back to indexSara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System | Lex Fridman Podcast #116
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The following is a conversation with Sarah Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT known
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for her work on the search for exoplanets, which are planets outside of our solar system.
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She's an author of two books on this fascinating topic, plus in a couple days, August 18th,
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her new book, a memoir called The Smallest Lights in the Universe, is coming out.
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I read it and I can recommend it highly, especially if you love space and are a bit of a romantic
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It's beautifully written.
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She weaves the stories of the tragedies and the triumphs of her life with the stories
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of her love for and research on exoplanets, which represent our hope to find life out
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there in the universe.
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Just a quick side note.
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Let me say that extraterrestrial life, aliens, I think represent our civilization longing
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to make contact with the unknown, with others like us, or maybe others that are very different
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from us, entities that might reveal something profound about why we're here.
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And now here's my conversation with Sarah Seeger.
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When did you first fall in love with the stars?
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I think I've always loved the stars.
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One of my first memory is of the moon.
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I remember watching the moon and I was in the car with my dad who my parents were divorced
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and he was driving me and my siblings to his house for the weekend and the moon was just
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Just had no idea why that was.
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So like looking up at the sky and there's this glowing thing, how do you make sense
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of the moon at that age?
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There's just no way you can.
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I think it's one of the great things about being a kid is just that curiosity that all
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You know, I was thinking because there's these almost out there ideas of that our earth is
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flat, floating about on the internet.
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And it made me think, you know, when did I first realize that the earth is like this
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ball that's flying through empty space?
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I mean, it's terrifying.
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It's awe inspiring.
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I don't know how to make sense of it.
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It's hard because we live in our frame of reference here on this planet.
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It's nearly impossible.
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None of us are lucky to go to see the curvature of earth.
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I mean, do you remember when you realized, understood like the physics, like the layout
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of the solar system?
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Was it like, did you first have to take physics to really, like high school physics to really
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I think it's hard to say.
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I had this book when I was a child.
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I grew up in Canada, where French is supposedly taught to all of us English speaking Canadians.
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And it was this book in French was about the solar system, and I just love flipping through
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It's hard to say how much, you know, you or I understand when we're kids, but it was
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really great book.
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What about the stars?
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When did you first learn about the stars?
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Like I do have this very incredible distinctive memory.
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And again, it had to do with my dad.
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He took us camping.
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Now, my dad was from the UK, and he was the type who you'd find wearing a tie on weekends.
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So camping was not in his sphere, his comfort zone.
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We had a babysitter.
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Every summer we had a babysitter, and one summer we had Tom.
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He was barely older than we were.
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My brother was 12.
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I would have been 11 or 10 maybe.
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And we went camping because Tom said camping is the thing.
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And I just remember I didn't aim to see the stars, but I walked out of my tent in the
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middle of the night, and I looked up, and wow, so many stars.
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The dark night sky and all those stars just screaming at me.
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I just couldn't believe that.
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Honestly, my first thought was, this is so incredible, mind blowing.
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Why wouldn't anyone have told me this existed?
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Can anyone else see this?
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Have you had an experience like that with anything?
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I mean, I don't know if maybe you can tell me if it's the same.
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I've had that with robots.
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There's a few robots I've met where I just fell in love with this.
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Is anyone else seeing this?
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Is anyone else seeing that here in a robot is our ability to engineer some intelligent
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beings, intelligent beings that we could love, that could love us, that we can interact with
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in some rich ways that we haven't yet discovered?
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Almost like when you get a puppy, instead of a dog, and there's this immediate bond
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and love, and on top of that, ability to engineer it, I had to just pause and hold myself.
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I imagine, I don't have kids, I imagine there's a magic to that as well, where it's a totally
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Well, yeah, the stars though, unlike kids or the puppy, it's only a good thing.
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So you felt, you weren't terrified?
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Like to me, when I look at the stars, it's almost paralyzingly scary how little we know
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about the universe, how alone we are.
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I mean, somehow it feels alone.
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I'm not sure if it's just a matter of perspective, but it feels like, wow, there's billions
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of them out there and we know nothing about them.
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And then also immediately to me, somehow mortality comes into it.
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I mean, how did that make you feel at that time?
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I think as a child without articulating it, I felt that same way.
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Just like, wow, this is terrifying.
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Like, what is this?
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What does it mean about us here?
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You're a scientist, an exo world class scientist, planetary scientist, astronomer.
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Now I'm a bit of an idiot who likes to ask silly questions.
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So some questions are a little bit in the realm of speculation, almost philosophical
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because we know so little and one of the awesome things about your work is you've actually
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put data and real science behind some of the biggest questions that we're all curious
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But nevertheless, many of the questions might be a little bit speculative.
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So on that topic, just in your sense, do you think we're alone in the universe, human
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Do you think there's life out there?
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Well, Lex, the funny thing is, is that as a scientist, I so don't even want to answer
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I will answer it though, but I just love to say, yeah, we naturally resist that because
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we want numbers and hard facts and not speculation.
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But I do love that question.
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It's a great question and it's one we all wonder about, but I have to give you the scientist
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answer first, which is we'll have the capability to answer that question soon, even starting
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How do you define soon?
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How do I define soon?
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So much happened in the last hundred years.
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And there's a difference, right, if it's 10 years or 20 years or a hundred years.
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Yeah, there's a difference in that.
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Well, soon could be a decade or two decades.
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Journalists usually don't like that or the people want like tomorrow, they want the news.
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But what it's going to take is telescopes, space telescopes, or very sophisticated ground
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or space telescopes to let us study the atmospheres of other planets far away and to look what's
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in the atmospheres and to look for water, which is needed for life as we know it, to
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look for gases that don't belong that we might attribute to life.
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So we have to do some really nitty gritty astronomy.
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So the promising way to answer this question scientifically is to look for hints of life.
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That's where like many of your ideas come in of what kind of hints might we actually
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see about this life.
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That's exactly what we need to do.
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And I like the word you chose, hint, because it's going to be a hint.
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It's not going to be a 100% yay, we found it.
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And then it will take future generations to do more careful work to hopefully even find
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a way to send a probe to these distant exoplanets and to really figure this out for us.
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I mean, we'll talk about the details.
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Those are fun, but like the back to the speculation, the zoomed out big picture is, yes, I believe
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absolutely there is life out there somewhere.
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Because the vastness of the universe is incredible.
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It's so breathtaking.
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When we look at the night sky, if you can go to that dark sky, you can see many, many
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hundred or even if you have good eyesight and you're somewhere very dark, you could
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see thousands of stars.
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But in our galaxy, we have hundreds of billions of stars and our universe has hundreds of
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billions of galaxies.
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So think about all those stars out there.
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And even if planets are rare, even if life is rare, just because the number of stars
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is so huge, things have to come together somewhere, someplace in our universe.
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So amazing to think that somebody might be looking up on another planet in a distant
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I have to interrupt your reverie and get back to, in our lifetime at least, the short term.
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We only have the nearest stars to look at.
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It's true that there are so many stars, so many hosts for planets that might have life.
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But in the practical question of will we find it, it has to be a star quite close to Earth,
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like a few light years, tens of light years, maybe hundreds of light years.
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And by the way, you've introduced me to a tool of Eyes on Exoplanets, I think that NASA
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Eyes on Exoplanets.
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It's a great software.
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You can download it.
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But anyway, can you give a sense of who our neighbors are?
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You said hundreds of light years.
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How many stars are close by?
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What's our neighborhood like?
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Are we talking about five, 10 stars that we might actually have a chance to zoom in on?
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I'm talking about maybe a dozen or two dozen stars.
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And those with planets that look suitable for us to follow up in detail.
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But one thing that's really exciting in this field is that the very nearest star to Earth
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called Proxima Centauri, it's part of the Alpha Centauri star system.
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Cool name, by the way.
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Whoever names them.
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Okay, but it sounds cooler than Proxima.
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Proxima Centauri appears to have a planet around it.
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It's about an Earth mass planet in the so called habitable zone or the Goldilocks zone
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So think about how incredible that is.
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Like out of all the stars out there, even the very nearest star has planets and has
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a planet of huge interest to us.
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So can we talk about that planet?
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What does it mean to be maybe possibly habitable?
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How does size come into play?
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How does you know what we know about gases and what kind of things are necessary for
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You know, what are the factors that you make you think that it's habitable?
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And by the way, I mean, maybe one way to talk about that is people know about the Drake
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equation, which is a very high level, almost framework to think about what is the probability
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that, correct me if I'm wrong, that there's life out there and intelligent life, I think.
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But then you have a equation named after you now, which I think nicely focuses in on the
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more achievable and interesting part of that question, which is on whether there is habitable
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planets out there or how many, I guess.
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So the funny thing is, was one time I met Frank Drake and I asked if he minded if I
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took his equation and kind of revamped it for this new field of exoplanet astronomy.
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He was totally cool with it.
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He's totally cool.
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He got total approval.
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I'm not sure if he'd actually read the stuff about my equation, but he was cool with it.
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So I just said like 15 different things, but maybe can you tell from your perspective,
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what is the Drake equation and what is, sorry, the Seager equation?
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Well, the Drake equation, as you said, it's a framework.
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It's a description of the number of civilizations out there of intelligent beings that are able
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to communicate with us by radio waves.
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So if you think of the movie Contact, you've seen Contact, right?
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We're listening in, actually.
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It's an active field of research, listening to other stars at radio wavelengths, hoping
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that some intelligent civilizations are sending us a message.
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And the Drake equation came like at the start of that whole field to put the factors down
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on paper to sort of illustrate what is involved to kind of estimating.
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And there's no real estimate or prediction of how many civilizations are out there, but
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it's a way to frame the question and show you each term that's involved.
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So I took the Drake equation and I called it a revised Drake equation and I recast it
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for the search for planets by more traditional astronomy means.
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We're looking at stars, looking for planets, looking for rocky planets, looking for planets
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that are the right temperature for life, looking for planets that might have life that outputs
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gases that we might detect in the future.
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It's the same spirit of the Drake equation.
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It's not going to give us any magic numbers.
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So I'm going to say, hey, here's exactly what's out there.
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It's meant to kind of guide, guide of where we're going.
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So the Drake equation did, I mean the initial equation proposed actual numbers for those
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The equation proposed numbers and you can still plug your own numbers in.
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And there's this really cute website that lets you for both the Drake and my revised
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equation plug in some numbers and see what you got.
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So what are, I mean, what are the variables, but maybe also what are like the critical
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So in my equation, I set out to what are the numbers of inhabited planets that show signs
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of life by way of gases in the atmosphere that can be attributed to life.
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I could just walk through the terms as far as I'm aware.
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So the first thing I say is what are the number of stars available?
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And it's not that those trillions and trillions of stars everywhere.
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It's what are available to like a specific search.
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And so for example, the MIT led NASA mission TESS is surveying the sky, looking for all
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kinds of planets, but it can also, it also has stars.
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It has about 30,000 red dwarf stars.
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So we just take a number of stars that a given survey can access.
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So that's what the number of stars is.
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Then I wanted to know what kind of stars are quiet.
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I called it fraction of those stars that is quiet.
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In the case of TESS, the way it's looking for planets is planets that transit the star.
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They go in front of the star as seen from the telescope, but it turns out that some
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stars are very active, they're variable and they brighten and dim with time and that interferes
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with our observation.
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I apologize to interrupt.
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So it's a transiting planet.
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So you're really looking for a black blob, essentially that blocks the light.
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We're looking for a black blob that blocks the light and then trying to say something
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about the size of the planet from the frequency of that black blobs appearance and the size
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of that black blob, that kind of thing.
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But let's just say that out of all the stars there are accessible to whatever telescope,
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some of them are just bad for whatever reason.
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You're not going to be able to find planets around them.
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So I need to know the fraction of those that are, that are good.
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So again, we have the number of stars, the fraction of them that we can actually find
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And by the way, is our sun one such, is our sun quiet?
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So I have actually two terms.
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One describes how quiet they are and one is if we can find a planet around that star.
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These transiting planets, for example, not all planets transit because the planet would
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have to be orbiting that star in this kind of plane as viewed from you.
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But if a star is, for example, orbiting in the plane of the sky, it will never transit.
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It will never go in front of the star.
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So in that case, we have to have a fraction that takes into account of that kind of geometric
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And hopefully, I mean, you can assume that it's uniformly distributed, hopefully.
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Yes, we can assume and there's evidence that it's uniformly distributed, yes.
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So then the next, so all of these factors so far, number of stars accessible to whatever
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telescope you're thinking about, how many stars are quiet, fraction of stars that are
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quiet, fraction that are observable, in this case for the geometric factor, those are all
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things we can measure.
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And there's one more term in the secret equation we can measure.
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I call it fraction of planets in the habitable zone.
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Because believe it or not, we have a handle on that for a certain set of stars.
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We know from our, the Kepler Space Telescope that operated for a number of years, we have
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estimates for how many planets are in the so called habitable zone of the host star
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for a certain type of star.
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So all those we have measurable.
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And then like the Drake equation itself, there are some terms we can not measure.
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And those ones, I call them FL, fraction of all those planets that have life on them.
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Because we don't know what that is.
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And FS, I called for spectroscopy, the fraction that have, we can use our telescope and instrument
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tools to look for light.
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The FS was the ones that, the planets that have life that actually gives off a gas, a
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useful gas that might accumulate in the atmosphere, so we could eventually observe it.
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How do the FL and FS interplay?
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So these are separate terms?
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So for example, you could imagine, so for example, you could imagine life, like us humans,
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we breathe out carbon dioxide.
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And our planet Earth, we already have a lot of carbon dioxide on it.
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Well, we have hundreds of parts per million, but it has a really strong signal.
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So us humans breathing out carbon dioxide, it's not helpful for any intelligent beings
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that are looking back at Earth, because there's already a lot of, there's already enough carbon
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dioxide, we're not adding to it.
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So if there is life on a planet, and it's outputting a boring gas that's not helpful
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for us to uniquely identify as being made by life versus just being there anyway, then
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So I separated those two terms out.
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Soon I think we'll have evidence that planets that can support life at least are common.
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So okay, this is such an awesome topic, I have a million questions.
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What okay, I know this is a little bit of speculation, but what's your sense about that,
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I think FS, which is like, that life would produce interesting gases that would be able
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to detect, like, is there, one, is there scientific evidence and, and second, is there some intuition
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around life producing gases with detectable hints in terms of chemistry?
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So interestingly enough, that entire question relates to, I'm going to say almost my life's
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work, the work I'm doing now and the work I'm doing for the next 20 years, and I wish
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I could give you a concrete number, like 1%, like on the worst days, it's 1%, let's say
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You know, in the best days, it's like 80%.
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And I could actually go into a lot of detail here, but I'll just give you the simplest
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So first of all, we make an assumption that like us, and our life here on Earth, life
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So we use chemistry because we eat food, we breathe air, and we have metabolism that to
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break down food to get energy to store energy, and then ultimately to use it.
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And all life here has some kind of byproduct in doing all that, some kind of waste product
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that goes into the atmosphere.
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So I like to think that life everywhere uses chemistry.
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Some people have imagined, like, let's imagine like a windmill, like mechanical energy, just
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getting energy and using it without storing it.
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And if there was life like that, it might not need to output a gas.
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So we make this basic assumption of chemistry, that's the first thing.
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The second more complicated thing that I and my team work on is what happens to the gas
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once it is produced by life, it goes into the atmosphere.
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And a lot of gas is just destroyed immediately, actually, by ultraviolet radiation or by oxygen.
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Oxygen is incredibly destructive to a lot of gases.
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So the gas can be produced by life, but it could be just completely destroyed by its
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I guess we should pause on that, that you mentioned your life's work.
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This is just the beautiful idea that it's kind of paralyzing when you look out there
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and you wonder, is there a life out there?
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It's the first paralyzing, actually, before I encountered your work, I feel like an idiot.
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But you know, it feels like there's no tool to answer that question.
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And then what you kind of provided is this cool idea that it might be possible to answer
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that by looking at the gases.
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I mean, that's a really interesting, that's a beautiful idea.
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And yeah, so we could just pause on like, that's a powerful tool, I think, to build
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the intuition around, because I was totally clueless about it.
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And that was kind of exciting.
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I mean, I'm sure there's folks probably early on in your life who were very skeptical about
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Well, maybe I'm not sure, but generally you would want to be skeptical, it's like, well,
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all these kinds of other things could generate gases, you know, all those kinds of things.
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Oh, that's so true.
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And that's a big part of this growing field is how to make sure that this gas isn't produced
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by another effect.
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But I do want to, you know, again, pausing on that and going back a bit.
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It's incredible to think, but like, at least almost 100 years ago, there's a record of
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someone talking about the idea of a gas being an indicator of life elsewhere.
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That idea was floating about somewhere.
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Yes, it was totally floating about.
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And it comes down to oxygen, which on our planet fills our atmosphere to 20% by volume.
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And you know, we rely on oxygen to breathe.
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You know, when you hear about the people in Mount Everest running out of air, they're
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really running out of oxygen, well, they're running out of oxygen because the air is getting
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thinner as they climb up the mountain.
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But without plants and bacteria, there's bacteria that also photosynthesizes and produces oxygen
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as a waste product.
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Without those, we would have virtually no oxygen.
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Our atmosphere would be devoid of oxygen.
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So yeah, if you were to analyze Earth, is oxygen the strong indicator here?
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Oxygen is a huge indicator.
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And that's what we're hoping, that there is an intelligent civilization not too far from
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here around a planet orbiting a nearby star with the kind of telescopes we're trying to
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And they're looking back at our sun and they've seen our Earth and they see oxygen.
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And they probably won't be like 100.0% sure that there's life making it.
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But if they go through all the possible scenarios, they'll be left with a pretty strong hint
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that there's life here.
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Okay, but how do you detect that type of gases that are on the planet from a distance?
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And that's going back to that, that's what people were skeptical about.
link |
When I first started working on exoplanets a long time ago, people didn't believe we
link |
would ever, ever, ever study an exoplanet atmosphere of any kind.
link |
And now dozens of them are studied.
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There's a whole field of people, hundreds of people working on exoplanet atmospheres
link |
But first there was a point where people didn't even know there was exoplanets, right?
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When was the first exoplanet detected?
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The first exoplanet around a sun like star anyway was detected in the mid 1990s.
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That was a big deal.
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Kind of vaguely remember that.
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Well, at the time it was a big deal, but it was also incredibly controversial.
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Because in exoplanets, we only had one example of a planetary system, our own solar system.
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And in our solar system, Jupiter, our big massive planet, is really far from our star.
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And this first exoplanet around a sun like star was incredibly close to its star, so
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close that people just couldn't believe it was a planet actually.
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So maybe zoom out, what the heck is an exoplanet?
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An exoplanet is our name, like is the name that we call a planet orbiting a star other
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Extrasolar, I guess is another.
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You can call it extrasolar.
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Exoplanet is simpler.
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But I think it's worth pausing to remember that each one of those stars out there in
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our night sky is a sun.
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And you know, our sun has planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc.
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And so for a long time, people have wondered, do those other stars or other suns have planets?
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And it appears that nearly every star has a planet, has a planet we call exoplanet.
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And there are thousands of known exoplanets already.
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So there's already, yeah, like, there's so many things about space that it's hard to
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put into one's brain, because it starts filling it with awe.
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So yeah, if you visualize the fact that the stars that we see in the sky aren't just stars,
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they're like, they're suns.
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And they very likely, as you're saying, would have planets around them.
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There's all these planets roaming about in this like, dimly lit darkness, with potentially
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I mean, it's just mind blowing.
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But maybe can you give a brief, like, history of discovering all the exoplanets?
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So there's no exoplanets in the 90s.
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And then there's a lot of exoplanets now.
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So how did that come about?
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How did it come about?
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Well, maybe another way to ask is, what is the methodology that was used to discover
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But I'd like to just say something else first where, so exoplanets, you know, the line
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between what is considered completely crazy.
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And what is considered mainstream research, legit, is constantly shifting.
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So before, when I started on exoplanets, it was still sketchy.
link |
Like, it wasn't considered a career, a thing, a place where you should be investing.
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And right now, now, today, it's so many people are working in this field, a good, I don't
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know, at least 1000, probably more.
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I don't know if that sounds like a lot to you, but it's a lot.
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No, it's a legitimate field of inquiry.
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Legitimate field of inquiry.
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And what's helped us is everything that's helped everyone else.
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It's software, it's computers, it's hardware.
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It's like our phones.
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You have a fantastic detector in there.
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Like, they didn't always have that.
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I don't know if you remember the so called olden days.
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We didn't have digital cameras.
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You take a film camera, you send the film away, and eventually it comes back, and then
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you see your pictures.
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And they could all be horrible.
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So yeah, I mean, digital.
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It just changed everything.
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Data changed everything.
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Yeah, and so one thing that really helped exoplanets were detectors that were very sensitive.
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Because when we're looking for the transiting planets, what we're doing is we're monitoring
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a star's brightness as a function of time.
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It's like click, taking a picture of the stars every few seconds or minutes.
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And we're measuring the brightness of a star, like every frame.
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And we're looking for a drop in brightness that's characteristic of a planet going in
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front of the star, and then finishing its so called transit.
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And to make that measurement, we have to have precise detectors.
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And the detectors that are making the measurement, can you do it from Earth?
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Are they floating about in space, like what kind of telescope?
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So on the ground, people are using telescopes, small telescopes that are almost just like
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a glorified telephoto lens.
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And they're looking at big swaths of the sky.
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And from the ground, people can find giant planets like the size of Jupiter.
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So it's about 10 to 12 times the size of Earth.
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We can find big planets, because we can reach about 1% precision.
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So not sure how technical you want to get.
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Well, how many pixels are we talking about?
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You mentioned phones, there's a bunch of megapixels, I think.
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So for exoplanets, you want to think about it as like a pixel or less than a pixel, we're
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not getting any information.
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But to be more technical, our telescope spreads the light out over many pixels, but we're
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not getting information.
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We're not tiling the planet with pixels.
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It's just like a point of light, or in most cases, we don't even see the planet itself,
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just the planet's effect on the star.
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But another thing that really helped was computers, because transiting planets are actually quite
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I mean, they don't all go in front of their star.
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And so to find transiting planets, we look at a big part of the sky at once, or we look
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at tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, or even in some cases, millions of stars at
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And so you're not going to do this by hand, going through a million stars, counting up
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So we have computer software and computer code that does the job for us and counts the
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brightness and looks for a signal that could be due to a transiting planet.
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And I just finished a job called Deputy Science Director for the MIT led NASA mission test.
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And it was my purview to make sure that we got the planet candidates, the transiting
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light curves, out to the community so people could follow them up and figure out if they're
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actual planets or false positives.
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So publish the data so that people could just, all the data scientists out there could crunch
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and see if they can discover something.
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They can discover something.
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And in fact, the NASA policy for this mission is that all the data becomes public as soon
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It's not as easy as it sounds, though, to download the data and look for planets.
link |
But there is a group called PlanetHunters.org, and they take the data and they actually crowdsource
link |
it out to people to look for planets.
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And they often find signals that our computers and our team missed.
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So we mentioned exoplanets.
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What about Earth like, or I don't know what the right distinction is, is it habitable
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or is it Earth like planets, but what are those different categories and how can we
link |
tell the difference and detect each?
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So we're not at Earth like planets yet.
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All the planets we're finding are so different from what we have in our solar system.
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They're just easier planets to find, but like...
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For example, there could be a Jupiter sized planet where an Earth should be.
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We find planets that are the same size as Earth, but are orbiting way closer to their
link |
star than Mercury is to our sun.
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They're so close that, because close to a star means they also orbit faster.
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And some of these hot super Earths we call them, their year, their time to go around
link |
their star is less than a day.
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And they're heated so much by their star, they're heated so much by the star.
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We think the surface is hot enough to melt rock.
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So instead of running out by the bay or the river, you'll have like liquid lava.
link |
There'll be liquid lava lakes on these planets, we think.
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And life can't survive.
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The molecules needed for life just wouldn't be able to survive those temperatures.
link |
We have some other planets.
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One of the most mysterious things out there, factoid, if you will, is that the most common
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type of planet we know about so far is a planet that's in between Earth and Neptune size.
link |
It's two to three times the size of Earth.
link |
And we have no solar system counterpart of that planet.
link |
That is like going outside to the forest and finding some kind of creature or animal that
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just no one has ever seen before and then discovering that is the most common thing
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And so we're not even sure what they are.
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We have a lot of thoughts as to the different types of planet it could be, but people don't
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I mean, what are your thoughts about what it could be?
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Well, one thought, and this is more when we want to be rather than might be, is that these
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so called mini Neptunes, we call them, that they are water worlds, that they could be
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scaled up versions of Jupiter's icy moons, such that they are planets that are made of
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more than half of water by mass.
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And what's the connection between water and life and the possibility of seeing that from
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a gas perspective?
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Okay, so all life on Earth needs liquid water.
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And so there's been this idea in astronomy or astrobiology for a long time called follow
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the water, find water, that will give you a chance of finding life, but we could still
link |
zoom out and the community consensus is that we need some kind of liquid for life to originate
link |
and to survive because molecules have to react.
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You don't have a way that molecules can interact with each other.
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You can't really make anything.
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And so when we think of all the liquids out there, water is the most abundant liquid in
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terms of planetary materials.
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There really aren't that many liquids.
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Like I mentioned, liquid rock, way too hot for life.
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We have some really cold liquids, like almost gasoline, like ethane and methane lakes that
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have been found on one of Saturn's moons, Titan.
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That's so cold though.
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And for exoplanets, we can't study really cold planets because they're just simply too
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dark and too cold.
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So we usually are just left with looking for planets with liquid water.
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And to your point, remember as we talked about how planets are less than a pixel in that
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way to say, so we can't see oceans on planet.
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We're not going to see continents and oceans, not yet anyway, but we can see gases in the
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And if it's a small rocky planet, and this is going into some more detail, if we see
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a small rocky planet with water vapor in the atmosphere, we're pretty sure that means there
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has to be a liquid water reservoir because it's not intuitive in any way, but water is
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broken up by ultraviolet radiation from the star or from the sun.
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And on most planets when water is broken up into H and O, the H, the hydrogen will escape
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Because just like when you think of a child letting go of a helium filled balloon, it
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floats upwards and hydrogen is a light gas and will leave from the planet.
link |
So ultimately if you have water, unless there's an ocean, like a way to keep replenishing
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water vapor in the atmosphere, that water vapor should be destroyed by ultraviolet radiation.
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Got it, so there's a, okay, so there's a need for liquid, I mean, I guess it was water.
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Is water essential or are the liquids, I mean, the chemistry here is probably super complicated.
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It does, but you know, there's not an infinite number of liquids.
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There's maybe like five liquids that can exist inside or on the surface of a planet.
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And water is the one that exists for the largest range of temperatures and pressures.
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And it's also the easiest type of planet for us to find and study is one with water vapor
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rather than a cold planet that has ethane and methane lakes.
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What's your personal, in terms of solar systems and planets that you're most hopeful about
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in terms of our closest neighbors that you kind of have a sense that there might be somebody
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living over there, whether it's bacteria or somebody that looks like us.
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I'm hopeful that every star nearby has a planet.
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That has some life.
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Because it almost has to for us to make progress.
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We have to have that dream condition.
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So the dream condition is like life is just super abundant out there.
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Yeah, the dream, yes, the dream condition is that life is super abundant and it's based
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on the thought that if there is a planet with water and continents, that it also has the
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ingredients for life and that the kind of base kernel thought is that if the ingredients
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for life is there, life will form.
link |
That's what we're holding on to.
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With a relatively high probability.
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Okay, let's go into land of speculation.
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What about intelligent life?
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Us humans consider ourselves intelligent, surprisingly or unsurprisingly.
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Do you think about from your perspective of looking at planets from a gas composition
link |
perspective and in general of how we might see intelligent life and your intuition about
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whether that life is even out there?
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I think the life is out there somewhere.
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The huge numbers of stars and planets.
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I like to think that life had a chance to evolve to be intelligent.
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I'm not convinced the life is anywhere near here, only because if it's hard for intelligent
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life to evolve, then it will be far away by definition.
link |
Well, the sad thing is maybe from the artificial intelligence perspective is it makes me sad
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there might be intelligent life out there that we're just not like the pathways of evolution
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can go in all these different directions where we might not be able to communicate with it
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or even know that or even detect its intelligence or even comprehend its intelligence.
link |
I'm convinced cats are more intelligent than humans that we're just not able to comprehend
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the measures, the proper measures of their intelligence.
link |
My dog is so funny.
link |
He's a golden doodle.
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We joke that he's either a really dumb dog and sorry, he's not here to defend himself,
link |
but he's either really dumb or he's a super genius just pretending to be dumb.
link |
And it's possible he's a multidimensional projection of alien life here monitoring one
link |
of the top scientists in the world trying to find aliens just to make sure that humans
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don't get out of hand.
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Oh, I'm definitely going to go in and ask him about that when I get home.
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She's onto something.
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What might we look for in terms of signs of intelligent life?
link |
From your toolkit, do you think there are things that we might be able to use or maybe
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in the next couple of decades discover that would be different than life that's like bacteria,
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that's primitive life?
link |
I still love SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
link |
I like to hope that if there is a civilization out there, they're trying to send us a message.
link |
I think, like, think about it, I don't know.
link |
What are your thoughts?
link |
Like, if you think about our Earth, there's no structure we've built that intelligent
link |
civilizations could see from far away.
link |
There's literally nothing, not even the Great Wall of China.
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And so to think, like, why would this other civilization build a giant structure that
link |
Yeah, so with SETI, the idea is that we're both trying to hear signals and send signals,
link |
Well, we haven't sent one.
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They call that METI, messaging.
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And there's a big kind of fear over METI, because do you want to tell them you're here?
link |
It's kind of this, like, let's wait till they call us.
link |
It's like a dating game, you have to, like, how many days do I wait before I call, kind
link |
But the funny thing is, if no one's sending us a message, if everybody's only listening,
link |
how do you make progress?
link |
And, I mean, but there's also, there's the Voyager spacecraft that we have these little
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pixels of robots flying out all over the place.
link |
Some of them, like the Voyager, reach out really far.
link |
And they have some stuff on them.
link |
We do, we have the Voyager, but they're not really going anywhere in particular.
link |
And they're moving very, very slowly on a cosmic scale.
link |
And me saying they're far is kind of silly.
link |
It's all relative in astronomy.
link |
It's all relative.
link |
So from the, if you look at Earth from an alien perspective, from visually and from
link |
gas composition, I wonder if it's possible to determine the degree of maybe productive
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I wonder if it's possible to tell, like, how busy these Earthlings are.
link |
Well, let's zoom out again and think about oxygen.
link |
So when cyanobacteria arose like billions of years ago and figured out how to harness
link |
the energy of the sun for photosynthesis, they reengineered the entire atmosphere.
link |
20% of the atmosphere has oxygen now.
link |
Like that is a huge scale.
link |
You know, they almost poisoned everything else by making this, what was apparently very
link |
poisonous to everything that was alive.
link |
So are we doing anything at that scale?
link |
Like, are we changing anything at like 20% of the Earth with a giant structure or 20%
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of this or 20% of that?
link |
Like we aren't actually.
link |
That's humbling to think that we're not actually having that much of an impact.
link |
But we are because in a way we're destroying our entire planet.
link |
But it's humbling to think that from far away, people probably can't even tell.
link |
But from the perspective of the planet, when we say we're destroying, you know, global
link |
warming, all that kind of stuff, what we really mean is we're destroying it for a bunch of
link |
different species, including humans.
link |
But like, I think the Earth will be okay.
link |
Oh, the Earth will be, the Earth will remain, whatever happens to us, the Earth will still
link |
And it'll still be difficult to detect any difference.
link |
Like it's sad to think that if humans destroy ourselves, except potentially with nuclear
link |
war, it'd be hard to tell that anything even happened.
link |
It's hard to tell from far away that anything happened.
link |
What about, what are your thoughts now?
link |
This is really getting into speculation land.
link |
You've mentioned exoplanets were in the realm of, you know, this is beautiful edge between
link |
science and science fiction.
link |
That some of us, a rare few are brave enough to walk, I think in academia, you were brave
link |
enough to do that.
link |
I think in some sense, artificial intelligence sometimes walks that line a little bit.
link |
There is so much excitement about extraterrestrial life and aliens in this world.
link |
I mean, I don't know what, how to comprehend that excitement, but to me, it's great to
link |
see people curious because to me, extraterrestrial life and aliens is at the core, a scientific
link |
And it's almost looks like people are excited about science.
link |
They're excited by discovery, discovery, right?
link |
And then the possibility that there's alien life that visited earth or is here on earth
link |
now is, is a excitement about discovery in your lifetime, essentially.
link |
I mean, what do you make, what do you make of that?
link |
There's recent events where DARPA or DOD released footage of these unmanned aerial phenomena.
link |
They're calling them now UAP.
link |
They got everybody like super excited.
link |
Like maybe there is like what, what, what's, what's here on earth.
link |
Do you follow the, this world of people who are thinking about aliens that are already
link |
here or have visited?
link |
I don't really follow it.
link |
Because in this field, if you're a scientist of any kind, you get, people contact us, me.
link |
There's a lot of them about, Hey, I have stuff you should see, Hey, the aliens are already
link |
I need to tell you about it.
link |
And I know there are people out there who really believe there's a psychology to it.
link |
There's a psychology to it and it's fascinating, but okay.
link |
So it's similar to artificial intelligence, but I still, but like you, I'm still enamored
link |
with the point that it is out there and that people believe so strongly.
link |
And that's so many people out there believe, believe.
link |
And I don't know, I I'm not as allergic to it as some scientists are because ultimately
link |
if aliens showed up or do show up or have showed up you know, these are going to be
link |
very difficult to study scientific phenomena.
link |
Like in, in fact, like going back to cats and dogs, like I just, I think we should be
link |
more open minded about developing new tools and looking for intelligent life on earth
link |
that we haven't yet found.
link |
Or even understanding the nature of our own intelligence because it kind of is an alien
link |
life form, the thing that's living, you know, in our skull.
link |
And we don't understand consciousness.
link |
We don't understand how biology is hard, you know, unpacking it and working it all out.
link |
And they say too that our thinking mind is like the tip of a pyramid and that everything
link |
else is happening under the hood and, but what is happening?
link |
But the thing with, so the typical scientist response to, you know, are there aliens here
link |
is that we need to see major evidence, not like a sketchy picture of something.
link |
We need some cold hard evidence and we just don't have that.
link |
That's exactly right.
link |
But from my perspective, I admire people that dream and I think that's beautiful.
link |
The thing I don't like, there's two sides of the, of the folks that probably listened
link |
to this, this podcast is, oh, those that dream, I think is beautiful, that, that wander what's
link |
out there, what's here on earth.
link |
And then the other ones who are very conspiratorial and thinking that stuff is being hidden and
link |
it becomes about institutions.
link |
Right, right, right.
link |
I have a funny thing to talk about that.
link |
So one of my colleagues had a really good answer to that and it's not me saying this,
link |
so I can say this, but he said, look, he works with NASA, not at NASA.
link |
He works with government, not in the government.
link |
It's kind of mean, but he'd say, trust me, they couldn't hide it if they tried.
link |
Do you know what I'm saying?
link |
Like, we're not smart enough or good enough.
link |
Not we or not me or not you, but whoever to cover it up.
link |
It just, it's sort of a myth.
link |
It makes it sad because the people at NASA, the people at MIT, the people in academia,
link |
the people in these institutions and yes, even in government are often trying, they're
link |
like just curious descendants of apes.
link |
They're just, they, they want to do good.
link |
They want to discover stuff.
link |
They're not trying to hide stuff.
link |
In fact, most of them would, in terms of leaks, would love to discover this and release this
link |
There's a, did you ever watch the show called The X Files?
link |
Scully and Mulder.
link |
And what I love actually, I used to put it up during my talks, my public talks.
link |
There's a picture of a UFO or what looks like UFO and it says, I want to believe.
link |
So that's, that's where I think a lot of us are coming from.
link |
I want to believe.
link |
And it's so great.
link |
And one time I put that up and this very, very nice couple approached me really nervous
link |
afterwards and they said, Hey, can we take you out for lunch sometime?
link |
And they were like the nicest people.
link |
And just one of many who has an alien, alien abduction story and the woman, um, could never
link |
They were older, but they didn't have kids, which for them was a real source of regret.
link |
But it was because the aliens who had abducted her had made it so that she couldn't have
link |
And she had apparently something implanted behind her ear, which was somehow unimplanted
link |
And they're just so sincere and they're such a lovely couple and they just wanted to share
link |
That's a, that's a real, whatever that is, that's the real thing.
link |
The mystery of the human mind is more powerful than any alien or, I mean, it's as interesting
link |
I think as the universe.
link |
And I think they're somehow intricately linked, maybe getting a sense of numbers.
link |
How many stars are there in, um, maybe, I don't know what the radius that's reasonable
link |
I don't know if the observable universe is like way too big to think about, but in terms
link |
of when we think about how many habitable planets there are, what are the numbers we're
link |
working with in your sense?
link |
What are the scale?
link |
Honestly, the numbers are probably like billions of trillions of stars.
link |
You know, in the UK, I think, I don't know if we do that here, but they will call a billion
link |
trillion where you put like one billion followed by a trillion.
link |
It's kind of weird, but here, I don't even know how to say the number 10 to the 20.
link |
Like if you know what that is, that's one followed by 20 zeros.
link |
That's a big number.
link |
We don't have a name for that number.
link |
There's so many per star.
link |
I think we kind of mentioned this.
link |
Is there a good sense, there's probably argument about this, but per star, how many planets
link |
We don't have that number yet per se, you know, we're not really there, but some people
link |
think that there's many planets per star.
link |
There's this analogy of filling the coffee cup, like, you know, you don't usually just
link |
pour one drop, you fill it.
link |
And that planetary systems, we see stars being born that have a disc of gas and dust and
link |
that ultimately forms planets.
link |
So the idea, this kind of concept is that planets, so many planets form too many.
link |
And eventually some get kicked out and you're left with like a full planetary system, a
link |
dynamically full system.
link |
And so there have to be a lot because so many form and a bunch survive.
link |
I mean, that makes perfect intuitive sense, right?
link |
Like why wouldn't that happen?
link |
Well, there's other thoughts too, though.
link |
These big planets that are really close to the star, we think they formed far away from
link |
the star where there's enough material to form and they migrated inwards.
link |
And some of these planets migrating inwards due to interaction with other planets or with
link |
the disc itself, they may have cleared it out.
link |
And kicked other planets out of the system.
link |
So there's a lot of ideas floating around.
link |
We're not entirely sure.
link |
And what about Earth like planets?
link |
That's another level of uncertainty.
link |
It's a level of uncertainty.
link |
If we think of an Earth like planet being an Earth around a sun in the same orbit, an
link |
Earth like planet being an Earth sized planet in an Earth like orbit about a sun like star,
link |
we're not there yet.
link |
You know, we're not able to detect enough of those to give you a hard number.
link |
Some people have extrapolated.
link |
And they will say as many as one in five stars like our sun could be hosting a true Earth
link |
On the topic of space exploration, there's been a lot of exciting developments with NASA,
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with SpaceX, with other companies successfully getting rockets into space with humans and
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getting them to land back, especially with SpaceX.
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What are your thoughts about Elon Musk and SpaceX, Crew Dragon, while working with NASA
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to launch astronauts?
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What's your sense about these exciting new developments?
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Well, SpaceX and other so called commercial companies are only good news for my field,
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because they're lowering the cost of getting to space by having reusable rockets.
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It's just been it's incredible.
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And we need cheaper access to space.
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So from a very practical viewpoint, it's all good.
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Without getting people, there's this dream that we have to go to Mars, boots on Mars.
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What do you think about that?
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You mentioned probes.
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What's the value of humans?
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Is that interesting to you from both scientific and a human perspective?
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I think it's such in our desire to explore because part of what it means to be human.
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So wanting to go to another planet and be able to live there for some time.
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It's just just what it means to be human.
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You know, oftentimes in science and engineering, big, huge discoveries are made when we didn't
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So often this kind of pure exploratory type of research or this pure exploration research,
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it can lead to something really important like the laser, we couldn't really live without
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At the grocery, you scan your foods, there's surgery that involves lasers, GPS, we all
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We don't have GPS because someone thought, hey, it'd be great to have a navigation system.
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And so I do support, I do, I just, but I really think it comes primarily just from the desire
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Do you think something, there's a lot of criticism and a lot of excitement about Mars.
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Do you think there's value in trying to go to put humans on Mars, first of all, and second
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of all, colonize Mars?
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Do you think there's something interesting that might come from there?
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I'm convinced there will be something interesting.
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I just don't know what it is yet, but I don't think, I don't think having some commercial
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value or value in the metric of something useful is really what's motivating us.
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So really, you see, exploration is a long term investment into something awesome that
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eventually will be commercial value.
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So what about visiting, okay, I apologize, but Amy, there's an exciting longing to visit
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Earth like planets elsewhere.
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So what's the closest Earth like planet you think is worth visiting and how hard is it?
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Wow, it is very hard.
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I mean, our nearest, call it Earth mass planet, it's orbiting a star very different from
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our own sun, an M Dwarf star, a small red star, Proxima Centauri.
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It's over four light years away and we can't travel at the speed of light.
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We can't even travel, I mean, it would take tens of thousands of years to get there with
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conventional methods.
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So, you know, the movies like multigenerational, yeah, this movie Passenger, have you seen
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It's about a big spaceship that is traveling to another planet and everyone's hibernating.
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I won't give you the spoiler alert because one person wakes up and then it's kind of
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But yeah, the multigenerational ships, I mean, when you think about where we're headed as
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a species, maybe we don't send people, maybe we end up sending raw biological materials
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and instructions to print out humans, it sounds kind of farfetched, but already we're printing
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like liver cells in the lab and beating heart cells, we're starting to reconstruct body
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I mean, the thing is, it is so hard to get to another planet that this thought of printing
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humans or printing life forms actually could be easier.
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Yeah, that's somehow so sad to think, to think of the idea that we would launch a successful
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spaceship that has multigenerational, like non human life and it's going to reach other
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intelligent life and by the time they figure out where it came from, human civilization
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Yeah, that is really, I mean, that's, so that's one, there's a, there's a tempting thing to
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What are the possible trajectories?
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So, you know, Elon keeps talking about multi planetary, us becoming multi planetary species.
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I mean, sure, Mars is a part of that, but like the dream is to really expand outside
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And it's, it's not clear, just like, as you said, like what the actual scientific engineering
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steps that are required to take, it seems like so daunting, so daunting.
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So like this, the smart thing seems to be to do the most achievable near daunting task,
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even if there doesn't seem to be a commercial application, which I think is colonizing
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But like from your perspective, is there some Manhattan project style, huge project in space
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that we might want to take on and you've had roles.
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You had scientists hat roles and then you also had roles in terms of being on like committees
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and stuff, determining where funding goes and so on.
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So like, is there a huge like multi trillion, we've been throwing the T word around recently
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a lot, but these huge projects that we might want to take on?
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Well, first of all, we want to find the planets like earth first, like just even finding those
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earth like planets is a billion dollar endeavor, billions of dollars endeavor.
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And that's so hard because an earth is so small, so less massive, and so faint compared
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It's the proverbial needle in a haystack, but worse.
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And we need very sophisticated space based telescopes to be able to find these planets
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and to look, look at them and see which ones have water and which ones have signs of life
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Yeah, the, the star shade project that you're part of, star shade, star shade, yeah, this
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is probably the most badass thing I've ever seen.
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You know what's interesting?
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Can you describe what it is?
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So what's amazing about star shade is it was first conceived of in the 1960s.
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Imagine that and revisited every decade until now when we think we can actually build it
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and star shade is a giant specially shaped screen.
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It is about, there's different versions of it, but think about 30 meters in diameter.
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So you're blocking out the sun.
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You're effectively blocking out the star so that you can see the planet directly and star
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shade would have a spacecraft attached to it and it would fly in space far away from
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Earth's gravity and it would have to formation fly with a space telescope.
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So the idea is that star shade blocks out the starlight in a very careful way and it
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has to block that starlight out so that the planet that is 10 billion times fainter than
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the star, that only the planet light goes to the telescope.
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So in formation, meaning the telescope flies in, you gave a presentation on this, but like
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it, it would fly like in, um, this is extremely high precision endeavor.
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We had this analogy like asking a friend to hold up a dime five miles away perfectly.
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Like at the perfect line of sight with you.
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And the shape of it is pretty cool.
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I mean, uh, I don't know exactly what the physics of that, like what the optics are
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that require that shape.
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I can tell you, it turns out that if you block out a star, imagine blocking out a star with
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a circle circularly or a square shaped screen, you wouldn't actually be blocking it because
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the star acts like a wave.
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The starlight can act like a wave and it would actually bend around the edges of the screen.
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And so instead of blocking out the light, you're expecting to see nothing.
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You would see ripples and the analogy that I love to give, it's like throwing a pebble
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You know, you get those ripples, you get these concentric ripples and they go out and light
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would do something quite similar.
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You'd actually see ripples of light and those ripples of light, they're actually way brighter
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than the planet we'd be looking for.
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So they would introduce this noise that's a noise.
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And so the star shade, it's like a mathematical solution to the problem of diffraction it's
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And this is what the first person who thought about star shape in the 1960s worked out the
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mathematical shape or one salute, one family of solutions.
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And the idea is that when the star shade, this very special shape, like a giant flower
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with petals, when it blocks out the light, the light bends around the edges, but interacts
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with itself in a way to give you a very, very dark image.
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It would be like throwing a pebble in a pond and instead of getting ripples, the pond would
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be perfectly smooth, like incredibly smooth to one part in 10 billion.
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And all the waves would be on the outer edges, far away from where you drop that pebble.
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And so this camera would be able to get some signal from the planet then.
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Yes, and it would be hard because the planet is so faint.
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But with the star out of the way, the glare of that bright, bright, bright star, with
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that out of the way, then it becomes a much more manageable task.
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So how do we get that thing out there?
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We're working with unlimited money.
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Okay, we're working with unlimited money.
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We have some more engineering problems to solve, but not too many more.
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We've been burning down our so called tall pole list.
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What kind of list?
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We call it technology tall pole.
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It's the phrase where you have to figure out what are your hardest problems and then break
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those down to solve.
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So the star shade, one of the really hard problems was how to formation fly at tens
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of thousands of kilometers.
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It's like, wow, that is insane.
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And the team broke that down actually into a sensing problem because of the star shade.
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How do you see the star shade precisely enough to control it?
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Because if you're shining a flashlight, you know the beam spreads out.
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So the star shade has a beacon, an LED or a laser, it's going to spread out so much
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by the time it gets to the telescope.
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The problem wasn't how do you tell the star shade how to move around fast enough to stay
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in a straight line.
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The problem was how are you able to sense it well enough?
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So problems like that were broken down and money that came from NASA to solve problems
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is put towards solving it.
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So we've got through most of the hard problems right now.
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Another one was that star shade, even though it's looking at a star, light from our own
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sun could hit the edges of the star shade and bounce off into the telescope, believe
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And that would actually ruin it because we're trying to see this tiny, tiny signal.
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So then the question is how do you make a razor thin edge?
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Those pedal edges would have to be like a razor.
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What materials can you use?
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So there's a series of problems like that.
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So there's a materials problem in there?
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So we almost finished solving all those problems and then it's just a matter of building one
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and testing it in a full scale size facility and then building the telescope.
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It's just a matter of time to build everything and get it, get it up for launch.
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So this is an engineering close engineering project.
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It's a real engineering project.
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I actually can tell you about two other projects that are not mine.
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I like to call, call star shade mine because it was my project that I helped make it mainstream
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without line is constantly shifting.
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When I started, when I got this leadership role on star shade, I remember telling people
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about it and it was definitely not on the mainstream okay line.
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It was on the giggle factor side of the line and people would just laugh like that's dead.
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Like you can never formation fly or they'd say, why are you working on that?
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That's just so not, it's not so awesome.
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There's a, there's a few things you've done in your life and that's when I first saw star
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shade, I was like, what, really?
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And then like it sinks in.
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I mean, it's the same thing I felt with like Elon Musk or certain people who do crazy stuff
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and like, and then, and they get, they actually make it work.
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I mean, if you get star shade information flying to like together, I mean, how awesome
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is that if you actually make that happen, even like from a robot, I'm sorry, from the
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robotics perspective, even if it doesn't give us good data, that's just like a cool
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thing to get out there.
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I mean, it's really exciting.
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So there's two other topics that aren't mine, but I still love them.
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One of them, let's just talk about it briefly because it's not a probe, but it's the idea
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to send a telescope very far away to 500 times the earth sun distance.
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And this is way farther than the Voyager spacecrafts are right now.
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And to use our sun as a gravitational lens, to use our sun to magnify something that's
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It's got to sink in for a minute.
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But I mean, I don't know what the physics of that is, like how to use the sun.
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In astronomy, and Einstein thought about this initially, we can use a massive objects, bend
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And so light that should be traveling like straight, it actually travels around the warped
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And somehow you figure out a way to use that for magnification.
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You have a way to use that for magnification.
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There are galaxies that are lensed, so called gravitational lens by intervening galaxy clusters
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And there are microlensing events where stars get magnified as an unseen gravitational lens
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star passes in between us and that very distant star.
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It's actually a real tool in astronomy.
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Yeah, using gravitational lensing to magnify because it bends more rays towards you than
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normally you'd normally see.
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And again, we're trying to get more higher resolution images that are basically boiled
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Well, it boils down to light.
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And then you can maybe get more information about.
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Well, in this case, you would ask me, let's say, if this thing could get built, it would
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take like something like they like to say 25 years to get from here to there, 25 years
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and then it could send some information back to us.
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And then you'd say, so Sarah, how many pixels?
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And I wouldn't say one or less than one.
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I'd say, you know, it could be like 10 by 10 pixels, it could be 100 pixels, which would
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I mean, that's still crazy that we can get a lot of information from that.
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And it's crazy for a lot of other reasons, because again, you have to line up the sun
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You'd only have one telescope per target, because every star is behind the sun in a
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So it's a lot of complicated things.
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What about the second?
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The second one, it's called star shot.
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You know, star shot means like big dreams and it's an initiative by the Breakthrough
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And star shot is the concept to send thousands of little tiny spacecraft, which they now
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So instead of star ship, it's star chip.
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And there's a little chip and the star chip, so like sending like thousands of little turtles
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being born, they're not all going to make it.
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The idea is to send lots of them, and each of these star chips, once they're launched
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into, I guess, low Earth orbit, they will deploy a solar sail that's a few meters in
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And the idea is that on Earth, we would have a bank of, this one is still a bit on the
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other side of the line, but we'd have a bank of telescopes with lasers that would be like
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a gigawatt power and these lasers would momentarily shine upwards and accelerate, they'd hit these
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They'd be like a power source for the sail and would accelerate the sails to travel at
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about a 20th the speed of light.
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Is that as crazy as it sounds?
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Well, like any good engineering project, it has to be broken down into the crazy parts.
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And the Breakthrough Initiative, like to their huge credit, is sponsoring, you know, getting
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over these, actually, they've listed initially, they listed 19 challenges, so it's broken
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down to concrete things.
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Like one of them is, well, you have to buy the land and make sure the airspace is okay
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with you sending up that much power overhead.
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Another one is you have to have material on the sail where the lasers won't just vaporize
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So there's a lot of issues, but anyway, these sails would be accelerated to 20th the speed
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of light and their journey to the nearest star would no longer be tens of thousands
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of years, but could be 20 years, okay, 20, so it's not as bad as tens of thousands.
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And these thousands or whatever, however many make it, they'll go by the nearest star system
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and snap some images and radio the information back to Earth because they're traveling so
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fast they can't slow down, but they'll zoom by, take some photos, send it back.
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See, just what I want you to pause on for a second is that just by making that a real
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concept and the money given won't make it happen, but what it's done is it's planted
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the seed and it's shifted that line from what is crazy to what is a real project.
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It's shifted it just ever so slightly enough, I think, to plant the seed that we have to
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find a way to somehow find a way to get there.
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That is, again, to stay on that, that is so powerful.
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Make a big, crazy idea and break it down into smaller, crazy ideas, order it in a list,
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and knock it out one at a time.
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I don't know, I've never heard anything more inspiring from an engineering perspective
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because that's how you solve the impossible things.
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So you open your new book discussing Rogue Planet, PSO, J318, I never said this out loud,
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PSO 1.522, so a Rogue Planet, which is just this poetic, beautiful vision of a planet
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that, as you write, lurches across the galaxy like a rudderless ship wrapped in perpetual
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darkness, its surface swept by constant storms, its black skies raining molten iron.
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Just like the vision of that, the scary, the darkness, just how not pleasant it is for
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human life, just the intensity of that metaphor, I don't know.
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And the reason you use that is to paint in a feeling of loneliness, I think, and despair.
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And why, maybe on the planet side, why does it feel, maybe it's just me, why does it feel
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so profoundly lonely on that kind of planet?
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I think it's because we all want to be a part of something, a part of a family, or a part
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of a community, or a part of something.
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And so, our solar system, and by the way, I only, it's sort of like when you treat yourself
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to like eating an entire tub of ice cream, like I sometimes treat myself to imagine things
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like this and not just be so cut and dried.
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But when you imagine that, this planet's not part, because I don't want to give emotions
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to a planet per se, but the planet's not part of anything.
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It's somehow, it's just all on its own, just kind of out there without that warm energy
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from its sun, it's just all alone out there.
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To me, it was this little discovery that I actually feel pretty good being part of this
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It felt like we have a sun, we have like a little family, and it felt like it sucked
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for the rogue planet to just floating about, not floating, flying rudderless.
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By the way, how many rogue planets are there in your sense?
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We don't know totally.
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I mean, there's some rogue planets that are just born on their own.
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I know that sounds really weird to be, how can you be born an orphan?
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But they just are, because most planets are born out of a disc of gas and dust around
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But some of these small planets are like totally failed stars.
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They're so failed, they're just small planets on their own.
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But we think that there's probably, honestly, there's another path to a rogue planet.
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That's one that's been kicked out of its star system by other planets, like a game of billiard
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It just gets kicked out.
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We actually think there's probably as many rogue planets as stars.
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No flying out there, fundamentally alone.
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So the book is a memoir, is about your life, and it weaves both your fascination with planets
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outside the solar system and the path of your life, and you lost your husband, which is
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a kind of central part of the book that created a feeling of the rogue planet.
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By the way, what's the name of the book?
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The name of the book is The Smallest Lights in the Universe.
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What's up with the title?
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What's the meaning?
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The title has a double meaning.
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On the face of it, it's the search for other Earths.
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Earths are so dim compared to the big, bright, massive star beside them.
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Searching for the Earths is like searching for the smallest lights in the universe.
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It has this other meaning, too.
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I really hope that you or the other people listening never get to the place where you've
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fallen off the cliff into this horrible place of huge despair.
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And once in a while, you get a glimmer of a better life, of some kind of hope.
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And those are also the smallest lights in the universe.
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Well, maybe we can tell the full story before we talk about the glimmer of hope.
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What did it feel like to first find out that your husband, Mike, was sick?
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It was incredibly frustrating.
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Like, lots of us have had some kind of problem that the doctors completely ignore.
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Just that they kept blowing him off.
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Are they paid to just say it's nothing?
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I mean, it's just insane.
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I was just so angry.
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And we finally got to a point where he was really sick.
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He was like in bed, not able to move, basically.
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And it turned out all the things they ignored and not done any tests, he had like a 100%
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blockage in his intestine.
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Like nothing could get out, nothing could get in.
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And it was pretty, pretty shocking to even hear then that it could be nothing.
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What was the progression of it in the context of the maybe the medical system, the doctors?
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I mean, what did it feel like?
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Did you feel like a human being?
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I felt like a child.
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Like the doctors were trying to water down the real diagnosis or treat us like we couldn't
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know the truth or they didn't know.
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You know, I felt mixed like, it's not a good situation if you think the doctor either has
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no idea what he or she is doing, or if the doctors purposely, let's just say lying to
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you to sugarcoat it.
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Like, I didn't know which one of it was, but I knew it was one of those.
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What were the things he was suffering from?
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Well, initially, he just had a random stomach ache.
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I hate to say that out loud because I know a lot of people will have a random stomach
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But so he just had a bad stomach ache and then, hmm, this is weird.
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A few days later, another bad stomach ache, kind of gets worse.
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Might go away for a few weeks, might come back.
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And at the time, all I knew was my dad had had that same thing.
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Not the same identical system, but he had these really weird pains and he ended up having
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the worst diagnosis.
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One of the worst diagnoses you can get from a random stomach ache is pancreatic cancer
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because the time, the pancreas, like you can't feel anything, so by the time you feel pain,
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It's spread already.
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So I was just like, beside myself, I'm like, this is like, wow, this guy, he's got a random
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All I know is another man I loved had a random stomach ache and it didn't end well.
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How did you deal with it emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, as a scientist?
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What was that like, that whole, because it's not immediate.
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It's a long journey.
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It's a long journey and you don't know where the diagnosis is going.
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So anyone who's suffered from a major illness, there's like always branches in the road.
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So he had this intestinal blockage.
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I can't imagine someone in their 40s having that and that be normal.
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But the doctor is like, it could be nothing, could just cut it out.
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You don't need most of your intestine, it's a repeating pattern.
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Just cut that out, it could be fine.
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But it ended up not being fine and he was diagnosed as being terminally ill.
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Well, it really changed my life in a huge way.
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First of all, I remember immediately one summer, the summer when this happened, I started asking
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I would ask you, I don't know if it's smart of my job to put you on the spot, I'd say,
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you have one year to live or two or three, what will you do differently about your life
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Lex, you have one year to live, what would you do?
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I mean, it's hard.
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I don't know if you want to answer that.
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I think about it a lot.
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I mean, that's a really good thing to meditate on.
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We can talk about maybe why you bring that up, if it is or not a heavy question.
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But I get, I think about mortality a lot and for me, it feels like a really good way to
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focus in on is what you're doing today, the people you have around you, the family you
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have, does it bring you joy?
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Does it bring you fulfillment?
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And basically, for me, long ago, try to be ready to die any day.
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So like today, I kind of woke up, look, if I was nervous about talking to you, I really
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admire your work and the book is very good and it's super exciting topic.
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But then, you know, there's this also feeling like, if this is the last conversation I have
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in my life, you know, if I die today, will this be, will this be the right, like am I
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glad today happened and it is, and I am glad today happened.
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So that's the way.
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And that's so unique.
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I never got that answer from a single person.
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The busyness of life, there's goals, there's dreams, there's like planning, plans.
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Very few people make it happen.
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That's what I learned.
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And so a lot of these people.
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Oh, like you run out of time.
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It's not so much you run out of time, but I'd come back later and be like, okay, why
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don't you do that?
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And if that's what you would do, if you're going to die a year from now, why don't you,
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why don't you make it real?
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Spend more time with family.
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Like why, why don't you do that?
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And that's what I had an answer, it turns out, unless you usually, unless you have,
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you really do have a pressing end of life, people don't do their bucket lists or try
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to change their career.
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And some people can't.
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So we can't, like for a lot of people, they can't do anything about it.
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And that's, that's fine.
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But the ones who can take action for some reason, never do.
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And that was one of the ways that Mike's death or at the time his impending death really,
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really affected me.
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Cause you know, for these sick people, what I learned, he had a bucket list and he was
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able to do some of the bucket lists.
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But he got sick pretty quickly.
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So if you do only have a year to live, it's ironic cause you can't do, you can't do the
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things you wanted to do because you get too sick too fast.
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What were the bucket list things for you that you realized like, what am I doing with my
link |
That was the major concept of him.
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After he died, I didn't know.
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Like I, I was just lost because when something that profound happens, all the things I was
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doing, most of the things I was doing were just meaningless.
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It was so tough to, to find an answer for that.
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And that's when I settled on, I'm going to devote the rest of my life to trying to find
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another earth and to find out, to find that we're not alone.
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What is that longing for connection with others?
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What's that about?
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What do you think?
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Why is that so full of meaning?
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I mean, I think it's how we're hardwired.
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Like one of my friends some time ago, actually when my dad died, he never heard someone say
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this before, but he's like, Sarah, you know, why are we evolved to take death so harshly?
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Like what kind of society would we be if we just didn't care people died?
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That would be a very different type of world.
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How would we as a species have got to where we are?
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So I think that is tied hand in hand with why do we, why do we seek connection?
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It's just that what we were talking about before, that subconsciousness that we don't
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A couple, you know, the other side, the flip side of the coin of connection and love is
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It's like that was, again, I don't know, that's what makes you appreciate the moment is that
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It's definitely a hard one.
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The thing ends, but, and it's hard to not, you wouldn't want to limit.
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Like it's like my dog who I love so much, I'll start to cry.
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Like I can't think about the end.
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I know he'll age much faster than I will.
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And someday it will end.
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But it's too sad to think of, but should I not have got a dog?
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Should I have not brought this sort of joy into my life because I know it won't be forever.
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well, there's a, there's a philosopher and his Becker who wrote a book, Denial of Death
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and just, and warm with the cores.
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And there's another book talks about terror management theory, Sheldon Solomon.
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I just talked to him a few weeks ago.
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It's a brilliant philosopher, psychologist that their theory, whatever you make of it
link |
is that the fear of death is at the core of everything, everything we do.
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So like you're that you think you don't think about the mortality of your dog, but you do.
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And that's what makes the experience rich.
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Like there's this kind of like in the shadows lurks the, the knowledge that this won't
link |
And that makes every moment just special in some kind of a weird way that the moments
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are special for us humans.
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I mean, sorry to use romantic terms like love, but what do you make, what did you learn about
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love from, from losing it, from losing your husband?
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Well I learned to love the things I have more.
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I learned to love the people that I have more and to not let the little things bother me
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What about the rediscovery or like the discovery of the little lights in the darkness?
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So you, the book, I think you've brilliantly described the dark parts of your journey.
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But maybe can you talk about how you were able to rediscover the lights?
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They came in many ways.
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And the way like to think about it is like grief is an ocean, you know, with tiny islands
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of the little, like, like the little lights.
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And eventually that ocean gets smaller and smaller and the islands like become continents
link |
So initially it'd be like the children laughing one day or my colleagues at work who rallied
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around me and would take me away from my darkness to work on a project.
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Later on it turned out to be a group of women my age, all widows, all with children in my
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And it would be, even though it was a bit morose getting together, still very joyful
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What was the journey of rediscovering love like for you?
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So refinding, I mean, is there some, by way of advice or insight about how to, how to
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rediscover the beauty of life?
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I think you just have to stay open to being positive and just to get out there.
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Do you still think, do you still think about your own mortality?
link |
So you mentioned that that was a thing that you meditate on as a question when it was
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right there in front of you.
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But do you still think about it?
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I think I will after talking to you.
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But no, it's not really something I think about.
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I mean, I do think about the search for another earth and will, will I get there?
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Will I be able to conclude my search and is there one?
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Like as time goes by, you know, that window to solve that problem gets smaller.
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What would bring you, again, I apologize if this makes concrete the fact that life is
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finite, but what, what would bring you joy if we discovered while you're still here?
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What would bring me joy?
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Finding another earth, an earth like planet around a sun like star, knowing that there's
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at least one or more out there, being able to see water, that it has signs of water and
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being able to see some gases that don't belong.
link |
So I know that the search will continue after I'm gone enough to fuel the next generation.
link |
So just like opening the door and there's like this glimmer of hope.
link |
What do you think it will take to realize that?
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I mean, we've talked about all these interesting projects, star shade, especially, but is there
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something that you're particularly kind of hopeful about in the next 10, 20 years that
link |
might give us that, that exact glimmer of hope that there's earth like planets out there?
link |
I have to, I stand behind star shade in all cases, so, but there is this other kind of
link |
field that I, that everyone is involved in because star shade is hard.
link |
Earths are hard, but there are, there's another category of planet star type that's easier.
link |
And these are planets orbiting small red dwarf stars.
link |
They're not earth like at all.
link |
Think like earth cousin instead of earth twin, but there's a chance that we might establish
link |
that some of those have water and signs of life on them.
link |
It's nearer term than star shade and we're all working hard on that too.
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Let me ask by way of recommendations, I think a lot of people are curious about this kind
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What three books, technical or fiction or philosophical or anything really had an impact
link |
on your life and, and or you would recommend besides of course your book.
link |
There's one book I wish everyone could read.
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I'm not sure if you've read it.
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It's actually a children's book, like a young adult book.
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It's called the giver.
link |
And it is the book that kids in school read now.
link |
And I only, sorry, that's not, that's wow.
link |
Sorry, that, that caught me off guard.
link |
So when I first came to this country, I didn't speak much.
link |
It's really what made me, it had a profound impact on my life and a really important moment
link |
because they give it to kids.
link |
Like I think middle school, I think, or maybe elementary, something like that.
link |
I'm so surprised you've even heard of this book.
link |
So they give it, but like it's the value of giving the right book to a person at the right
link |
I was, I was, cause it's very accessible.
link |
Do we want to share what the story is without spoiling it?
link |
Oh yeah, you can without spoiling, right?
link |
It follows this boy in this very utopic society.
link |
That's like perfect.
link |
It's been all clean cut and made perfect actually.
link |
And as he kind of comes of age, he starts realizing something's wrong with his world.
link |
And so it's part of that question.
link |
Are we going to evolve as, I mean, this isn't what's there, but it made me wonder, you know,
link |
are we evolving to a better place?
link |
Is there a day when we can eliminate, you know, poverty and hunger and crime and sickness
link |
in this book, they pretty much have in a society that the boys in and sort of follows him.
link |
And he becomes a chosen one to be like a receiver.
link |
The givers, the old wise man who retains some of the harshness of the outside world so that
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he can advise the people as a sort of boy comes of age and is chosen for the special
link |
He finds the world isn't what he expects.
link |
And I don't know about you, but it was so profound for me because it jolts you out of
link |
It's like, Oh my God, what am I doing here?
link |
I'm just going with the flow with my society.
link |
How do I think outside the box and the confines of my society, which surely carries negative
link |
things with it that we don't realize today.
link |
Yeah, and also in the flip side of that is if you do take a step outside the box on occasion,
link |
what's the psychological burden of that?
link |
Like is that, is that a step you want to take?
link |
Is that the journey you want to take?
link |
What is that life like?
link |
I felt like from the book, you have to take it.
link |
I found from the book, I never thought like now that you're saying it, I see what you're
link |
The burden is huge, but I always felt like the answer is yes, you absolutely want to
link |
know what's outside.
link |
But you can't do that if you're very, it's hard to be objective about your own reality.
link |
I mean, it's a very human instinct, but, uh, it also, the book kind of shows that, uh,
link |
it has an effect on you and this, it's a really interesting question about our society and
link |
taking a step out.
link |
It's by, uh, Lois Lowry, I think is how you pronounce it.
link |
I really do hope everyone created it and it is a young adult book, but it's still, it's
link |
incredibly, I'm really glad I only read it cause my kids got it for school.
link |
I just thought, okay, well, why don't I just see what this is about?
link |
I think it's also the value of education.
link |
I think I'm surprised you mentioned, I've never really mentioned to anybody.
link |
I'm sure a lot of people had the similar experience like me and maybe it's a generational thing
link |
though, because like the book came out, I think in the nineties.
link |
So if you're older than like me, that book didn't exist when we were in middle school.
link |
So I just do think a lot of people won't have heard of it, but it's an interesting question
link |
of like those books.
link |
I mean, I'm reminded often, I suppose the same is true with other subjects, but books
link |
are special at the early age, like middle school, maybe early high school, those can
link |
change like the direction of your life.
link |
And also certainly teachers, they can change completely the direction of your life.
link |
There's so many stories about teachers of mathematics, teachers of physics, of any kind
link |
of subjects basically changing the direction of a human's life.
link |
That's like not to get on the whole, almost like a political thing, but you know, we,
link |
we undervalue teachers.
link |
It's a special, it's a special position that they hold.
link |
Well, I do have two other books or two other things.
link |
One is something I came across just a few days ago, actually.
link |
It's actually a film called Picture a Scientist.
link |
And when you picture a scientist, you probably don't picture the women and women of color
link |
And it is a way to get outside your box.
link |
I really think everyone interested in science, even just peripherally should watch this because
link |
it is shocking and sobering at the same time.
link |
And it talks about how, well, I think one of the messages across is, you know, we really
link |
are like, I don't know if we're hardwired to just like people like ourselves, but we're
link |
excluding a lot of people and therefore a lot of great ideas by not being able to think
link |
outside of how we're all stereotyping each other.
link |
So it's, it's, it's hard to kind of convey that and you can just say, oh yeah, I want
link |
to be more diverse.
link |
I want to be more open, but it's a nearly impossible problem to solve and the movie
link |
really helps open people's eyes to it.
link |
This book I put third because unlike The Giver, people may not want to read it.
link |
It's not as relevant.
link |
But when I was in my early twenties, I went to this big, this like 800 people large conference
link |
run by the Wilderness Canoe Association in my hometown of Toronto.
link |
And there was a family friend there who I met and he said, read this book, it'll change
link |
And it actually changed my life.
link |
And it was a book called Sleeping Island by an author, PG Downs, who just coincidentally
link |
lived in this area, lived in the Boston area and he was a teacher, I think at a private
link |
school and every summer he would go to Canada with a canoe often by himself.
link |
And he wrote this book maybe in the forties or fifties about a trip he took in the late
link |
And it was, I was just shocked that even at that time, although that was a long time ago,
link |
there were large parts of Canada that were untouched by white people.
link |
And he went up there and interacted like with the natives.
link |
He called the book and had a subtitle that was called, there's something like Journey
link |
in the Barren Lands.
link |
And when you go up North in Canada, you pass the tree line, just like on a mountain, if
link |
you hike up a mountain, you get so far North there aren't any trees.
link |
And he wrote eloquently about the land and about being out there.
link |
There weren't even any maps of the region, like in that time.
link |
And I just thought to myself, wow, like that you could just take the summer off and explore
link |
by canoe and go and see what's out there.
link |
And it led to me just doing that, that very thing.
link |
Of course it's different now, but going out to where the road ends and putting the canoe
link |
in the water and just, well, we had to have a plan.
link |
We didn't just explore, but go down this river, rivers with rapids and travel over lakes and
link |
portages and just really live.
link |
So just really explore, screw it.
link |
That doesn't like, it doesn't explore just use from a topo map, from a topographical
link |
map from the library.
link |
There were scary elements about it, out of it, but part of the excitement or the joy
link |
or the desire was to be scared, like it was to go out there and have live on the edge.
link |
Do you have a advice that you would give to a young person today that would like to help
link |
you maybe on the planetary science side, discover exoplanets or maybe bigger picture, just
link |
I do have some advice just to succeed.
link |
It's tough advice in a way, but it is to find something that you love doing that you're
link |
also very good at.
link |
And in some ways the stars have to align because you've got to find that thing you're good
link |
at or the range of things, and it actually has to overlap with something that actually
link |
you love doing every day.
link |
So it's not a tedious job.
link |
That's the best way to succeed.
link |
What were the signals that in your own life were there to make you realize you're good
link |
What were you good at that made you pursue a PhD and it made you pursue the search?
link |
I mean, that was the one sentence version.
link |
In my case, it was a long slog and there were a lot of things I wasn't good at initially.
link |
But so initially, I was good at high school math.
link |
I was good at high school science.
link |
I loved astronomy and I realized those could all fit together.
link |
Like the day I realized you could be an astronomer for a job, it has to be one of my top days
link |
I didn't know that you could be that for a job and I was good at all those things.
link |
And although my dad wanted me to do something more practical where he could be guaranteed
link |
I could support myself was another option, but initially I wasn't that good at physics.
link |
It was a slog to just get through school and grad school is a very, very long time.
link |
And ultimately, when faced with a choice and I had the luxury of choosing, knowing that
link |
I was good at something and also loved it, it really carried me through.
link |
Now, I asked some of the smartest people in the world the most ridiculous question.
link |
We already talked about it a little bit, but let me ask again, why are we here?
link |
I think you've raised this question in one of your presentations as like one of the things
link |
that we kind of as humans long to answer and the search for exoplanets is kind of part
link |
But what do you think is the meaning of it all, of life?
link |
I wish I had a good answer for you.
link |
I think you're the first person ever who refused to answer the question.
link |
It's not so much refusing, I just, yeah, I mean, I wish I had a better answer.
link |
It's why we're here.
link |
It's almost like the meaning is wishing there was a meaning, wishing we knew.
link |
That's a great way to say it.
link |
Sarah, like I said, the book is excellent.
link |
I admired your work from afar for a while and I think you're one of the great stars
link |
It makes me proud to be part of the community.
link |
So thank you so much for your work.
link |
Thank you for inspiring all of us.
link |
Thanks for talking today.
link |
Thank you so much, Lynx.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Seager.
link |
And thank you to our sponsors, Public Goods, Power Dot, and Cash App.
link |
Click the links in the description to get a discount.
link |
It's the best way to support this podcast.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast,
link |
support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled I'm not
link |
Just keep typing stuff in until you get to the guy with the tie and the thumbnail.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan, somewhere something incredible
link |
is waiting to be known.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.