What do 75-million-year-old rocks have to do with how Americans vote?

More than you’d think. And that’s only the opening move in my conversation with astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell.

Lewis spends his working life searching for microbial life on Mars. In Origins, he turns the telescope around and asks a stranger question: what did our own planet do to us? His answer is uncomfortable. Much of what we call history, politics and economics was written in stone long before we showed up to take credit for it.

“We’re children of plate tectonics,” he told me. I haven’t looked at a map the same way since.

We recorded this in 2022. Rewatching it now, with #AI pitched as the thing that will finally lift us above nature, it lands very differently. Lewis also wrote The Knowledge, a manual for rebuilding civilization from scratch, so when we got to AI and consciousness, his view of what intelligence is actually for had nothing to do with benchmarks.

We also get into #ClimateChange and the #Anthropocene, whether we’re alone in the universe, the minimum number of people you’d need to colonize Mars, and why humanity, for all its rockets and #Astrobiology, still survives on eating grass.

That last line isn’t a metaphor. Or is it?

Watch or listen to the full 85-minute conversation with Lewis Dartnell here: [ https://snglrty.co/3Xs4HpO](https://snglrty.co/3Xs4HpO)

Prof. Lewis Dartnell explains how and why Earth’s geological planetary processes drove the evolution of humanity.