Ep 215: Charley Lineweaver

A conversation with physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, polyglot and polymath - Charley Lineweaver. 00:00 - My introduction 08:57 - Charley’s fascinating early years 12:14 - From an English/History degree to physics 13:53 - Charley’s historic work on the Cosmic Microwave Background 17:34 - Methods of probing deep space 19:51 - Our accelerating universe 22:15 - Dark Matter Candidates 23:20 - The Fermi Problem and the “Planet of the Apes” Hypothesis 28:37 - Natural experiments in the evolution of intelligence 33:38: What can the early appearance of life on Earth tell us about aliens? 37:31: Non-intelligent alien life. 38:06: Deep homology and misconceptions about convergent biological evolution 44:31 The Shadow Biosphere 48:53 The significance of extremophiles 50:23 Does life arise from non-life easily or not? What do we know? 53:32 What is life? 55:56 A “debate” about people? 1:10:20 - The Potato Radius 1:15:00 - What Charley is working on now