Explore every episode of the podcast Dr. Starkid

Could something alive on Earth survive in the ocean beneath an alien moon’s ice? Researchers tested that question by recreating some of the conditions thought to exist on Enceladus, a small moon of Saturn. The archaea they introduced survived and multiplied under some of those simulated conditions.

I wanted to understand how you even design that experiment when the ocean you’re studying is buried beneath ice. We talk through Cassini’s encounters with Enceladus’s plumes, how tidal heating keeps water liquid, and how microbes can get their energy from chemistry instead of sunlight.

I also follow this into a more speculative question: could life travel between worlds inside rocks launched by asteroid impacts? If we ever discover organisms on Enceladus, finding out whether they share an ancestor with Earth life would be incredible. There are a lot of hurdles between surviving a laboratory experiment and making that journey, and I walk through those too.

study link:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aei0167

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Relevant studies mentioned:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/2774113 - melanoma

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/fullarticle/2790089 (free version: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8943625/) - Keratinocyte carcinoma (aka Non-melanoma skin cancer)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10896812/ — The evolution of human skin coloration

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43630-026-00940-x — Blindspot: how sun exposure guidelines have ignored the health of individuals with skin of color

https://faseb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1096/fj.201701472R - Research on the protective role of melanin in black skin against UV DNA damage 

Dr. Adewole Adamson is a board-certified dermatologist and health services researcher at UT Austin’s Dell Medical School. He has co-authored systematic reviews examining UV exposure and skin cancer in people of color. I asked him to come on because his findings challenge something I’ve been told my entire life: that everybody needs sunscreen to prevent skin cancer.

UV radiation damages DNA, and its connection to skin cancer is well established in white populations. But Dr. Adamson explains that studies looking for a connection between UV exposure and melanoma in Black people largely haven’t found one. His review of other common skin cancers found no studies directly examining that question in Black populations. So why are we giving everyone the same cancer-prevention message?

We talked about melanin, the different types of skin cancer, why sunscreen wouldn’t have prevented Bob Marley’s melanoma, and the questions around vitamin D. We also discussed sunscreen’s uses for sunburn and other skin damage, and why later cancer diagnoses demand attention to healthcare access and recognition of disease on darker skin.

For me, this is also a conversation about Black people being marginalized in medicine. When the evidence differs but the advice stays the same, whose health are we actually accounting for?

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Elias 2-24b is already several times Jupiter’s mass, yet its star system is estimated to be less than a million years old. This episode follows the discovery and asks how a gas giant can grow so massive, so quickly.

We cover how astronomers use infrared and radio observations to study young planets, how they estimate ages, and why growing from tiny grains into a giant planet is a bit more complicated than it sounds. 

We also look at how an early forming giant planet can influence the future planets that are able to form around it, with connections to Jupiter, Mars, atmospheric loss, and the delivery of rock and ice in our solar system. Could the timing of planet formation help shape a system’s chances for life?

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

You might be a Martian.

In this installment of the Dr. Starkid astrobiology series, I’m making the case that life on Earth may have actually started on Mars first. This idea does not yet have scientific consensus, but there is a convincing evidence-based argument for what might be the simplest explanation for why life showed up on Earth so early.

Expect to learn about panspermia, LUCA, the origin of life, why Mars may have been chemically ready for life before Earth, how early Earth may have had too much water for some origin-of-life pathways, and how Martian rocks naturally travel to Earth.

The episode also covers wet-dry cycles, hydrothermal vents, dormant microbes, RNA world ideas, Martian meteorites, Black Beauty, ancient hydrothermal activity on Mars, atmospheric escape, the Fermi Paradox, and why searching Mars for ancient life might also mean searching for our own ancestors.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler. 

Lead with curiosity.

Momentum is a basic concept in physics: mass in motion, moving in a particular direction. But it also provides an interesting way to think about how a human life takes shape.

In this episode, Dr. Dakotah Tyler starts with the physics of momentum, inertia, conservation laws, and the strange rotations of planets like Uranus and Venus. From there, the conversation moves into biology, energy efficiency, the high metabolic cost of the human brain, learning, automaticity, and why repeated behaviors become increasingly resistant to change.

The same process can play out across an entire life. Decisions accumulate. Habits become easier. Responsibilities grow. The path you are already traveling can become increasingly difficult to leave, even when it is no longer taking you somewhere you want to go.

But that works in the other direction too.

Dr. Dakotah reflects on making his first science communication video, beginning a book while still in graduate school, and how small intentional decisions eventually accumulated into an entirely different career.

The lesson isn’t that the equations of physics literally govern our careers, relationships, or choices. It’s that momentum offers a useful way to think about them: motion matters, but so does direction.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Dr. Dakotah Tyler reflects on the lowest periods of his life, finding purpose through football, losing that identity after a knee injury, and eventually starting over academically on the path toward a PhD in astrophysics.

But the point of the story is the difference between believing in yourself and maintaining hope in yourself. You can doubt whether you’ll succeed. You can get exhausted. You can question whether the path you chose is going to work. But as long as you still have some vision of who you could become, you have a reason to keep moving.

This episode is about building a life slowly, brick by brick, rejecting the fantasy of overnight success, and refusing to abandon the person you still hope to become.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Stars do much more than light up the universe. They create the environments where planets form, provide energy to those planets, manufacture new elements through fusion, and eventually return that material to the galaxy where another generation of stars, planets, and potentially life can form.

In this episode of the Dr. Starkid astrobiology series, Dr. Dakotah Tyler explains what happens inside stars, why quantum tunneling is necessary for fusion in the Sun, and why more massive stars actually live much shorter lives despite having more fuel.

The episode also explores the astrobiological consequences of stellar lifetimes, from red dwarfs that may survive for trillions of years to massive stars that can die before their planets have enough time to fully form.

Along the way, we visit the Cambrian explosion, some of the strangest organisms in Earth’s evolutionary history, the death of massive stars, and a supernova Dr. Dakotah Tyler personally observed during graduate school.

Ultimately, the elements inside planets and living things were produced by earlier generations of stars. The atoms inside your body existed before Earth, and some of them may continue their journey long after Earth is gone.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Arian Foster is a former NFL running back who played for the Houston Texans and Miami Dolphins. He also studied philosophy and, after reaching the NFL, developed a deep interest in science, physics, and some of the biggest questions about reality.

In this conversation, expect to hear Arian and Dr. Dakotah Tyler talk about general relativity, scientific expertise, misinformation, distrust of science, “doing your own research,” and why changing your mind when new evidence appears is a feature of science rather than a weakness.

The conversation eventually moves into the Big Bang, dark energy, the possible fate of the universe, the block universe, quantum field theory, consciousness, determinism, free will, God, religion, capitalism, democracy, human nature, and the strange stories humans build to hold societies together.

They also discuss Star Trek, the Borg, whether humans may eventually merge with artificial intelligence, why Arian strongly dislikes AI replacing human creativity, and what happens when people begin outsourcing their thinking to machines.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Could an advanced civilization evolve on a planet where trees and wood never existed?

In this speculative astrobiology episode, Dr. Dakotah Tyler constructs a rocky super-Earth with stronger gravity, widespread volcanic activity, and immense crystal formations that function ecologically like forests. A six-limbed aquatic species gradually moves onto land and evolves the dexterity, spatial reasoning, memory, and problem-solving abilities needed to survive inside this dangerous three-dimensional environment.

Expect to learn why trees were so important to human evolution, why intelligent marine animals have not developed technological civilizations, and how evolution repurposes traits that originally evolved for survival. The imagined hexapods eventually learn to manipulate light, ignite fires without wood, excavate crystal cities, harness electrical properties, and develop advanced optics and astronomy.

This is not a prediction of what aliens must look like. It is a scientifically grounded world-building experiment exploring one plausible path to intelligence and civilization on a world very different from Earth.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

The Space Traders by Derrick Bell pdf: https://blog.richmond.edu/criticalracetheory/files/2019/02/The-Chronicle-of-the-Space-Traders.pdf

Derrick Bell was a civil rights lawyer and the first Black tenured professor at Harvard Law School. In his 1992 story The Space Traders, extraterrestrial visitors offer the United States enough gold and technology to erase its debt, restore the environment, and provide practically unlimited clean energy. Their price is every Black person in America.

In this episode, expect to learn how Bell imagines the offer moving through the president’s cabinet, Congress, corporate America, religious institutions, civil rights organizations, and a national vote. The story examines how political leaders can decide on an outcome first and then search the law for the precedent needed to defend it.

The conversation also covers tokenism, respectability politics, capitalism, public self-interest, the limits of legal equality, and whether the United States would make the same decision today. It ends with a larger science-fiction question: if aliens arrived, who would have the authority to speak for humanity?

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

In Part 3 of the Dr. Starkid astrobiology series, Dr. Dakotah Tyler traces the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the formation of worlds capable of supporting life.

Expect to learn about the three major lines of evidence for the Big Bang, Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background, the first stars, and how stellar explosions created the heavier elements needed to build planets.

The episode also covers planet formation, migrating gas giants, the Grand Tack model, why Mars may be so small, how Earth got some of its water, the giant impact that formed the Moon, and why icy moons such as Europa may contain oceans beneath their surfaces.

This series is adapted from astrobiology courses taught at UCLA and Pomona College.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

This is Part 2 of the Dr. StarKid astrobiology series.

Before we can talk seriously about life beyond Earth, we have to understand how humans figured out Earth was not the center of everything. This episode walks through the ideas, assumptions, observations, and arguments that moved us from ancient skywatching to modern astrophysics.

Expect to learn about ancient debates over infinite worlds, human pattern recognition, the night sky as an early scientific tool, planets as “wanderers,” retrograde motion, epicycles, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo, and Einstein’s update to gravity.

We also get into Tycho Brahe’s brass nose and drunk moose, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, why orbits work, and why this history matters for astrobiology.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

This version has the corrected audio

Tony Baker is a comedian, actor, creator, and lifelong astronomy fan who came into this conversation ready with the National Geographic space book that first got him hooked as a kid.

Expect to learn how Tony thinks about space, comedy, God, science, acting, stand-up, observation, crows, astrology, astronomy, alien life, and the absurd luck of existing at all. We talk about why comedians are professional observers, why space makes us feel small in a good way, whether intelligent life is out there, why aliens probably have not visited Earth, and why the distances between stars and galaxies are so hard to overcome.

The conversation also covers dinosaurs, mass extinctions, water worlds, Mars, Venus, Saturn, the Moon, natural disasters, whether Tony would go to space, and why humans may be the biggest threat to life on Earth.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Dr. Natasha Latouf is an astrobiologist, NASA Fellow, and PhD physicist studying how we could detect Earth-like life on nearby Earth-like planets.

Expect to learn what astrobiology actually is, how scientists search for biosignatures, why oxygen is both useful and dangerous, why UFOs and UAPs probably are not aliens, and what future telescopes may be able to detect in the atmospheres of small rocky planets.

We also talk about Dr. Latouf’s BARBIE code, K2-18b, extremophiles, Mars, Venus, viruses, whether life may be almost impossible to fully kill, and whether we might confirm alien life in our lifetime.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

Qasim Rashid is a human rights and civil rights attorney, author, advocate, and the founder of Let’s Address This. His work focuses on justice, democracy, human rights, and public discourse, but this conversation turned into a wide-ranging exploration of science, society, faith, sci-fi, and the future.

Expect to learn how an astrophysicist and a human rights attorney ended up talking about alien life, Project Hail Mary, relativity, intelligent whales, faith, the Quran and astronomy, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, space law, human rights in future space colonies, and why curiosity matters in an age of anti-intellectualism.

We also talk about The Expanse, Interstellar, Contact, The Last Question, The Space Traders, whether intelligent life might exist in our galaxy, and one biology fact about mitochondria that still blows my mind.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

June Sass is a public health scientist and microbiologist with a master’s from Johns Hopkins in molecular microbiology and immunology. Her work connects fungal biology, public health, pathogens, therapeutics, astromycology, and the microbiome. She also runs Summercraft Kombucha, where she develops mushroom kombucha and wellness drinks.

Expect to learn why fungi and bacteria are not just harmful pathogens, but also essential parts of our health, our ecosystems, and the story of life on Earth. We talk about how microbes compete, cooperate, adapt, survive extreme environments, and sometimes behave in ways that start to feel strangely intelligent.

The conversation also covers kombucha, symbiosis, NASA clean rooms, fungi in space, extremophiles, panspermia, the origin of life, alien biology, the deep ocean, antibiotics, antifungals, microbial defense systems, and the weird power of tiny life.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

This is the first installment in the astrobiology series, adapted from the astrobiology course Dr. Dakotah Tyler taught at university. Expect to learn what astrobiology actually means, why sci-fi aliens are usually too human, why UFO claims require careful assumptions, and why defining life is harder than it sounds. We cover viruses, dormant microbes, ideas as information systems, chemical possibility, life as a physical process, habitability, synthetic life and biosignatures. As always, lead with curiosity.

Dr. Dakotah Tyler sits down with Dr. Suh for a wide-ranging conversation on biomedical engineering, organs on chips, how biology behaves in space, stem cells, evolution, and human identity.

They talk about microgravity and aging, space travel, induced pluripotent stem cells, tissue engineering, animal research ethics, body odor genetics, microplastics, beauty standards, the manosphere, and what it means to deconstruct your sense of self.

Lead with curiosity.

What would alien astronomers see if they pointed an impossible telescope at Earth from millions of light-years away?

This episode uses that thought experiment to explain light travel time, relativity, time dilation, the Andromeda paradox, and the strange idea that there may be no single universal “now.” We also get into the block universe, why GPS depends on relativity, and what all of this might mean for how we think about the future.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.

This episode starts with the story behind the science: how a football injury, a lost sense of identity, and a Cosmos documentary helped send me toward astronomy and exoplanet research.

From there, we get into what my dissertation was actually about: atmospheric mass loss for close-in exoplanets. That means planets getting blasted by radiation from their stars, losing gas over time, and sometimes leaving behind clues we can detect from Earth. We talk Mars, Venus, hot Jupiters, helium escape, WASP-69b, the radius gap, young planets, and why understanding atmospheres matters for the search for life.

Lead with curiosity.

How did we go from knowing a handful of planets in our own solar system to confirming thousands of worlds around other stars?

This episode traces the story of exoplanets, from ancient “wanderers” in the night sky to the modern methods astronomers use to detect worlds we usually can’t see directly. We talk Galileo, Jupiter’s moons, hot Jupiters, pulsar planets, lava worlds, water worlds, rogue planets, Planet 9, and why the universe keeps handing us planets we never expected.

Hosted by Dr. Dakotah Tyler.

Lead with curiosity.