{"id":244874,"date":"2026-10-03T09:04:05","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T14:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/lewis-dartnell-on-origins-how-the-earth-shaped-human-history"},"modified":"2026-10-03T09:04:05","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T14:04:05","slug":"lewis-dartnell-on-origins-how-the-earth-shaped-human-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/lewis-dartnell-on-origins-how-the-earth-shaped-human-history","title":{"rendered":"Lewis Dartnell on Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History"},"content":{"rendered":"

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What do 75-million-year-old rocks have to do with how Americans vote?<\/p>\n

More than you\u2019d think. And that\u2019s only the opening move in my conversation with astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re children of plate tectonics,\u201d he told me. I haven\u2019t looked at a map the same way since.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

We also get into #ClimateChange and the #Anthropocene, whether we\u2019re alone in the universe, the minimum number of people you\u2019d need to colonize Mars, and why humanity, for all its rockets and #Astrobiology, still survives on eating grass.<\/p>\n

Continue reading \u201cLewis Dartnell on Origins: How the Earth Shaped Human History\u201d | ><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What do 75-million-year-old rocks have to do with how Americans vote? More than you\u2019d think. And that\u2019s 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 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1527,39,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alien-life","category-economics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}