This Week in Space 236 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Tariq Malik [00:00:00]:
Coming up on This Week in Space, all eyes are on SpaceX as they attempt the historic Flight 15 test flight of Starship. The first double landing. Will they do it and set the stage for their future? I guess we're going to find out this weekend. And our soup du jour, what is life and how should we be looking for it? Well, Mikhail Tikhonov, Associate Professor of Physics at Washington University, chats with Rod and I about why we should be looking for energy and not water for alien life. Check it out.

Rod Pyle [00:00:37]:
This is This Week in Space, episode number 136, recorded on November 13th, 2026: Alienspotting. Hello and welcome to another episode of This Week in Space, the Alienspotting edition. Woo! I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra magazine. And I'm spotting my pal here, the master of space missives himself, Tariq Maliq. How are you, sir?

Tariq Malik [00:01:03]:
I'm doing well, Ron. I'm doing well. It's Friday the 13th. Oh, watch out, watch out. Don't walk under ladders. Watch out for black cats.

Rod Pyle [00:01:09]:
Or don't try and fly your starship.

Tariq Malik [00:01:12]:
Oh yeah, hey, you're getting ahead of it again. That's a preview.

Rod Pyle [00:01:14]:
On Friday the 13th. Sneak peek. But our guest this week, despite all that, is Dr. Mikhail Tikhonov, who's an associate professor of physics at Washington University. And here's— he's come here to speak to us about some kind of mind-bending stuff that involves the different ways you might actually spot alien life where you least expect it. But we'll let him explain that. But first, I need to explain a joke from returned jokester Tom Melton. Are you ready?

Tariq Malik [00:01:43]:
Tom! Tom! Yes, I'm ready. I'm ready. Don't explain the joke. Say the joke.

Rod Pyle [00:01:48]:
And there's no prompt and response here, so just ride it out. All right. Ceres is much bigger than the other asteroids in the asteroid belt. In fact, you might call it the World Series.

Tariq Malik [00:02:00]:
Baseball? Because it's like baseball and it's the biggest asteroid. Also a dwarf planet, Tom. It's also a dwarf planet.

Rod Pyle [00:02:09]:
Oh, fine. Go ahead and pollute the joke with that. He sent me a whole string of baseball jokes, and Tom, all apologies, but they got a little thin towards the end, so that may be the last one.

Speaker D [00:02:18]:
We have to hear another one.

Rod Pyle [00:02:21]:
I don't have it here.

Tariq Malik [00:02:23]:
Who's on first?

Rod Pyle [00:02:24]:
They're on my other computer. Haha. Now, I've heard that some folks want to put us in the penalty box when it's joke time in this show, but you can help.

Tariq Malik [00:02:31]:
The penalty box? That's not baseball.

Rod Pyle [00:02:35]:
That was— that's my knowledge of sports at work there. What is penalty box?

Tariq Malik [00:02:39]:
It's ice hockey. It's

Rod Pyle [00:02:41]:
hockey.

Speaker D [00:02:42]:
Oh, okay. Well, Jesus.

Tariq Malik [00:02:44]:
Which you can do in space, I'm sure.

Rod Pyle [00:02:46]:
The difference between a baseball and a puck. Um, fuck me. Anyway, send us your best, worst, or most indifferent space joke at twistthetwit.tv, and we'll be happy to blame it on you and torture it on the air. But first, let's go to headline news.

Tariq Malik [00:03:06]:
Headline news. I nailed it. It was, it was so perfect.

Rod Pyle [00:03:14]:
I stand in awe. So before we, we get to our lead story here, I just want to mention that today, which is Friday, November 13th, as we're recording this, is the opening day of the new display of the Space Shuttle Endeavour at the California Science Center.

Tariq Malik [00:03:31]:
NASA's baby.

Rod Pyle [00:03:32]:
If you haven't been following that, which I'm sure you have, it's the only one that's being displayed in launch configuration. When they announced this, uh, God, probably 10 years ago at this point, You know, they rolled Endeavour into this big metal shed and parked it there. And, you know, you could see it. It was very cool. You could stand underneath it. It wasn't lit very well. They didn't really have a gallery where you could go up and look down at it. So you're basically just looking up at this big thing in landing configuration, which is fine.

Rod Pyle [00:04:00]:
But we all hope they do something else. But, you know, these projects are big and expensive, and you hear the announcement and you go, yeah, sure, I'll believe it when I see it, and all that. And it was many, many tens of millions of dollars to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. I think it might be upwards of $150 million or something by the time they were done.

Tariq Malik [00:04:18]:
Took a long time.

Rod Pyle [00:04:19]:
Well, it did.

Tariq Malik [00:04:20]:
I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it like that. Yeah,

Rod Pyle [00:04:22]:
part of it was they were waiting for an external tank to arrive, which it did shortly after Endeavour showed up. And then you had to get the solid rocket boosters, and then you have to figure out all the hardware to make it stand up because that thing's heavy.

Tariq Malik [00:04:36]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:04:36]:
And they didn't— it's not like they brought in a launch gantry or a launch platform to put it on. They had to build supports for it and rig it so that people can go up and look inside it and all that. So, pretty amazing. And this, it's called the Sambell Ocean Center. I think it's O-S-C-H-I-N.

Tariq Malik [00:04:54]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:04:55]:
And he's been a donor of a bunch of big science stuff, including the remodeling of the Griffith Observatory. So, he's been— his family. Trust has been very generous.

Tariq Malik [00:05:03]:
Do you remember when that place used to just be like the Museum of Science and Technology? Do you remember?

Rod Pyle [00:05:07]:
Oh yeah, I went, like, I went to summer school there in the '60s, believe it or not, when they still had, which I bet you never saw, a ramjet engine.

Tariq Malik [00:05:18]:
Yeah, no, I, I went, I, I went there in like the '90s. So,

Rod Pyle [00:05:22]:
so they had a glass case and they had, yeah, they had all sorts of stuff, had a jet engine in it. You could push a button and it would go and the whole thing would tilt forward and you could hear it for blocks. And then they finally took it out because it was noisy. And

Tariq Malik [00:05:33]:
I, I had a—

Rod Pyle [00:05:34]:
probably was gonna blow up or something.

Tariq Malik [00:05:36]:
I bought my Buran poster from there way back when, in their tiny little gift shop. So,

Rod Pyle [00:05:41]:
Buran.

Tariq Malik [00:05:42]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:05:43]:
Uh, all right, let's move on to SpaceX has chosen Friday the 13th.

Tariq Malik [00:05:49]:
Before we, before we put a pin in it, everyone just, just, just, you know, go see the Endeavour if you can. Yeah, it's a really spectacular thing. We'll have a big piece of it on space.com in a little bit as well this weekend to mark the opening.

Rod Pyle [00:06:01]:
Oh, who's running it?

Tariq Malik [00:06:02]:
Chelsea Goat. Chelsea Goat. And you and I should go there, Rod.

Rod Pyle [00:06:05]:
I know. Together. I've got permission anytime from the PR firm. So you just let me know. We'll head on out here.

Tariq Malik [00:06:12]:
I will. Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:06:14]:
Okay. When?

Tariq Malik [00:06:15]:
I don't know. I don't know. We'll see when I win the lottery. So we're gonna talk about our big news story for the day. We got one, everybody. I mean, like, we could pick a lot. Like we talked about the Endeavour. There's a lot of other things that are also happening in space.

Tariq Malik [00:06:29]:
But there is one thing happening as we are recording this that I think everyone is waiting to see, and that is in fact the launch of SpaceX's Starship Flight 15. But Tariq, it's the 15th one. Why is it so important? You're supposed to ask that, Rod, right?

Rod Pyle [00:06:46]:
Tariq, it's the 15th one. Why is it so important?

Tariq Malik [00:06:49]:
I'm glad you asked, Rod. I'm glad you asked, because for the first time in history—

Rod Pyle [00:06:52]:
It's time, loser.

Tariq Malik [00:06:55]:
My mom says to be nicer to me, Rod. You promised.

Rod Pyle [00:06:59]:
Well, now that I've met her, I should. Okay. Sorry, Mrs. Malik. No, but, but the, the—

Tariq Malik [00:07:03]:
this is going to be the first time that SpaceX is going to try to land not just the Super Heavy booster, which they've done 3 times, and they've actually reflown one, that they've actually landed both that and the ship component. So the mission itself is going to last 22.5 hours. So that's— they launched from, from the thing, from the launch pad in Starbase, the booster comes back and it lands, and then the orbiter could orbit the Earth like 12, 14, 16 times. And then it comes back in the afternoon on Saturday as we're recording this for a landing at the same pad. So hopefully there's no issues there. And this would be not just like a big milestone for SpaceX. Their entire business model is based on this succeeding. Everything.

Tariq Malik [00:07:48]:
Because they're going to retire the Falcon 9, the workhorse, most economical, most transformative rocket, I think, in the history—

Rod Pyle [00:07:55]:
To the consternation of many.

Tariq Malik [00:07:56]:
To the con— yeah, but, and maybe to the benefit, because there's folks like Rocket Lab we heard this week is going to try to capitalize on that by raising the prices of their rockets. Another company, AST SpaceMobile, is going to build their own rocket. There's opportunity as well. But SpaceX has bet the farm on this vehicle being their catch-all for landing astronauts on the Moon for NASA with Artemis, for sending people to Mars. That was why it was announced back in 2012 by Elon Musk in Mexico at the IAC meeting. And then also for their Starlink business model to put a million satellites in orbit that are like orbiting data centers for AI, to build their, their Starlink network for tens of thousands of satellites, it all relies on them being able to, like, fly these vehicles over and over and over again. And the first part to reusability, as SpaceX has shown, is to land the rocket back down so that you can refurbish it. And so it— they do need to get it right.

Tariq Malik [00:08:57]:
Not, not, not if— not just for all of those plans, but like, if NASA wants to get to the Moon. They picked Starship, right, to go, and, and they need to show that they can make it work. And so we're all watching it. I got Josh Dinner, friend of the show, you know, a guest in the past. He's down there right now getting an inside look at the Starfactory. You know, they're, they're, they're—

Rod Pyle [00:09:17]:
Oh, I am so, so jealous.

Tariq Malik [00:09:20]:
I know. Can you— and they can't take pictures or nothing. I was like, oh, I'm so— oh, I want to be there and see.

Rod Pyle [00:09:25]:
That's what they said at Building 9. Yeah. Um, why didn't you go?

Tariq Malik [00:09:31]:
Because, uh, he was closer. Josh was closer. I don't get to go to all the fun things. I go to my fun things and it's—

Rod Pyle [00:09:37]:
Well, the last time I had an opportunity to go to a fun thing, you took it away from me. It didn't stop you then.

Tariq Malik [00:09:42]:
Remember when Rod is talking about a zero-g flight from like the aughts, everybody, from like the 2000s?

Rod Pyle [00:09:48]:
It was like 2012.

Tariq Malik [00:09:51]:
But yeah, over a decade ago. You know what? You know what, uh, Zero Gravity Corporation, if you're out there listening, like, would you like a podcast from your plane? Because Rod and I—

Rod Pyle [00:10:03]:
airplane—

Tariq Malik [00:10:04]:
Rod and I can, can, can do something there. So

Rod Pyle [00:10:07]:
they closed, didn't they?

Tariq Malik [00:10:08]:
Zero Gravity? No. Zero-G?

Rod Pyle [00:10:10]:
Yeah, I thought the plane that they used was decommissioned.

Tariq Malik [00:10:14]:
I, I think that— I think they're still selling flights, man. So I'll find out. I'll find out. Get

Rod Pyle [00:10:20]:
that in your budget.

Tariq Malik [00:10:22]:
Otherwise, we have to go to Europe. Oh no, we have to go to Europe. And fly for us.

Rod Pyle [00:10:27]:
Okay. Have you— but you haven't finished your speech.

Tariq Malik [00:10:30]:
No, no. So like, so I've got a few other things about Starship. So everyone, you know, if you're listening to this live right now, like right after the launches in the evening on Friday, it is Friday the 13th. SpaceX has not shown any tryptophobia, tryptophobia. triptodecaphobia? Anyway, about fear of Friday the 13th, because they also launched Crew-13, that mission to the space station over the summer. And, and they, you know, they kind of laughed off the 13th thing there, because it was the first crewed mission since Apollo 13, which I did not know called 13. And so I guess Expedition 13. No, that was another one.

Tariq Malik [00:11:11]:
Never mind. But— Because it's— because it's 22 and a half hours long, there is a chance that you can see the ship. This is Starship 42. They even wrote Don't Panic on it, like they did for Tesla in honor of Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There's a chance you can see that ship in orbit from the ground, like observing the International Space Station at nighttime if you have clear skies. So we've got a guide on space.com on how to do that. And then we're gonna find out what condition these are going to be in in the future, but they may not even land if things go wrong. We saw on the last flight, they lost an engine when they went to orbit for the first time on Flight 14, and they came back early instead of circling the planet, I think, 6 times.

Tariq Malik [00:11:58]:
They circled the planet, they orbited twice, and then they came back early. SpaceX has at least 3 opportunities to ditch and only 1 opportunity to land. So that landing zone target in the afternoon on Saturday is the only chance to actually catch the vehicle with the chopsticks at the launch pad and land it. Otherwise, they're going to ditch it in Hawaii.

Rod Pyle [00:12:20]:
So wait, excuse me, but you're saying they've only got one orbit during which they can grab it? Is that what you're saying?

Tariq Malik [00:12:26]:
They've got one opportunity to land. I mean, whether or not they want to go over a couple of orbits, I don't know a lot of the specifics there. But I do know that they have, after payload deployment, because they are launching 26 Starlink satellites on this operationally, like they did with the last one. They have like an out. They can reenter over Hawaii and ditch it in the sea like they did on Flight 14. That's if things aren't looking good. Maybe they lost an engine on the way up or something, and that makes them a bit squeamish to land at Starbase. You know, as we discussed before the show, there's always the potential that something goes wrong on that approach and they could damage the pad.

Tariq Malik [00:13:05]:
They can't afford that. They need those 2 towers— Right. To be in good shape. Then they can do it again off the coast of Chile, about 7 hours into the flight. And so we'll know around midnight, 1 o'clock in the morning, if they're in really good shape for landing, because the last out is about 2 hours before that landing at about 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock in the afternoon on Saturday. So it's going to be very interesting that, you know, they've got like a very slim window for the landing. And they want that. That's the whole point of this mission.

Tariq Malik [00:13:34]:
If the weather doesn't look like it's going to be good, they're probably going to delay it, right? Or wave it off. So that— because they really want that to happen. So we're waiting to see how that all goes. And I think as we are recording this right now, they don't technically have the FAA approval. But that's something that I assume is going to come in under the wire. Because the government and the FAA have made a lot of strides. Yeah, to get that.

Rod Pyle [00:13:57]:
Well, and I'd just like to add at this point, I think I was talking to one of my writers the other day, You know, between now and the end of the decade, everything SpaceX does with Starship has to go perfectly.

Tariq Malik [00:14:12]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:14:12]:
For there to be the slightest chance that they make this landing deadline instead of Blue Origin.

Tariq Malik [00:14:16]:
There's a lot of people watching this, right? It's not just SpaceX, it's not just their investors as a public company now, uh, it's not just their $2 trillion valuation that is riding on this, you know. Uh, NASA is watching. There's that, uh, uh, their customers. There's that one guy that bought a trip around Mars that wants to know when that's gonna happen, you know.

Rod Pyle [00:14:35]:
Wait, Mars?

Tariq Malik [00:14:37]:
Yeah, that cryptocurrency billionaire. Uh, uh, yeah, he, he bought one

Rod Pyle [00:14:42]:
of them.

Tariq Malik [00:14:42]:
He bought a flight around. Uh,

Rod Pyle [00:14:44]:
well, and you know, Elon will sell anything to anybody. Uh, Jammer B just writes that they do have approval as of now, apparently.

Tariq Malik [00:14:50]:
Oh, there you go. So it came in.

Rod Pyle [00:14:52]:
And, and Butch Henderson wrote in on Discord.

Tariq Malik [00:14:56]:
Butch!

Rod Pyle [00:14:57]:
The G-Force One is currently not airworthy. So there. You blew my chance forever.

Tariq Malik [00:15:02]:
Oh no, I'm so sad.

Rod Pyle [00:15:05]:
Yeah, I could tell. It's just seething out of your pores.

Tariq Malik [00:15:09]:
Oh, sometimes I have dreams of that flight. So—

Rod Pyle [00:15:13]:
That is just— that is just hard, man.

Tariq Malik [00:15:15]:
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I feel bad now. I'm sorry.

Rod Pyle [00:15:21]:
Oh yeah, it's, it's all over your face. Uh, so Did that cover everything you wanted to say about—

Tariq Malik [00:15:28]:
You know, I just, I think, I think it's gonna be interesting to see, you know, we should, we should everyone just, just, just keep an eye on that. We're gonna see where it goes. Because they have to— SpaceX has to launch a lot more of these, a lot more of these flights. They have to do refueling in space, they have to have a tanker version of Starship, they have to have a human lander version of Starship. And then I guess a crewed version that just stays in space So we haven't seen a lot of those variants, although they must be working on them because they have to get it all done in the next less than 2 years. How many? 1 year and 12 months, right? So no, that is 2 years. 1 year and 11 months to land on the Moon. But I never claimed.

Rod Pyle [00:16:15]:
Well, did I read— did I see correctly that Blue Origin has said they're backing off Orbital Reef? I

Tariq Malik [00:16:22]:
did. Yeah, there was a report in Space News this week week about that, that, that Blue Origin not, not, not backing out of Orbital Reef per se, but backing out of the Commercial Lunar Destinations, Commercial LEO Destinations program to build a private space station, which I guess if, if they internally still want to build one, that's their prerogative. But they're not trying to compete for this, this money. Meanwhile, by the way, Ars Technica, Eric Berger has a piece all about how Axiom is suing Vast because Vast included in its its paperwork, um, uh, paperwork that cited technology used, uh, on Axiom. And apparently it was because they used the same contractor who filed the same paperwork for, for Vast.

Rod Pyle [00:17:04]:
And I don't think it was specific technology. I think it was just exact phrasing.

Tariq Malik [00:17:08]:
It was a phrasing of it all that it said that they were using Axiom stuff. And so we're gonna see. Max Hout, who has been on the show, the CEO of Vast, uh, uh, came out very forcefully against that, the claim, and says that he thinks they're going to be vindicated in court. So we'll see. A lot of, a lot of stuff happening in commercial space. I mean, this is, this is like the big, the big thing, the Starship launch. But there's a lot of other things that are going on and cooking right now. It's a really weird and exciting time.

Rod Pyle [00:17:37]:
Well, and just from us to you, space industry that's dealing with CLD contracts, stop messing around with lawsuits and get on with your work. Because there's not a lot of time And, uh, you have a lot to accomplish. We got, we got 2030.

Tariq Malik [00:17:52]:
4 years, less than 4 years, right?

Rod Pyle [00:17:55]:
Yeah. So, and, and lawsuits are just so freaking counterproductive.

Tariq Malik [00:17:58]:
My, my 200-ton baby falls out of the sky into Point Nemo. We gotta have a cruise for that, man. We gotta report live from the deck of the cruise as the space station burns up in flames.

Rod Pyle [00:18:08]:
And our report will be, okay, we see a bright white light. It's getting bigger and bigger. Hey, Tariq. Yeah. Why is it not, it's not moving sideways. It's just getting bigger.

Tariq Malik [00:18:17]:
Why is it, uh, why is it getting so dark now? You know?

Rod Pyle [00:18:19]:
I don't remember my differential equations. What does that mean? And that'd be the end of it. All right, let's get on with the show. We'll be right back to talk about Alienspotting. So stay with us. And we're back with Dr. Mikhail Tikhonov, who's the Associate Professor of Physics in Arts and Sciences at Washington University. Thank you for joining us today, sir.

Tariq Malik [00:18:42]:
Welcome. Thank you for having me.

Rod Pyle [00:18:46]:
You did a paper, which I'm calling Alienspotting, which is paraphrased on my part, but basically about— which really caught our eye. It was about how are we going to know these things if we see them? So for years, I mean, especially I'm a boomer, so I grew up with old black and white movies of rubber aliens with their arms out like zombies and dripping with alien slime and all that kind of thing. But all the way up through Every Star Trek franchise, most of every Star Wars critter, they're basically bipedal rubber beings, right? Mm-hmm. And they, they look roughly like people because, at least until the digital age, they were people in rubber suits. Now with digital stuff, we can do aliens like what we saw in Project Hail Mary and so forth. But I think there's still this kind of general idea in the broader public of aliens as being creatures versus, you know, maybe some mile-long gas bag floating in the atmosphere of Jupiter or something. So, what I liked about your paper especially was the— I'm getting ahead of myself here, but sort of redefining what life is. But let's back up for a second.

Rod Pyle [00:20:01]:
Tell us about— when I spoke to you before the show briefly, This, this was kind of an outlier for you. So what's your general background and what kind of stuff do you mostly do at the university?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:20:13]:
Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, definitely an outlier. And I got to say, this definitely attracted more of broad public interest than my regular work. Yeah, I have a background in theoretical physics and I sort of now work at this interface of theoretical physics and biology, actually microbial ecology specifically. So, yeah, not very much on anything astro-related.

Rod Pyle [00:20:48]:
Okay, Tariq, your question?

Tariq Malik [00:20:49]:
Well, yeah, I guess just as— oh, I'm very curious how you got involved in that in the first place, Mikhail, because, you know, I usually ask all of our guests, what their first kind of encounter, close encounter, since we're talking about aliens and alien life on this episode, you know, was with either their interest in space or in this, in this case, you know, what drew you to this topic as an application of your, of your, your kind of biology, theoretical physics kind of mashup there? You know, what was your, your interest, you know, that really piqued in this? Is it like an interest in space that for you when you were a kid? Or was it the idea of being able to apply your field into an area that maybe we haven't really discussed how things really could go, to be ready for the unexpected there?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:21:42]:
Yeah, I think it's more the latter, but I mean, also it's a very cool subject, right? So if you feel like you have something to say that might be of relevance, then that's kind of exciting. I think like what always attracted me In just theoretical physics is, um, like, for me, theoretical physics is about asking the question, like, what else is possible? Or what might the world be like where, like, in what questions might we be limited by our imagination? Right. And that is true about a lot of questions in theoretical physics about thinking how the universe works, right? And how, you know, early stages of after Big Bang or Those who sort of study that kind of thing, which is, by the way, not my day job either. But, you know, common things that you would associate with theoretical physics is totally in this vein. And even though— so I work and interface with biology, but that's the same mindset and the same kind of approach and methodology. It's this asking, well, in what questions do we assume certain things just because it's hard to imagine things being different? Right? And so I think it's a very natural, like, connects to this question of, well, similarly, when we think about life, the things we're looking for, well, what if it's something we can't even imagine? How would we even know? Yeah, right. So that's, that's the connection, I think.

Tariq Malik [00:23:07]:
And your, your interest in physics in the first place, I mean, is that— were you always like a, like a science kid growing up, or was it something that you just discovered as like a passion as you're going through university and whatnot? Or were you a big sci-fi nut? I'm just very curious, like, where the origins of the scientists are born in folks like yourself.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:23:30]:
Yeah, I was a mathy kid. I was in a high school that's like all about math. I mean, all this interest, it's my mentors. I had an amazing teacher in physics, also in math, but like, I got especially excited about physics. And then I had a mentor in college who sort of of excited this, uh, burning passion for the mathy aspects of theoretical physics. And precisely this flavor, kind of what I just articulated, I think I just directly inherited it from, uh, from my mentor. Um, so yeah, I think, uh, it's a common story for everybody.

Tariq Malik [00:24:06]:
They have such—

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:24:06]:
excited by somebody.

Rod Pyle [00:24:09]:
So if we had looked at your bibliography before this particular paper, what kind of stuff did we see?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:24:17]:
Well, super early on, I have a couple papers related to laser physics. That was a blip. And then one foray into theoretical physics of proper electromagnetic duality on manifolds with boundaries, which is like some very mathy imagined world. And then I switched into biophysics early in grad school. And so since then, it's all about biology and genetic regulation in organisms and then microbial ecology, these ecosystems of microbes that live in us and on us and in the water and in the soils and these fascinating systems that are incredibly complex. And so we're at a loss a little bit for how to predict anything about them. And That's my world.

Rod Pyle [00:25:12]:
So, you said you got a little more notice for this one than the other papers, which doesn't surprise me given the title, at least the way it was written up in the articles I saw. But can you tell us a little bit about that before we dive into the meat of it?

Tariq Malik [00:25:23]:
Should we explain how it was announced to the world?

Rod Pyle [00:25:27]:
Go for it.

Tariq Malik [00:25:28]:
It's called How to Theoretically Spot an Alien. So, that's— I understand You know what you're talking about when you say that it grabbed some people there, but it's very fun.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:25:42]:
At WashU, we have a great media office and sort of people who work there are great. And so we sort of always, when something comes out, I sort of forward a paper there. And that was one of those that they quite liked for obvious reasons, I think. Yeah. Sorry, what was your question, Rod?

Rod Pyle [00:26:02]:
Just what kind of response you got out of that might have been out of the normal curve of responses you'd get for the kind of papers you've done before.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:26:10]:
Oh, I mean, it's just, it's a very simple idea, and so it's very easy to explain, and it excites imagination, and then also gives me a little bit of a chance to, you know, talk about what I find exciting about theoretical physics and why You know, also physicists have this reputation of, you know, barging into other fields and thinking we have things to say and to contribute. So that's also my opportunity to sort of be a little bit on the defensive there and say, hey, you know, no, it's like, it's just a cute idea.

Rod Pyle [00:26:48]:
My uncle was a physicist at Lawrence Livermore, so I know the type. Okay, that's a gross generalization, by the way, but There's a little insight there. Let's, let's jump into a quick break here and we'll be right back to hear more about your research. Stand by. So, Mikhail, I kind of set this up with, you know, aliens may not be the rubber-suited bipedal Gorns that we're used to seeing in Star Trek, but I think you handle the whole thing much more elegantly than my capsule description. So could you just kind of give us a rundown of the paper and what your primary points were so we can pick at them?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:27:23]:
Sure. Um, I also— it was, it was actually great. Uh, it's funny you mentioned movies because wasn't there some movie where the sort of to make something look very alien, they kind of used an insect but very close up, right? Because—

Rod Pyle [00:27:37]:
Oh, they've used insects and Gila monsters and God knows what else. Yeah.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:27:42]:
Because then they look so strange, but it's just kind of like change of scale. Um, yeah, so I think the question is just You know, how do we— there's one thing that we all agree about, that life kind of has to have that property, which is self-replication. So it makes more of itself. And there's some idea that once you get replication, even if it's like the simplest of bacteria, you'll get, you know, all sorts of complexity emerging just naturally through this process. But yeah, like, as we are trying— like, a lot of the ways how we're trying to detect life practically on other planets would be through, let's say, whether oxygen is present in the atmosphere. That's one of the common things we look at. And there are excellent reasons for doing that because that's one of the things where you can measure from far away, right? But kind of conceptually, There is this interesting question of, but that's the life we're looking for— oxygen, it's associated to life here on Earth. And could you imagine life using some completely different substrates or being at some different scale in a way that even if you were there, right? Like there's— what's this sci-fi book where they're on this planet and they're looking for intelligent life because they have evidence that seems like there's life here? Alien.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:29:09]:
and they're looking for this life in the ocean. And then it turned out that— Solaris, right? That the ocean— The ocean is alive. Is intelligent life, right? And that's what you get with, you know, great sci-fi writers. They can imagine something that is genuinely imaginative because by default you say, well, imagine something crazy. What could you imagine? You would imagine something familiar but very small or very large, right? This example of a You know, take an insect and blow up, and that would be so strange and unfamiliar, but that's a familiar insect. Yeah, so that's the intro, kind of, you know, the context for our motivation. But the paper is very simple. We just— so I work in this interface with ecology, so I think a lot about how organisms interact with each other, and that's one So, when we think about what makes life life, okay, it needs to have self-replication, but self-replication leaves almost no sign.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:30:08]:
Like, there's not a signature that just the self-replication process leaves. And so, but there's one other thing that is quite plausibly— maybe would be generally true about life. Maybe that's not such a strong assumption, which is that life never happens alone. And so, even if you get the process started, even just different variants, different mutants, they would form an ecology. They start interacting with each other, they partition resources somehow differently. And so maybe it's not such a strong assumption to say that if life would exist somewhere, it would probably be in the context of an ecosystem. And as soon as you have multiple species competing for resources, then you have a possibility of leaving kind of new kind of signature, which is plausibly you know, an example of this agnostic signature, which doesn't require, you know, specific assumptions that it has to be oxygen-based or something else. So in sort of simple terms, let's say that somebody brings back a rock from Mars.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:31:08]:
And so one thing that happens on Earth a lot, like in the oceans, if you look at the column of water, oxygen disappears first and then nitrate and then sulfate. So sort of various nutrients in terms of differ in their, so to speak, juiciness, how useful they are to life, how much energy can be extracted from them. And life cares about the higher energy ones first. And so that's, for example, in the columns of water on Earth, that's a— that would be a pattern you would notice. And our argument basically, and we back it up with some models, but our argument is that if you bring back a rock from Mars and in that rock you see various compounds layered in order of their energy content, then I would argue that that should be seen as a signature of, like, a biotic signature. Because I would say, hmm, that probably means that that must have been, you know, a living process that created that.

Tariq Malik [00:32:06]:
You know, I was really struck by the different— I don't know if you want to call it like a philosophy in, like, the search for life— after, you know, reading the overview of of the paper itself. Because, you know, after 20-whatever years of covering NASA, they always tell you, you know, we're gonna follow the water, we're gonna follow this habitable zone, you know, where it's— they can have liquid water and it's warm. And, you know, as you point out, it's a very kind of Earth-centric definition of what we should be looking at all. And it reminds me, Rod, a lot of like the Horta. Remember the Horta in Star Trek? Right. Where they don't know what it is. It's just like a thing. And there's like all these holes in the mines.

Tariq Malik [00:32:48]:
And it turns out that it's a whole different kind of life. And I just, it's very, I guess what I'm trying to say is this seems like a very basic approach that scientists really should have been looking at from like the beginning, right? About having like a much more broader definition of what life is. Because to me, With this follow the water thing, it was always something that was— you could see it under a microscope, but your assessment in the study of an energy transfer that replicates is a much more, I want to say, like a basic, this is what we need when you boil it down. All life has it. And I was really struck by that. And I'm just curious if that was a starting point or did you arrive— at that definition through this study, or is that something that you knew to base on so that you can then say, we're looking for this energy transfer now through consuming it, growing, and self-replicating, and then let's apply it to these different situations?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:33:55]:
Well, I certainly don't want to undersell the community here because like you said, follow the water. There's also like follow the energy, right? It's very much like recognized that sort of Processing energy is like a defining characteristic. And just the sort of little addition that we made here was, well, here's an example of what could be a measurable imprint, right, from just that, as opposed to what specific high-energy compound, right, could be used, or specifically some, you know, organic molecule of a particular type that's like judged to be too complex to be generated abiotically, because of course that's also, well, how do we know what sort of processes operate on those? You need a very good model of abiotic chemistry on that unknown world to be confident that abiotic process couldn't have given rise to it. But also, I am benefiting from the privilege of a theorist who's not actually going to try and look for that signature anywhere because that is not measurable remotely in any sense. So I find it interesting to think about as a, you know, the question is exciting enough that even just a purely theoretical way of asking it is interesting, right? Like, could there be— what are our examples of truly agnostic signatures, meaning, you know, signature of life without Assuming any specific mechanism? And that seems like a hard enough question that even if I do the theorist thing and say, let me, you know, completely separate myself from any practicalities of what's actually measurable, given that we're here and the, you know, these worlds are over there. Yeah, but if given the practicalities of the actual measurements, then of course you'd be doing, you know, looking for water and these organic compounds. As for the origin of how we got there, I mean, we were definitely thinking about just ecosystems and I honestly— the genesis, the idea is pretty old. We just sort of— I never knew what to do with it.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:36:03]:
So it was like in a drawer and then I was talking to a friend about it yet another time and the friend said, why don't you just like write this up and just this, like don't do anything else with it. Just put it out there. It's kind of fun. So that's what we did.

Rod Pyle [00:36:18]:
That's not a good one. You know, Tariq, wouldn't he be fun to have at a dinner party, say, in some high-end restaurant in Japan where you've got this spread of food that looks completely unidentifiable, but it has tentacles and suckers and teeth and fins and all kinds of stuff? And then you could have this conversation and freak everybody out. I think that would be really kind of fun. Speaking of freaking out, let's freak ourselves into a break and we'll be right back before I ask my next question. Standby. So I'm going to drag this conversation down to the hopelessly practical, and this may not even be a valid question to ask, but one of your points, as we've kind of discussed, is that, you know, while we're looking for life on other worlds, we're often saying, oh, let's go find some organic molecules because there's a good chance those were created in some kind of biological fashion. As you point out, and many others have pointed out, many of them could also be formed by Non-biological circumstances. So ignoring for a moment the idea— well, actually embracing the idea that you could be looking for critters that consume and convert energy in some form.

Rod Pyle [00:37:31]:
I'm really torturing this comment, but bear with me. If you're talking about something like the Perseverance rover, or a deep diving submarine on Europa, what then are we looking for if we're using your model instead of the traditional model? Does that question even make sense?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:37:50]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, that's— you're putting the finger on it. That's kind of literally the point, right? To try and take abstraction of any specific compounds and just define a pattern that would kind of robustly emerge through a biological process and seem unlikely abiotically for some plausible reason.

Rod Pyle [00:38:16]:
Yeah, that's exactly what I meant.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:38:18]:
Kind of unlike— so hard to explain by coincidence. And the pattern would be kind of a layering of Concept like the spatial distribution of some set of compounds that is layered in terms of their intrinsic energy content, which their intrinsic energy content is just kind of something like a binding energy of a molecule. That's a reasonably objective, uh, just property of chemistry, right? Uh, how— and that corresponds to how much energy you can get out of decomposing it into, you know, Smaller constituents. And the observation is that, like, abiotic chemistry also, they're catalyzed reactions. There's kind of natural rates of various reactions, including abiotic catalysis. But abiotic processes, you know, there's the rate at which reaction— a reaction runs, which some reactants become some product. There's the rate at which it happens, the speed of reaction, and then there's how much energy is released in the process. And these abiotically, they have no reason to be correlated because they're controlled by different parameters of the sort of the molecules.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:39:37]:
But for life, you know, you would care if you were a living process, you would care about those that give you more energy. Mm-hmm. First. And that can be, you know, in some sense of a, well, if I'm a smart organism, I would, you know, eat the juicier resource first. But it doesn't have to even invoke any sort of smartness. Just if there's more energy to be gained out of a reaction, you can turn it into more biomass and therefore more biomass will— that always running that reaction means that reaction is running faster and faster, right, compared to some other reaction which is very poor in energy yield. So biologically, as soon as you have any sort of replicating process, the juicier resources are consumed first. That's, you know, for biology, that's a natural consequence.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:40:30]:
In an abiotic context, that would have to be a coincidence if you have, you know, several of them that just happen to be ordered in order of their energy yield. So that's, that's kind of the, you know, the, the idea.

Tariq Malik [00:40:42]:
You mentioned earlier that, that, you know, the, the current state of like what, what NASA, what other folks are looking for with orbiters at Mars, with rovers, etc., uh, is based on what we can observe remotely. And I'm, I'm curious, you know, trying to define this, you know, looking for this This kind of energy relationship, looking for an ecosystem based on that, right? Because you mentioned that if it's there with like one example, it's likely part of a community. Is that something that can only be done in person, like an astronaut, etc.? Or is there a way to develop the remote tools to look for that on either a global scale or even like on our robot that we would send? And then we can We would know, like, hard and fast if that's— is that, like, the next step, I guess, is the question?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:41:40]:
Well, I'm definitely, like, rapidly getting out of a territory where I know anything about. And our whole entire point with this paper was to put it out there so that people to whom that would actually speak could actually, you know, use this for something. And, you know, if there is any possible follow-up to this that You know, if this is not entirely theoretical, then somebody would, you know, maybe use it. As far— I mean, again, with my theorist hat on, I find it fun to speculate. Of course, if it's only limited to like, you know, there are some sample return missions that people have run. And I mean, they rarely— the scale is kind of small. because— and also like the undisturbed sample is, you know, is only a pretty small time spatial scale, and there are like— there would be a couple opportunities like this to observe something. I mean, the thing I like to think about is, you know, let's say that we see some layers in the atmosphere on some, you know, remote planet.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:42:50]:
That's technically, you detectable. There's even some layering on Venus, I think, or something like that. Could it be that the entire atmosphere is alive? You know, like— Oh, I love that. Like, there's a thing that's, you know, there's some convection cells that somehow replicate and process energy, and maybe, you know, that should be considered life or something. That is very much sci-fi territory, right? But, you know, one thing I like to say, the theoretical physics is basically writing science fiction but with math, right? It's trying to extend the reach of our intuition using mathematical models as our, you know, crutch to get places where intuition doesn't work. Uh, so yeah, I don't know, why not? Would be cool.

Tariq Malik [00:43:33]:
I think that would be awesome.

Rod Pyle [00:43:35]:
Now see, Tariq, had we done better in math, his classes would be fun to go to, but for you and I, we'd just be sitting there in pain.

Tariq Malik [00:43:42]:
Can you get there without differential equations? That's the question. Like, how vital was that in your training, right?

Rod Pyle [00:43:48]:
It's probably a rhetorical question. So let's say I whip out my checkbook, Michael, and I write you a check for $2 billion. And I say, okay, here's enough money for you to send a probe to the planet of your choice with the instrumentation of your choice. What would you send and what would it be seeking?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:44:10]:
Oh,

Rod Pyle [00:44:10]:
I'm pulling you beyond the range of your paper. I apologize.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:44:13]:
I wish I had a good answer to that. The thing is, I think different— this is a place where I'm a theorist even when it comes closer to my direct field of expertise. I find it supremely fun to be working with people who design experiments and to think within the constraints of those experiments. Here's what the data— here's what data we have, what could we do with it? And I just find that a super fun puzzle and to sort of like, can we see more in these same data? And for example, I work in this field, microbial ecology, and thinking about evolution of microbial ecosystems, which is a hard problem. And I could ask even a similar question there. Like, imagine you had $1 billion, you could measure whatever you want. What would be the dataset that would really advance the field? And that is such a hard question, even for things that are right under our noses. like pretty much, I mean, literally, right? There's microbes on our skin.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:45:17]:
So I wish I had an answer to that, but I've heard that there's all this, there's this moon of a planet where there's this sub-ocean, and they're gonna send a probe that's gonna fly through the plume and collect that. I mean, that's right, there are people who literally live in the science fiction. It's amazing. So

Tariq Malik [00:45:34]:
Europa Clipper is gonna do that, or JUICE. Which one, Rod? Do you remember?

Rod Pyle [00:45:38]:
Well, Europa Clipper was supposed to. I don't remember if they finally sent that along or not, but yeah, it was supposed to scoop up the Pluto plume and put it through.

Tariq Malik [00:45:46]:
JUICE is gonna do something, Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. That's the European one. And now China is gonna land on Callisto, which is another icy moon as well. So that'll—

Rod Pyle [00:45:56]:
Oh, let's race them to Callisto. We don't want them there first. Okay, speaking of which, let's race to a break before Tariq's next compelling question. and standby.

Tariq Malik [00:46:04]:
You know, I guess, Mikhail, you know, one of the other kind of, I guess, basic questions, and I apologize if it's really simple, is what an energy signature actually is, right? Because I understand, I think from a broad sense, that because I have to, you know, live, I have to have breakfast, and then I get the energy from that. But in the terms of like looking for that as a potential sign of alien life, Is it like, uh, like, what does it mean? Like, in those layers, what is the sign of the energy then itself? Is it minerals that, that have been, I guess, ingested and excreted? Or how would you be able to pick that? It— would it be different from environment to environment, even if it's on the same planet?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:46:53]:
Yeah, that's a good question. Um, So, and that's actually an interesting thing about how— so if I think about microbes on Earth, so we have this picture of, you know, to live you need food, right? That's actually a very animal-centric perspective that we always think about one food.

Tariq Malik [00:47:19]:
Because plants don't need it. They get sunlight.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:47:22]:
No, plants also need it. But what I mean is, actually, you always need 2 compounds, and that's kind of how the metabolism works. So you need, you know, there's a word— people who think about biochemistry metabolism, they think, you know, life— there's this poetic quote about life is nothing but, you know, the journey of an electron looking for a place to rest or something like that. So there's this kind of That the way you gain energy is you take some compounds where the binding energy of the electron is kind of low and you move them to other molecules where now that energy is— that electron is closer to the atoms and therefore there's kind of— and so by moving it closer to the atom, you gain energy out of that. And you can think of that as all metabolism. So we take food, which are organic compounds, and we oxidize them against oxygen. So we breathe oxygen, and it's the combination of the food and oxygen that together allow us to generate energy that we need to, you know, to grow, to maintain ourselves. And that's the case for, you know, all our other animals.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:48:38]:
Microbes are very diverse in what they can do, so they use all sorts of pairs of compounds. And so you can read that like some microbes, they can breathe rocks. What this means is that they sort of like— they oxidize directly certain minerals that they, you know, take directly from the environment, and they use that process as the way to sort of gain their energy needs. But so all of that is to say that there is a certain objective sense in which kind of given one molecule and another molecule, you can tell from basic thermodynamics, basic physics, how much of a living could conceivably be made out of this pair of compounds.

Tariq Malik [00:49:23]:
Uh-huh.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:49:24]:
And so that's why, you know, in the ocean, that's this example that I mentioned on Earth, in the ocean water, like all bacteria need those 2 compounds that they need are called something that's a reductant and an oxidant. And so, you need to— and among oxidants, there's a certain tower of how appealing they are in terms of how much energy is there to be gained to use them as a source of oxidation. Yeah. And so, oxygen is very energy-rich. And then, there's the nitrate and sulfate and that's why in the column of ocean water, that is roughly the order in which they disappear. That's what I was referring to. And so, you know, how much energy is there in nitrate? It's not kind of quite this intuitively how you think about an energy-rich compound as, let's say, you know, oil molecule, right? But oil molecule is a molecule that can be— it's a very— it's a thing with a lot of— that can be— so oil molecule is what you would be oxidizing with one of those oxidants. And typically you burn oil, that would be using oxygen, but if you were a microbe, you could eat oil molecule and some other oxidant.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:50:38]:
And that's kind of— and so to assess that, that's, you know, basic chemistry. And

Tariq Malik [00:50:46]:
so we should be seeing chemists, biochemists, not astronauts, or I guess biochemist astronauts, biochemist robots. Something like that. So

Rod Pyle [00:50:56]:
I'm kind of moving into mind-blown territory here, but I'm gonna stick with some of my pedantic questions. So let's go back to that money I gave you for that machine, okay? So we decide we're gonna go to—

Tariq Malik [00:51:09]:
Venus, Venus, Venus.

Rod Pyle [00:51:12]:
Venus is a trailer park. Okay, Venus, fine. And we have budget for a sample return. So does this argument, this new look at ways of defining life, A, does it strengthen our argument for a sample return, and B, if so, are we just grabbing a bit of atmosphere, or are we looking for soil, are we looking for rocks, are we hoping to find, say if we're on Europa or Enceladus, a liquid? I mean, what do you bring back if you want your proof to be terrestrial?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:51:44]:
I think in sort of practical terms, Realistically, if we can bring back, you know, a rock from Venus and we'd be looking for life there, you would put that rock under a microscope and see sort of structures, right, and imprints of things. And they wouldn't be, you know, even though we wrote that paper, that wouldn't be the first thing I'd be looking for, for sure, right? Mm-hmm. If you have— again, that's That's more of a kind of playing with the theoretical idea of what if, you know, what are the chances? You can, in terms of probabilities, you have to think about what's the probability of there being life on Venus, right? But then even smaller than that, what's the probability of there being life on Venus and you making it there and you grabbing a rock and yet not seeing anything there that you would recognize as life? Hmm. But hey, there is this extra signature, right? So it generally is more of a theoretical level of excitement, right? It's just another idea for something that's an agnostic signature because, you know, naively, it's not even obvious why there should be agnostic signatures of life. Why would there be something that would be, you know, unique that we could recognize as life irrespective of what it is like, right? It's kind of It's totally possible the answer to this would be it's not possible. And there's one cool, super cool idea about chirality, which is that if once you get chemistry that somehow knows to distinguish, you know, molecules of one chirality from the other, then through self-replication that would perpetrate itself. And therefore, if you see this asymmetry between them, that sort of has to have happened through some autocatalytic cycles. That's a beautiful idea, right? And so, but there's just something in that class that seemed like that's the only thing that I know of.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:53:41]:
I mean, I'm pretty limited in my understanding of the field, and so it seemed like we have another one. But, you know, if we bring it back from a rock from Venus, if there is life there, you'd be looking for the— what are the little skeletons of things, right? Things that look like bacteria. Also, there's excellent reasons generally to think that life, even anywhere else, would quite likely be quite similar to ours. There's arguments for that that are very compelling. So that's not a reason not to find it a fun question of what if, what if it is very different, right? But I think that's really—

Tariq Malik [00:54:23]:
it would be the, the, the biggest it's not all about you, Earth, right? Kind of sign from the universe if, if we find some Some kind of rock that can feel, you know, so like from Project Hail Mary. Rocky. Yeah, like from Project Hail Mary. You know, I was really struck by your example about, like, flying clouds that are alive. You know, if we detect something like that, and I mentioned the Horta from Star Trek. There's other examples, obviously, in sci-fi. And I'm very curious as a theoretician, if you will, you know, If there's some, like, what the wildest theoretical life thing you've ever thought of, you know, could be like, what would you love to see if you put your theoretical wishlist on? And just, it would be like the most beautiful thing, you know, for me, I guess, as an example, would be like whales in Jupiter, like space whales that are all, you know, just floating around in there. You know, I think that would be crazy.

Tariq Malik [00:55:22]:
That would be awesome. To see, you know, where they light up and they talk with like lights or something like that. I don't know. I don't know. But I'm just wondering if that's something that you've ever thought about, just because it's, like you say, it's really entertaining to think about what could be possible if we take off what's recognizable filter off of our, you know, definitions for life and whatnot.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:55:43]:
I think that's a fascinating question. I've not thought about this particularly much in the context of, like, extraterrestrial life, because again, that's, you know, our one and only foray into that. But I do think that actually, I think that's— there's a kind of science that is basically that question, but applied to very different contexts of— and that's what makes science exciting in this deep way of what if something is done in a way that— like, what if something deep down is by its nature something I never thought of, right? Yeah. I couldn't have imagined, and that's what discovery is. And I find it fascinating that, you know, that's what, like, quantum mechanics, right? Or, you know, astro— like the galaxies and black holes and spacetime that's deforming, and space and time are the the same thing, right? That is the kind of thing that you're talking about, right? It's not about specifically life, but it's this kind of fascination with the fact that space and time are in some sense the same thing. And not, you know, I could write a book about it, it's kind of philosophically, you know, trying to sort of muse about and think, wouldn't it be amazing if somehow there was a sense in which that were true? And that never would have grazed the level of depth and coolness that actually, you know, relativity theory has, because it is literally true. It's not just a metaphor. And we know that, like, you know, GPS satellites, they correct for these relativistic effects because time flows slower, whatever that means, right? So yeah, I think that's why a lot of us do science, and that's the kind of questions So, I think about this in the context of microbes, even microbes in your gut, right? Maybe actually we think of them as 300 species all interacting, but maybe if we knew how to look at it the right way, maybe it's kind of 2 factions that are fighting it out, and that's the right level of description.

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:57:55]:
And we might never know until one day we discover that's the right way to look at things. And You know, because it seems so counterintuitive, but why would microbial ecology seem intuitive to me? I'm not a microbe. I can't look around and, you know, apply my intuition to these worlds. And I think it's not— no less alien than what we might discover on some other planet. If I could be a microbe and look around, that world would be absolutely crazy and cool and insane, right? We can study that right here on Earth.

Rod Pyle [00:58:28]:
Well, if you get to know Tariq better, you'll realize all his microbes are fighting, which is why he's— never mind. So, you mentioned a book. I'm visualizing a children's book you could write called Life Doesn't Look Like Mommy and Daddy Except Under Certain Circumstances or something. But, if we want to see more about this work, and I realize this paper was a one-off, But, it's so cool and you're clearly having so much fun with it. I hope you'll do more, but where would we go to see more of the things you have done and are working on? Website?

Mikhail Tikhonov [00:59:08]:
Well, that's a— I mean, in my regular life, I think about microbes, right? Yeah. But, maybe one day when I retire, I'll try to think of what sort of popular book I could write about it. Because, you know, if we succeed at any of those things we're trying to do, maybe there would be room for that. But I mean, I think microbes, you know, they sort of break our intuitions about what it means, what it means, what's an organism, right? It's such an intuitive concept that I, you know, I know it when I see it, right? Same as with life. You know, because there's a cat and clearly there's— this is this volume in space that's a cat, and what's outside is not a cat, right? And that's sort of foundational to how we think about biology and about how we think about evolution and ecology. And if I were a microbe and I lived in this densely populated— where things are attached to each other and they exchange DNA with each other— and to what extent that concept would even apply. So if we exceeded our, you know, dreams of understanding how maybe some of these concepts need to be corrected and changed when thinking about these complex communities where things are always interacting and therefore cannot be defined as being separable, you know, maybe, uh, there'll be room there for a cool— I don't know. For now, where you'd find it would be in the journals where we're trying to publish

Rod Pyle [01:00:42]:
Okay. Well, Tariq, just think about it. If we were microbes, every time we went to a conference, we'd end up sticking to each other. I don't quite know what to think about that. We're fighting. Oh, that's true. Well, we do that anyway.

Tariq Malik [01:00:53]:
That's right.

Rod Pyle [01:00:54]:
Well, I want to thank everybody for joining us today for episode 236 that we like to call Alienspotting because it's fun. Mikhail, you kind of mentioned this already, but where specifically can we look for some of the stuff you already published online?

Mikhail Tikhonov [01:01:11]:
We have a website, tikhanovgroup.org, I believe, with our publications and little write-ups about, you know, the kind of questions we are asking.

Rod Pyle [01:01:23]:
Spell your last name for us.

Mikhail Tikhonov [01:01:26]:
Yeah, Tikhanov, T-I-K-H-O-N-O-V, just the last name. group.org.

Rod Pyle [01:01:35]:
Excellent. Okay, everybody, go to fast rewind and write that down. Tariq, how about, how about your amazing work online? Yeah,

Tariq Malik [01:01:43]:
you can find it, uh, as always at space.com. You can find me on the socials as well, of course, at, uh, Tariq J. Malik. The J is important to separate me from all those other Tariq Maliks out there. Uh, and, uh, this weekend— well, I guess if you like video games, you can find me on YouTube at SpaceTronPlays. And right now, after we finish up here, you can find me watching SpaceX's Starship Flight 15, that first test flight with the landings, the double landings, 22 hours. It's gonna be a marathon, so tune in, check it out.

Rod Pyle [01:02:13]:
I want to look on Calci, or what's the other one, Poly— Polygram, Poly—

Tariq Malik [01:02:19]:
yeah,

Rod Pyle [01:02:20]:
anyway, the wagering sites, and see what the odds are.

Tariq Malik [01:02:23]:
They're saying— yeah,

Rod Pyle [01:02:24]:
well, I want to see the odds on Not just safe return of spacecraft, but whether or not the landing facilities survive. But that aside, you can always find me at pylebooks.com or at adastramagazine.com or National Space Society at nss.org. Remember, you can always drop us a line at TWiST@twit.tv. We welcome your comments, suggestions, and ideas, and space jokes. We're waiting on those. New episodes of this podcast publish every Friday on your favorite podcatcher, so make sure to subscribe, tell your friends, and give us reviews. We'll take Whatever, whatever currency reviews you want to give us, as long as it's 5 or something. And you can also follow the TWiT Tech Podcast Network @TWiT on Twitter and on Facebook and TWiTTV on Instagram.

Rod Pyle [01:03:04]:
And don't forget to join Club TWiT to show us your love. All right, we'll see you next week, everybody. Thanks, Mikhail, for joining us. This was a really fun, interesting departure from our normal stuff. Thank you. So this was great.

Tariq Malik [01:03:19]:
Thank you so much.

Rod Pyle [01:03:20]:
And thank you for putting the work into the paper, because I'm sure a couple of eyebrows went up when you suggested this. You said, I want to do it. So kudos. Thank you so much.

Rod Pyle [01:03:30]:
Goodbye, everybody.