kill you. And the
ships have to frantically dodge around through the slamming rocks
while they dog fight. Yeah, it's a great sequence, but

(12:17):
it is just um maddening just how how tired everything is,
and and it just seems like a complete nightmare that
anyone would I mean, it seems like it should be
a Butcher Cassidy and the Sundance Kid kind of moment, right,
Like why would the Thaie fighters even chase them in there?
Like how? Because how could you expect to survive unless
you were like a fourth sensitive pilot of some sort,

(12:37):
you know, or like the greatest pilot of all time,
like like a Han Solo. Yeah, they'd be crazy to
follow us, wouldn't they. And I know when I was
a kid, I pictured the asteroid belt of our Solar
system being like this, probably because of especially Empire, but
more generally movies like this that it's just you know,
it's just tight with rocks. But now we know that

(12:58):
is not the case. I was trying to find what
is the actual density of the asteroid belt in terms
of asteroids of an appreciable size. I found an explainer
about this from Scientific American that's older. It's from nine
so our our our knowledge might be a little bit
updated since then. But this, I feel like gives you
a good idea to asks several experts about this, this

(13:20):
question of the density of the asteroid belt. First of all,
there was an interesting story in it that's relayed by
Tom Garrels of the University of Arizona, who said that quote,
some scientists were seriously concerned about the possible high density
of objects in the asteroid belt, which lies between the
orbits of Mars and Jupiter, when the first robotic spacecraft

(13:41):
were scheduled to be sent through it. The first crossing
of the asteroid belt took place in the early nineteen
seventies when the Pioneer ten and Pioneer eleven spacecraft journey
to Jupiter and beyond. The danger lies not in the
risk of hitting a large object. In fact, such a
risk as minuscule because there is a tremendou this amount
of space between Mars and Jupiter, and because the objects

(14:03):
there are very small in relation. Even though there are
perhaps a million asteroids larger than one kilometer in diameter,
the chance of a spacecraft and not getting through the
asteroid belt is nearly negligible. And then there was an
updated thought that came in after that from David Morrison
of NASA AMES who said, quote, there were more than

(14:24):
a hundred thousand asteroids larger than one kilometer in diameter,
but these objects are distributed within the huge volume of
the asteroid belt. Their average spacing is several million kilometers.
Collisions are thus extremely rare. An average one kilometer asteroid
suffers one collision every few billion years, or maybe one

(14:46):
or two collisions over the lifetime of the Solar System.
The spacing is also so large that seen from one asteroid,
even the nearest one kilometer asteroid would likely be too
faint to be visible without a telescope. Uh So, yeah,
extreme distances between these objects, not because there aren't a
lot of objects. There are, but the you know, space

(15:07):
is gigantic, so the space between them is also gigantic.
If you were to fly into an asteroid belt, it's
actually unlikely you would even notice it. You probably wouldn't
see any asteroids while you were flying through it. Though,
I did think about something that could make another interesting.
I'm sure some movie has done this, but it could
make a different kind of threat of traveling through an
asteroid belt interesting. I think the more likely risk while

(15:31):
flying through an asteroid belt is not that you would
be smashed between giant space rocks while you're trying to
dodge through them, but the chance that you would hit
an invisibly tiny micro asteroid at high speed, and it
would be like a bomb because of the kinetic energy
of the impact because it's going so fast and you're
going so fast. Though I guess, of course, it would

(15:51):
depend on how fast you were going and what angle
you hit it at relative to its own trajectory. I mean,
a head on collision with a with a tiny asteroid
could be catast traffic. Yeah, but there's another thing in
the sequence that doesn't make sense if you try to
bring hard sci fi rules to it, which is the
part where they're in the cave and the minox show

(16:12):
up in that great moment where I think Leiah is
looking out the window and then suddenly the big sucker
comes down and got which I was talking to Rachel
about this earlier this morning, and she says, when she
saw that part in the theater when the Star Wars
remasters or remake, not remakes, the whatever you call him.
The remasters came out in the nineties or the earlier.

(16:33):
I guess it was the nineties. Yeah, that she just
like screamed in the theater, just like Bloody Murder screamed. Yeah,
it's startling and gross totally. It's like, it still gets
me when I watched the movie. It's very suddenly that
noise it makes. It's like when the head pops out
of the boat and Jaws, you know, when when Richard
Dreyfuss is like down in the water looking at it.
It gets you every time. But anyway, so there's yeah,

(16:57):
the minox come out, and so Han and she we
and lay a walk outside of the Millennium Falcon in
their regular clothes wearing little oxygen masks. So this is
another one of those space fantasy things, because this would
not work on a real asteroid. The vacuum would kill you.
Pretty quickly, even if you had a little oxygen mask.

(17:18):
So I found a good explainer on this. This was
also a Scientific American article. This was written by Anna
Goslin in two thousand eight. And of course, one thing
we should be clear about is that a vacuum, in
as the term is generally used, is defined as a
region of space with extremely low gas pressure. Uh. It's
sort of a conventional definition because even in outer space,

(17:41):
there's not nothing in space. You're still going to have
a few random hydrogen atoms floating around and stuff, but
it's pressure so low that it's negligible. So once you
walk out of the Millennium Falcon, once you are exposed
to the low pressure environment of a vacuum of space,
several things are going to happen pretty quickly. One is
that because of the lower pressure, gases tend to expand,

(18:06):
and this includes the gases that are trapped in your body,
trapped in your lungs. So if you're holding your breath
or inhaling, this expanding gas is going to cause trauma
in the lungs, tearing up gas exchange tissues. Also, the
low pressure will cause water to boil at a lower
temperature and in the case of a vacuum, this means

(18:27):
water boils at a temperature lower than your body temperature,
which translates to swelling in the body, rapid evaporation of
water vapor from the easiest escape roots in your body,
and primarily this will be things like the holes in
your face, like your mouth, nose, and eyes, and this
rapid boiling off of water will of course cause very

(18:49):
low temperatures around these holes in your face. I think
about the way that you know, the rapid evaporation of
water cools your body through sweat, except take that to
the extreme, like literally your tongue might freeze. And if
records of what has happened to animals that are exposed
to a vacuum or any indication, you also might simultaneously defecate, urinate,

(19:09):
and projectile vomit. Wow, So even event horizon scaled back
a little bit on what this would be like. Yes. Now,
on the other hand, sometimes movies make it look like
if you were exposed to a vacuum, you would explode,
and that doesn't seem to be true. It actually does
seem like you could survive being in a vacuum for

(19:31):
maybe a few minutes, I mean, it would depend on
a number of factors, but you could Most people could
probably survive being exposed to a vacuum for some amount
of times, like a few minutes, less than five minutes maybe,
but it would require somebody else who is not exposed
to a vacuum helping you. Because we have seen this
in in sci fi. I think that's basically what happens

(19:52):
in a event horizon. And I think the and yeah,
the Expense has has has explored this as well. Yeah,
because like one of the reasons you would need somebody
to help you is that you would you would very
rapidly lose consciousness. The low pressure would also cause bubbles
to form in your blood vessels, which would interfere with
oxygen circulation. And I think the estimate is that this

(20:13):
leads to rapid unconsciousness, probably in something like ten to
fifteen seconds after you're exposed to the vacuum, and then
so you lose consciousness, you probably collapse and it would
go on to kill you within a few minutes if
you're not repressurized. This article by Anna Gosline shares a
story of a human who actually survived vacuum exposure. So

(20:35):
I just want to read this part quote. In nineteen
sixty five, a technician inside a vacuum chamber at Johnson
Space Center in Houston accidentally depressurized his space suit by
disrupting a hose. After twelve to fifteen seconds, he lost consciousness.
He regained it at twenty seven seconds after his suit
was re pressurized to about half that of sea level.

(20:56):
The man reported that his last memory before blacking out
was of the moisture on his tongue beginning to boil,
as well as a loss of taste sensation that lingered
for four days following the incident. So all that to say,
Han Chewy and Leiah, these are experienced space travelers. They
would know better than to try to walk out into

(21:18):
the vacuum of space without a pressure suit. Now, I
want to be fair. I have seen some righteous nerds
on the Internet arguing that, well, maybe because we we
now we know from what happens later in the movie,
that actually they were not in a cave on an asteroid.
They were in the exo Gorth's gullet. And maybe the
exo Gorth's gullet creates its own pressurized atmosphere. And okay,

(21:41):
let's say I grant that. Uh. Maybe, but I thought
the whole point was that they thought they were in
a cave on an asteroid, not in the belly of
a giant worm. So it doesn't seem like they would
go outside without a pressure suit. Yeah. I mean, I
guess if maybe they're like the ship's readings were like, hey,
you don't actually need a suit to go outside in
this this weird cave, and they're like, Okay, that's fine. Cool.

(22:05):
They really wasn't thinking about it that hard, Like they
weren't asking, well, why would that be? Why would a
cave that it's supposedly open to the to the void
have these unique conditions? Um? But I guess if I
was gonna play Devil's advocate and try and like sort
of stitch everything together, I could and then maybe, yes,
maybe this giant space slug. Uh. It's it's gastric environment

(22:28):
closely mimics a terrestrial world and just you know, the
atmosphere is a little off. Um, I don't know, maybe
or maybe that's maybe that's so one of the ways
that it gets its its food right, it just waits
for spaceships to land inside its belly. And uh. And
since spaceships are hard to digest. It needs to have
an inviting environment that lures the precious meat beings out

(22:50):
of the spaceship, right, Yeah, it gets gets gets them
out there. I mean, it does have fog rolling around,
so it almost looks like you're out on the moor
once you leave spaceship. I wonder also how fog rolling
around would work in a vacuum. It doesn't seem very
vacuum like. It's almost as if they weren't really thinking
of it and in pure physical terms as a vacuum,
which would make a lot of sense. Again, because this

(23:12):
is space fantasy, I just wanted to say also, I
I found a picture on the Internet of the model
of the the giant exit Worth's teeth while it was
being created along with the I l M model maker
Lauren Peterson inside the mouth looking at it, and he
just looks just exploding with joy while chasing at the

(23:33):
teeth he has created. He kind of he also in
this picture he's got long hair and a big beard.
He almost looks like a human ewalk. Yeah. I love
looking at these old photos of these like these these
seventies guys working on these models for this, uh, for
for these films. It's pretty great. But yeah, it's pure
joy on this NaN's face. Than I wanted to come

(24:00):
back to the question that I brought up earlier about
the vacuum dwellers. When we imagine finding alien life forms,
not in space fantasy, but in reality. Of course, we
always imagine finding them on a planet, a planet with
an atmosphere. But I was wondering, is it biochemically and
evolutionarily conceivable that there could be such thing as an

(24:24):
alien dwelling directly within the void, within the you know,
the howling emptiness of space. Could there be creatures of
the vacuum? And so I was looking around trying to
find some good sources on this. I didn't come across
any like direct scientific papers, though, if any listeners know
of any that I couldn't find and want to send
in my way, please do. The best thing I came

(24:46):
across was actually an interesting BBC article from sixteen by
the science writer Philip Ball, one of my my favorite
science writers, who wrote probably the best book I've ever
read on quantum physics, which is called Beyond Weird. I
wreck commended it, uh. I think A couple of years ago,
during a summer reading episode. But in this article, Ball

(25:07):
starts off by pointing to a study published in the
journal Science by Cornelia Minair at All. Mine Air is
a professor at the University of Nice in France, and
it's a study called ribos and related sugars from ultra
violet Irradiation of Interstellar ice analogs. And so to read
from the summary from from the journal Science on this quote,

(25:30):
Astrobiologists have long speculated on the origin of prebiotic molecules
such as amino acids and sugars. Mine art at All
demonstrated that numerous prebiotic molecules can be formed in an
interstellar analog sample containing a mixture of simple ices of water, methanol,
and ammonia. They irradiated the sample with ultra violet light

(25:52):
under conditions similar to those expected during the formation of
the Solar system. This yielded a wide variety of sugars,
including ribos, a major constituent of ribonucleic acid or RNA.
And of course, as we've discussed on the show before,
RNA is one of the important, uh you know, long
organic molecules that is considered a possible precursor of the

(26:16):
original formation of life on Earth the first cell, and
of course RNA is used is used in life forms today,
it's in the cells in your body. And this is
not the only study of this kind showing that some
molecules important to the formation of a biological sphere, such
as sugars and amino acids, can be formed in space,
maybe even just on little tiny grains of ice floating

(26:39):
around in space by themselves, not on a planet at all,
that they can be formed in these types of scenarios
by radiation acting on precursor compounds. So another example would
be that um researchers for decades have have found evidence
of amino acids in meteorites that apparently these amino acids
were formed in deep space, and the Rosetta mission which

(27:01):
intercepted a comet was a comet six in space. In
the Rosetta orbiter detected the presence of the amino acid glycine,
along with methylamine and ethylamine from a spectrometry reading of
the of the comet. So it's possible that important molecules

(27:22):
and molecules that are necessary for the early stages of
chemical evolution before the formation of the first cell were
not formed on Earth, but in space and then somehow
delivered to Earth, maybe on the backs of icy comets
that smashed into the Earth's surface when the planet was young.
And of course this is all hypothetical. We still don't

(27:43):
know for sure how the first life on Earth came
to be. We actually talked about one very interesting model
of this on a recent episode, the one we did
about the Nile Inundation, where we discussed the idea that
the first cells might have been created by the presence
of pre biotic molecules like lipids and nucleic acids in
areas on the surface of the Earth that are repeatedly

(28:04):
subjected to wet dry cycles. And if you want the
details on on the reasoning behind that, you can go
back and listen to that episode. What was it called,
I believe the title we went with was the Nile
Inundation God's Water in Life, because there's a little bit
of mythology in there, but also just a lot about
the the the annual flooding of the Nile and how
it factors into the environment and the history of the region. Right,

(28:26):
So we don't know how for sure how it happened,
but the process of chemical evolution leading from those organic
molecules to the formation of the first cell, meaning a
cell capable of replication and metabolism. That's generally assumed to
have happened somewhere on Earth or in a or on
another planet like Mars maybe, and then seated to Earth

(28:47):
through some kind of collision and travel of rocks through space,
and that could be in hydrothermal vents or in puddles
or what have you. But it's usually assumed to have
happened on Earth. But Philip Ball rights quote, there is
a more intriguing possibility. Life itself might not have needed
a warm and comfortable planet bathed in sunlight to get going.

(29:08):
If the raw ingredients were already out there in interplanetary limbo.
Might life have started there too? Interesting question? And of
course there's another question, which is a follow up. If
it were possible for life to form in space rather
than on a planet, would it also be possible to
for that life to evolve into complex forms out there

(29:31):
in space? Um. Now, there are some reasons that this
does seem unlikely on its face, So a bunch of
Philip Ball's article ends up focusing on ways that alien
life forms could have the benefits of a home planet
while existing in interstellar space, and the primary idea he
explores here is life on rogue planets, meaning planets that

(29:52):
are ejected from their solar systems and float through the
interstellar void alone or maybe with some moons in tone
uh and you you might think that without a home star,
these worlds would be guaranteed to be barren, But internal
heating from residual formation heat and radioactive elements in the core,
and possible title interactions with the moons that are along

(30:15):
for the ride, this could possibly be enough to sustain
a biosphere, perhaps in an iced over ocean. But this
isn't really what we're talking about, right We're we're looking
for something that could live in space itself, or on
the surface of an asteroid exposed to the vacuum where
there's no atmosphere, no ocean, just the raw hell of
the infinite. Now and exploring this part of the article,

(30:38):
Ball notes something that I had read about before, but
I had forgotten about until I was reading this, which
is that um the astronomer Fred Hoyle, who did a
lot of important work in in twentieth century astronomy, but
now is probably best remembered in the popular consciousness for
coining the term Big Bang, which he meant as an insult,

(30:58):
like a ridicule of the theory, because he was a
supporter of the steady state theory of the universe, which
is now known to be wrong, like the the We
know that the universe is thirteen point eight billion years old,
and and we called the process of expansion leading to
the universe we know today the Big Bang. After this,
after this negative appellation from Hoyle, But anyway, Hoyle actually

(31:20):
wrote a science fiction novel that was published in nineteen
fifty nine called The Black Cloud, and supposedly it's quite good,
though I've never read it. But the premise is that
there is a giant cloud of intelligent gas that floats
around through outer space, and when it encounters Earth, it
sort of doesn't know what to make of life that

(31:42):
inhabits a planet, and it becomes a threat to us.
But Hoyle did not have a plausible theory for how
a such a sentient space gas would would come to evolve.
I think it's just a mystery in the book. But
Ball looks at this question of what the chemical basis
of space based life could be and concludes that despite
the difficulties of the environment, it seems like carbon molecules

(32:05):
are still probably the best bet for creating biology. The
most common alternative put forward to carbon based biology is
silicon and I will know that when I looked up
the the exo gorth on Wikipedia. Wikipedia tells me that
the exo go is a silicon based life form. And also,
I think that in addition to eating humans and spaceships

(32:26):
and stuff, it eats rocks, you know, eats the minerals
of asteroids. So I think it's the case it's supposed
to have like a mineral and energy diet that perhaps
occasionally supplements. But you know, another thing I was thinking
about is that, Okay, two things. I guess on one level,
it could be eat biting at a spaceship just because
it's there, or out of defense, it doesn't really want

(32:46):
to eat it, you know, in the same way that
you'll have animals in the wild that will attempt to
take a bite out of something, you know, defensively even
if it's not part of their diet. But also the
curious mouth. Yeah so, but but here's another thing. If
the inside of the the of the creature here is
essentially an ecosystem um. Is it possible that it it

(33:07):
is like grabbing things in order to sort of not
feed itself, but to supply and feed the ecosystem within it,
And then it somehow gets so much sort of residual
nutrition from that ecosystem, like it kind of has. It's
almost like a hive maintaining a um like like a
domestic crop within itself, except its domestic crop is just
like this swampy world. Oh my god. So when it

(33:30):
eats a millennium falcon, that's like it's poop yogurt, like
the probiotics stuff it's trying to supply its interior mine
ox and like the mossy organisms that line its gullet
and produce all that fog we see with some nice
power cables to chew on and and I guess presumably
humans to feast on whenever they die. Yeah, maybe it

(33:51):
feeds on swamp fog. And but it needs a you know,
a ripe swamp environment there, and occasionally, yeah, it needs
some needs some new stuff to add to the to
the genetic pool. You're so good at world building. This
is this is great a future Star Wars writers, I
hope you're taking notes. But anyway, So back to Philip
Ball's article. So he he echoes the sentiments of many

(34:11):
experts I've read who have deep familiarity with chemistry, who
generally say that carbon is just so much better at
building complex molecules than silicon. Uh, silicon really does not
seem like a very good candidate for creating life. Again,
maybe our imagination is being limited in some way, but
but it really looks like carbon is the good stuff

(34:32):
if if we're fine, if we're gonna find life elsewhere
in the universe. A lot of astrobiologists seem to think
that carbon is just the way it's going to be.
For example, Ball quotes an astrobiologist named Charles Cockle of
the University of Edinburgh who thinks that, yeah, alien life
could be very different. Maybe there's a lot that is
hard for us to imagine, but that whatever it is,

(34:53):
it's going to be carbon based, and it's going to
require water, and that this will be a universal norm
no matter what plan it or part of space you're on. Uh.
And he does he does admit quote, I have a
quite conservative view, which science generally proves is misguided. But
he he holds the view. Nonetheless, so when looking for
carbon molecules to form the precursors to life, we already

(35:16):
know that a substantial number of them can be and
are readily formed in the vacuum and in deep space.
As we mentioned already, both sugars and amino acids. We
have evidence that both of these things can be formed
outside the environment of a planet, maybe on the surface
of a comet or just an ice grain floating around
in a dust cloud in space. And of course, you know,

(35:38):
amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. These sugars
like ribos or important ingredients in forming nucleic acids. So
uh so, like this is the stuff you would need.
And typically these things are formed through simple chemical and
photochemical processes. So Ball mentions a typical chemical reaction called
Strekker synthesis that could be responsed well for the formation

(36:00):
of amino acids in space, but also that these things
can be formed by exposure of precursor chemicals to radiation,
typically ultra violet light. Now this part I thought was interesting.
Ball rights quote. It looks at first as though these
reactions should not take place in deepest space without a
source of heat or light to drive them. Molecules encountering

(36:21):
one another in frigid dark conditions do not have enough
energy to get a chemical reaction started. It's as if
they run into a barrier that is too high for
them to jump over. However, in the nineteen seventies, the
Soviet chemist Vitality golden Sky showed otherwise, some chemicals could
react even when chilled to just four degrees above absolute zero,

(36:44):
which is about as cold as space gets. They just
needed a bit of help from high energy radiation such
as gamma rays or electron beams like the cosmic rays
that whiz through all of space. And so maybe there
is some hope for for deep space stimulation of the
chemical reactions that lead to life given these types of
inputs like like gamma rays or cosmic rays. Given these

(37:08):
inputs which are possible in outer space, Goldanski found evidence
that some long chain molecules could form, such as formaldehyde
chains that are several hundred molecules long. But there's a
there's a catch. There's the downside. While space can form
these precursor molecules, the molecules encounter another problem, which is

(37:29):
continued exposure to the same radiation sources that formed them
in the first place. Ball sides uh this this guy
Charles Cockle again saying that they are just as likely
to smash molecules as they are to form them. Potential
biomolecules progenitors of proteins and RNA say, would be broken
apart faster than they were being produced. And to come

(37:51):
back to the Nile episode, this reminds me of what
we talked about in that episode with theories about the
formation of life on Earth and the role of water,
because again, water would play this stimulating and destructive role
in the in the early chemical evolution of life. Water
is a key ingredient in Earth based models of chemical evolution,
but it also easily destroys the delicate organic molecules it creates,

(38:16):
and that's one of the reasons that it's been hypothesized
that there are these wet dry cycles that Uh that
would have allowed the first cells to come together. So
ultimately that the experts that Ball consults here seem to
think it's pretty unlikely that we would see in these
really cold environments in deep space, like on the surfaces
of ice creams. Even though these precursor molecules to life

(38:39):
can be formed, it seems unlikely that these environments would
form enough complex molecules and have them survive long enough
to kick off chemical evolution and really really bring together
space based life. But I want to get into another
option in just a second here that could explain where
something like this organism comes from. But before that, I

(39:00):
was just wondering also, like, Okay, why the complex morphology
of the exo coreth Uh? You know? Complex? More So,
it's got like a body with different parts like the
animals we see on Earth. It's got a mouth with teeth,
and it's got something that looked like little eyes talks,
and it's got a head and a tail, and it's
it's very differentiated. Uh. Complex morphology arises on Earth, I

(39:21):
think as a reaction to complex environments. Right, Like if
you look at all the body parts on an animal,
these are parts that have arisen in response to different
qualities and challenges of the environment in which the animal evolved.
Animals need to I mean not all animals. I guess
there were sessile animals, but most animals that move they've

(39:42):
had these different parts because they need to move around
and do different types of things. They have different types
of predators and prey, etcetera. The asteroid in the Empire
strikes Back does not seem to me to be a
complex environment, like so if anything was living there in reality,
I feel like I could more easily imagine a sort
of map of bacteria just harvesting radiation on the surface

(40:05):
of the asteroid rather than rather than like a complex,
differentiated large animal. But that that makes me think, well,
what if these organisms didn't first evolve in space? But
this is this is sort of a transplant operation. Yeah,
this would seem to make more sense, right, Yeah, the
idea that it's it's worm shaped because this worm shape

(40:27):
that it has once served it well in a non
asteroid environment exactly. So, I think all of our listeners
now probably know about the animal I'm about to bring up,
but but it's worth revisiting the details. The mighty tarte grade,
also known as the water bearer, a truly all inspiring organism. Yeah,
they're they're absolutely incredible. Tarte Grades are animals. They're not

(40:51):
bacteria or fungus. They are animals like us. They're even
bilateral animals. They have bilateral symmetry like we do. So
they're not like sponges. But they are extremely tiny tarte
grades are ubiquitous within Earth's biosphere. You'll find them on
the highest mountain peaks, in marine caves, in moss in Antarctica.
They're basically everywhere, and as far as I can find

(41:14):
evidence of they are the only known animal that has
been documented to survive prolonged exposure to the raw vacuum
of space, and they do it apparently by taking specific
steps to avoid some of the nastiness that we talked
about earlier when we were talking about humans being exposed
to a vacuum. Now, of course one of their main

(41:35):
defense mechanisms has got to be just that they're they're
so cute, Like they imagined that one day they would
be discovered by humans, and if they were not so cute,
we would not take so kindly to to uh to
finding out that this is really their planet and we're
just on it um. But they're they're so adorable, you
you kind of don't get Earth jealous. Yeah, the what

(41:57):
was the German description that the decline uh vassa baron
the tiny water bears, yeah, or the little moss piglets
some people. Yeah, they look like across I think I've
seen somewhere described as a cross between a caterpillar and
a teddy bear. That's pretty accurate. I keep seeing them
pop up in animated shows recently. Really. Yeah. I just

(42:19):
was watching the show with the Fam and there was
a race of creatures in another world that were clearly
based on on water bears. And then there was another
cartoon we were watching where they were like futuristic mutated
water bears that live in the water and if they
get in the water, you drink the water, then they
get in your brain and start controlling you stuff like that.

(42:40):
Clearly they strike a chord. Yeah, I mean there's something
about the way they look and the way that we've
already started describing them that, um it lends itself well
to further imagination. Yeah. So about their hardiness and ability
to survive, to survive a vacuum. I was reading a
New York Times article about water bears by corn Melia Dean,

(43:01):
and this article discusses the tarte grad's ability to survive
unbelievably harsh environmental conditions. So, if a tartar grade encounters
extreme drought or sudden changes in temperature or water salinity,
or other types of environmental threats, the tartar grade can
enter a kind of hibernation state where it's metabolism throttles

(43:21):
down to zero point zero one percent of its standard rate,
so that's one ten thousand of its regular metabolism. During
this process, almost all of the water content is avoided
out of the tartar grade's body, and the tartar grade
curls up into this dehydrated shell state called a ton

(43:41):
spelled t u n so. Cornelia Deane writes, quote, tons
can be subjected to atmospheric pressure six hundred times the
surface of Earth and they will bounce right back. They
can be chilled to more than three hundred degrees fahrenheit
below zero for more than a year, no problem. The
your p and Space Agency once sent tons into space.

(44:03):
Two thirds survived simultaneous exposure to solar radiation and the
vacuum of space. This is not something that can be
said of any other animal that I know about. I
think this is the only one we're aware of, and
it really seems like this dehydration is one of the
main keys to survival in the state, because with all

(44:23):
the water evacuated, you won't get these rapid boiling and
freezing effects of water content that can occur in space
that led to some of the really gross outcomes we
were talking about earlier. In fact, the evacuation of the
water content, counterintuitively apparently even affects the Tarte grades ability
to survive exposure to extreme radiation. You wouldn't think those

(44:46):
things were correlated, but Dean writes, quote, when cosmic radiation
hits water in a cell, it produces a highly reactive
form of oxygen that damages cell d n A. The
ton doesn't have this problem. Tons have been reconstituted after
more than a century and brought back to life as
tartar grades looking not a day older. So no frozen
tongue for the tartar grade and no radiation damage either.

(45:09):
So if you're if you're looking for a candidate for
something that could possibly take hold of life in the void,
I'm not saying a tart grade could like take up
life on an asteroid. It seems like eventually it would
just like its window for life would close. But using
our imaginations here and this might be trending in the
right direction, And I want to take it a step further,
because did you know that there are probably Tarta grades

(45:30):
on the Moon not native to the Moon. I want
to be very clear, they're from Earth, but they're on
the Moon now, possibly still alive, and in this this
ton state just awaiting the possibility to get splashed with
water again. Right. So I was reading about this in
an article on vox by Brian Resnick called Tartar Grades

(45:50):
the toughest animals on Earth have crash landed on the Moon. Uh.
This was from twenty nineteen, and it covers the fact
that I think this is actually drawing from an article
that was Gulian Wired in twenty nineteen that had some
interviews with the people involved. But the short version is
that in April of nineteen, there was a lunar lander
called a Baracheet, which was scheduled to become the first

(46:12):
privately funded spacecraft ever to land on the Moon. It
was originally a competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize,
with that window had passed, but the mission was still
scheduled and it was controlled by a group called Israel
Aerospace Industries that was based out of Yehoo Di Israel,
and after landing on the surface, it was planned to

(46:32):
take some readings of the Moon's magnetism, but Unfortunately, there
was a mission failure. There was a critical computer error
I think during its descent or before, and the probe
ended up crash landing on the Moon. And so you
would think, okay, well the craft was destroyed, end of story.
But there was something on the craft. There was something

(46:52):
much of interest aboard. There was a small installation created
by a group called the arch Mission Foundation, and speaking
to Daniel Oberhouse of Wired, the group claims that they
believed their cargo may have survived the crash, and their
cargo it included several things. I mean, the idea was
they were trying to send up to the Moon a

(47:15):
record of Earth civilization that could last for billions of years.
So maybe like if humanity goes extinct and aliens ever
get to the Moon, they could find some records of
Earth from this little from this little installation on this
lunar lander. And so part of it was a library
of information that was etched onto a nickel metal disc
that had like a bunch of English Wikipedia pages and

(47:38):
some some classic books. But it also had samples of
human tissue like human blood, and it had tarte grades.
Oh man, I hope they screenshotted essentially screenshot at Wikipedia
at a time when there were no like trolley entries
at a incorrect information because there's a cut off period
there and now it's it's up there on the moon,

(47:59):
that's right. Yeah. I wonder how many uh citation needed
tags the aliens are going to run into. But to
read from Resinus article here quote, many of those tarte
grades are coated in a protective resin, much like how
amber preserves long dead mosquitoes that were once trapped in
tree sap. According to Wired, a co creator of the

(48:19):
library believes the disc survived the crash. In the best
case scenario, Barascheet ejected the Archmission Foundation's Lunar Library during
impact and it lies in one piece somewhere near the
crash site. Wired reports, so water bears on the Moon
at least potentially may maybe still viable. So I would
say this is still not super plausible if you're if

(48:42):
you're gonna be really strict about it, But to play
our hand as far as we can, I'm going to
say that I think the Exo Gorth was originally some
type of extremely hardy water bear type creature that crash
landed via spaceship on an asteroid and a heavily populated
stretch of space and somehow adapted to the new environment

(49:02):
over millions of years of evolution. I'm still not quite
sure how it survives without an atmosphere. That doesn't seem
very possible, because while the tarte grade can for a while,
it's only able to survive that through entering this cryptobiotic
state the ton uh So it's it's harder to imagine
an organism do in its life and doing full metabolism

(49:24):
while simultaneously being exposed to the vacuum um. Maybe if
the exo gorth and the my knock have some kind
of biology that allows them to live without water content,
because it seems like one of the main problems with
being exposed to the vacuum and trying to live is
that the organisms were thinking of are sort of heterogeneous
mixtures of different states of matter. They've got some gas contents,

(49:47):
some liquid content, and some solid content, and that that
just doesn't all hold together super well when exposed to
a vacuum. The low pressure messes with your liquid and
your gas contents. Plus, I mean, I can't honestly say
that it seems like the exo Gorth in the movie
is all is purged of water because I think, as
we mentioned, it's got fog and it's in its belly,

(50:07):
so yeah, it's very swampy in there. Yeah, it's not
a dry heat um. You know, it almost as a
sonotype environment. It would be interesting to see if there
was like a treatment of this where where one of
these exo Goths is actually like a vacation destination where
you you know, you go to just sweat it out.

(50:29):
But as far as I know that that does not
currently exist. Another awesome idea that man, they should hire
you to write one of these upcoming movies. I wouldn't
go that far um at any rate. The Exo go
certainly one of the cooler alien monster type species that
that we discover in the Star Wars movies, and a
great reveal as well. Always love that scene where you

(50:52):
finally see the whole thing like just you know, leaping
out of that hole in the asteroid trying to grab
the millennium falcon. I love how it bends over as
it bites. Yeah, and I guess another thing that's wonderful
about it is that it's not certainly not a cheap
creation like it has they put a lot of skill
and a lot of love into creating it. But it

(51:13):
also kind of looks like an oven mit, you know,
so it it has this, it's it's basic um body
shape is uh is a big hand puppet, you know,
but but they make it into something that is uh
you know that it goes beyond hand puppets. So I
don't know, but it's still kind of simultaneously hits both
those uh uh those frequencies For me, I love it.

(51:36):
Give me more monsters like that puppets models, uh instead
of the computer animation. Please. All right, well, I think
we have time for at least one more uh consideration
here in the episode. So for my selection for today,

(51:58):
basically I went to my son and I said, hey,
Joe and I are doing these episodes on creatures from
the Star Wars world. What should we cover? And without
any deliberation, he said, toe grout Is. He's been obsessed
with toe groot Is over the past year, often discussing
their key anatomical features, their leak wu and their mon trails. Uh,

(52:20):
just wondering aloud, what do they feel like? What do
you know? What is there? How flexible are they? What? Um,
how do they move? As the as individual toe groutes
get older and so forth, and so it was a
very popular discussion area. So I owe it to him
to consider them. Here. Now are these the creatures? These

(52:42):
are humanoid creatures, right, so they're they're like sentient humanoid,
not like some space monster. And they have a kind
of they have a biological feature that kind of looks
like a long hat or head dress. Yep, they have Yeah,
they have these, uh, these appendages on their head that
do look like head dress and certainly strike that that

(53:02):
chord when you're looking at them, and they are yeah,
so basically, yeah, that you have two different sets. So
you have the man trails and these are two large
cone like horns on the top of their head, sometimes
said to be hollow. And then you have the leaku.
These are three fleshy appendages also called head tails that

(53:22):
protrude downward, two on either side beneath the montrels, and
one behind the head. Uh. These are sometimes compared to
the head appendages of the Twilights, which I believe you're
familiar with these from Return of the Jedi, Yes, from
Jab of the Huts, little lackey guy. Yeah. But while
the leaku of the twilex uh, you know, are are

(53:46):
supposed to contribute to communication, like they have like subtle
movements that they make with them. Uh. The Leaku of
the toe Gruta seem mostly motionless, though with varying degrees
of rigidity. They might have to do with age or
environmental conditions or in many cases like what you know,
what what degree of flexibility is inherent in the makeup,

(54:07):
special effects or in the computer animations being used. You know,
this is funny because I was sort of considering picking
the Twilight actually because I was thinking about, oh, the
weird like head tails, those things, until I saw you
had picked this. So I feel like we got our
head tail bases covered. You're gonna be the Leku and
Montrale's expert here. I feel like there's a little more

(54:28):
to talk about with with the tagrudas because you have
you have these two different features going on. Yeah, so, um,
in case you don't know, you're not you don't know
offhand who I'm talking about with the dogrutas, I should
point out the two most notable togrutas in the Star
Wars galaxy, both of whom were Jedi. So there's Jedi
Masters Shocked tie UH hero general of the Clone Wars

(54:51):
and UH she fought in pivotal battles on Genosis, Camino,
and Corrassant and served as the Jedi representative on the
world of Camino. And she was killed at the close
of the Clone Wars by Darth Vader. But the even
more famous Uh toe groot of character is Jedi Commander
as Katano, hero of the Clone Wars, later a rebel operative. UH.

(55:13):
She was the padawan of Anakin Skywalker. And she was
voiced by Ashley Extein on the Clone Wars and later
played in live action by Rossario Dawson. I would say
she's not only the most beloved Star Wars character of
the modern era, but probably at this point one of
the most beloved Star Wars characters of all time. Like,
she's she's up there? Wait, why do I not know

(55:35):
this character? What does she? What does she? What properties
is she from? So she pops up in the Clone
Wars animated series. Um, the long the long run, not
the initial one. Um, you know that that was very
short form. This is the uh, the later one, the
computer animated version. Oh, I mean I like, I like

(55:55):
all the the Clone Wars animated, but but yeah, this
one was was particularly good. Enjoyed going through all that
with my son over the past years. But yeah, she's
introduced in that series early on as as Anakin's padawan,
and you follow her throughout this whole series. She kind
of grows up and then as you know, as a
as an adult. She's a character in the Rebels series,

(56:18):
and she finally popped up as a live action character
in the second season of The Mandalorian and she's gonna
have her own spin off series, etcetera. She's in all
the stuff I haven't seen, right, right, but you know,
it's just a really well fleshed out character. Um, you know,
just a strong female character and uh, an alien character

(56:38):
with a lot of depth to them. You know, so
often in the Star Wars universe where we're just focusing
on the human characters amid the aliens, and here we
have one of the aliens. Yeah, I mean, you gotta
love Han Solo, Princess Lea and all them, but we've
got enough humans. I'm gonna have some real creatures as heroes. Yeah,
So coming back to their biology, Yeah, for the most part,
they're they're very, very human, but they do have these

(57:01):
mon trials and the leeku, So what are they doing? What?
What are they for? Well, as far as the leeku go, again,
they seem to play a role in communication uh in
other species, but not so in the toegrew or they
don't seem to to move around or anything. Now, they
do seem to grow throughout their life. And there does
seem to be some degree of sexual dimorphism in that

(57:23):
they're longer in females than in males. Um. So obviously
they could have evolved to aid in mate selection to
communicate fitness to potential mates. Uh. They are quite colorful
and I cut catching after all. Uh. And you know
we see this in the wattles of various bird species
for instance. And uh, I think I think leeku are

(57:43):
quite comparable to waddles uh in other species like goats, however,
wattles or castles, as have sometimes known, are generally thought
to have no purpose. I was reading about this in
a book book by Sue Weaver titled The Goat Just
all about goats and how they work? Yea about the
parts that have no purpose? Yeah, pretty much. It seems
it seems as if wattles or tassels have no purpose.

(58:06):
So it's possible that you have this feature in this
alien humanoid species that ultimately has no purpose. But maybe
but you know, is a part of of of their
anatomy and is you know, factored into their own ideas
of beauty and representation. Now, as for the montrals, we
have a far more specific purpose in the Star Wars lore. Uh,
they allow an individual to sense the movement of objects

(58:29):
around them through echolocation and um in consens up to
eighty two feet or roughly twenty fives Now. Echolocation is
of course the location of objects by reflected sound, used
in a number of terrestrial birds and mammals, either used
in the hunting of prey or in the navigation of
their environments such as trees and caves. Um. Now, I

(58:52):
was looking around it some possible parallels, and I think
a good comparison for the to gruta might actually be
the shrew, which uses that colocation quote for habitat assessment
at close range, according to why do Shrew's twitter communication
or simple echo based orientation by Siemens at All published
in the Royal Society Biology Letters from two thousand and nine.

(59:15):
So again, this would be a situation where the shrew
or perhaps that took ruta is not using its echolocation
like say like a bat, you know, to hunt in
a you know, a nighttime environment. They would be using
it more as a way to assist in their understanding
of their immediate environment. Now, okay, so we were with
these possible echolocation horns again we're talking about the montrels

(59:39):
on the took rudas. But this actually come brings us
back to the leak of those uh those those tales
that are hanging down um because sometimes waddles are used
by organisms such as the umbrella bird to aid in
the production of sounds. So perhaps that's what's going on
with the took root as well. I don't think we

(59:59):
ever see or hear at too groot of doing this,
but I was wondering if possibly, like that's the reason
for this combination of headgear, like the leakup would have
been used at least originally to create sounds that would
aid in echolocation that was then picked up by the montrels.
Oh like you also see I think in some marine mammals,
like some of the equipment on the front of their

(01:00:21):
head is not just used for receiving the sounds, but
for producing the sounds. Yeah, so so again there's nothing.
I don't think there's anything in the shows too to
support this idea. Maybe it's somebody's written about it, uh
and gone to this this area. I'm not sure, but
I was thinking, well, okay, on one hand, maybe it's
simply out of our range of hearing as a supposedly
you know, human viewer of this space drama. Um. Or

(01:00:44):
it could have to do with the fact that the
two to grooted that we spend the most time with
our our our fourth sensitive and their Jedi trained, so
perhaps most of the time they have little use for
these um more archaic since features, but then again for sensitivity.
Would you know it would open up a new sense
realm for an individual, But I don't mean, I don't

(01:01:06):
know if that would mean you would just completely abandon
another sense realm, you know, even if it was decreased
or or partially um you know, atrophied, uh, you know,
due to evolution. Well, you know, I think about in
the very first Star Wars movie, how a large part
of what the forces shown to do is to aid
in the guidance of actions without the use of senses.

(01:01:27):
So when when Luke is training with Obi Wan Kenobi
while they're on the way to the Death Star, they
put the blast shield down on the helmet so that
he can't see the remote while he's training with it,
he's supposed to be able to tell what's there without
using his primary sense of his eyes. Same way, Um,
you know, he turns off his targeting computer when he's
aiming the proton torpedoes into the death Star. He somehow

(01:01:49):
is is abandoning or surrendering is either natural or technologically
aided senses in in almost as a kind of supplication
to the power of the force. Right, It's like you
put the blast shield down or you turn off the
targeting computer as a sign of faith. Is showing that
you you truly forsake these senses and you trust the

(01:02:09):
force totally. Well, there you go, there's there's precedent for
it after all. So anyway, it's a fun exercise I
think to you know, to look at something like that
on a on a fictional alien species that you know
it's clearly there, mostly because it looks cool, but try
to imagine what what could it have done? What what
could its purpose actually be? And again some of it
is baked into the cannon already, the idea that there

(01:02:31):
is some of these worst sense features of some sort.
But yeah, it's it's fun to then try and break
it down further and imagine exactly what they were doing
and what it would be like, uh to have uh,
those those montreles and leku um, you know, without getting
into my son's additional concerns over well, what do they
feel like? How flexible? I'm sorry, this is unacceptable. We

(01:02:51):
need an answer, Rob, What do they feel like? Oh? Well,
I mean I guess you could say, what does the
wattle of a bird or or the tassels of a goat?
What do they feel like? I guess they would be
kind of fleshy and awesome. Um yeah, the horns would
be kind of rigid. Uh yeah, And I guess it
would depend on, you know, how how old they are

(01:03:13):
and how you know, if they did they lotion? Do
they lotion? There? There they're leaku enough to keep them,
you know, uh, you know, from getting too dried out.
I don't know. It's like the self care manuals for
the tokruta. It's like, hey, you know, remember to oil
your oil your leaku don well, the Jedi tended. They
seem to take pretty good care of themselves. How often

(01:03:34):
you see like a truly scruffy Jedi, That's true. One
thing I always noticed, Obi Wan Kenobi's beard is so
well trimmed and sculpted. Yeah, I think you just have
that extra you have that extra time on your hands,
you know. Uh, you know, even as even as an
old Jedi, he took the time. Yodo was pretty scruffy, um,

(01:03:54):
especially towards the end, but he was ancient, so yeah,
he's earned it. Okay, should we call part one there?
Because we've got plenty more alien the cropsies from the
Star Wars universe to to come back and explore next time.
That's right, we have there's a more fun specimens to
discuss and to die sect. Uh So in the meantime,

(01:04:17):
we'd love to hear from everyone, what are your thoughts
on on giant Star Wars space worms and uh fleshy
appendages to alien species? Uh, you know, let us know
of anything we missed, any details uh that we're not
aware of from from Cannon or extended universe that might
uh you know, further fill in some of the holes
here and uh yeah, In the meantime, if you want

(01:04:39):
to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
such as the past episodes where we talked about the
Death Star blowing things up or or or certainly the
Mighty Star Lack, you can find them in the Stuff
to Blow your Mind podcast feed, which you can find
wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be.
We just asked the rate review and subscribe huge thanks
as always to our excellent audio produce Sir Seth Nicholas Johnson.

(01:05:01):
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