CHANDRA WICKRAMASINGHE: Almost every ancient civilization looks to the skies
as the source for their own existence.
And I think modern science has very, very slowly
come to the same conclusion.
All the little bits and pieces that ended up with humans
and plants and animals came from the skies.
One of the most recent discoveries--
that the octopus genome, the DNA of the octopus,
suddenly arrived or emerged in the Earth's, uh,
record of fossils, uh, something like 400 million years ago,
and has DNA that is more complex than human, uh, DNA.
JOHN BRANDENBURG: The octopus has 30,000 more genome protein writing pairs
than human beings.
It's almost as if somebody's
being paid by the word to do this.
It is a remarkable animal.
Its genetics look absolutely unearthly.
It has no relationship whatsoever to the rest
of the mollusk family, snails and things like this.
An incredibly gifted predator.
And it learns very quickly.
And they've even on occasion
been thought to play pranks on their human keepers.
And they change color.
So, this is a truly remarkable creature.
It has no evolutionary bridge to anything.
TRAVIS TAYLOR: If you look at the evolution of the octopus
and compare it to creatures that are very similar
that should've been its predecessors
in its evolutionary path, like squids, for example,
the genetic makeup is quite different.
And there's one theory that suggests the reason
the octopus is so much more intelligent
and has a different genome is because
meteorites crashed into the ocean...
that may have had organic material in it,
and this organic material from these meteorites
infected or affected in some way this creature
that eventually would become the octopus.
So as we look at the evolution of Earth,
we have to recognize it's not a closed system.
It's a system that has a history of meteorites coming,
and those meteorites very likely could be coming
from other places that also had the same basic chemistry
of life being developed.
So you have to wonder whether extraterrestrials
were sending meteorites here to Earth
in order to interact with life that was already here
and-and accelerate that life
and make it more intelligent.