I really enjoyed this! I'll be sure to take a look at Jordan's show sometime. As a science major and science person in general I'm convinced there's life all throughout the universe, including in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our solar system that we haven't discovered yet. The problem is that when people think of extraterrestrial life they immediately go to sci-fi space faring life. As far as anyone can tell, intelligent self-aware life is rare with us as the only example so far, sort of an aberration, although evidence continues to come out that there are sea creatures that are far more intelligent than people have given them credit for in the past and exploring the sea is pretty much like meeting aliens for the researchers doing that work.
There are a lot of dumbfounding things that happen out in the seas that remain unexplained, like gigantic glowing masses that immediately make you think it must simply be bio-luminescent creatures, but it would require many trillions of the known small glowing creatures we know about to create that kind of luminosity. I'm always interested in situations like that where even the most logical scientific explanations seem far-fetched, so it might be something completely new about the natural world that we haven't learned about, which gives me a super science boner.
It's surprisingly likely that life could be present right at this moment in sub-surface oceans on Jupiter's moon Europa because Jupiter's gravity causes tidal stretching that heats the planet enough to maintain a massive ocean beneath the icy surface and cause gigantic water eruptions on the surface that have been observed, and also the necessary chemicals for life are present and have natural mechanisms that circulate it from the surface down through the oceans, and there's an energy source obviously as I mentioned earlier; all the building blocks as we know them are there. If we found evidence of life in our own solar system beyond Earth it would be pretty conclusive that at the very least simple life must thrive all over the galaxy and universe because there are literally billions of systems out there that are similar to ours, so we don't appear to be that rare, structurally.
I also love indulging in ghost stories, those are the types of movies, games, folklore, and 1st hand accounts that creep me out the most. I don't believe in any afterlife, souls, or spirit energy. But there are obviously a plethora of unexplained macabre phenomena that people have been experiencing since time immemorial, and even though the majority have explanations, there's a percentage that have no explanation at all, and the same thing goes for UAPs. There have to be reasons out there we haven't discovered yet, so I like to try and find a balance between keeping an open mind and utilizing the scientific method to avoid fooling myself into believing things that aren't accurate. There are some theories in science, like parallel universe theories, that creep me out or boggle my mind because of their possible implications. In general, I always find that no matter how creative human imaginations are, mother nature is always far more inventive and weird than anything we can come up with. The actual physical universe around us that you can learn about through science is totally nuts and stupefying on its own, no mythology needed.
Look, an old fashioned stream of consciousness wall of text from yours truly! This episode was fun, it got me in the mood to ramble so hard
