188 | Arik Kershenbaum on What Aliens Will Be Like

188 | Arik Kershenbaum on What Aliens Will Be Like

If extraterrestrial life is out there — not just microbial slime, but big, complex, macroscopic organisms — what will they be like? Movies have trained us to think that they won't be that different at all; they'll even drink and play music at the same cafes that humans frequent. A bit of imagination, however, makes us wonder whether they won't be completely alien — we have zero data about what extraterrestrial biology could be like, so it makes sense to keep an open mind. Arik Kershenbaum argues for a judicious middle ground. He points to constraints from physics and chemistry, as well as the tendency of evolution to converge toward successful designs, as reasons to think that biologically complex aliens won't be utterly different from us after all.

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Arik Kershenbaum received his Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology from the University of Haifa. He is currently College Lecturer and Director of Studies at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens — and Ourselves.


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Episoder(427)

AMA | June 2023

AMA | June 2023

Welcome to the June 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreo...

5 Jun 20232h 58min

238 | Scott Shapiro on the Technology and Philosophy of Hacking

238 | Scott Shapiro on the Technology and Philosophy of Hacking

Modern computers are somewhat more secure against being hacked - either by an inanimate virus or a human interloper - than they used to be. But as our lives are increasingly intertwined with computers...

29 Mai 20231h 27min

237 | Brooke Harrington on Offshore Wealth as a Complex System

237 | Brooke Harrington on Offshore Wealth as a Complex System

The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people are barely aware. One of these is the offshore weal...

22 Mai 20231h 18min

236 | Thomas Hertog on Quantum Cosmology and Hawking's Final Theory

236 | Thomas Hertog on Quantum Cosmology and Hawking's Final Theory

Is there a multiverse, and if so, how should we think of ourselves within it? In many modern cosmological models, the universe includes more than one realm, with possibly different laws of physics, an...

15 Mai 20231h 8min

AMA | May 2023

AMA | May 2023

Welcome to the May 2023 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreon...

8 Mai 20233h 8min

235 | Andy Clark on the Extended and Predictive Mind

235 | Andy Clark on the Extended and Predictive Mind

What is the mind, and what does it try to do? An overly simplified materialist view might be that the mind emerges from physical processes in the brain. But you can be a materialist and still recogniz...

1 Mai 20231h 21min

234 | Tobias Warnecke on Cellular Structure and Evolution

234 | Tobias Warnecke on Cellular Structure and Evolution

Eukaryotic cells manage to pull off a number of remarkable feats. One is packing quite a long DNA molecule, with potentially billions of base pairs, into a tiny central nucleus. A key role is played b...

24 Apr 20231h 6min

233 | Hugo Mercier on Reasoning and Skepticism

233 | Hugo Mercier on Reasoning and Skepticism

Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea of not just doing things, but doing things for reas...

17 Apr 20231h 12min

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