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Sara 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 Seeger, a planetary scientist at MIT known
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for her work on the search for exoplanets, which are planets outside of her 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
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and are a bit of a romantic like me. It's beautifully written.
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She weaves the stories of the tragedies and the triumphs of her life
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with the stories of her love for and research on exoplanets,
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which represent our hope to find life out there in the universe.
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Quick summary of the ads, three sponsors, Public Goods, that's the new one, PowerDot,
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As a quick side note, let me say that extraterrestrial life, aliens, I think represent
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our civilization longing to make contact with the unknown. With others like us,
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or maybe others that are very different from us, entities that might reveal something profound
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about why we're here. The possibility of this is both exciting and, at least to me,
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terrifying, which is exactly where we humans do our best work.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with Five Stars and Apple Podcasts,
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As usual, I'll do a few minutes of as now and never any ads in the middle that could
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but still please do check out the sponsors by clicking the special links in the description.
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an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the
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world. And now here's my conversation with Sarah Seeger. When did you first fall in love with
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the stars? I think I've always loved the stars. One of my first memory is of the moon. I remember
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watching the moon and I was in the car with my dad who my parents were divorced and he was driving
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me and my siblings to his house for the weekend. And the moon was just following me. Just had no
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idea why that was. Yeah. So like looking up at the sky and there's this glowing thing. How do
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you make sense of the moon at that age? At age, like age five, there's just no way you can. I think
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it's one of the great things about being a kid. It's just that curiosity that all kids have.
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You know, I was thinking because there's these almost out there ideas of that our earth is flat
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floating about on the internet. And it made me think, you know, when did I first realize that
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the earth is like this ball that's flying through empty space? I mean, it's terrifying. It's awe
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inspiring. I don't know how to make sense of it. It's hard because we live in our frame of reference
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here on this planet. Yeah. It's nearly impossible. None of us are lucky to go to see the curvature
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of earth. I mean, do you remember when you realized understood like the physics, like the layout of
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the solar system? Was it like, did you first have to take physics to really like high school
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physics to really take that in? I think it's hard to say. I had this book when I was a child. It was
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in French. I grew up in Canada where French is supposedly taught to all of us English speaking
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Canadians. And it was this French book in French was about the solar system. And I just love
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flipping through it. It's hard to say how much, you know, you or I understand when we're kids,
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but it was really great book. What about the stars? When did you first learn about the stars?
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I have like, I do have this very incredible distinctive memory. And again, it had to do with
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my dad. He took us camping. Now, my dad was from the UK. And he was the type who you'd find wearing
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a tie on weekends. So camping was not in his fear. It's his comfort zone. We had a babysitter every
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summer we got a baby. We every summer we had a babysitter. And one summer we had Tom. He was
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barely older than than we were. He was 14. My brother was 12. I would have been 11 or 10 maybe.
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And we went camping because Tom said camping is the thing we should we should try it. And I just
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remember I didn't aim to see the stars, but I walked out of my tent in the middle of the night.
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And I looked up and wow, so many stars. The dark night sky and all those stars just like screaming
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at me. I just couldn't believe that. Honestly, like my first thought was this is so incredible,
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mind blowing. Like why wouldn't anyone have told me this existed?
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Can anyone else see this? Have you had an experience like that with anything?
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Yeah, I've had that. 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. There's a few robots I've met where I just fell in love with this.
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Like, is anyone else seeing this? Is anyone else seeing that here in a robot is our ability to
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engineer some intelligent beings, intelligent beings that we could love, that could love us,
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that we can interact with in some rich ways that we haven't yet discovered? Like almost like when
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you get a puppy, you need to have a dog and there's this immediate bond and love. And on top of that,
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ability to engineer it, I had to just pause and hold myself. I imagine, I don't have kids,
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I imagine there's a magic to that as well, where it's a totally new experience. It's like, what?
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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? Like, just to me, when I look at the stars,
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it's almost paralyzingly scary how little we know about the universe, how alone we are. I mean,
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somehow it feels alone. I'm not sure if it's a, it's just a matter of perspective, but it feels
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like, wow, there's billions of them out there. And we know nothing about them. And then also
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immediately to me, some immortality comes into it. 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. Just like, wow, this is terrifying.
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What's out there? Like, what is this? What does it mean about us here?
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You're a scientist, an exo world class scientist, planetary scientist, astronomer. Now,
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I'm a bit of an idiot who likes to ask silly questions. So some questions are a little bit
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in the realm of speculation, almost philosophical, because we know so little. And one of the awesome
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things about your work is you've actually put data and real science behind some of the biggest
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questions that we're all curious about. But nevertheless, many of the questions might be a
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little bit speculative. So on that topic, just in your sense, do you think we're alone in the
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universe, human beings? Do you think there's life out there?
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Sure. Well, Lex, the funny thing is, is that as a scientist, I so don't even want to answer that.
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I will answer it, though. But I just love to say, yeah, we naturally resist that,
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because we want numbers and hard facts and not speculation. 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
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scientist answer first, which is, we'll have the capability to answer that question
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soon, even starting soon. How do you define soon?
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How do I define soon? What do you so much happened in the last 100 years?
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Right, right. And there's a difference, right? If it's 10 years or 20 years or 100 years. Yeah,
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there's a difference in that. Well, soon could be a decade or two decades.
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And the 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 or
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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,
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to 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 see
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about this life. Right, right. That's exactly what we need to do. And I like the word you chose,
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hint, because it's going to be a hint. 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 a way
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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. Those are fun, but like,
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the back to the speculation. The zoomed out big picture. The zoomed out big picture is, yes,
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I believe absolutely there is life out there somewhere because the vastness of the universe
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is incredible. It's so breathtaking. When we look at the night sky, if you can go to that dark sky,
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you can see, you know, many, many hundred or even if you have good eyesight and you're somewhere
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very dark, you could see thousands of stars. But in our galaxy, we have hundreds of billions of
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stars. And our universe has hundreds of billions of galaxies. So think about all those stars out
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there. And even if planets are rare, even if life is rare, just because the number of stars is so
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huge, things have to come together somewhere someplace in our universe.
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Yeah, it's so amazing to think that somebody might be looking up on another planet in a distant
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galaxy. After you interrupt your reverie and get back to, in our lifetime at least, the short term,
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we have to, we only have the nearest stars to look at. It's true that there are so many stars,
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so many hosts for planets that might have life. But in the practical question of will we find it,
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it has to be a star quite close to Earth, like a few light years, tens of light years, maybe
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hundreds of light years. And by the way, you've introduced me to a tool of eyes on exoplanets,
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I think, that NASA has put together. Eyes on exoplanets, so great software, you can download.
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It's so cool. But anyway, can you give a sense of who our neighbors are? You said
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hundreds of light years, like how many stars are close by? What's our neighborhood like?
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We're 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. And those that's with planets that look
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suitable for us to follow up in detail. For life. Right. But one thing that's really exciting in
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this field is that the very nearest star to Earth called Proxima Centauri. It's part of the Alpha
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Centauri star system. Cool name, by the way. Yeah, Proxima. Whoever names them. Nearby.
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Okay, but it sounds cool. But Proxima Centauri appears to have a planet around it. That's
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an earth, about an earth mass planet in the so called habitable zone or the Goldilocks zone
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of the host star. So think about how incredible that is, like out of all the stars out there,
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even the very nearest star has planets and has a planet of huge interest to us.
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Yeah. Okay. So can we talk about that planet? What does it mean to be maybe possibly habitable?
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What is how does size come into play? How does what we know about gases and what kind of things
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are necessary for life? What are the factors that you make you think that it's habitable? And by the
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way, I mean, maybe one way to talk about that is people know about the Drake equation, which is
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a very high level, almost framework to think about what is the probability that,
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correct me if I'm wrong, that there's life out there and intelligent life, I think. I don't know.
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But then you have an equation named after you now, which I think nicely focuses in on the more
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achievable and interesting part of that question, which is on whether there is habitable planets
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out there or how many, I guess, habitable planets out there. So the funny thing is, was one time
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I met Frank Drake and I asked if he minded if I took his equation and kind of revamped it for
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this new field of exoplanet astronomy. He was totally cool with it. He's got total approval.
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Well, maybe, okay, so sorry. I'm not sure if you'd actually read the stuff about my equation,
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but he was cool with it. He was cool with it. Okay, so I just said like 15 different things,
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but maybe can you tell from your perspective what is the Drake equation and what is sorry,
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the Seeger equation? Sure. 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 to
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communicate with us by radio waves. So if you think of the movie Contact, you've seen Contact,
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right? We're listening in, actually. It's an active field of research, listening to other
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stars at radio wavelengths, hoping that some intelligent civilizations are sending us a message.
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And the Drake equation came at the start of that whole field to put the factors down on paper to
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sort of illustrate what is involved to kind of estimating. And there's no real estimate or prediction
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of how many civilizations are out there, but it's a way to frame the question and show you each term
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that's involved. So I took the Drake equation and I called it a revised Drake equation. And
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I recast it for the search for planets by more traditional astronomy means. We're looking at
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stars, looking for planets, looking for rocky planets, looking for planets that are the right
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temperature for life, looking for planets that might have life, that outputs gases that we might
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detect in the future. It's the same spirit of the Drake equation. It's not going to give us any magic
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numbers. So I'm going to say, hey, here's exactly what's out there. It's meant to kind of guide,
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guide of where we're going. Although the Drake equation did, I mean, the initial
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equation proposed actual numbers for those variables, right? Oh, yes, the equation proposed
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numbers. And you can still plug your own numbers in. And there's this really cute website that
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lets you, for both the Drake and my revised equation, plug in some numbers and see what you get. So,
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yeah. So, okay, so what are, I mean, what are the variables, but maybe also what are the critical
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variables? So in my equation, I set out to what are the numbers of inhabited planets that show
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signs of life by way of gases in the atmosphere that can be attributed to life. I could just
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walk through the terms. That's probably simpler. So the first thing I say is, what are the number
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of stars available? 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. And so, for example, the MIT led NASA mission
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TESS is surveying the sky looking for all kinds of planets, but it can also, it also has stars.
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It has about 30,000 red dwarf stars. So we just take a number of stars that are given survey
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can access. So that's what the number of stars is. Then I wanted to know what kind of stars are
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quiet. A quiet, I called it a fraction of those stars that is quiet. In the case of TESS, the way
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it's looking for planets is planets that transit the star. They go in front of the star as seen
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from the telescope. But it turns out that some stars are very active. They're variable. And
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they brighten and dim with time. And that interferes with our observation.
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I apologize to interrupt. So it's a transiting planet. So you're really looking for a black blob,
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essentially, that blocks the light. We're looking for a black blob that blocks the light.
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And then trying to say something about the size of the planet from the frequency of that black
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blob's appearance and the size of that black blob, that kind of thing. Yeah. But let's just say that
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out of all the stars there are accessible to whatever telescope, some of them are just bad.
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For whatever reason, 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 good. So again, we have the number of stars,
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the fraction of them that we can actually find planets around.
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And by the way, is our sun, one such, is our sun quiet?
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Our sun is quiet. So I have actually two terms. One describes how quiet they are. And one is
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if we can find a planet around that star. These transiting planets, for example,
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not all planets transit, because the planet would have to be orbiting that star in this kind of plane
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as viewed from you. But if a star is, for example, orbiting in the plane of the sky,
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it will never transit. It will never go in front of the star. So in that case,
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we have to have a fraction that takes into account of that kind of geometric factor.
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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 quiet,
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fraction that are observable, in this case, for the geometric factor, those are all things we
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can measure. And there's one more term in the Seger equation we can measure. I call it fraction
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of planets in the habitable zone. Because believe it or not, we have a handle on that for a certain
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set of stars. We know from our, the Kepler space telescope that operated for a number of years,
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we have estimates for how many planets are in the so called habitable zone of the host star
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for certain type of star. So all those we have measurable. And then like the Drake equation
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00:21:36.160
itself, there are some terms we can not measure. And those ones, I call them FL, fraction of all
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00:21:42.240
those planets that have life on them. Because we don't know what that is. And FS, I called for
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00:21:49.040
spectroscopy, the fraction that have, we can use our telescope and instrument tools
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00:21:56.640
to look for light. Actually, FS was the ones that the planets that have life that actually
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00:22:02.400
gives off a gas, a useful gas that might accumulate in the atmosphere. So we could eventually observe
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00:22:07.680
it. How do the FL and FS interplay? So these are separate terms?
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00:22:13.920
Separate terms. And so. So for example, you could imagine, so for example, you could imagine life
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00:22:22.400
like us humans, we breathe out carbon dioxide. But our planet Earth, we already have a lot of
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00:22:28.240
carbon dioxide on it. Well, we have hundreds of parts per million, but it has a really strong
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00:22:32.320
signal. So us humans breathing out carbon dioxide, it's not helpful for any intelligent
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00:22:37.040
beings that are looking back at Earth. Because there's already a lot of, there's already enough
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00:22:40.720
carbon dioxide, we're not adding to it. So if there is life on a planet, and it's outputting
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00:22:45.680
a boring gas, that's not helpful for us to uniquely identify as being made by life versus
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00:22:52.560
just being there anyway, then it's not helpful. So I separated those two terms out. Soon, I think
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00:22:58.480
we'll have evidence that planets that can support life at least are common.
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00:23:02.880
So, okay, this is such an awesome topic. I have a million questions. What, okay,
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00:23:11.520
I know it's a little bit of speculation, but what's your sense about that? I think FS, which is like
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00:23:18.800
that life would produce interesting gases that would be able to detect. Like, is there one,
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00:23:26.480
is there scientific evidence? And, and second, is there some intuition around life producing
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00:23:32.400
gases detectable hints in terms of chemistry? So interestingly enough, that entire question
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00:23:40.400
relates to, I'm going to say almost my life's work, the work I'm doing now and the work I'm
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00:23:44.800
doing for the next 20 years. And I wish I could give you a concrete number, like 1%. Like on
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00:23:49.440
the worst days, it's 1%, let's say, in my mind. You know, in the best days, it's like 80%. And I
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00:23:54.480
could actually go into a lot of detail here, but I'll just give you the simplest things.
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00:23:58.480
So first of all, we make an assumption that like us and our life here on earth, life uses chemistry.
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00:24:07.440
So we use chemistry because we eat food, we breathe air, and we have metabolism that
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00:24:12.480
to break down food to get energy, to store energy, and then ultimately to use it. And all life here
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00:24:19.440
has some kind of byproduct in doing all that, some kind of waste product that goes into the
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00:24:23.120
atmosphere. So I like to think that life everywhere uses chemistry. Some people have imagined like,
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00:24:30.800
let's imagine like a windmill, like mechanical energy, just getting energy and using it without
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00:24:35.920
storing it. And if there was life like that, it might not need to output a gas. So we make this
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basic assumption of chemistry. That's the first thing. The second more complicated thing that
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00:24:45.600
I and my team work on is what happens to the gas once it is produced by life. It goes into the
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00:24:50.480
atmosphere. And a lot of gas is just destroyed immediately actually by ultraviolet radiation
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00:24:58.080
or by oxygen. Oxygen is incredibly destructive to a lot of gases. So the gas can be produced by
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00:25:05.200
life, but it could be just completely destroyed by its environment. I guess we should pause on that,
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00:25:10.480
that you mentioned your life's work. This is just the beautiful idea that it's kind of paralyzing
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00:25:18.080
when you look out there and you wonder, is there a life out there? It's the first paralyzing.
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00:25:24.240
Actually, before I encountered your work, I feel like an idiot, but it feels like there's no tool
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00:25:30.800
to answer that question. And then what you kind of provided is this cool idea that it might be
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00:25:39.200
possible to answer that by looking at the gases. I mean, that's a really interesting, that's a
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00:25:44.560
beautiful idea. And yeah, so we could just pause on like, that's as a powerful tool, I think,
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00:25:54.080
that to build the intuition wrong, because I was totally clueless about it. And that was kind of
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00:25:58.720
exciting. I mean, I'm sure there's a folks probably early on in your life who were very skeptical
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00:26:05.440
about this notion. Maybe I'm not sure, but it's generally you would want to be skeptical. It's
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00:26:11.600
like, well, all these kinds of other things could generate gases, all those. Oh, that's so true.
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00:26:17.680
And that's a big part of this growing field is how to make sure that this gas isn't produced by
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00:26:23.440
another effect. But I do want to, again, pausing on that and going back a bit. It's incredible to
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00:26:29.520
think, but like, at least almost 100 years ago, there's a record of someone talking about
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00:26:35.120
the idea of a gas being an indicator of life elsewhere.
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00:26:37.680
Oh, that idea was floating about somewhere. Yes, it was totally floating about.
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00:26:41.680
And it comes down to oxygen, which on our planet fills our atmosphere to 20% by volume.
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00:26:48.160
And we rely on oxygen to breathe. When you hear about the people on Mount Everest running out of
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00:26:53.040
air, they're really running out of oxygen, well, they're running out of oxygen because the air is
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00:26:57.280
getting thinner as they climb up the mountain. But without plants and bacteria, there's plants
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00:27:05.520
that bacteria that also photosynthesizes and produces oxygen as a waste product. Without
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00:27:09.840
those, we would have virtually no oxygen. Our atmosphere would be devoid of oxygen.
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00:27:15.280
So yeah, if you were to analyze Earth, is oxygen the strong indicator here?
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00:27:21.440
Oxygen's a huge indicator. And that's what we're hoping that there is an intelligent
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00:27:24.560
civilization not too far from here around a planet orbiting a nearby star with the kind
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00:27:30.160
of telescopes we're trying to build. And they're looking back at our sun and they've seen our Earth
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00:27:34.640
and they see oxygen. And they probably won't be like 100.0% sure that there's life making it.
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00:27:41.360
But if they go through all the possible scenarios, they'll be left with a pretty strong
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00:27:44.960
hint that there's life here. Okay, but how do you detect that type of gases that are on the planet
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00:27:53.520
from a distance? And that's going back to that. That's what people were skeptical about.
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00:27:58.720
When I first started working on exoplanets, a long time ago, people didn't believe we would
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00:28:05.040
ever, ever, ever study an exoplanet atmosphere of any kind. And now dozens of them are studied.
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00:28:11.040
There's a whole field of people, hundreds of people working on exoplanet atmospheres, actually.
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00:28:15.280
Wow. But first there was a point where people didn't even know there's exoplanets, right?
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00:28:20.560
When was the first exoplanet detected? The first exoplanet around a sun like star,
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00:28:25.040
anyway, was detected in the mid 1990s. That was a big deal. Kind of vaguely remember that.
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00:28:30.640
Well, at the time it was a big deal, but it was also incredibly controversial. Because in exoplanets,
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00:28:37.600
we only had one example of a planetary system, our own solar system. And in our solar system,
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00:28:42.960
Jupiter, our big, massive planet, is really far from our star. And this first exoplanet
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00:28:48.960
around a sun like star was incredibly close to its star, its star, so close that people just
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00:28:53.920
couldn't believe it was a planet, actually. So maybe zoom out what the heck is an exoplanet.
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00:28:59.840
An exoplanet is our name. Like is the name that we call a planet orbiting a star other than our sun.
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00:29:06.640
Right. Extrasolar, I guess is another. You can call it extrasolar.
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00:29:10.720
Exoplanet is simpler. But I think it's worth pausing to remember that each one of those stars
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00:29:16.560
out there in our night sky is a sun. And our sun has planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc.
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00:29:22.320
And so for a long time, people have wondered, do those other stars or other suns have planets?
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00:29:28.880
And they do. And it appears that nearly every star has a planet, has a planet we call exoplanet.
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00:29:33.760
And there are thousands of known exoplanets already.
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00:29:36.800
So that's already, yeah, like there's so many things about space that it's hard to put into one's
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00:29:43.680
brain because it starts filling it with awe. So yeah, if you visualize the fact that the stars
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00:29:50.880
that we see in the sky aren't just stars, they're like their suns. And they very likely,
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00:29:59.200
as you're saying, would have planets around them. There's all these planets roaming about in this
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00:30:07.920
dimly lit darkness with potentially life. I mean, it's just mind blowing. But maybe can you
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00:30:16.240
give a brief history of discovering all the exoplanets? So there's no exoplanets in the 90s.
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00:30:26.080
And then there's a lot of exoplanets now. So how did that come about?
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00:30:29.360
So many planets. How did it come about? Well,
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00:30:33.360
maybe another way to ask is, what is the methodology that was used to discover them?
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00:30:37.360
I can say that. But I'd like to just say something else first where, so in exoplanets,
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00:30:42.480
it's the line between what is considered completely crazy and what is considered
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00:30:47.840
mainstream research legit is constantly shifting. This is awesome, yeah.
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00:30:52.640
So before, when I started on exoplanets, it was still sketchy. It wasn't considered a career or
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00:30:58.080
a thing, a place where you should be investing. And right now, now today, it's so many people
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00:31:04.960
are working in this field, a good, I don't know, at least a thousand, probably more. I don't know
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00:31:09.040
if that sounds like a lot to you, but it's a lot. No, it's a legitimate field of inquiry.
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00:31:13.600
Yeah, legitimate field of inquiry. And what's helped us is everything that's helped
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00:31:17.120
everyone else. It's software, it's computers, it's hardware. It's like our phones. You have a
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00:31:22.560
fantastic detector in there. Like they didn't always have that. I don't know if you remember
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00:31:26.720
the so called olden days, we didn't have digital cameras. We had film. You take a film camera,
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00:31:31.360
you send the film away and eventually it comes back and then you see your pictures and they
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00:31:34.880
could all be horrible. So yeah, it's digital. It just changed everything, data changed everything.
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00:31:39.680
Yeah. And so one thing that really helped exoplanets were detectors that were very sensitive
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00:31:45.520
because when we're looking for the transiting planets, what we're doing is we're monitoring
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00:31:51.040
a star's brightness as a function of time. It's like click, taking a picture of the stars every
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00:31:55.840
few seconds or minutes. And we're measuring the brightness of a star, like every frame.
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00:32:01.840
And we're looking for a drop in brightness that's characteristic of a planet going in front of the
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00:32:06.400
star and then finishing its so called transit. And to make that measurement, we have to have
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00:32:13.200
precise detectors. And the detectors that are making the measurement, can you do it from earth?
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00:32:19.600
Is it, are they folding the ball in space? Like what kind of telescope? Both. So on the ground,
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00:32:26.320
people are using telescopes, small telescopes that are almost just like a glorified telephoto lens.
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00:32:31.040
And they're looking at big swaths of the sky. And from the ground, people can find giant planets
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00:32:37.440
like the size of Jupiter. So it's about 10 to 12 times the size of earth. We can find big planets
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00:32:42.640
because we can reach about 1% precision. So not sure how much technically you want to get, but...
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00:32:48.400
Well, yeah. Well, how many pixels are we talking about? Like what, you mentioned phones as a bunch
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00:32:54.880
of megapixels, I think. So for exoplanets, you want to think about it as like a pixel or less
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00:33:00.400
than a pixel. We're not getting any information. But to be more technical, our telescope, you know,
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00:33:05.520
spreads the light out over many pixels, but we're not getting information. We're not
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00:33:10.160
tiling the planet with pixels. It's just like a point of light, or in most cases, we don't even
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00:33:15.040
see the planet itself, just the planet's effect on the star. But another thing that really helped
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00:33:19.440
was computers, because transiting planets are actually quite rare. I mean, they don't all go
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00:33:23.680
in front of their star. And so to find transiting planets, we look at a big part of the sky at once,
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00:33:29.360
or we look at tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, or even in some cases, millions of
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00:33:33.680
stars at one time. And so, you know, you're not going to do this by hand, going through a million
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00:33:37.920
stars, counting up the brightness. So we have computer software and computer code that does the
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00:33:44.960
job for us and looks for a, you know, counts the brightness and looks for a signal that could be
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00:33:50.640
due to a transiting planet. And, you know, I just finished a job called Deputy Science Director for
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00:33:56.480
the MIT led NASA mission test. And it was my purview to make sure that we got the planet candidates,
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00:34:05.120
the transiting light curves, out to the community so people could follow them up
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00:34:09.360
and figure out if they're actual planets or false positives.
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00:34:12.560
I'll also publish the data so that people could just...
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00:34:15.840
Yeah, publish the data.
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00:34:16.880
All the data scientists out there could crunch and see if they can discover something.
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00:34:20.880
Exactly. They can discover something. And in fact, the NASA policy for this mission is that
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00:34:25.360
all the data becomes public as soon as possible. So anyone could act... It's not as easy as it
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00:34:30.000
sounds, though, to download the data and look for planets. But there is a group called PlanetHunters.org
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00:34:36.160
and they take the data and they actually crowdsource it out to people to look for planets. Yeah. And
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00:34:40.400
they often find signals that our computers and our team missed.
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00:34:44.720
So we mentioned exoplanets. What about Earth like or I don't know what the right distinction is.
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00:34:50.640
Is it habitable or is it Earth like planets? But what are those different categories and how
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00:34:55.600
can we tell the difference and detect each? Right, right. So we're not at Earth like planets yet.
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00:35:01.040
All the planets we're finding are so different from what we have in our solar system. They're
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00:35:06.640
just easier planets to find, but like... In which way?
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00:35:09.280
For example, there could be a Jupiter size planet where an Earth should be.
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00:35:12.960
We find planets that are the same size as Earth but are orbiting way closer to their star than
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00:35:20.000
Mercury is to our Sun. And they're so close that because close to a star means they also orbit
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00:35:26.000
faster. And some of these hot super Earths we call them, their year, their time to go around their
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00:35:32.480
star is less than a day. And they're heated so much by their star. They're heated so much by
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00:35:38.080
their star. They're heated so much by the star, we think the surface is hot enough to melt rock. So
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00:35:42.880
instead of running out by the bay or the river, you'll have like liquid lava. There'll be liquid
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00:35:48.000
lava lakes on these planets, we think. And life can't survive? Way too hot. The molecules for life
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00:35:55.200
would just be... Molecules needed for life just wouldn't be able to survive those temperatures.
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00:35:59.520
We have some other planets. One of the most mysterious things out there, factoid, if you will,
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00:36:05.520
is that the most common type of planet we know about so far is a planet that's
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00:36:10.800
in between Earth and Neptune size. It's two to three times the size of Earth. And we have no
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00:36:16.080
solar system counterpart of that planet. That is like going outside to the forest and finding some
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00:36:22.320
kind of creature or animal that just no one has ever seen before and then discovering that is the
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00:36:26.640
most common thing out there. And so we're not even sure what they are. We have a lot of thoughts as
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00:36:31.600
to the different types of planet it could be, but people don't really know. I mean, what are your
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00:36:36.000
thoughts about what it could be? Well, one thought, and this is more when we want to be rather than
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00:36:40.320
might be, is that these so called mini Neptune's, we call them, that they are water worlds,
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00:36:47.840
that they could be scaled up versions of Jupiter's icy moons, such that they are
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00:36:52.240
planets that are made of more than half of water by mass. So yeah, and what's the connection between
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00:36:58.640
water and life and the possibility of seeing that from a gas perspective?
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00:37:03.920
Okay, so all life on Earth needs liquid water. And so there's been this idea in astronomy or
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00:37:10.560
astrobiology for a long time called follow the water, find water. That will give you a chance
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00:37:14.880
of finding life. But we could still zoom out. And the kind of the community consensus is that we
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00:37:21.520
need some kind of liquid for life to originate and to survive because molecules have to react.
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00:37:27.360
If you don't have a way that molecules can interact with each other, you can't really make
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00:37:31.520
anything. And so when we think of all the liquids out there, water is the most abundant liquid in
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00:37:37.440
terms of planetary materials. There really aren't that many liquids. Like I mentioned,
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00:37:41.040
liquid rock, way too hot for life. We have some really cold liquids, like almost gasoline,
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00:37:47.280
like ethane and methane lakes that have been found on one of Saturn's moons, Titan.
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00:37:51.920
That's so cold though. And for exoplanets, we can't study really cold planets because
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00:37:55.680
they're just simply too dark and too cold. So we usually just left with looking for planets
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00:38:02.080
with liquid water. And to your point, remember, we talked about how planets are less than a pixel
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00:38:11.440
in that way to say. So we can't see oceans on the planet. We're not going to see continents and oceans
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00:38:16.240
not yet anyway. But we can see gases in the atmosphere. And if it's a small rocky planet,
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00:38:21.600
and this is going into some more detail, if we see a small rocky planet with water vapor in the
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00:38:28.000
atmosphere, we're pretty sure that means there has to be a liquid water reservoir. Because it's not
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00:38:34.240
intuitive in any way, but water is broken up by ultraviolet radiation from the star or from the sun.
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00:38:40.960
And on most planets, when water is broken up into HNO, the H, the hydrogen, will escape to space.
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00:38:47.200
Because just like when you think of a child letting go of a helium filled balloon, it floats upwards.
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00:38:53.440
And hydrogen's a light gas and will leave from earths, leave from the planet. So ultimately,
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00:38:57.920
if you have water, unless there's an ocean, like a way to keep replenishing water vapor in the
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00:39:02.560
atmosphere, that water vapor should be destroyed by ultraviolet radiation.
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00:39:07.760
Got it. So there's a, okay, so there's a need for liquid. I mean, I guess, what is water?
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00:39:14.560
Well, is water sensors other liquids? I mean, the chemistry here is probably super complicated.
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00:39:19.200
Well, there's not, it does, but you know, there's not an infinite number of liquids.
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00:39:22.160
Right. There's maybe like five liquids that can exist inside or on the surface of a planet.
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00:39:27.200
And water is the one that exists for the largest range of temperatures and pressures.
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00:39:31.280
And it's also the easiest type of planet for us to find and study is one with water vapor,
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00:39:36.080
rather than a cold planet that has ethane and methane lakes.
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00:39:38.960
What's your personal, in terms of solar systems and planets that you're most hopeful about
link |
00:39:46.000
in terms of our closest neighbors, that you kind of have a sense that there might be
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00:39:54.080
somebody living over there, whether it's bacteria or somebody that looks like us?
link |
00:40:00.400
I'm hopeful that every star nearby has a planet.
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00:40:04.000
Because it almost has to for us to make progress. We have to have that dream condition.
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00:40:08.960
So the dream condition is like, life is just super abundant out there.
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00:40:13.920
Yeah, the dream, well, yes, the dream condition is that life is super abundant.
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00:40:17.600
And it's based on the thought that if there is a planet with water and continents,
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00:40:23.600
that it also has the ingredients for life. And that the kind of base, the base,
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00:40:28.720
the base kernel thought is that if the ingredients for life is there, life will form.
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00:40:37.600
Life will form.
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00:40:38.160
That's what we're holding on to.
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00:40:39.040
With a relatively high probability.
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00:40:41.600
With a, yes, that's it.
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00:40:43.440
Okay, let's go into land of speculation. What about intelligent life?
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00:40:49.280
Us humans consider ourselves intelligent, surprisingly, or unsurprisingly,
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00:40:54.320
do you think about, from your perspective of looking at planets from a gas composition
link |
00:41:02.560
perspective, and in general, of how we might see intelligent life and your intuition about
link |
00:41:10.400
whether that life is even out there?
link |
00:41:12.000
I think the life is out there somewhere, the huge numbers of stars and planets.
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00:41:17.360
I like to think that life had a chance to evolve to be intelligent.
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00:41:20.400
And I'm not convinced the life is anywhere near here only because if it's hard for intelligent life
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00:41:26.800
to evolve, then it will be far away by definition.
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00:41:29.520
Well, the sad thing is maybe from the artificial intelligence perspective is
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00:41:35.200
it makes me sad there might be intelligent life out there that we're just not,
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00:41:40.160
like the pathways of evolution can go in all these different directions where we might not
link |
00:41:45.760
be able to communicate with it, or even know that, or even detect its intelligence, or even
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00:41:50.800
comprehend its intelligence. I'm convinced cats are more intelligent than humans that
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00:41:57.600
we're just not able to comprehend the measures, the proper measures of their intelligence.
link |
00:42:04.800
My dog is so funny. He's the golden doodle. His name's Leo.
link |
00:42:08.080
We joke that he's either a really dumb dog. And so he's not here to defend himself,
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00:42:12.240
but he's either really dumb or he's a super genius just pretending to be dumb.
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00:42:16.000
Yeah. And he's possible. He's a multi dimensional projection of alien life here,
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00:42:23.440
monitoring one of the, you know, one of the top scientists in the world trying to find aliens
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00:42:29.760
just to make sure, just to make sure that humans don't get out of hand.
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00:42:34.320
That's funny. Oh, I'm definitely going to go in and ask him, ask him about that.
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00:42:38.960
Ask him about that one again.
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00:42:39.680
She's onto something. Yeah. What might we look for in terms of signs of intelligent life?
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From your toolkit, do you think there are things that we should, 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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00:43:00.640
that's primitive life?
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00:43:02.960
I still love SETI, search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I like to hope that if there is a
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00:43:07.760
civilization out there, they're trying to send us a message. I think, like think about it,
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00:43:12.480
I don't know, what are your thoughts? Like if you think about our earth,
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00:43:15.520
there's no structure we've built that intelligent civilizations could see from far away.
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00:43:20.400
There's literally nothing, not even the Great Wall of China. And so to think like,
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00:43:24.400
why would this other civilization build a giant structure that we could see?
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00:43:29.120
Yeah. So with SETI, the idea is that we're both trying to hear signals and send signals, right?
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00:43:34.080
We haven't sent one, they call that METI messaging. And there's a big kind of fear over METI,
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00:43:39.920
because do you want to tell them you're here? It's kind of this like, let's wait till they call us.
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00:43:47.200
It's like a dating game. You have to like, how many days do I wait before I call kind of thing?
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00:43:52.480
Yes, it is. And so, but the funny thing is, if no one's sending us a message,
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00:43:55.520
if everybody's only listening, how do you make progress?
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00:43:58.080
Yes. That's right. And I mean, but there's also, there's the Voyager spacecraft that we have these
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00:44:04.720
little pixels of robots flying out all over the place. Some of them, like the Voyager,
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00:44:11.600
reach out really far and they have some stuff on them. Okay. I just... We do. We have the Voyager,
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00:44:17.120
but they're not really going anywhere in particular and they're moving very, very slowly on a cosmic
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00:44:21.280
scale. Yeah. And me saying they're far is kind of silly. Yeah, it's all relative in astronomy.
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00:44:26.640
It's all relative. Yeah. Yeah. I just, so from a, if you look at Earth from an alien perspective,
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00:44:34.480
from visually and from gas composition, I wonder if it's possible to determine the degree
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00:44:41.680
of maybe productive energy use? I wonder if it's possible to tell
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00:44:48.720
like how busy these earthlings are. Well, let's zoom out again and think about oxygen.
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00:44:54.560
So when cyanobacteria arose like billions of years ago and figured out how to harness the energy of
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00:45:00.160
the sun for photosynthesis, they reengineered the entire atmosphere. 20% of the atmosphere has
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00:45:06.800
oxygen now. Like that is a huge scale. You know, they almost poisoned everything else by making
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00:45:12.880
this what was apparently very poisonous to everything that was alive. But imagine, so are
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00:45:17.280
we doing anything at that scale? Like are we changing anything at like 20% of the earth with
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00:45:21.280
a giant structure or 20% of this or 20% of that? Like we aren't actually. Yeah. Yeah. That's,
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00:45:28.240
that's humbling to think that we're not actually having that much of an impact.
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00:45:32.240
I know. Well, we are because in a way we're destroying our entire planet,
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00:45:35.120
but it's humbling to think that from far away, people probably can't even tell.
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00:45:39.520
But from the perspective of the planet, when we say we're destroying, you know,
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00:45:44.480
global warming, all that kind of stuff, what we really mean is we're destroying it
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00:45:49.280
for a bunch of different species, including humans. But like, I think the earth will be okay.
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00:45:55.040
Oh, the earth will be, the earth will remain. Whatever, whatever happens to us, the earth
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00:45:59.840
will still be here. And it'll still be difficult to detect any difference. Like it's sad to think
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00:46:04.160
that if humans destroy ourselves, except potentially in nuclear war, it'll be hard to
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00:46:09.760
tell that anything even happened. Yeah, it will be hard to tell from far away that anything happened.
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00:46:14.160
What about, what are your thoughts now? This is really getting into speculation land there.
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00:46:21.120
You've, you've mentioned exoplanets were in the realm of, you know, this is beautiful edge
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00:46:27.760
between science and science fiction that some of us, a rare few are brave enough to walk. I think
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00:46:36.400
in academia, you were brave enough to do that. I think in some sense, artificial intelligence
link |
00:46:41.920
sometimes walks that line a little bit. There is so much excitement about extraterrestrial life
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00:46:50.480
and aliens in this world. I mean, I don't know what, how to comprehend that excitement. But to me,
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00:46:58.800
it's great to see people curious, because to me, extraterrestrial life and aliens
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00:47:04.560
is at the core, a scientific question. And it's almost looks like people are excited about science.
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00:47:10.960
They're excited by discovery. Discovery, right. And then the possibility that there's alien
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00:47:18.000
life that visited earth or is here on earth now is, is excitement about discovery in your lifetime,
link |
00:47:28.160
essentially. I mean, what do you make, what do you make of that? There's recent events where DARPA
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00:47:34.880
or DoD released footage of these unmanned aerial phenomena. They're calling them now UAP.
link |
00:47:46.000
They got everybody like super excited. Like maybe there is like what, what's here on earth? Do you
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00:47:52.400
follow the, this world of people who are thinking about aliens that are already here or have visited?
link |
00:48:00.240
I don't really follow it. They follow me, I'd say. Because in this field, if you're a scientist of
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00:48:05.760
any kind, you get, people contact us, me. There's a lot of them about, hey, I have stuff you should
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00:48:13.520
see. Hey, the aliens are already here. I need to tell you about it. And I know there are people
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00:48:18.240
out there who really believe. There's a psychology to it. There's a psychology to it.
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00:48:23.520
And it's fascinating. But okay. So it's similar to artificial intelligence.
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00:48:27.120
But I still, but like you, I'm still enamored with the point that it is out there and that people
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00:48:31.360
believe so strongly and that so many people out there believe. Believe and I don't know. I'm not
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00:48:40.320
as allergic to it as some scientists are because ultimately if aliens showed up or do show up or
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00:48:46.800
have showed up, you know, these are going to be very difficult to study scientific phenomena.
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00:48:52.800
Like, in fact, like going back to cats and dogs, like, I just, I think we should be more open minded
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00:49:02.640
about developing new tools and looking for intelligent life on earth that we haven't yet
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00:49:09.040
found. Or even understanding the nature of our own intelligence, because it kind of is an alien
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00:49:15.120
life form, the thing that's living, you know, in our skull.
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00:49:18.720
It's so true. And we don't understand consciousness. Yeah. It's true. We don't understand how
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00:49:24.160
biology is hard, you know, unpacking it and working it all out. It's a stretch. And they
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00:49:29.120
say too that our thinking mind is like the tip of a pyramid, that everything else is happening
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00:49:34.720
under the hood and, but what is happening? But the thing with, so the typical scientist's response
link |
00:49:40.240
to, you know, are there aliens here is that we need to see major evidence, not like a sketchy
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00:49:47.440
picture of something. We need some cold heart evidence and we just don't have that.
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00:49:53.280
That's exactly right. But from my perspective, I admire people that dream. And I think that's
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00:49:59.040
beautiful. The thing I don't like, there's two sides of the folks that probably listen to this
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00:50:06.160
broadcast is, oh, those that dream, I think is beautiful, that wonder what's out there,
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00:50:12.560
what's here on earth. And then the other ones who are very conspiratorial and thinking that stuff
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00:50:17.760
is being hidden. It becomes about institutions. Right, right, right. Okay. I have a funny thing
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00:50:23.120
to tell you about that. So one of my colleagues had a really good answer to that. And it's not
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00:50:27.840
me saying this, so I can say this, but he said, look, he works with NASA, not at NASA. He works
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00:50:32.640
with government, not in the government. It's kind of me, but he'd say, trust me, they couldn't hide
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00:50:36.880
it if they tried. Do you know what I'm saying? Like we're not smart enough or good enough.
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00:50:42.160
Not we or not me or not you, but whoever to cover it up. It's just, it's sort of a myth.
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00:50:47.920
Yeah. It makes it sad because the people at NASA, the people at MIT, the people in academia,
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00:50:56.800
the people in these institutions, and yes, even in government are often trying, they're like just
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00:51:04.160
curious descendants of apes. They're just, they want to do good. They want to discover stuff.
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00:51:09.760
They're not trying to hide stuff. In fact, most of them would, in terms of leaks, would love
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00:51:16.400
to discover this and release this kind of stuff. There's a, did you ever watch this show called
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00:51:22.240
The X Files? Yeah. Scully and Mulder? Yeah. And what I love actually, I used to put it up during
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00:51:27.440
my talks, my public talks, there's a picture of a UFO or what looks like UFO and it says,
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00:51:32.800
I want to believe. So that's where I think a lot of us are coming from. I want to believe. And it's
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00:51:40.480
so great. And one time I put that up and this very, very nice couple approached me really nervous
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00:51:46.080
afterwards and I said, hey, can we take you out for lunch sometime? And I said, sure. And they
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00:51:50.480
were like the nicest people and just one of many who has an alien abduction story. And the woman
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00:51:58.560
could never have kids. They were older, but they didn't have kids, which for them was a real
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00:52:02.080
source of regret. But it was because the aliens who had abducted her had made it so that she
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couldn't have kids. And she had apparently something implanted behind her ear, which was somehow
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00:52:11.440
unimplanted later. And they were just so sincere. And they're such a lovely couple.
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00:52:17.520
And they just wanted to share their story. That's, that's a real, whatever that is, that's a real
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00:52:22.480
thing. The mystery of the human mind is more powerful than any alien or, I mean, it's as
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00:52:30.160
interesting I think as the universe. And I think they're somehow intricately linked. Maybe getting
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00:52:36.240
a sense of numbers. How many stars are there in maybe, I don't know what the radius that's
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00:52:46.400
reasonable to think about. I don't know if the observable universe is like way too big to think
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00:52:50.960
about. But in terms of when we think about how many habitable planets there are, what are the
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00:52:55.920
numbers we're working with in your sense? What are the scale? Honestly, the numbers are probably
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00:53:01.280
like billions of trillions of stars. Yeah, you know, in the UK, I think, I don't know if we do
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00:53:06.080
that here, but they will call a billion trillion. We put like one billion followed by a trillion.
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00:53:11.440
Yeah, it's kind of weird. But here, I don't even know how to say the number 10 to the 20.
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00:53:14.720
Like if you know what that is, that's one followed by 20 zeros. That's a big number.
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00:53:18.400
And we don't have a name for that number. There's so many per star. I think we kind of mentioned
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00:53:23.440
this. Is there a good sense? There's probably argument about this, but per star, how many
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00:53:29.440
planets are there? We don't have that number yet per se. You know, we're not really there.
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00:53:34.480
But some people think that there's many planets per star. There's this analogy of
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00:53:40.720
filling the coffee cup. Like, you know, you don't usually just pour one drop. You fill it. And that
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00:53:45.440
planetary systems, we see stars being born that have a disk of gas and dust, and that ultimately
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00:53:51.680
forms planets. So the idea, this kind of concept is that planets, so many planets form too many.
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00:53:58.640
And eventually, some get kicked out and you're left with like a full planetary system,
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00:54:02.400
a dynamically full system. And so there have to be a lot because so many form and a bunch survive.
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00:54:07.920
I mean, that makes perfect intuitive sense, right? Like why wouldn't that happen?
link |
00:54:13.120
Right. Well, there's other thoughts too, though. These big planets that are really close to the star,
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00:54:18.160
we think they formed far away from the star where there's enough material to form,
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00:54:22.800
and they migrated inwards. And some of these planets migrating inwards due to interaction
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00:54:27.520
with other planets or with the disk itself, they may have cleared it out,
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00:54:31.840
like kicked other planets out of the system. So there's a lot of ideas floating around.
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00:54:36.320
We're not entirely sure. And what about Earth like planets? Is that that's another level of
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00:54:42.560
uncertainty that? It's a level of uncertainty. If we think of an Earth like planet being an
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00:54:47.680
Earth around a Sun in the same orbit, an Earth like planet being an Earth size planet in an
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00:54:53.520
Earth like orbit about a Sun like star, we're not there yet. We're not able to detect enough of those
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00:54:58.240
to give you a hard number. Some people have extrapolated and they will say as many as one
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00:55:04.800
in five stars like our Sun could be hosting a true Earth like planet.
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00:55:09.200
Wow. On the topic of space exploration, there's been a lot of exciting developments with NASA,
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00:55:14.960
with SpaceX, with other companies successfully getting rockets into space with humans and getting
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00:55:23.920
them to land back, especially with SpaceX. What are your thoughts about Elon Musk and SpaceX,
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00:55:30.800
Crew Dragon, while working with NASA to launch astronauts? What's your sense about
link |
00:55:37.520
these exciting new developments? Well, SpaceX and other so called commercial
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00:55:42.640
companies are only good news for my field because they're lowering the cost of getting to space.
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00:55:48.880
By having reusable rockets, it's just been it's incredible and we need cheaper access to space.
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00:55:53.600
So from a very practical viewpoint, it's all good. About getting people, there's this dream
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00:55:58.240
that we have to go to Mars, Boots on Mars. Boots on Mars. What do you think about that?
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00:56:04.640
You mentioned probes. What's the value of humans? Is that interesting to you from both scientific
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00:56:11.920
and a human perspective? Human mostly. I think it's such in our desire to explore because part
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00:56:17.200
of what it means to be human. So wanting to go to another planet and be able to live there for
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00:56:22.640
some time, it's just what it means to be human. Oftentimes in science and engineering, big huge
link |
00:56:30.240
discoveries are made when we didn't intend to. So often this kind of pure exploratory type of
link |
00:56:35.600
research or this pure exploration research, it can lead to something really important,
link |
00:56:39.040
like the laser. We couldn't really live without that now. At the grocery, you scan your foods.
link |
00:56:43.680
There's surgery that involves lasers. GPS, we all use our GPS. We don't have GPS because someone
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00:56:49.280
thought, hey, it'd be great to have a navigation system. And so I do support, I do, but I really
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00:56:56.400
think it comes primarily just from the desire to explore. Do you think something, there's a lot of
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00:57:01.840
criticism and a lot of excitement about Mars. Do you think there's value in trying to go to put
link |
00:57:10.640
humans on Mars, first of all, and second of all, colonize Mars? Do you think there's something
link |
00:57:16.320
interesting that might come from there? I'm convinced there will be something interesting.
link |
00:57:20.560
I just don't know what it is yet. But I don't think having some commercial value or value in
link |
00:57:26.000
the metric of something useful is really what's motivating us. So really, you see, exploration
link |
00:57:31.280
is a long term investment into something awesome that eventually will be commercial value.
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00:57:35.440
I do, actually. Yeah. So what about visiting? Okay, I apologize, but there's an exciting longing to
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00:57:47.520
visit Earth like planets elsewhere. So what's the closest Earth like planet you think is worth
link |
00:57:56.400
visiting? And how hard is it? Wow, it is very hard. I mean, our nearest, call it Earth,
link |
00:58:03.360
mass planet, it's orbiting a star very different from our own Sun, an Emdorff star, a small red star,
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00:58:08.720
Proxima Centauri. It's over four light years away. And we can't travel at the speed of light.
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00:58:15.120
We can't even, I mean, it would take tens of thousands of years to get there with conventional
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00:58:19.040
methods. So you know, the movies like multigenerational, you have, yeah, this movie,
link |
00:58:22.880
Passenger, have you seen that movie? Passenger. It's about a big spaceship that is traveling
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00:58:28.560
to another planet and everyone's hibernating. I won't give you the spoiler alert because one
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00:58:31.840
person wakes up and then it's kind of a problem. Okay, got it. But yeah, the multigenerational
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00:58:36.800
ships, I mean, when you think about where we're headed as a species, maybe we don't send people.
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00:58:43.840
Maybe we end up sending raw biological materials and instructions to print out
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00:58:49.760
humans. It sounds kind of farfetched, but already we're printing like liver cells in the lab and
link |
00:58:55.360
beating heart cells. We're starting to reconstruct body parts. I mean, the thing is, it is so hard
link |
00:59:01.920
to get to another planet that this thought of printing humans or printing life forms actually
link |
00:59:06.960
could be easier. Yeah, that's somehow so sad to think, to think of the idea that we would launch
link |
00:59:14.320
a successful spaceship that has multigenerational, like nonhuman life, and it's going to reach
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00:59:22.320
other intelligent life. And by the time they figure out where it came from, human civilization
link |
00:59:29.280
will be extinct. Wow, yeah, that is really suffering. So that's one. There's a tempting
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00:59:35.280
thing to think about. What are the possible trajectories? So, you know, Elon keeps talking
link |
00:59:41.920
about multiplanetary, us becoming multiplanetary species. I mean, sure, Mars is a part of that,
link |
00:59:49.120
but like the dream is to really expand outside the solar system. And it's not clear, just like
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00:59:58.480
it, as you said, like what the actual scientific engineering steps that are required to take,
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01:00:04.480
it seems like so daunting, so daunting. So like the smart thing seems to be to do the
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01:00:10.800
to do the most achievable near daunting task, even if there doesn't seem to be a commercial
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01:00:17.040
application, which I think is colonizing Mars. But like from your perspective, is there some
link |
01:00:24.480
Manhattan project style huge project in space that we might want to take on? And you've had roles,
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01:00:34.640
you had scientists hat roles, and then you also had roles in terms of being on like committees
link |
01:00:39.520
and stuff determining where funding goes and so on. So like, is there a huge like multi trillion
link |
01:00:46.640
we've been throwing the T word around recently a lot, but these huge projects that we might want
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01:00:51.280
to take on? Well, first of all, we want to find the planets like Earth first. Like just even finding
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01:00:56.000
those Earth like planets is a billion dollar endeavor, billions of dollars endeavor. And that's
link |
01:01:01.360
so hard because an Earth is so small, so less massive, and so faint compared to our sun. It's
link |
01:01:08.000
the proverbial needle in a haystack, but worse. And we need very sophisticated space based telescopes
link |
01:01:14.160
to be able to find these planets and to look at them and see which ones have water and which
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01:01:18.800
ones have signs of life on them. Yeah, the the star shade project that you're part of. Star shade.
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01:01:23.680
Star shade, yeah, this probably was badass thing I've ever seen. Right. You know what's
link |
01:01:27.680
interesting is describe what it is first. So what's amazing about star shade is it was first
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01:01:31.920
conceived of in the 1960s. Imagine that and revisited every decade until now when we think we
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01:01:37.680
can actually build it. And star shade is a giant specially shaped screen. It is about,
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01:01:43.840
there's different versions of it, but think about 30 meters in diameter. So you're blocking out the
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01:01:48.560
sun. You're effectively blocking out the star. Yeah. So that you can see the planet directly.
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01:01:53.760
And star shade would have a spacecraft attached to it and it would fly in space far away from
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01:01:58.720
Earth's gravity. And it would have to formation fly with a space telescope. So the idea is that
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01:02:04.160
star shade blocks out the starlight in a very careful way. And it has to block that starlight out
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01:02:10.080
so that the planet that is 10 billion times fainter than the star, that only the planet light
link |
01:02:15.760
goes to the telescope. Yeah. So in formation, meaning the telescope flies and you've given
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01:02:23.600
presentation on this, but like it would fly like and this is extremely high precision endeavor.
link |
01:02:31.040
Yeah. We had this analogy like asking a friend to hold up a dime five miles away.
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01:02:36.240
Perfectly. Like at the perfect line of sight with you.
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01:02:40.160
And the shape of it is pretty cool. I mean, I don't know exactly what the physics of that,
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01:02:44.320
like what the optics are that require that shape. I can tell you, it turns out that if you
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01:02:48.800
block out a star, imagine blocking out a star with a circle, circularly or a square shape screen,
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01:02:54.560
you wouldn't actually be blocking it because the star acts like a wave. The starlight can
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01:02:59.280
act like a wave and it would actually bend around the edges of the screen. And so instead of blocking
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01:03:04.560
out the light, you're expecting to see nothing, you would see ripples. And the analogy that I
link |
01:03:09.520
love to give, it's like throwing a pebble in a pond. You get those ripples, you get these concentric
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01:03:15.200
ripples and they go out and light would do something quite similar. You'd actually see
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01:03:19.120
ripples of light and those ripples of light, they're actually way brighter than the planet we'd be
link |
01:03:24.560
looking for. So they would introduce this noise that's... Yeah, noise. And so this star shade,
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01:03:30.480
it's like a mathematical solution to the problem of diffraction, it's called. And this is what the
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01:03:36.720
first person who thought about star shade in the 1960s worked out, the mathematical shape,
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01:03:40.800
or one family of solutions. And the idea is that when the star shade, this very special
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01:03:46.400
shape like a giant flower with petals, when it blocks out the light, the light bends around
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01:03:52.480
the edges but interacts with itself in a way to give you a very, very dark image. It would be like
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01:03:57.600
throwing a pebble in a pond. And instead of getting ripples, the pond would be perfectly smooth,
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01:04:03.360
like incredibly smooth to one part in 10 billion. And all the waves would be on the outer edges,
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01:04:08.960
far away from where you dropped that pebble. And so this camera would be able to... Oh,
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01:04:13.920
this camera, this telescope would be able to get some signal from the planet then.
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01:04:19.680
Yes. And it would be hard because the planet is so faint. But with the star out of the way,
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01:04:23.120
the glare of that bright, bright, bright star, with that out of the way,
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01:04:27.120
then it becomes a much more manageable task.
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01:04:30.320
So how do we get that thing out there? We're still working with unlimited money.
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01:04:34.000
Okay, we're working with unlimited money. We have some more engineering problems to solve,
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01:04:38.000
but not too many more. We've been burning down our so called tall pole list.
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01:04:42.240
And then we just... What kind of list?
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01:04:43.600
We call it technology tall pole. It's the phrase where you have to figure out what are your hardest
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01:04:50.480
problems and then break those down to solve. So the star shade, one of the really hard problems
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01:04:55.520
was how to formation fly at tens of thousands of kilometers. It's like, wow, that is insane.
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01:05:01.840
And the team broke that down actually into a sensing problem. Because of the star shade,
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01:05:06.560
how do you see the star shade precisely enough to control it? Because if you're shining a flashlight,
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01:05:11.520
you know the beam spreads out. So the star shade has a beacon, an LED or a laser. It's going to
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01:05:16.400
spread out so much by the time it gets to the telescope. The problem wasn't how do you tell
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01:05:21.280
the star shade how to move around fast enough to stay in a straight line. The problem was how
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01:05:25.200
are you able to sense it well enough? So problems like that were broken down and money that came
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01:05:31.120
from NASA to solve problems is put towards solving it. So we've got through most of the
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01:05:35.840
hard problems right now. Another one was that star shade, even though it's looking at a star,
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01:05:40.800
light from our own sun could hit the edges of the star shade and bounce off into the telescope,
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01:05:46.560
believe it or not. And that would actually ruin it because we're trying to see this tiny,
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01:05:52.240
tiny signal. So then the question is, how do you make a razor thin edge? Like those pedal
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01:05:56.000
edges would have to be like a razor. And what materials can you use? So there's a series of
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01:06:00.720
problems like that. Wow. So there's a materials problem in there? Some of them. Wow. And there's
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01:06:06.640
one. So we almost finished solving all those problems. And then it's just a matter of
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01:06:11.920
building one and testing it in a full scale size facility. And then building the telescope,
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01:06:17.840
it's just a matter of time to build everything and get it, get it up for launch. So this is
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01:06:22.960
an engineering? Close, engineering. Yeah, it's close. This is an engineering project.
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01:06:26.240
It's a real engineering project. I actually can tell you about two other projects that are not mine.
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01:06:30.640
I like to call, call star shade mine because it was my project that I helped make it mainstream
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01:06:38.800
where that line is constantly shifting. When I started, when I got this leadership role on
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01:06:42.640
star shade, I remember telling people about it and it was definitely not on the mainstream
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01:06:46.880
okay line. It was on the giggle factor side of the line. And people would just laugh like,
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01:06:51.600
that's dead. Like you can never formation fly. Or they'd say, why are you working on that? That's
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01:06:55.760
just so not, it's not. This is so awesome. There's a few things you've done in your life.
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01:07:00.240
And that's when I first saw star shade. I was like, what, really? And then like it sinks in.
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01:07:06.880
I mean, it's the same thing I felt with like Elon Musk or certain people who do crazy stuff.
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01:07:13.840
And then, and they get, they actually make it work. I mean, if you get star shade information
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01:07:18.720
flying to like together, I mean, how awesome is that if you actually make that happen?
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01:07:24.640
Even like from a robot, sorry, from the robotics perspective, even if it doesn't give us good
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01:07:30.320
data, that's just like a cool thing to get out there. I mean, it's really exciting.
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01:07:34.320
Really cool. So there's two other topics that aren't mine, but I still love them.
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01:07:39.040
One of them, let's just talk about it briefly, because it's not a pro, but
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01:07:42.560
it's the idea to send a telescope very far away to 500 times the earth's sun distance.
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01:07:47.520
And this is way farther than the Voyager spacecrafts are right now. And to use our sun
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01:07:52.000
as a gravitational lens, to use our sun to magnify something that's behind it.
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01:07:58.880
It's got to sink in for a minute.
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01:08:00.160
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't know what the physics of that is, like how to use the sun.
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01:08:05.200
In astronomy, and Einstein thought about this initially, we can use massive objects, bend
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01:08:10.640
space. And so light that should be traveling like straight, it actually travels around the
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01:08:16.240
warped space. And somehow you figure out a way to use that for magnification.
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01:08:22.800
You have a way to use that for magnification. That's right. There are galaxies that are
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01:08:28.400
lens, so called gravitational lens, by intervening galaxy clusters, actually.
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01:08:34.320
And there are microlensing events where stars get magnified as an unseen gravitational lens star
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01:08:40.960
passes in between us and that very distant star. It's actually a real tool in astronomy.
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01:08:44.880
Yeah, using gravitational lens to magnify, because it bends more
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01:08:49.040
raised towards you than normally would normally see.
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01:08:51.840
And again, we're trying to get more higher resolution images that are basically boiled
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01:08:58.720
down to light. Well, it boils down to light. And then you can maybe get more information about...
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01:09:05.440
Well, in this case, you would ask me, let's say, if this thing could get built, it would take
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01:09:10.640
something like, they like to say 25 years to get from here to there, 25 years, and then it could
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01:09:16.240
send some information back to us. And then you'd say, so, Sarah, how many pixels? And I wouldn't
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01:09:20.640
say one or less than one. I'd say, you know, it could be like 10 by 10 pixels, could be 100 pixels,
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01:09:25.920
which would be awesome. I mean, it's still crazy that we can get a lot of information from that.
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01:09:30.480
Crazy, right. And it's crazy for a lot of other reasons, because again, you have to line up the
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01:09:34.000
sun and your target. You only have one telescope per target, because every star is behind the sun
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01:09:39.760
in a different way. So it's a lot of complicated things. But what about the second? The second one,
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01:09:45.520
it's called Starshot. You know, Starshot means like big dreams. And it's an initiative by the
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01:09:53.040
Breakthrough Foundation. And Starshot is the concept to send thousands of little tiny spacecraft,
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01:10:02.080
which they now call StarChip. So instead of Starship, it's StarChip. And there's a little chip
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01:10:07.200
and the Starship. So like thousands of little turtles being born, they're not all going to make it,
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01:10:15.520
because they just send lots of them. And each of these Starships, once they're launched into,
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01:10:21.680
I guess, low Earth orbit, they will deploy a solar sail that's a few meters in diameter.
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01:10:27.680
And they'd use it on Earth, we would have a bank of... This one is still a bit on the other side
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01:10:34.320
of the line, but we'd have a bank of telescopes with lasers that'd be like a gigawatt power.
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01:10:42.560
And these lasers would momentarily shine upwards and accelerate. They'd hit these sails. They'd
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01:10:49.200
be like a power source for the sail and would accelerate the sails to travel at about a 20th
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01:10:55.200
the speed of light. Is that as crazy as it sounds? Well, like any good engineering project,
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01:11:02.880
it has to be broken down into the crazy parts. And the breakthrough initiative, like to their huge
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01:11:07.440
credit, is sponsoring getting over these... Actually, they've listed initially, they listed 19
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01:11:14.640
challenges. This is broken down into concrete things. Like one of them is, well, you have to buy
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01:11:19.040
the land and make sure the airspace is okay with you sending up that much power overhead.
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01:11:24.560
Another one is you have to have material on the sail where the lasers won't just vaporize it.
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01:11:29.040
And well, so there's a lot of issues. But anyway, these sails would be accelerated to
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01:11:32.960
20th the speed of light. And their journey to the nearest star would no longer be tens of thousands
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01:11:38.400
of years, but could be 20 years. Okay, 20. So it's not as bad as tens of thousands. And these
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01:11:47.840
thousands or whatever, however many make it, they'll go by the nearest star system and snap
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01:11:53.040
some images and radio the information back to Earth. Because they're traveling so fast,
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01:11:57.440
they can't slow down, but they'll zoom by, take some photos, send it back. Hi, Rez. Yeah. But see,
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01:12:02.560
just what I want you to pause on for a second is that just by making that a real concept,
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01:12:07.360
and the money given won't make it happen, but what it's done is it's planted the seed.
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01:12:12.480
And it's shifted that line from what is crazy to what is a real project. It's shifted it just ever
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01:12:16.800
so slightly enough, I think, to plant the seed that we have to find a way to somehow find a way
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01:12:22.160
to get there. That is, again, to stay on that, that is so powerful. Take a big crazy idea
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01:12:28.960
and break it down into smaller crazy ideas, order it in a list, and knock it out one at a time.
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01:12:38.720
I don't know, I've never heard anything more inspiring from an engineering perspective,
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01:12:43.360
because that's how you solve the impossible things. So you open your new book, Discussing
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01:12:50.400
Rogue Planet, PSO J318, I never said this out loud, 0.522. So a rogue planet, which is just this
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01:12:59.840
poetic, beautiful vision of a planet that, as you write, lurches across the galaxy,
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01:13:07.760
like a rudderless ship wrapped in perpetual darkness, its surface swept by constant storms,
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01:13:14.160
its black skies raining molten iron. Just like the vision of that, the scary, the darkness,
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01:13:23.680
the, just how not pleasant it is for human life, just the intensity of that metaphor,
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01:13:31.520
I don't know. And the reason you use that is to paint a feeling of loneliness,
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01:13:40.480
I think, and despair. And why, maybe on the planet side, why does it feel,
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01:13:52.080
maybe it's just me, why does it feel so profoundly lonely on that kind of planet?
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01:14:01.520
I think it's because we all want to be a part of something, a part of a family or a part of a
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01:14:06.400
community or a part of something. And so our solar system, and by the way, I only, it's sort of like a,
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01:14:15.680
like when you treat yourself to like eating an entire tub of ice cream, like I sometimes treat
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01:14:20.880
myself to imagine things like this and not just be so cut and dried. But when you imagine that,
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01:14:25.920
this planet's not, because I don't want to give emotions to a planet per se, but the planet's
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01:14:29.600
not part of anything. It's somehow, it's just all on its own, just kind of out there without that warm
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01:14:36.640
energy from its sun. It's just all alone out there.
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01:14:40.800
To me, it was this little discovery that I actually feel pretty good being part of this solar system.
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01:14:47.360
It felt like we have a sun, we have like a little family. And it felt like it sucked for the rogue
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01:14:53.440
planet to just floating about, not floating, flying rudderless. By the way, how many rogue
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01:15:02.000
planets are there in your sun? We don't know totally. I mean, there's some rogue planets
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01:15:07.280
that are just born on their own. I know that sounds really weird to be, how can you be born
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01:15:10.560
an orphan? But they just are. Because most planets are born out of a disk of gas and dust around
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01:15:18.000
a star. But some of these small planets are like totally failed stars. They're so failed,
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01:15:22.000
they're just small planets on their own. But we think that there's probably, honestly,
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01:15:27.120
there's another path to a rogue planet. That's one that's been kicked out of its star system
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01:15:31.120
by other planets, like a game of billiard balls. Something just gets kicked out.
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01:15:35.440
We actually think there's probably as many rogue planets as stars.
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01:15:39.600
No, flying out there fundamentally alone. So the book is a memoir. It's about your life and it
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01:15:50.880
weaves both your fascination with planets outside the solar system and the path of your life.
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01:16:02.320
And you lost your husband, which is a kind of central part of the book
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01:16:10.880
that created a feeling of the rogue planet. By the way, what's the name of the book?
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01:16:17.120
The name of the book is the smallest lights in the universe. What's up with the title?
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01:16:22.400
What's the meaning? The title has a double meaning. On the face of it, it's the search for other
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01:16:26.640
Earths. Earths are so dim compared to the big, bright, massive star beside them. Searching for
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01:16:32.960
the Earths is like searching for the smallest lights in the universe. It has this other meaning,
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01:16:40.800
too. I really hope that you or the other people listening never get to the place where you're
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01:16:48.720
falling off the cliff into this horrible place of huge despair. And once in a while,
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01:16:56.960
you get a glimmer of a better life, of some kind of hope. And those are also the smallest
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01:17:02.000
lights in the universe. Well, maybe we can tell the full story before we talk about the glimmer
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01:17:08.960
of hope. What did it feel like to first find out that your husband, Mike, was sick?
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01:17:17.680
It was incredibly frustrating. Lots of us have had some kind of problem that the doctors completely
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01:17:24.320
ignore. Just that they kept blowing him off. It's nothing. Are they paid to just say it's
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01:17:29.920
nothing? I mean, it's just insane. I was just so angry. And we finally got to a point where he
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01:17:36.000
was really sick. He was in bed, not able to move, basically. And it turned out all the things they
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01:17:42.560
ignored and not done any tests, he had a 100% blockage in his intestine. 100%. Nothing could
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01:17:50.880
get out. Nothing could get in. And it was pretty, pretty shocking to even hear then that it could
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01:17:56.320
be nothing. What was the progression of it in the context of maybe the medical system of the
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01:18:02.640
doctors? I mean, what did it feel like? Did you feel like a human being?
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01:18:08.800
I felt like a child. The doctors were trying to water down the real diagnosis or treat us like
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01:18:18.640
we couldn't know the truth or they didn't know. I felt mixed. It's not a good situation if you
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01:18:24.000
think the doctor either has no idea what he or she is doing or if the doctors purposely,
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01:18:28.800
let's just say lying to you to sugarcoat it. I didn't know which one of it was,
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01:18:32.160
but I knew it was one of those. What were the things he was suffering from?
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01:18:37.760
Well, initially, he just had a random stomach ache. I hate to say that out loud because I know
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01:18:41.600
a lot of people will have a random stomach ache. Yeah. But so he just had a bad stomach ache and
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01:18:46.080
then, hmm, this is weird. A few days later, another bad stomach ache kind of gets worse,
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01:18:50.160
might go away for a few weeks, might come back. And at the time, all I knew was my dad had had
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01:18:55.040
that same thing. Not the same identical system, but he had these really weird pains and he
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01:18:59.680
ended up having the worst diagnosis. One of the worst diagnoses you can get from a random
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01:19:05.680
stomach ache is pancreatic cancer. Because the time, the pancreas, like you can't feel anything. So
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01:19:10.880
by the time you feel pain, it's too late. It's spread already. So I was just like, beside myself,
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01:19:15.840
I'm like, this is like, wow, this guy, he's got a random stomach ache. All I know is another man
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01:19:20.800
I loved had a random stomach ache and it didn't end well. How did you deal with it emotionally,
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01:19:26.080
psychologically, intellectually as a scientist? What was that like, that whole, because it's
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01:19:32.640
not immediate. It's a long journey. It's a long journey. And you don't know where the diagnosis
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01:19:38.080
is going. So anyone who's suffered from a major illness, there's like always branches on the road.
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01:19:43.920
So, you know, he had this intestinal blockage. I can't imagine someone in their 40s having that
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01:19:49.440
and that be normal. But the doctor is like, it could be nothing. Could just cut it out. You
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01:19:54.400
don't need most of your intestine. It's a repeating pattern. Just cut that out. It could be fine. But
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01:19:57.840
it ended up not being fine and huge diagnosis being terminally ill. Well, it really changed my life
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01:20:02.960
in a huge way. First of all, I remember immediately one summer, the summer when this happened,
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01:20:08.960
I started asking everyone I knew, I would ask you, I know it's not my job to put you on the spot.
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01:20:13.440
I'd say, you have one year to live or two or three. What will you do differently about your life now?
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01:20:19.840
Lex, you have one year to live. What would you do?
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01:20:26.400
I mean, it's hard. I don't know if you want to answer that. No, no, no. I think about it a lot.
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01:20:30.320
I mean, that's a really good thing to meditate on. We can talk about maybe how,
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01:20:37.520
why you bring that up, if it is or not a heavy question. But I get, I think about mortality
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01:20:45.600
a lot. And for me, it feels like a really good way to focus in on is what you're doing today,
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01:20:55.600
the people you have around you, the family you have. Does it bring you joy? Does it bring you
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01:21:04.960
fulfillment? And basically, for me of long ago, try to be ready to die any day. So like today,
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01:21:21.920
you know, I kind of woke up, look if I was nervous about talking to you,
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01:21:26.160
I've really admire your work and the book is very good and super exciting topic.
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01:21:31.200
But then, you know, there's this also feeling like if this is the last conversation I have
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01:21:37.760
in my life, you know, if I die today, will this be the right, like am I glad today happened?
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01:21:44.720
And it is. And I am glad today happened. So that's the way.
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01:21:49.520
And that's so unique. I never got that answer from a single person.
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01:21:54.400
The busyness of life, there's goals, there's dreams, there's like planning.
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01:21:59.600
And very few people make it happen. That's what I learned. And so a lot of these people...
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01:22:05.440
Oh, like you run out of time?
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01:22:07.120
It's not so much you run out of time, but I'd come back later and be like,
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01:22:09.440
okay, why don't you do that? If that's what you would do, if you're going to die a year from now,
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01:22:13.840
why don't you make it real? Simple things, spend more time with family. Like why don't you do that?
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01:22:20.000
And no one had an answer. It turns out unless you usually, unless you have,
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01:22:24.400
you really do have a pressing end of life, people don't do their bucket list or try to
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01:22:29.200
change their career. And some people can't. So we can't. Like for a lot of people,
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01:22:32.640
they can't do anything about it. And that's, that's fine. But the ones who can take action
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01:22:36.880
for some reason never do. And that was one of the ways that Mike's death or at the time,
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01:22:42.400
his impending death really, really affected me. Because you know, for these sick people,
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01:22:47.200
what I learned, he had a bucket list and he was able to do some of the bucket lists. It was awesome.
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01:22:51.600
But he got sick pretty quickly. So if you do only have a year to live, it's ironic because you can't
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01:22:57.200
do, you can't do the things you wanted to do because you get too sick too fast.
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01:23:01.120
What were the bucket list things for you that you realized like, what am I doing with my life?
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01:23:06.240
That was the major cons of him. After he died, I didn't know. Like I, I was just lost because
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01:23:12.240
when something that profound happens, all the things I was doing, most of the things I was
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01:23:17.920
doing were just meaningless. It was so tough to, to find an answer for that. And that's when I
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01:23:24.560
settled on, I'm going to devote the rest of my life to trying to find another earth and to find
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01:23:30.640
out to find that we're not alone. What is that longing for connection with others?
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01:23:41.760
What's that about? What do you think? Why is that so full of meaning?
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01:23:45.360
I don't know why. I mean, I think it's how we're hardwired. Like one of my friends some time ago,
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01:23:50.160
actually when my dad died, he never heard someone say this before, but he's like, Sarah, you know,
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01:23:57.120
why are we evolved to take death so harshly? Like what kind of society would we be if we just
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01:24:03.440
didn't care people died? That would be a very different type of world. How would we as a species
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01:24:08.480
have got to where we are? So I think that is tied hand in hand with why do we, why do we
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01:24:14.880
seek connection? It's just that what we were talking about before, that subconsciousness
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01:24:19.520
that we don't understand. Yeah, a couple, you know, the other side, the flip side of the coin of
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01:24:26.240
connection and love is a fear of loss. It's like that was again, I don't know, it's what makes
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01:24:34.320
you appreciate the moment is that the thing ends. Yeah, it's definitely a hard one. The thing ends,
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01:24:40.480
but what, and it's hard to not you, you wouldn't want to limit like it's like my dog who I love so
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01:24:47.920
much, I'll start to cry. Like I can't think about the end. I know he'll age much faster than I will
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01:24:52.480
and someday it will end, right? But it's too sad to think of. But should I not have got a dog?
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01:24:57.600
Right.
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01:24:58.080
Should I have not brought this sort of joy into my life because I know it won't be forever?
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01:25:02.000
It's, well, there's a, there's a philosopher who wrote a book, Denial of Death. I just,
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01:25:10.320
and warm with the cores and there's another book talks about terror management theory,
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01:25:15.040
Sheldon Solomon, I just talked to him a few weeks ago. He's a brilliant philosopher, psychologist
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01:25:21.440
that their theory, whatever you make of it, is that the fear of death is at the core of
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01:25:29.280
everything, everything we do. So like, you're, that you think you don't think about the mortality
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01:25:37.520
of your dog, but you do. And that's what makes the experience rich. Like there's this kind of,
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01:25:43.200
like in the shadows looks the, the knowledge that this won't last forever. And that makes every moment
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01:25:52.160
just special in some kind of a weird way that it, the moments are special for us humans. I mean,
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01:26:01.840
I mean, sorry to use romantic terms like love, but what do you make, what did you learn about love
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01:26:12.800
from, from losing it from losing your husband? Well, I learned to love the things I have more.
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01:26:21.760
I learned to love the people that I have more and to not let the little things bother me as much.
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01:26:29.040
What about the rediscovery or like the discovery of the little lights
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01:26:40.480
in the darkness? So you, the book, I think you
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01:26:46.000
brilliantly describe the dark parts of your journey. But maybe, can you talk about how
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01:26:56.560
you were able to rediscover the lights? They came in many ways. And the way like to think
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01:27:03.440
about it is like grief is an ocean. It was tiny islands of the little, like, like the little
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01:27:10.560
lights and eventually that ocean gets smaller and smaller and the islands like become continents
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01:27:15.280
with lakes. So initially be like the children laughing one day or my colleagues at work who
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01:27:21.920
rallied around me and would take me away from my darkness to work on a project. Later on,
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01:27:29.200
it turned out to be a group of women my age, all widows, all with children in my town.
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01:27:35.040
And it would be even though it was a bit morose getting together,
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01:27:39.120
still very joyful at the same time. What was the journey of rediscovering love
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01:27:44.480
of like for you? So refinding. I mean, is there some by way of advice or insight about how to
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01:27:57.440
how to rediscover the beauty of life? Of life. It's a hard one. I think you just have to stay
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01:28:03.920
open to being positive and just to get out there. Do you still think, do you still think
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01:28:11.600
about your own mortality? So you mentioned that that was the thing that you would meditate on
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01:28:16.560
as a question when it was right there in front of you, but do you still think about it?
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01:28:23.840
I think I will after talking to you. No, it's not really something I think about. I mean,
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01:28:28.800
I do think about the search for another earth and will I get there? Will I be able to conclude
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01:28:35.440
my search and is there one? I guess time goes by, that window to solve that problem gets smaller.
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01:28:45.200
What would bring you, again, I apologize if this makes concrete the fact that life is finite,
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01:28:52.000
but what would bring you joy if we discovered while you're still here?
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01:28:58.080
What would bring me joy? Finding another earth, an earth like planet around a sunlike star,
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01:29:03.600
knowing that there's at least one or more out there, being able to see water, that it has
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01:29:08.800
signs of water and being able to see some gases that don't belong. So I know that the search
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01:29:14.080
will continue after I'm gone, enough to fuel the next generation.
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01:29:19.280
So just like opening the door and there's like this glimmer of hope.
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01:29:23.840
What do you think it will take to realize that? I mean, we've talked about all these
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01:29:26.960
interesting projects, Star Shade especially, but is there something that you're particularly kind of
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01:29:34.400
hopeful about in the next 10, 20 years that might give us that exact glimmer of hope that
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01:29:41.600
there's earth like planets out there? I have to, I stand behind Star Shade in all cases.
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01:29:47.120
But there is this other kind of field that I, that everyone is involved in, because Star Shade
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is hard. Earths are hard. But there are, there's another category of planet star type that's
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easier. And these are planets orbiting small red dwarf stars. They're not earth like at all,
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01:30:03.840
think like earth cousin instead of earth twin. But there's a chance that we might establish
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01:30:08.000
that some of those have water and signs of life on them. That's nearer term than Star Shade and
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01:30:12.800
we're all working hard on that too. Let me ask by way of recommendations. I think a lot of people
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01:30:19.040
are curious about this kind of stuff. What three books, technical or fiction or philosophical or
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01:30:25.120
anything really had an impact on your life and, and or you would recommend besides of course your
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01:30:33.280
book. There's one book I wish everyone could read. I'm not sure if you've read it. It's actually a
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01:30:40.160
children's book, like a young adult book. It's called The Giver. Yes. And it is the book that
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01:30:47.200
kids in school read now. And I only, sorry. That's, that's, that's wow. Cause I've, sorry,
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01:30:54.800
that, that caught me off guard. So when I first came to this country, I didn't speak much. It's
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01:30:59.680
really what made me, it had a profound impact on my life. And I had a really important moment
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01:31:05.920
because they, they give it to kids like, I think middle school, I think, or maybe elementary
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01:31:09.520
or something like that. I'm so surprised you've even heard of this book. Yeah. So they gave it,
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01:31:13.600
but like it's the value of giving the right book to a person at the right time.
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01:31:20.000
It's very accessible. Do we want to share what the story is without spoiling it?
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01:31:25.920
Yeah, you can without spoiling, right? It follows this boy in this very
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01:31:30.800
utopic society that's like perfect. It's been all clean cut and made perfect actually. And as he
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01:31:35.840
kind of comes of age, he starts realizing something's wrong with his world. And so it's part of that
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01:31:42.160
question. Are we going to evolve this? I mean, this isn't what's there, but it made me wonder,
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01:31:45.280
you know, are we evolving to a better place? Is there a day when we can eliminate, you know,
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01:31:49.120
poverty and hunger and crime and sickness in this book they pretty much have in a society that the
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01:31:55.040
boy's in and sort of follows him and he becomes a chosen one to be like a receiver that givers the
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01:32:02.240
old wise man who retains some of the harshness of the outside world so that he can advise the people.
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01:32:08.320
As the sort of boy comes of age and is chosen for the special role, he finds the world isn't what
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01:32:12.160
he expects. And I don't know about you, but it was so profound for me because it jolts you out of
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01:32:17.680
reality. It's like, oh my God, what am I doing here? I'm just going with the flow with my society.
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01:32:22.640
How do I think outside the box and the confines of my society which surely carries negative
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01:32:26.800
things with it that we don't realize today? Yeah, and also in the flip side of that is if you do
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01:32:32.880
take a step outside the box on occasion, what's the psychological burden of that? Is that a
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01:32:41.280
step you want to take? Is that a journey you want to take? What is that life like? I don't know. I
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01:32:46.400
felt like from the book you have to take it. I found from the book. Now that you're saying it,
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01:32:51.600
I see what you're saying. The burden is huge, but I always felt like the answer is yes,
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01:32:55.200
you absolutely want to know what's outside, but you can't do that. It's hard to be objective
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01:33:00.560
about your own reality. Yeah, I mean, it's a very human instinct, but it also the book kind of
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01:33:07.040
shows that it has an effect on you. And it's a really interesting question about our society
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01:33:13.760
taking a step out. It's by Lois Lowry, I think is how you pronounce it. I really do hope everyone
link |
01:33:21.760
created it. And it is a young adult book, but it's still, it's incredibly, I'm really glad,
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01:33:25.200
I only read it because my kids got it for school. I just thought, okay, well, why don't I just see
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01:33:28.960
what this is about? And I just, wow. Yeah, I think it's also the value of education. I think,
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01:33:36.000
I'm surprised you mentioned, I've never really mentioned to anybody. I'm sure a lot of people
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01:33:40.640
had the similar experience like me and maybe. It's a generational thing though, because like
link |
01:33:44.640
the book came out, I think in the 90s. So if you're older than me, that book didn't exist
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01:33:49.840
when we were in middle school. So I just do think a lot of people won't have heard of it.
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01:33:53.520
But it's an interesting question of like those books. I mean, I'm reminded often, I suppose
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01:34:00.480
the same is true as all the subjects, but books are special. At the early age, like middle school,
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01:34:06.800
maybe early high school, those can change like the direction of your life. And also certainly
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01:34:13.600
teachers, they can change completely direction of life. There's so many stories about teachers
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01:34:19.920
of mathematics, teachers of physics of any kind of subjects, basically changing the direction of
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01:34:26.240
a human's life. That's like, not to get on the, the whole almost like a political thing, but
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01:34:34.880
you know, we, we undervalue teachers. It's a special, it's a special position that they hold.
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01:34:41.840
That's so true. Yeah. Well, I do have two other books or two other things. One is something I
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01:34:47.200
came across just a few days ago, actually. It's actually a film called Picture a Scientist.
link |
01:34:54.560
And when you picture a scientist, you probably don't picture the women and women of color in this
link |
01:34:59.920
film. And it is a way to get outside your box. I really think everyone interested in science,
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01:35:06.720
even just peripherally, should watch this because it is shocking and sobering at the same time.
link |
01:35:12.320
And it talks about how, well, I think one of the messages across is, you know, we really are like,
link |
01:35:19.200
I don't know if we're hardwired to just like people like ourselves, but we're excluding a lot of
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01:35:23.280
people and therefore a lot of great ideas by not being able to think outside of how we're all
link |
01:35:28.320
stereotyping each other. So it's, it's, it's hard to kind of convey that. And you can just say,
link |
01:35:33.360
oh yeah, I want to be more diverse. I want to be more open, but it's a nearly impossible problem
link |
01:35:37.920
to solve. And the movie really helps open people's eyes to it. This book I put third because unlike
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01:35:44.960
the giver, people may not want to read it. It's not as relevant. But when I was in my early 20s,
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01:35:50.240
I went to this big, this like 800 people large conference called, run by the Wilderness Canoe
link |
01:35:57.280
Association in my hometown of Toronto. And there was a family friend there who I met.
link |
01:36:02.240
And he said, read this book, it'll change your life. And it actually changed my life. And it
link |
01:36:07.600
was a book called Sleeping Island by an author, PG Downs, who just coincidentally lived in this
link |
01:36:13.680
area, lived in the Boston area. He was a teacher, I think at a private school. And every summer,
link |
01:36:18.160
he would go to Canada with a canoe often by himself. And he wrote this book, maybe in the
link |
01:36:24.240
40s or 50s about a trip he took in the late 1930s. And it was, I was just shocked that even at that
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01:36:30.240
time, although that was a long time ago, there were large parts of Canada that were untouched by
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01:36:35.120
white people. And he went up there and interacted like with the natives. He called the book,
link |
01:36:41.920
it had a subtitle that was called, there's something like Journey in the Baron Lands. And when
link |
01:36:47.120
you go up north in Canada, you pass the tree line, just like on a mountain, if you hike up a mountain,
link |
01:36:50.880
you get so far north there aren't any trees. And he wrote eloquently about the land and about
link |
01:36:55.120
being out there. There weren't even any maps of the region in that time. And I just thought to
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01:37:01.040
myself, wow, that you could just take the summer off and explore by canoe and go and see what's
link |
01:37:06.000
out there. And it led to me just doing that, that very thing. Of course, it's different now,
link |
01:37:12.000
but going out to where the road ends and putting the canoe in the water and just, well,
link |
01:37:15.840
we had to have a plan. We didn't just explore, but go down this rivers with rapids and travel
link |
01:37:20.880
over lakes and portages and just really live. So just really explore, screw it. That doesn't,
link |
01:37:27.760
like it doesn't. Explore, just use from a topo map, from a topographical map
link |
01:37:32.400
from the library in those days. That's scary. There were scary elements about of it,
link |
01:37:36.960
out of it, but part of the excitement or the joy or the desire was to be scared,
link |
01:37:43.120
like was to go out there and live on the edge. And persevere, yeah. And persevere, yeah.
link |
01:37:47.840
Yeah. Do you have advice that you would give to a young person today
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01:37:54.000
that would like to help you maybe on the planetary science side, discover exoplanets,
link |
01:38:01.440
or maybe bigger picture, just succeed in life? I do have some advice just to succeed.
link |
01:38:06.160
It's tough advice in a way, but it is to find something that you love doing that you're also
link |
01:38:11.680
very good at. In some ways, the stars have to align because you've got to find that thing you're
link |
01:38:17.280
good at or the range of things. And it actually has to overlap with something that actually you
link |
01:38:21.920
love doing every day. So it's not a tedious job. That's the best way to succeed.
link |
01:38:27.200
What were the signals that in your own life were there to make you realize you're good at something?
link |
01:38:35.120
Like what were you good at that made you pursue a PhD and it made you pursue the search?
link |
01:38:43.680
Yeah. I mean, that was the one sentence version. In my case, it was a long slog and there were a
link |
01:38:48.880
lot of things I wasn't good at initially. But so initially, I was good at high school math,
link |
01:38:53.200
I was good at high school science. I loved astronomy and I realized those could all fit
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01:38:57.920
together. Like the day I realized you could be an astronomer for a job, it has to be one of my
link |
01:39:02.240
top days of my life. I didn't know that you could be that for a job. And I was good at all those
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01:39:07.440
things. And although my dad wanted me to do something more practical, where he could be
link |
01:39:10.960
guaranteed I could support myself was another option. But initially, I wasn't that good at
link |
01:39:15.840
physics. It was a slog to just get through school and grad schools a very, very long time.
link |
01:39:20.800
But ultimately, when faced with a choice and I had the luxury of choosing,
link |
01:39:25.760
knowing that I was good at something and also loved it, it really carried me through.
link |
01:39:29.440
Now, I asked some of the smartest people in the world the most ridiculous question.
link |
01:39:34.160
We already talked about it a little bit, but let me ask again, why are we here? So I think you've
link |
01:39:43.040
raised this question when your presentation says like one of the things that we kind of
link |
01:39:47.920
assume is long to answer in the search for exoplanets is kind of part of that.
link |
01:39:54.320
But what do you think is the meaning of it all, of life?
link |
01:39:57.040
I wish I had a good answer for you.
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01:39:58.480
I think you're the first person ever who refused to answer the question.
link |
01:40:06.960
It's not so much refusing. I just, yeah, I mean, I wish I had a better answer.
link |
01:40:10.880
It's why we're here.
link |
01:40:12.560
It's almost like the meaning is wishing there was a meaning. Wishing we knew.
link |
01:40:19.840
I love that. That's a great way to say it.
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01:40:24.160
Sarah, like I said, the book is excellent. I admired your work from afar for a while.
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01:40:29.840
And I think you're one of the great stars at MIT. It makes me proud to be part of the community.
link |
01:40:38.800
Thank you so much for your work. Thank you for inspiring all of us. Thanks for talking to me.
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01:40:42.560
Thank you so much, Lynx.
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01:40:44.720
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Seeger and thank you to our sponsors,
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01:40:49.440
Public Goods, PowerDot, and Cash App. Click the links in the description to get a discount.
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01:40:55.520
It's the best way to support this podcast. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
link |
01:40:59.920
review the Fire Stars on Apple Podcast, support her on Patreon, I'll connect with me on Twitter,
link |
01:41:05.360
Alex Friedman, spelled I'm not sure how. Just keep typing stuff in until you get to the guy
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01:41:12.160
with the tie in the thumbnail. And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan.
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01:41:17.440
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.