back to indexKatherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, Asteroids & Life in Our Solar System | Lex Fridman Podcast #184
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The following is a conversation with Catherine Duclir, a professor of Planetary Science and
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Astronomy at Caltech.
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Her research is on the surface environments, atmospheres, and thermochemical histories
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of the planets and moons in our solar system.
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Quick mention of our sponsors, Fundrise, Blinkist, ExpressVPN, and Magic Spoon.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that this conversation and a few others, quite big ones actually,
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that are coming up were filmed in a studio where I was trying to outsource some of the
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Like all experiments, it was a learning experience for me.
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It had some positives and negatives.
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Ultimately, I decided to return back to doing it the way I was doing before, but hopefully
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with a team who can help me out and work with me long term.
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The point is, I will always keep challenging myself, trying stuff out, learning, growing,
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and hopefully improving over time.
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My goal is to surround myself with people who love what they do, are amazing at it,
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and are obsessed with doing the best work of their lives.
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To me, there's nothing more energizing and fun than that.
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In fact, I'm currently hiring a few folks to work with me on various small projects.
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If this is something of interest to you, go to lexfreedman.com slash hiring.
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That's where I will always post opportunities for working with me.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Catherine DeClear.
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Why is Pluto not a planet anymore?
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Does this upset you or has justice finally been served?
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So I get asked this all the time.
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I think all planetary scientists get asked about Pluto, especially by kids who, we just
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love for Pluto to still be a planet.
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But the reality is, when we first discovered Pluto, it was a unique object in the outer
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And we thought we were adding a planet to the inventory of planets that we had.
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And then over time, it became clear that Pluto was not a unique, large object in the outer
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solar system, that there were actually many of these.
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And as we started discovering more and more of them, we realized that the concept of Pluto
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being a planet didn't make sense unless maybe we added all the rest of them as planets.
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So you could have imagined actually a different direction that this could have gone where
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all the other objects that were discovered in that belt, or at least all the ones, let's
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say, above a certain size, became planets instead of Pluto being declassified.
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But we're now aware of many objects out there in the outer solar system and what's called
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the Kuiper Belt that are of the same size or in some cases even larger than Pluto.
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So the declassification was really just a realization that it was not in the same category
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as the other planets in the solar system.
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And we basically needed to refine our definition in such a way that took into account that
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there's this belt of debris out there in the outer solar system of things with a range
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Is there a hope for clear categorization of what is a planet and not, or is it all just
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When you study planets, when you study moons, satellites of those planets, is there lines
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that could be cleanly drawn or is it just a giant mess?
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Is it all like a fluid, let's say not mess, but it's like fluid of what is a planet, what
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is a moon of a planet, what is debris, what is asteroids, all that kind of...
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So there are technically clear definitions that were set down by the IAU, the International
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Is it size related?
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Like what are the parameters based on?
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So the parameters are that it has to orbit the sun, which was essentially to rule out
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Of course, this was a not very forward thinking definition because it technically means that
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all extrasolar planets according to that definition are not planets.
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So it has to orbit the sun.
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It has to be large enough that its gravity has caused it to become spherical in shape,
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which also applies to satellites and also applies to Pluto.
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The third part of the definition is the thing that really rules out everything else, which
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is that it has to have cleared out its orbital path.
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And because Pluto orbits in a belt of material, it doesn't satisfy that stipulation.
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Why didn't you clear out the path?
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It's not big enough to knock everybody out of the way.
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And this actually is not the first time it has happened.
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So Ceres, when it was discovered, Ceres is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt,
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and it was originally considered a planet when it was first discovered.
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And it went through exactly the same story, history, where people actually realized that
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it was just one of many asteroids in the asteroid belt region, and then it got declassified
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to an asteroid, and now it's back to a dwarf planet.
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So there is a lot of reclassification.
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So to me, as somebody who studies solar system objects, I just personally don't care.
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My level of interest in something has nothing to do with what it's classified as.
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So my favorite objects in the solar system are all moons, and frequently when I talk
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about them, I refer to them as planets because to me they are planets.
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They have volcanoes, they have geology, they have atmospheres, they're planet like worlds.
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And so the distinction is not super meaningful to me, but it is important just for having
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a general framework for understanding and talking about things to have a precise definition.
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So you don't have a special romantic appreciation of a moon versus a planet versus an asteroid.
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It's just an object that flies out there and it doesn't really matter what the categorization
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Because there's movies about asteroids and stuff, and then there's movies about the moon,
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whatever, it's a really good movie.
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There's something about moons that's almost like an outlier.
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You think of a moon as a thing that's the secret part, and the planet is the more vanilla
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You don't have any of that?
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No, I actually do.
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I really, satellites are, the moons are my favorite things in the solar system.
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I think part of what you're saying, I agree from maybe a slightly different perspective,
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which is from the perspective of exploration, we've spent a lot of time sending spacecraft
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missions to planets.
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We had a mission to Jupiter, we had a mission to Saturn, we have plenty of missions to Mars
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and missions to Venus.
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I think the exploration of the moons in the outer solar system is the next frontier of
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solar system exploration.
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The belt of debris, just real quick, that's out there.
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Is there something incredible to be discovered there?
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Again, we tend to focus on the planets and the moons, but it feels like there's probably
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a lot of stuff out there and it probably, what is it?
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It's like a garbage collector from outside of the solar system, isn't it?
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Like, doesn't it protect from other objects that kind of fly in and what, it just feels
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like it's a cool, you know when you like walk along the beach and look for stuff and like
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look for, it feels like that's that kind of place where you can find cool weird things.
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Or I guess in our conversation today, when we think about tools and what science is studying,
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is there something to be studied out there or we just don't have maybe the tools yet
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or there's nothing to be found?
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There's absolutely a lot to be found.
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So the material that's out there is remnant material from the formation of our solar system.
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We don't think it comes from outside the solar system, at least not most of it.
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But there are so many fascinating objects out there and I think what you fit on is exactly
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right that we just don't have the tools to study them in detail.
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But we can look out there and we can see there are different species of ice on their surface
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that tells us about, you know, the chemical composition of the disk that formed our solar
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Some of these objects are way brighter than they should be, meaning they have some kind
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of geological activity.
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People have hypothesized that some of these objects have subsurface oceans.
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You could even stretch your imagination and say some of those oceans could be habitable.
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But we can't get very detailed information about them because they're so far away.
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And so I think if any of those objects were in the inner solar system, it would be studied
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intently and would be very interesting.
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So would you be able to design a probe in that like very dense debris field, be able
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to like hop from one place to another?
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Is that just outside of the realm of like how would you even design devices or sensors
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that go out there and take pictures and land?
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Do you have to land to truly understand a little piece of rock or can you understand
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it from remotely, like fly up close and remotely observe?
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You can learn quite a lot from just a flyby and that's all we're currently capable of
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doing in the outer solar system.
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The New Horizons mission is a recent example which flew by Pluto and then they had searched
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for another object that was out there in the Kuiper Belt, any object that was basically
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somewhere that they could deflect their trajectory to actually fly by.
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And so they did fly by another object out there in the Kuiper Belt and they take pictures
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and they do what they can do.
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And if you've seen the images from that mission of Pluto, you can see just how much detail
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we have compared to just the sort of reddish dot that we knew of before.
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So you do get an amazing amount of information actually from just essentially a high speed
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It always makes me sad to think about flybys that we might be able to, we might fly by
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a piece of rock, take a picture and think, oh, that looks pretty and cool and whatever.
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And that you could study certain like composition of the surface and so on.
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But it's actually teeming with life and we won't be able to see it at first.
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Cause you know, like when you're on a deserted island and you wave your hands and the thing
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flies by and you're trying to get their attention and they probably do the same, well in their
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own way, bacteria probably, right?
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But and we miss it.
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I don't know, some reason it makes me, it's the FOMO, it's fear of missing out.
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It makes me sad that there might be life out there and we don't, we're not in touch with
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We're not talking.
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A sad pause, a Russian philosophical pause.
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What are the tools available to us to study planets and their moons?
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That is such a big question.
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So among the field of astronomy, so planetary science broadly speaking, well, it falls kind
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of at the border of astronomy, geology, climate science, chemistry, and even biology.
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So it's kind of on the border of many things, but part of it falls under the heading of
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And among the things that you can study with telescopes, like solar system moons and planets,
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the solar system is really unique in that we can actually send spacecraft missions to
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the objects and study them in detail.
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And so I think that's, that's the kind of type of tool that is, that people are most
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aware of, that's most popularized, these amazing NASA missions that either you fly by the object,
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you orbit the object, you land on the object, potentially you can talk about digging into
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it, drilling, trying to detect tectonic tremors on its surface.
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The types of tools that I use are primarily telescopes and so I, my background is in astrophysics
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and so I actually got into solar system science from astronomy, not from, you know, a childhood
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fascination with spacecraft missions, which is actually what a lot of planetary scientists
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became planetary scientists because of childhood fascination with spacecraft missions, which
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is kind of interesting for me to talk to people and see that trajectory.
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I kind of came at it from the fascination with telescopes angle.
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So you like telescopes, not rockets, or at least when I was a kid it was looking at the
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stars and playing with telescopes that really fascinated me and that's how I got into this.
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But telescopes, it's amazing how much detail and how much information you can get from
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You can resolve individual cloud features and watch them kind of sheer out in the atmosphere
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You can literally watch volcanoes on Io change from day to day as the lava flows expand.
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So and then, you know, spectroscopy, you get compositional information on all these things
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and it's, when I started doing solar system astronomy, I was surprised by how much detail
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and how much information you can get even from Earth and then as well as from orbit
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like the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb.
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So with the telescope, you can, I mean, how much information can you get about volcanoes,
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about storms, about sort of weather, just so we kind of get a sense, like what a resolution
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we're talking about?
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Well, in terms of resolution, so at a, you know, on a given night, if I go and take a
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picture of Io and its volcanoes, you can sometimes see at least a dozen different volcanoes.
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You can see the infrared emission coming off of them and resolve them, separate them from
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one another on the surface and actually watch how the heat coming off of them changes with
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And I think this time variability aspect is one of the big advantages we get from telescopes.
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So you send a spacecraft mission there and you get an incredible amount of information
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over a very short time period.
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But for some science questions, you need to observe something for 30 years, 40 years.
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Like let's say you want to look at the moon Titan, which has one of the most interesting
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atmospheres in the solar system.
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Its orbital period is 29, 30 years.
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And so if you want to look at how its atmospheric seasons work, you have to observe it over
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that long of a time period.
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And you're not going to do that with a spacecraft, but you can do it with telescopes.
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Can we just zoom in on certain things like, let's talk about Io, which is the moon of
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There's like volcanoes all over the place.
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It's from a distance.
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So can you tell me about this moon and you're sort of a scholar of many planets and moons,
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but that one kind of stood out to me.
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So why is that an interesting one?
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For so many reasons, but Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system.
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It has hundreds of active volcanoes on it.
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It has volcanic plumes that go hundreds of kilometers up above its surface.
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It puts out more volume of magma per volcano than volcanoes on Earth today.
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But I think to me, the reason that it's most interesting is as a laboratory for understanding
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planetary processes.
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So one of the broad goals of planetary science is to put together a sort of more general
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and coherent framework for how planets work in general.
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Our current framework, you know, it started out very Earth centric.
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We start to understand how Earth volcanoes work.
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But then when you try to transport that to somewhere like Io that doesn't have an atmosphere,
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which has a very tenuous atmosphere, which makes a big difference for how the magma degasses,
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for something that's really small, for something that has a different heat source, for something
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that's embedded in another object's magnetic field, the kind of intuition we have from
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Earth doesn't apply.
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And so broadly, planetary science is trying to broaden that framework so that you have
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a kind of narrative that you can understand how each planet became different from every
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And I'm already making a mistake.
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When I say planet, I mean planets and moons.
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Like I said, I see the moons as planets.
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I actually already noticed that you didn't introduce Io as the moon of Jupiter.
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You completely, you kind of ignored the fact that Jupiter exists.
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It's like, let's focus on this.
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So, and you also didn't mention Europa, which I think is the, is that the most famous moon
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Is that the one gets attention because it might have life?
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But to you, Io is also beautiful.
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What's the difference between volcanoes on Io versus Earth?
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You said atmosphere makes a difference.
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What the heat source plays a big role.
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So many of the moons in the outer solar system are heated from gravitationally by tidal heating.
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And I'm happy to describe what that is or, yeah, please, what's tidal?
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So tidal heating is, it's, if you want to understand and contextualize planets and moons,
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you have to understand their heat sources.
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So for Earth, we have radioactive decay in our interior as well as residual heat of formation.
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But for satellites, tidal heating plays a really significant role and in particular
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in driving geological activity on satellites and potentially making those subsurface oceans
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in places like Europa and Enceladus habitable.
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And so the way that that works is if you have multiple moons and their orbital periods are
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integer multiples of one another, that means that they're always encountering each other
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at the same point in the orbit.
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So if they were on just random orbits, they'd be encountering each other at random places
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and the gravitational effect between the two moons would be canceling out over time.
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But because they're always meeting each other at the same point in the orbit, those gravitational
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interactions add up coherently.
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And so that tweaks them into eccentric orbits.
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What's an eccentric orbit?
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So eccentric orbit or elliptical orbit, it just means noncircular, so a deviation from
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And that means that for Io or Europa, at some points in their orbit, they're closer to Jupiter
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and at some points in their orbit, they're farther away.
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And so when they're closer, they're stretched out in a sense, but literally just not very
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stretched out, like a couple hundred meters, something like that.
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And then when they're farthest away, they're less stretched out.
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And so you actually have the shape of the object deforming over the course of the orbit.
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And these orbits are like just a couple of days.
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And so that, in the case of Io, that is literally sufficient friction in its mantle to melt
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the rock of its mantle.
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And that's what generates the magma.
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That's the source of the magma.
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So why is, so Europa is, I thought there was like ice and oceans underneath kind of thing.
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So why is Europa not getting the friction?
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It is, it's just a little bit farther away from Jupiter.
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And then Ganymede is also in the orbital resonance.
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So it's a three object orbital resonance in the Jupiter system.
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But we have these sorts of orbital resonances all over the solar system and also in exoplanets.
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So for Europa, basically because it's farther from Jupiter, the effect is not as extreme,
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but you do still have heat generated in its interior in this way.
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And that may be driving, could be driving hydrothermal activity at the base of its ocean,
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which obviously would be a really valuable thing for life.
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So it's like heating up the ocean a little bit.
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Heating up the ocean a little bit.
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And specifically in these like hydrothermal vents where we see really interesting life
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evolve in the bottom of Earth's oceans.
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So what's Io, what else?
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So we know the source is this friction, but there's no atmosphere.
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I'm trying to get a sense of what it's like if you and I were to visit Io, like what would
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What would it feel like?
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Is this the entire thing covered in basically volcanoes?
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So it's interesting because there's very little atmosphere.
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The surface is actually really cold, very far below freezing on the surface when you're
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away from a volcano, but the volcanoes themselves are over a thousand degrees or the magma when
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it comes out is over a thousand degrees.
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But it does come to the surface, the magma?
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In particular places.
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Whoa, that probably looks beautiful.
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So like, so it's frozen, not ice.
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Like what is, is rock, it's really cold rock.
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And then you just have this like, what is, what does that look, what would that look
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like with no atmosphere?
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Would that, uh, would it be smoke?
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What does it look like?
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It's just magma, like just red, yellow, like liquidy things?
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It's black, it's black and red, I guess.
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Like think of the type of magma that you see in Hawaii.
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So different types of magma flow in different ways, for example.
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So in somewhere like Io, the magma is really hot and so it will flow out in sheets because
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it has really low viscosity.
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And I think the lava flows that we've been having in Hawaii over the past couple of years
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are probably a decent analogy, although Io's magma's lavas are even more fluid and faster
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Like what, uh, how fat, like if you, uh, by the way, sorry, through the telescope, are
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you tracking at what timescale?
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Like every frame is how far apart?
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If you're looking through a telescope, are we talking about seconds or we're talking
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about days, months, when you kind of track, try to get a picture of what the surface might
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look like, what's the frequency?
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So it depends a little bit on what you want to do.
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I, ideally every night, um, but you could take a frame every second and see how things
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The, the problem with that is that for things to change on a one second timescale, you to
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actually see something change that fast, you have to have super high resolution.
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The spatial resolution we have is a couple of hundred kilometers.
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And so things are not changing on those scales over one second, unless you have something
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really crazy happening.
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So if you get, if you get a telescope closer to Io, if you get a, or a camera closer to
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Io, would you be able to understand something?
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Is that something of interest to you?
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Would you be able to understand something deeper about these volcanic eruptions and
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how magma flows and just the, like the rate of the magma is, or is it basically enough
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to have the kilometer resolution?
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We want to go there.
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You want to go, you want to go to Io?
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I mean, I don't want to go there personally, but I want to send a spacecraft mission there.
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Why are you scared?
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Oh, you mean you don't like, I don't want to go there as a human as a human.
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I want to send a robot there to look at it though.
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This is again, everybody's discriminating against robots.
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This is not, but it's fine.
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But it's not hospitable to humans in any way, right?
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Just very cold and very hot.
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The atmosphere is composed of sulfur dioxide, so you can breathe it.
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There's no pressure.
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I mean, it's kind of all the same things you talk about.
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One talks about, about Mars only worse, the atmosphere is still a thousand times less
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dense than Mars is.
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And the radiation environment is terrible because you're embedded deep within Jupiter's
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magnetic field and Jupiter's magnetic field is full of charged particles that have all
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come out of Io's volcanoes actually.
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So Jupiter's magnetic field strips all this material out of Io's atmosphere and that populates
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its entire magnetosphere and then that material comes back around and hits Io and spreads
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throughout the system actually.
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It's just, it's like Io is the massive polluter of the Jupiter system.
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So what does studying Io teach you about volcanoes on earth or vice versa?
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Is in the difference of the two, what insights can you mine out?
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That might be interesting in some way.
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Well, we try to port the tools that we use to study earth volcanism to Io and it works
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to some extent, but it is challenging because the situations are so different and the compositions
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are really different.
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When you talk about outgassing, you know, earth volcanoes outgassed primarily water
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and carbon dioxide, and then sulfur dioxide is the third most abundant gas.
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And on Io, the water and carbon dioxide are not there, either it didn't form with them
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or it lost them, we don't know.
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And so the chemistry of how the magma outgassed this is completely different.
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But the kind of one to me most interesting analogy to earth is that, so Io, as I've said,
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it has these really low viscosity magmas, the lava spreads really quickly across its
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surface, it can put out massive volumes of magma in relatively short periods of time.
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And that sort of volcanism is not happening anywhere else in the solar system today.
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But literally every terrestrial planet and the moon had this, what we call very effusive
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volcanism early in their history.
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Okay, so this is almost like a little glimpse into the early history of earth.
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So what are the chances that a volcano on earth destroys all of human civilization?
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Maybe I wanted to sneak in that question.
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Yeah, a volcano on earth.
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Do you think about that kind of stuff when you just study volcanoes elsewhere?
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Because isn't it kind of humbling to see something so powerful and so hot, like so unpleasant
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for humans, and then you realize we're sitting on many of them here?
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Yeah, Yellowstone is a classic example.
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I don't know what the chances are of that happening.
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My intuition would be that the chances of that are lower than the chances of us getting
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wiped out by some other means, that maybe it'll happen eventually, that there'll be
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one of these massive volcanoes on earth, but we'll probably be gone by then by some other
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Not to sound bleak.
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That's very comforting.
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Okay, so can we talk about Europa?
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Is there, so maybe can you talk about the intuition, the hope that people have about
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life being in Europa?
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Maybe also, what are the things we know about it?
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What are the things to you that are interesting about that particular moon of Jupiter?
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Yeah, Europa is, from many perspectives, one of the really interesting places in the solar
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system among the solar system moons.
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So there are a few, there's a lot of interest in looking for or understanding the potential
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for life to evolve in the subsurface oceans.
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I think it's fairly widely accepted that the chances of life evolving on the surfaces of
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really anything in the solar system is very low.
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The radiation environment is too harsh and there's just not liquids on the surface of
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most of these things and it's canonically accepted that liquids are required for life.
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And so the subsurface oceans, in addition to maybe Titan's atmosphere, the subsurface
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oceans of the icy satellites are one of the most plausible places in the solar system
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for life to evolve.
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Europa and Cellitus are interesting because for many of the big satellites, so Ganymede
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and Callisto, also satellites of Jupiter, also are thought to have subsurface oceans.
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But they have these ice shells and then there's an ocean underneath the ice shell.
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But on those moons around Ganymede, we think that there's another ice shell underneath
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and then there's rock.
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And the reason that that is a problem for life is that your ocean is probably just pure
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water because it's trapped between two big shells of ice.
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So Europa doesn't have this ice shell at the bottom of the ocean, we think.
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And so the water and rock are in direct interaction and so that means that you can basically dissolve
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a lot of material out of the rock.
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You potentially have this hydrothermal activity that's injecting energy and nutrients for
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And so this rock water interface is considered really important for the potential habitability.
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As a small aside, you kind of said that it's canonically assumed that water is required
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Is it possible to have life like in a volcano?
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I remember people were like in that National Geographic program or something kind of hypothesizing
link |
that you can really have life anywhere.
link |
So as long as there's a source of heat, a source of energy, do you think it's possible
link |
to have life in a volcano, like no water?
link |
I think anything's possible.
link |
It doesn't have to be water.
link |
You can tell, as you identified, I phrased that really carefully.
link |
It's canonically accepted that because scientists recognize that we have no idea what broad
link |
range of life could be out there and all we really have is our biases of life as we know
link |
But for life as we know it, it's very helpful to have or even necessary to have some kind
link |
of liquid and preferably a polar solvent that can actually dissolve molecules, something
link |
So the case of liquid methane on Titan is less ideal from that perspective.
link |
But liquid magma, if it stays liquid long enough for life to evolve, you have a heat
link |
source, you have a liquid, you have nutrients.
link |
In theory, that checks your three classic astrobiology boxes.
link |
That'd be fascinating.
link |
I mean, it'd be fascinating if it's possible to detect it easily.
link |
How would we detect if there is life on Europa?
link |
Is it possible to do in a noncontact way from a distance through telescopes and so on?
link |
Or do we need to send robots and do some drilling?
link |
I think realistically you need to do the drilling.
link |
So Europa also has these long tectonic features on its surface where it's thought that there's
link |
potential for water from the ocean to be somehow making its way up onto the surface.
link |
And you could imagine some out there scenario where there's bacteria in the ocean.
link |
It's somehow working its way up through the ice shell.
link |
It's spilling out on the surface.
link |
It's being killed by the radiation.
link |
But your instrument could detect some spectroscopic signature of that dead bacterium.
link |
But that's many ifs and assumptions.
link |
That's a hope because then you don't have to do that much drilling.
link |
You can collect from the surface.
link |
Skeletons of bacteria.
link |
I'm thinking even remotely.
link |
That's sad that there's a single cell civilization living underneath all that ice trying to get
link |
Trying to get out.
link |
Enceladus gives you a slightly better chance of that because Enceladus is a moon of Saturn
link |
and it's broadly similar to Europa in some ways.
link |
It's an icy satellite.
link |
It has a subsurface ocean that's probably in touch with the rocky interior.
link |
But it has these massive geysers at its south pole where it's spewing out material that
link |
appears to be originating all the way from the ocean.
link |
And so in that case, you could potentially fly through that plume and scoop up that material
link |
and hope that at the velocities you'd be scooping it up.
link |
You're not destroying any signature of the life you're looking for.
link |
But let's say that you have some ingenuity and can come up with a way to do that.
link |
It potentially gives you a more direct opportunity at least to try to measure those bacteria
link |
Can you tell me a little more on, how do you pronounce it, Salas?
link |
Can you tell me a little bit more about Enceladus?
link |
Like we've been talking about way too much about Jupiter, Saturn doesn't get enough love.
link |
Saturn doesn't get as much love.
link |
So what's Enceladus?
link |
Is that the most exciting moon of Saturn?
link |
Depends on your perspective.
link |
It's very exciting from a astrobiology perspective.
link |
I think Enceladus and Titan are the two most unique and interesting moons of Saturn that
link |
definitely both get the most attention also from the life perspective.
link |
So what's the more likely Titan or Enceladus for life?
link |
If you were to bet all your money in terms of like investing, which to investigate, what
link |
are the differences between the two that are interesting to you?
link |
So the potential for life in each of those two places is very different.
link |
So Titan is the one place in the solar system where you might imagine, again, all of this
link |
is so speculative, but you might imagine life evolving in the atmosphere.
link |
So from a biology perspective, Titan is interesting because it forms complex organic molecules
link |
in its atmosphere.
link |
It has a dense atmosphere.
link |
It's actually denser than Earth's.
link |
It's the only moon that has an atmosphere denser than Earth's and it's got tons of methane
link |
What happens is that methane gets irradiated, it breaks up and it reforms with other things
link |
in the atmosphere.
link |
It makes these complex organic molecules and it's effectively doing prebiotic chemistry
link |
in the atmosphere.
link |
While still being freezing cold?
link |
What would that be like?
link |
Would that be pleasant for humans to hang out there?
link |
It's just really cold?
link |
There's nowhere in the solar system that would be pleasant for humans.
link |
You couldn't breathe the air.
link |
But colonization wise, if there's an atmosphere, isn't that a big plus?
link |
Or still a ton of radiation?
link |
So Titan, that's a really nice feature that life could be in the atmosphere because then
link |
it might be remotely observable or certainly is more accessible if you visit.
link |
So what about Enceladus?
link |
So that would be still in the ocean.
link |
And Enceladus has the advantage, like I said, of spewing material out of its south pole
link |
so you could collect it.
link |
But it has the disadvantage of the fact that we don't actually really understand how its
link |
ocean could stay globally liquid over the age of the solar system.
link |
And so there are some models that say that it's going through this cyclical evolution
link |
where the ocean freezes completely and thaws completely and the orbit sort of oscillates
link |
in and out of these eccentricities.
link |
And in that case, the potential for life ever occurring there in the first place is a lot
link |
lower because if you only have an ocean for 100 million years, is that enough time?
link |
It also means there might be mass extinction events if it does occur and then it just freezes.
link |
Again, very sad, man.
link |
This is very depressing, all the slaughter of life elsewhere.
link |
How unlikely do you think life is on Earth?
link |
So when you study other planets and you study the contents of other planets, does that give
link |
you a perspective on the origin of life on Earth, which again is full of mystery in itself,
link |
not the evolution, but the origin, the first springing to life, like from nothing to life,
link |
from the basic ingredients to life?
link |
I guess another way of asking it is how unique are we?
link |
Yeah, it's a great question and it's one that just scientifically we don't have an answer
link |
We don't even know how many times life evolved on Earth, if it was only once or if it happened
link |
independently a thousand times in different places.
link |
We don't know whether it's happened anywhere else in the universe, although it feels absurd
link |
to believe that we are the only life that evolved in the entire universe, but it's conceivable.
link |
We just have just no real information.
link |
We don't understand really how life came about in the first place on Earth.
link |
I mean, so if you look at the Drake equation that tries to estimate how many alien civilizations
link |
are out there, planets have a big part to play in that equation.
link |
If you were to bet money in terms of the odds of origins of life on Earth, I mean, this
link |
all has to do with how special and unique is Earth.
link |
What you land in terms of the number of civilizations has to do with how unique their rare Earth
link |
How rare and special is Earth?
link |
How rare and special is the solar system?
link |
Like if you had to bet all your money on a completely unscientific question, well, no,
link |
it's actually a rigorously scientific, we just don't know a lot of things in that equation.
link |
There's a lot of mysteries about that and it's slowly becoming better and better understood
link |
in terms of exoplanets, in terms of how many solar systems are out there where there's
link |
planets that are Earth like planets, it's getting better and better understood.
link |
What's your sense from that perspective, how many alien civilizations out there, zero or
link |
You're right that the equation is being better understood, but you're really only talking
link |
about the first three parameters in the equation or something.
link |
How many stars are there, how many planets per star, and then we're just barely scratching
link |
the surface of what fraction of those planets might be habitable.
link |
The rest of the terms in the equation are like how likely is life to evolve given habitable
link |
conditions, how likely is it to survive, all these things.
link |
There are all these huge unknowns.
link |
Actually I remember when I first saw that equation, I think it was my first year of
link |
college and I thought this is ridiculous.
link |
This is A, common sense that didn't need to give a name, you know, and B, just a bunch
link |
of unknowns, it's like putting our ignorance together in one equation.
link |
But now I understand this equation, you know, it's not something we'll ever necessarily
link |
have the answer to, it just gives us a framework for having the exact conversation we're having
link |
And I think that's how it was intended in the first place when it was put into writing
link |
was to give people a language to communicate about the factors that go into the potential
link |
for aliens to be out there and for us to find them.
link |
I would put money on there being aliens, I would not put money on us having definitive
link |
evidence of them in my lifetime.
link |
Well, definitive is a funny, is a funny word.
link |
My sense is, this is the saddest part for me, is my sense in terms of intelligent alien
link |
civilizations, I feel like we're so, we're so self obsessed that we literally would not
link |
be able to detect them.
link |
Even when they're like in front of us, like trees could be aliens, but just their intelligence
link |
could be realized on a scale, on a time scale or physical scale that we're not appreciating.
link |
Like trees could be way more intelligent than us.
link |
It's just a dumb example.
link |
It could be rocks or it could be things like, this, I love this, this is a Dawkins memes.
link |
It could be that ideas are the, like ideas we have, like where do ideas come from?
link |
Where do thoughts come from?
link |
Maybe thoughts are the aliens or maybe thoughts is the actual mechanisms of communication
link |
in physics, right?
link |
This is like, we think of thoughts as something that springs up from neurons firing or where
link |
the hell they come from.
link |
And now what about consciousness?
link |
Maybe consciousness is the communication.
link |
It sounds like ridiculous, but like we're so self centered on this space, time, communication
link |
and physical space using like written language, like spoken with audio on a time scale that's
link |
very specific on a physical scale, it's very specific.
link |
So I tend to think that, but bacteria will probably recognize like moving organisms will
link |
probably recognize, but when that forms itself into intelligence, most likely it'll be robots
link |
of some kind because we won't be meeting the origins.
link |
We'll be meeting the creations of those intelligences.
link |
We just would not be able to appreciate it.
link |
And that's the saddest thing to me that we, yeah, we're too dumb to see aliens.
link |
Like we're too, we kind of think like, look at the progress of science, we've accomplished
link |
The sad thing it could be that we're just like in the first 0.0001% of understanding
link |
anything is humbling.
link |
I hope that's true because I feel like we're very ignorant as a species.
link |
And I hope that our current level of knowledge only represents the 0.001% of what we will
link |
That actually feels optimistic to me.
link |
Well, I feel like that's easier for us to comprehend in the space of biology and not
link |
as easy to comprehend in the space of physics, for example, because we have a sense that
link |
like we have it, like if you, if you talk to theoretical physicists, they have a sense
link |
that we understand the basic laws that form the nature of reality of our universe.
link |
But so there's much more, like physicists are much more confident.
link |
Biologists are like, uh, this is a squishy mess, we're doing our best, physicists, but
link |
I would be, it'd be fascinating to see if physicists themselves would also be humbled
link |
by their being like, what the hell is dark matter and dark energy?
link |
What the hell is the, not just the origin of the, not just the big bang, but everything
link |
that happened since the big bang.
link |
A lot of things that happened since the big bang, we have no ideas about except basic
link |
models of physics.
link |
What happened before the big bang?
link |
What happened before?
link |
Or what's happening inside the black hole?
link |
Why is there a black hole at the center of our galaxy?
link |
Can somebody answer this?
link |
A supermassive black hole.
link |
Nobody knows how it started.
link |
And they seem to be like in the middle of all galaxies.
link |
Um, so that could be a portal for aliens to communicate through consciousness.
link |
Um, all right, back to planets.
link |
How, um, what's your favorite outside of earth?
link |
What's your favorite planet or moon?
link |
Maybe outside of the ones we, well, first, have we talked about it already or, and then
link |
if we did mention it, what's the one outside of that?
link |
I have to come up with another favorite that's not IO.
link |
Oh, IO is the favorite.
link |
Why is IO the favorite?
link |
I mean, basically everything I've, I've already said, it's just such a, an amazing and unique
link |
Um, but on, I guess a personal note, it's probably the object that made me become a
link |
planetary scientist.
link |
It's the first thing in the solar system that really deeply captured my interest.
link |
Um, and when I started my PhD, I wanted to be an astrophysicist working on things like
link |
galaxy evolution, um, and sort of slowly, I had done some projects in the solar system,
link |
but IO was the thing that like really caught me in to doing solar system science.
link |
Let's, let's leave, uh, moons aside.
link |
What's your favorite planet?
link |
It sounds like you like moons better than planets.
link |
So it's, uh, that's accurate.
link |
Um, but the planets are, are fascinating.
link |
I think, you know, I find that the planets in the solar system really fascinating.
link |
What I like about the moons is that they, there's so much less that is known.
link |
There's still a lot more discovery space and the questions that we can ask are still the,
link |
the bigger questions.
link |
Um, which, you know, I, and maybe I'm being unfair to the planets because we're still
link |
trying to understand things like, was there ever life on Mars?
link |
And that is a huge question and one that we've sent numerous robots to Mars to try to answer.
link |
So maybe I'm being unfair to the planets, but, but there is certainly quite a bit more
link |
information, uh, that we have about the planets than the moons.
link |
But I mean, Venus is, is a fascinating object.
link |
So I like the objects that lie at the extremes.
link |
I think that if we can make a sort of theory or, or like I've been saying, framework for
link |
understanding planets and moons that can incorporate even the most extreme ones, then, you know,
link |
those are the things that really test your theory and test your understanding.
link |
And so they've always really fascinated me.
link |
Not so much the nice habitable places like Earth, but these extreme places like Venus
link |
that have, um, sulfuric acid clouds and just incredibly hot and dense surfaces.
link |
And Venus, of course, I love volcanism for some reason, and, and Venus has, probably
link |
has volcanic activity, definitely has in their recent past, maybe has ongoing today.
link |
What do you make of the news and maybe you can update it in terms of life being discovered
link |
in the atmosphere of Venus?
link |
I can already tell you have opinions.
link |
Was that fake news?
link |
I got excited when I saw that.
link |
What's the, what's the final, uh, is there a life on Venus?
link |
So the detection that was reported was the detection of the molecule phosphine.
link |
Um, and they said that they tried every other mechanism they could think of to produce phosphine
link |
and they, none of, no mechanism worked.
link |
And then they said, well, we know that life produces phosphine.
link |
And so that was sort of the train of logic.
link |
And, um, I don't personally believe that phosphine was detected in the first place.
link |
So then, I mean, this is just one study, but I, as a layman, I'm skeptical a little bit
link |
about tools that sense the contents of an atmosphere, like contents of an atmosphere
link |
from remotely and making conclusive statements about life.
link |
Well that connection that you just made, the contents of the atmosphere to the life is,
link |
And yeah, I know that that claim received a lot of criticism for the lines of logic
link |
that went from detection to, uh, to claim of life.
link |
Even the detection itself though, did, doesn't, doesn't meet the sort of historical scientific
link |
standards of, of a detection.
link |
Um, the, it was a very tenuous detection and only one line of the species was detected.
link |
And a lot of really complicated data analysis methods had to be applied to even make that
link |
So it could be, it could be noise, it could be polluted data, it could be all the, all
link |
And so it doesn't have, it doesn't meet the, the level of rigor that you would hope.
link |
But of course, I mean, we're doing our best and it's clear that, uh, the human species
link |
are hopeful to find life.
link |
Everyone is so excited about that possibility.
link |
Let's, uh, let me ask you about Mars.
link |
So, um, there's a guy named Elon Musk and, uh, he seems to want to take something called
link |
First of the month.
link |
I'm just, I'm just kidding about the Dogecoin.
link |
I don't even know what the heck is up with that whole, um, I think, uh, I think humor
link |
has power in the 21st century in a way to spread ideas in the most positive way.
link |
So I love that kind of humor because it makes people smile, but it also kind of sneaks.
link |
It's like a Trojan horse for cool ideas.
link |
You you open with humor and you, uh, like the humor is the appetizer.
link |
And then the main meal is the science and the engineering anyway, uh, do you think it's
link |
possible to colonize Mars or other planets in the solar system, but we're especially
link |
Is there something about planets that make them very harsh to humans?
link |
Is there something in particular you think about and maybe in a high like big picture
link |
perspective, do you have a hope we, we do in fact become a multi planetary species?
link |
I do think that if our species survives long enough and we don't wipe ourselves out or
link |
get wiped out by some other means that we will eventually be able to colonize other
link |
I do not expect that to happen in my lifetime.
link |
I mean, tourists may go to Mars, tourists, people who commit years of their life to go
link |
into Mars as a tourist may go to Mars.
link |
Um, I don't think that we will colonize it.
link |
Um, is there a sense why it's just too harsh on the environment to, uh, to, to, like it's
link |
too costly to build something habitable there for a large population.
link |
I think that we need to do a lot of work and learning how to use the resources that are
link |
are on the planet already to do the things we need.
link |
So if you're talking about someone going there for a few months, um, so we'll back up a little
link |
There are many things that make Mars not hospitable, temperature, you can't breathe the air, you
link |
need a pressure suit, even if you're on the surface, the radiation environment is, you
link |
know, even in all of those things, the radiation environment is too harsh for the human body.
link |
Um, all of those things seem like they could eventually have technological solutions.
link |
Um, the challenge, the, the real significant challenge to me seems to be the, the creation
link |
of a self sustaining civilization there.
link |
You know, you can bring pressure suits, you can bring oxygen to breathe, but those are
link |
all in limited supply.
link |
And if we're going to colonize it, we need to find ways to make use of the resources
link |
that are there to do things like produce food, produce the air, the humans need to keep breathing
link |
just in order to make it self sustaining.
link |
There's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done.
link |
And people are working on these problems, but I think that's going to be a major obstacle
link |
in going from visiting where we can bring everything we need to survive in the short
link |
term to actually colonizing.
link |
I find that whole project of the human species quite inspiring these like huge moonshot projects.
link |
Somebody I was reading something, um, in terms of the source of food that's that may be the
link |
most effective on Mars is you could farm insects.
link |
That's the easiest thing to farm.
link |
So we'd be eating like cockroaches before living on Mars because that's the easiest
link |
thing to actually, um, as a source of protein.
link |
So growing a source of protein is the easiest thing as insects.
link |
I just imagine this giant for people who are afraid of insects.
link |
This is not a pleasant, maybe you're not supposed to even think of it that way.
link |
It'd be like a cockroach milkshake or something like that.
link |
I wonder if, have people been working on the genetic engineering of, of insects to make
link |
them radiation friendly, right.
link |
Or pressure resistant or whatever.
link |
What can possibly go wrong with making radiation resistant, they're already like survived everything.
link |
Plus I, um, I took an allergy test, um, in Austin.
link |
So there's everybody's alert is like the allergy levels are super high there.
link |
Uh, and, uh, one of the things, apparently I'm not allergic to any insects except cockroaches.
link |
So maybe, uh, um, well, I'm going to use that as a, you know, people use, uh, an excuse
link |
that I'm allergic to cats to not have cats.
link |
I'm going to use that as an excuse to, uh, not go to Mars as one of the first batch of
link |
I was going to ask if you had the opportunity, would you go?
link |
Yeah, I'm joking about the cockroach thing.
link |
I would definitely go.
link |
I love challenges.
link |
I love, I love things.
link |
I love doing things where the possibility of death is, is, uh, not insignificant because
link |
it makes me appreciate it more.
link |
Meditating on death makes me appreciate life.
link |
And uh, when the meditation on death is forced on you because of how difficult the task is,
link |
I enjoy those kinds of things.
link |
Most people don't, it seems like, but I love the idea of difficult journeys, um, for no
link |
purpose whatsoever, except exploration, going into the unknown, seeing what the limits of
link |
the human mind and the human body are is like, what the hell else is this whole journey that
link |
I, I, uh, but it could be because I grew up in the Soviet Union.
link |
There's a kind of love for space, like the, the space race, the cold war created.
link |
I don't know if still it permeates American culture as much, but especially with the dad
link |
as a scientist, I think I've, I've loved the idea of humans striving out towards the stars
link |
always, like from the engineering perspective has been really exciting.
link |
I don't know if people love that as much in America anymore.
link |
I think, uh, Elon is bringing that back a little bit, that excitement about rockets
link |
and going out there.
link |
But, uh, so that's, that's hopeful, but for me, I always loved that idea.
link |
From a alien scientist perspective, if you were to look back on earth, is there something
link |
interesting you could say about earth?
link |
Like, how would you summarize earth?
link |
Like in a report, you know, like, uh, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, like if you had to report,
link |
like write a paper on earth or like a letter, like a, like a one pager, um, summarizing
link |
the contents of the surface and the atmosphere, is there, is there something interesting?
link |
Like, do you ever take that kind of perspective on it?
link |
I know you like volcanism, so volcanoes that will probably be in the report.
link |
I was going to say that's where I was going to go first.
link |
Uh, there are a few things to say about the atmosphere, but in terms of the volcanoes,
link |
so one of the really interesting puzzles to me in planetary science is so we can, we can
link |
look out there and we've been talking about surfaces and volcanoes and atmospheres and
link |
But that is just, you know, this tiny little veneer on the outside of the planet and most
link |
of the planet is completely sort of inaccessible to telescopes or to spacecraft missions.
link |
You can drill a meter into the surface, but you know, that's still really the veneer.
link |
Um, and one of the cool puzzles is looking at what's going on on the surface and trying
link |
to figure out what's happening underneath or just any kind of indirect means that you
link |
have to study the interior because you can't dig into it directly, even on Earth.
link |
You can't dig deep into Earth.
link |
Uh, so from that perspective, looking at Earth, um, one thing that you would be able to tell
link |
from orbit, given enough time, is that Earth has tectonic plates.
link |
So you would see that volcanoes follow the edges.
link |
If you trace where all the volcanoes are on Earth, they follow these lines that trace
link |
the edges of the plates.
link |
And similarly, you would see things like the, uh, Hawaiian string of volcanoes that you
link |
could infer just like, you know, we did as people actually living on Earth, that the
link |
plates are moving over some plume that's coming up through the mantle.
link |
And so you could use that to say, if the aliens could look at where the volcanoes are, are
link |
happening on Earth and say something about the fact that Earth has plate tectonics, which
link |
makes it really unique in the solar system.
link |
So the other planets don't have plate tectonics?
link |
It's the only one that has plate tectonics.
link |
What about Io and the friction and all that, that's not plate tectonics?
link |
What's the difference between...
link |
Oh, it's plate tectonics, like another layer of like solid rock that moves around and there's
link |
So, so Earth has plates of solid rock sitting on top of a partially molten layer, and those
link |
plates are kind of shifting around.
link |
Um, on Io, it doesn't have that.
link |
And the volcanism is what we call heat pipe volcanism.
link |
It's the magma just punches a hole through the crust and comes out on the surface.
link |
I mean, that's a simplification, but that's effectively what's happening.
link |
Through the freezing cold crust?
link |
Very cold, very rigid crust.
link |
How do you, how does that look like, by the way?
link |
I don't think we've mentioned, so the gas that's expelled, like if we were to look at
link |
it, is it beautiful or is it like boring?
link |
I mean, the whole thing, like the magma punching through, the icy...
link |
Yes, I'm sure it would be beautiful, and the pictures we've seen of it are beautiful.
link |
You have, so the magma will come out of the lava, will come out of these fissures, and
link |
you have these curtains of lava that are maybe even a kilometer high.
link |
So if you looked at videos, I don't know how many volcano videos you've looked at on Earth,
link |
but you sometimes see a tiny, tiny version of this in Iceland.
link |
You see just these sheets of magma coming out of a fissure when you have this really
link |
low viscosity magma, sort of water like, coming out of these sheets.
link |
And the plumes that come out, because there's no atmosphere, all the plume molecules are
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just plume particles, where they end up is just a function of the direction that they
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left the vent, so they're all following ballistic trajectories, and you end up with these umbrella
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You don't get these sort of complicated plumes that you have on Earth that are occurring
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because of how that material is interacting with the atmosphere that's there.
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You just have these huge umbrellas, and it's been hypothesized, actually, that the atmosphere
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is made of sulfur dioxide, and that you could have these kind of ash particles from the
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volcano and the sulfur dioxide would condense onto these particles, and you'd have sulfur
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dioxide snow coming out of these volcanic plumes.
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And there's not much light, though, right?
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So you wouldn't be able to, like, it would not make a good Instagram photo, because you
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have to, would you see the snow?
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So you could, okay.
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It depends what angle you're looking at it, where the sun is, all the things like that.
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You know, the sunlight is much weaker, but it's still there.
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And how big is Io in terms of gravity?
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Is it a pretty small moon?
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It's quite a bit smaller than Earth anyway.
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It's smaller than Earth.
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So they float up for a little bit.
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That would be gorgeous.
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What else about Earth is interesting besides volcanoes?
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So plate tectonics.
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I didn't realize that that was a unique element of a planet in the solar system, because that,
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I wonder what, I mean, we experienced as human beings, it's quite painful because of earthquakes
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and all those kinds of things, but I wonder if there's nice features to it.
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So coming back to habitability again, things like tectonics and plate tectonics are thought
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to play an important role in the surface being habitable.
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And that's because you have a way of recycling materials.
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So if you have a stagnant surface, everything, you know, you use up all the free oxygen,
link |
everything reacts until you no longer have reactants that life can extract energy from.
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And so if nothing's changing on your surface, you kind of reach this stagnation point.
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But something like plate tectonics recycles material, you bring up new fresh material
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from the interior, you bring down material that's up on the surface, and that can kind
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of refresh your nutrient supply, in a sense, or the sort of raw materials that the surface
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So from a kind of astrobiologist perspective, looking at Earth, you would see that recycling
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of material because the plate tectonics, you would also see how much oxygen is in Earth's
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And between those two things, you would identify Earth as a reasonable candidate for a habitable
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environment in addition to, of course, the, you know, pleasant temperature and liquid
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But the abundance of oxygen and the plate tectonics both play a role as well.
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And also see like tiny dot satellites flying around and rockets.
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I wonder if they would be able to, I really think about that, like, if aliens were to
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visit, and would they really see humans as the thing they should be focusing on?
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I think it would take a while, right?
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Because it's so obvious that that should, because there's like so much incredible,
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in terms of biomass, humans are a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction.
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There's like ants, they would probably detect ants, right?
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Or they probably would focus on the water and the fish because there's like a lot of
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I was surprised to learn that there's more species on land than there is in the sea.
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Like there's 90, I think 90 to 95% of the species are on land.
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Not in the sea, but no, the variety that like the branches created by evolution, apparently
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it's probably a good answer from evolutionary biology perspective, why land created so much
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diversity, but it did.
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So like the sea, there's so much not known about the sea, about the oceans, but it's
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not, it's not diversity friendly.
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It needs to improve its diversity.
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Do you think the aliens would come, I mean, the first thing they would see is I suppose
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our cities, assuming that they had some idea of what a natural world looked like, they
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would see cities and say, these don't belong.
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Which of these many species created these?
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I mean, there's, if I were to guess, it would, it's a good question.
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I don't know if you do this when you look at the telescope, whether you look at geometric
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Like if it's, cause to me like hard corners, like what do we think is engineered?
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Things that are like, have kind of straight lines and corners and so on, they would probably
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detect those in terms of buildings would stand out to them because that's, that goes against
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the basic natural physics of the world.
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But I don't know if the electricity and lights and so on, it could be, I honestly, it could
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be the plate tectonics.
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It could be like, that they're like the volcanoes that'd be okay.
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That's a source of heat.
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And then they would focus.
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They might literally, I mean, depending on how alien life forms are, they might notice
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the microorganisms before they notice the big, like notice the ant before the elephant.
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Cause like there's a lot more of them depending what they're measuring.
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We think like size matters, but maybe with their tools of measurement, they would look
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for quantity versus size.
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Like why focus on the big thing, focus on the thing that there's a lot of.
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And when they see humans, depending on their measurement devices, they might see we're
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made up of billions of organisms.
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Like the fact that we have, we're very human.
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We think we're one organism, but that may not be the case.
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They might see, in fact, they may also see like a human city as one organism.
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Like what is this thing that like, clearly this organism gets aroused at night because
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the lights go on and then, and then it like, it sleeps during the day.
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I don't know how, like the, what perspective you take on the city.
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Is there something interesting about earth or other planets in terms of weather patterns?
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So we talked a lot about volcanic patterns.
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Is there something else about weather that's interesting, like storms or variations in
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temperature, all those kinds of things?
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So there's sort of every planet and moon has a kind of interesting and unique weather pattern.
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And those weather patterns are really, we don't have a good understanding of them.
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We don't even have a good understanding of the global circulation patterns of many of
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these atmospheres, why the storm systems occur.
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So the composition and occurrence of storms and clouds and these objects is another one
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of these kind of windows into the interior that I was talking about with surfaces.
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One of these ways that we can get perspective and what the composition is at the interior
link |
and how the circulation is working.
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So circulation will bring some species up from deeper in the atmosphere of the planet
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to some altitude that's a little bit colder and that species will condense out and form
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a cloud at that altitude.
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And we can detect in some cases what those clouds are composed of.
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But looking at where those occur can tell you how the circulation cells are, whether
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the atmospheric circulation is, say, coming up at the equator and going down at the poles
link |
or whether you have multiple cells in the atmosphere.
link |
And I mean, Jupiter's atmosphere is just insane.
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There's so much going on.
link |
You look at these pictures and there's all these vortices and antivortices and you have
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these different bands that are moving in opposite directions that may be giving you information
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about the deep, like deep in the atmosphere, physically deep properties of Jupiter's interior
link |
What are these vortices?
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What's the basic material of the storms?
link |
It's condensed molecules from the atmosphere.
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So ammonia ice particles in the case of Jupiter, it's methane ice in the case of let's say
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Uranus and Neptune and other species, you can kind of construct a chemical model for
link |
which species can condense where.
link |
And so you see a cloud at a certain altitude within the atmosphere and you can make a guess
link |
at what that cloud is made of and sometimes measure it directly and different species
link |
make different colors as well.
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I mean, the climate of Uranus has always been fascinating to me because it orbits on its
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side and it has a 42 year orbital period.
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And so, you know, with Earth, our seasons are because our equator is tipped just a little
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bit to the plane that we orbit in.
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So sometimes the sunlight's a little bit above the equator and sometimes it's a little bit
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below the equator.
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But on Uranus, it's like for 10 years, the sunlight is directly on the North Pole and
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then it's directly on the equator and then it's directly on the South Pole.
link |
And it's actually kind of amazing that the atmosphere doesn't look crazier than it does.
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But understanding how, taking again, like one of these extreme examples, if we can understand
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why that atmosphere behaves in the way it does, it's kind of a test of our understanding
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of how atmosphere is.
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So like heats up one side of the planet for 10 years and then freezes it the next, like,
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and that you're saying should probably lead to some chaos.
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The fact that it doesn't tells you something about the atmosphere.
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So atmospheres have a property that surfaces don't have, which is that they can redistribute
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heat a lot more effectively.
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So they have a stabilizing, like self regulating aspect to them that they're able to deal with
link |
extreme conditions.
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But predicting how that complex system unrolls is very difficult, as we know, about predicting
link |
the weather on Earth even.
link |
Even with the little variation we have on Earth.
link |
You know, people have tried to put together global circulation models.
link |
You know, we've done this for Earth.
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People have tried to do these for other planets as well.
link |
And it is a really hard problem.
link |
So Titan, for example, like I said, it's one of the best studied atmospheres in the solar
link |
system, and people have tried to make these global circulation models and actually predict
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what's going to happen moving into sort of the next season of Titan.
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And those predictions have ended up being wrong.
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And so then, you know, I don't know, it's always exciting when a prediction is wrong
link |
because it means that there's something more to learn, like your theory wasn't sufficient.
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And then you get to go back and learn something by how you have to modify the theory to make
link |
I'm excited by the possibility of one day there will be for various moons and planets,
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there will be like news programs reporting the weather with the fake confidence of like
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as if you can predict the weather.
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We talked quite a bit about planets and moons.
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Can we talk a little bit about asteroids?
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What is, what's an asteroid?
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And what kind of asteroids are there?
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So the asteroids, let's talk about just the restricted to the main asteroid belt, which
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is the region, it's a region of debris basically between Mars and Jupiter.
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And the, these sort of belts of debris throughout the solar system, the outer solar system,
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you know, the Kuiper belt that we talked about, the asteroid belt, as well as certain other
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populations where they accumulate because they're gravitationally more favored, are
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remnant objects from the origin of the solar system.
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And so one of the reasons that we are so interested in them, aside from potentially the fact that
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they could come hit Earth, but scientifically it's, it gives us a window into understanding
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the composition of the material from which Earth and the other planets formed and how
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that material was kind of redistributed over the history of the solar system.
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So the asteroids, one could classify them in two different ways.
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Some of them are ancient objects.
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So they accreted out of the sort of disc of material that the whole solar system formed
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out of and have kind of remained ever since more or less the same.
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They've probably collided with each other and we see the, all these collisional fragments
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and you can actually look and based on their orbits say, you know, like these 50 objects
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originated as the same object.
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You can see them kind of dynamically moving apart after some big collision.
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And so some of them are these ancient objects maybe that have undergone collisions.
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And then there's this other category of object that is the one that I personally find really
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interesting which is remnants of objects that could have been planets.
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So early on a bunch of potential planets accreted that we call planetesimals and they formed
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and they formed with a lot of energy and they had enough time to actually differentiate.
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So some of these objects differentiated into cores and mantles and crests.
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And then they were subsequently disrupted in these massive collisions and they, now
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we have these fragments, we think fragments floating around the asteroid belt that are
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like bits of mantle, bits of core, bits of crest basically.
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So it's like puzzle pieces that you might be able to stitch together or I guess it's
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all mixed up so you can't stitch together the original planet candidates or is that
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possible to try to see if they kind of, I mean, there's too many objects in there to.
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I think that there are cases where people have kind of looked at objects and by looking
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at their orbits, they say these objects should have originated together, but they have very
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different compositions.
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And so then you can hypothesize maybe they were different fragments of a differentiated
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But one of the really cool things about this is, you know, we've been talking about getting
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clues into the interiors of planets.
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We've never seen a planetary core or deep mantle directly.
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Some mantle material comes up on our surface and then we can see it, but, you know, sort
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We haven't seen these things directly and these asteroids potentially give us a chance
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to like look at what our own core and mantle is like, or at least would be like if it had
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been also floating through space for a few billion years and getting irradiated and all
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But it's a cool potential window or like analogy into the interior of our own planet.
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Well, how do you begin studying some of these asteroids?
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What if you were to put together a study, like what are the interesting questions to
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ask that are a little bit more specific?
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Do you find a favorite asteroid that could be tracked and try to track it through telescopes?
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Or do you, is it has to be, do you have to land on those things to study it?
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So when it comes to the asteroids, there are so many of them and the big pictures or the
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big questions are answered, so some questions can be answered by zooming in in detail on
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individual object, but mostly you're trying to do a statistical study.
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So you want to look at thousands of objects, even hundreds of thousands of objects and
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figure out what their composition is and look at, you know, how many big asteroids there
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are of this composition versus how many small asteroids of this other composition and put
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together these kinds of statistical properties of the asteroid belt.
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And those properties can be directly compared with the results of simulations for the formation
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of the solar system.
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What do we know about the surfaces of asteroids or the contents of the insides of asteroids
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and what are still open questions?
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So I would say that we don't know a whole lot about their compositions.
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Most of them are small and so you can't study them in such detail with telescopes as you
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could, you know, a planet or moon and at the same time, because there are so many of them,
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you could send a spacecraft to a few, but you can't really like get a statistical survey
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And so a lot of what we, a lot of what has been done comes down to sort of classification.
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You look at how bright they are, you look at whether they're red or blue, simply, you
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know, whether their spectrum is sloped towards long wavelengths or short wavelengths.
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There are certain, if you point a spectrograph at their surfaces, there are certain features
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So you can tell that some of them have silicates on them.
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But these are the sort of, they're pretty basic questions.
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We're still trying to classify them based on fairly basic information in kind of combination
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with our general understanding of the material the solar system formed from.
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And so you're sort of, you're coming in with prior knowledge, which is that you more or
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less know what the materials are the solar system formed from, and then you're trying
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to classify them into these categories.
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There's still a huge amount of room for understanding them better and for understanding how their
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surfaces are changing in the space environment.
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Is it hard to land on an asteroid?
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Is this a dumb question?
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It feels like it would be quite difficult to actually operate a spacecraft in such a
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dense field of debris.
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Oh, the asteroid belt, there's a ton of material there, but it's actually not that dense.
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It is mostly open space.
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So mentally do picture like mostly open space with some rocks.
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The problem is some of them are not thought to be solid.
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So some of these asteroids, especially these, these core mantle fragments, you can think
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of as sort of solid like a planet, but some of them are just kind of aggregates of material.
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We call them rubble piles.
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And so there's not necessarily.
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Might look like a rock, but do a lot of them have kind of clouds around them, like a dust
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cloud thing, or like, do you know what you're stepping on when you try to land on it?
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Like what are we supposed to be visualizing here?
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This is like very few have water, right?
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There's some water in the outer part of the asteroid belt, but they're not quite like
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comets in the sense of having clouds around them.
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There are some crazy asteroids that do become active like comets.
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That's the whole other category of thing that we don't understand.
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But their surfaces, I mean, we have visited some, you can find pictures that spacecraft
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have taken of them.
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We've actually scooped up material off of the surface of some of these objects.
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We're bringing it back to analyze it in the lab.
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And there's a mission that's launching next year to land on one of these supposedly core
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fragment objects to try to figure out what the heck it is and what's going on with it.
link |
But the surfaces, you know, they're, they're, you can picture a solid surface with some
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little grains of sand or pebbles on it and occasional boulders, maybe some fine dusty
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regions, dust kind of collecting in certain places.
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Is there this, do you worry about this?
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Is there any chance that one of these fellas destroys all of human civilization by an asteroid
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kind of colliding with something, changing its trajectory and then heading its way towards
link |
That is definitely possible.
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And it doesn't even have to necessarily collide with something and change its trajectory.
link |
We're not tracking all of them.
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We can't track all of them yet.
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You know, there's still a lot of them.
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People are, people are tracking a lot of them and we are doing our best to track more of
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But there are a lot of them out there and it would be potentially catastrophic if one
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of them impacted earth.
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Have you, are you aware of this Apophis object?
link |
So there's an asteroid, a near earth object called Apophis that people thought had a decent
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probability of hitting earth in 2029 and then potentially again in 2036.
link |
So they did a lot of studies.
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It's not actually going to hit earth, but it is going to come very close.
link |
It's going to be visible in the sky in a relatively dark, I mean, not even that dark, probably
link |
not visible from Los Angeles, but, and it's going to come a 10th of the way between the
link |
earth and the moon.
link |
It's going to come closer apparently than some geosynchronous communication satellites.
link |
So that is a close call, but people have studied it and apparently are very confident it's
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not actually going to hit us, but it was.
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I'm going to have to look into this because I'm very sure, I'm very sure what's going
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to happen if an asteroid actually hits earth.
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That the scientific community and government will confidently say that, uh, we have nothing
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It's going to be a close call.
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And then last minute they'll be like, there was a miscalculation.
link |
They're not lying.
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It's just like the space of possibilities, because it's very difficult to track these
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kinds of things and there's a lot of kind of, um, there's complexities involved in this.
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There's a lot of uncertainties that I just, something tells me that human civilization
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will end with, we'll see it coming.
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And then last minute there'll be a, oops, we'll like, we'll see it coming and we'll,
link |
it'll be like, no, it's just, it's just threatening, but no problem.
link |
And last minute it'll be like, oops, that was a miscalculation.
link |
And it's all over in a matter of like a week, or just very positive and optimistic today.
link |
Is there any chance that Bruce Willis can save us in the sense that from what you know
link |
about asteroids, is there something that, um, you can catch them early enough to, uh,
link |
change volcanic, uh, eruptions, right, um, sort of drill, put a nuclear weapon inside
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and break up the asteroid or change its trajectory?
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There is potential for that.
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If you catch it early enough in advance, um, I think in theory, if you knew five years
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in advance, um, depending on the objects and how close, how much you would need to deflect
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it, um, you could deflect it a little bit.
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I don't know that it would be sufficient in all cases.
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Um, and this is definitely not my specific area of expertise, but my understanding is
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that there is something you could do.
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Um, but it also, how you would carry that out depends a lot on the properties of the
link |
If it's a solid object versus a rubble pile.
link |
So let's say you planted some bomb in the middle of it and it blew up, but it was just
link |
kind of a pile of material anyway.
link |
And then that material comes back together and then you kind of just have the same thing.
link |
Presumably its trajectory would be altered, but it's, it's like a terminator too.
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When it's like the thing that just like you shoot it in splashes and then comes back together
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will be very useless.
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That's fascinating.
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It was fascinating.
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I've gotten a lot of hope from watching, uh, uh, SpaceX rockets that land.
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It's like, Oh wow.
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From an AI perspective, from a robotics perspective, wow, we can do a hell of an amazing job with
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And but then we have an understanding about surfaces here on earth, we can map up a lot
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I wonder if we can do that.
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Some kind of detail of being able to have that same level of precision in landing on
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surfaces with as wide of a variety as asteroids have to be able to understand the exact properties
link |
of the surface and be able to encode that into whatever rocket that lands sufficiently
link |
to, I presume humans, unlike the, unlike the movies, humans would likely get in the way.
link |
Like it should all be done by robots and like land drill, place the, the explosive that
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should all be done through control, the robots.
link |
And then you should be able to dynamically adjust to, um, to the surface.
link |
The flip side of that for a robotics person, I don't know if you've seen these, it's been
link |
very heartbreaking.
link |
Uh, somebody I know well, Russ Tedrick at MIT led the DARPA robotics challenge team for
link |
the humanoid robot challenge for DARPA.
link |
I don't know if you've seen videos of robots on two feet falling, but you're talking about
link |
millions, you know, several years of work from with some of the most brilliant roboticists
link |
in the world, millions of dollars.
link |
And the final thing is a highlight video on YouTube of robots falling, but they had a
link |
lot of trouble with uneven surfaces.
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That's basically what you have to do with, uh, the challenge involves you're mostly autonomous
link |
with some partial human communication, but that human communication is broken up.
link |
Like you don't get a, you get a noisy channel, so you can, humans can, which is very similar
link |
to what it would be like in humans remotely operating a thing on an asteroid.
link |
And so with that, robots really struggled.
link |
There's some hilarious painful videos of like a robot, not able to like open the door.
link |
And then it tries to open the door without like, it misses the handle and in doing so
link |
like falls, I mean, it's, um, it's painful to watch.
link |
So like that, there's that, and then there's SpaceX.
link |
So I have hope from SpaceX and then I have less hope from bipedal robotics, um, but it's
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It's fun to kind of imagine.
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And I think the planetary side of it comes into play in understanding the surfaces of
link |
these asteroids more and more that, you know, forget sort of destruction of human civilization.
link |
It'd be cool to have like spacecraft just landing on all these asteroids to study them
link |
at scale and being able to figure out dynamically what, you know, whether it's a rubble pile
link |
or whether it's, um, a solid objects, like, do you see that kind of future of science?
link |
Maybe a hundred, 200, 300 years from now, where there's just robots expanding out through
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the solar system, like sensors, essentially.
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Some of it taking pictures from a distance, some of them landing, just exploring and giving
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Cause it feels like we're working with very little data right now.
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Sure I, I do see exploration going that way.
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I think, um, the way that NASA is currently or historically has been doing missions is
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putting together these, these really large missions that do a lot of things and are extremely
link |
well tested and have a very low rate of failure.
link |
But now that, um, these sort of CubeSat technologies are, are becoming easier to build, easier
link |
to launch, they're, they're very cheap.
link |
And you know, NASA is getting involved in this as well.
link |
There's, there's a lot of interest in these missions that are relatively small, relatively
link |
cheap and just do one thing.
link |
So you can really optimize it to just do this one thing.
link |
And maybe you could build a hundred of them and send them to different asteroids.
link |
And they would just collect this one piece of information from each asteroid.
link |
It's a kind of different, more distributed way of doing science, I guess.
link |
And there's a ton of potential there, I agree.
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Let me ask you about objects or one particular object from outside our solar system.
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We don't get to study many of these, right?
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They don't, we don't get stuff that just flies in out of nowhere from outside the solar system
link |
and flies through.
link |
Apparently there's been two recently in the past few years.
link |
One of them is Amuamua.
link |
What are your thoughts about Amuamua?
link |
Could it, could it be space junk from a distant alien civilization or is it just a weird shaped
link |
I like the way that's phrased.
link |
Um, so Amuamua is, is a fascinating object.
link |
Just the fact that we have started discovering things that are coming in from outside our
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solar system is amazing and can, can start to study them.
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And now that we have seen some, we can design now kind of thinking in advance.
link |
The next time we see one, we will be much more ready for it.
link |
We will know which telescopes we want to point at it.
link |
We will have explored whether we could even launch a fast turnaround mission to actually
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like get to it before it leaves the solar system.
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In terms of Amuamua, yeah, it's, for an object in our solar system, it's really unusual in
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two particular ways.
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One is the dimensions that we don't see natural things in our solar system that are kind of
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We see, the things we see in our solar system don't deviate from spherical by that much.
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And then that it showed these strange properties of accelerating as it was leaving the solar
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system, which was not understood at first.
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So in terms of the alien space junk, you know, as a scientist, I cannot rule out that possibility.
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I have no evidence to the contrary.
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See, you're saying there's a chance.
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I cannot, I cannot, as a scientist, honestly say that I can rule out that it's alien space
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However, I see the kind of alien explanation as following this, the Sagan's extraordinary
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claims require extraordinary evidence.
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If you are going to actually claim that something is aliens, you need to carefully evaluate,
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everyone needs to carefully evaluate the other options and see whether it could just be something
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that we know exists that makes sense.
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In the case of Oumuamua, there are explanations that fit well within our understanding of
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So there are a couple, there are two hypotheses for what it could be made of.
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They're both basically just ice shards.
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In one case, it's a nitrogen ice shard that came off of something like Pluto in another
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solar system, that Pluto got hit with something and broke up into pieces, and one of those
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pieces came through our solar system.
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In the other scenario, it's a bit of a failed solar system.
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So our solar system formed out of a collapsing molecular cloud.
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Sometimes those molecular clouds are not massive enough, and they sort of collapse into bits,
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but they don't actually form a solar system, but you end up with these kind of chunks of
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hydrogen ice, apparently.
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And so one of those chunks of hydrogen ice could have got ejected and passed through
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So both cases explain these properties in about the same way.
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So those ices will sublimate once they've passed the sun, and so as they're moving away
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from the sun, you have the hydrogen or nitrogen ice sublimating off the sunward part of it,
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and so that is responsible for the acceleration.
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The shape also, because you have all this ice sublimating off the surface, if you take
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something, the analogy that works pretty well here is for a bar of soap.
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Your bar of soap starts out sort of close to spherical, at least from a physicist perspective,
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and as you use it over time, you eventually end up with this long, thin shard because
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it's been just by sort of weathering, as we would call it.
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And so in the same way, if you just sublimate material off of one of these ice shards, it
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ends up long and thin, and it ends up accelerating out of the solar system.
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And so given that these properties can be reasonably well explained that way, we should
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be extremely skeptical about attributing things to aliens.
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See, the reason I like to think that it's aliens is because it puts a lot of priority
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on us not being lazy and we need to catch this thing next time it comes around.
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I like the idea that there's objects, it almost saddens me, they come out of the darkness
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really fast and just fly by and go and leave.
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It just seems like a wasted opportunity not to study them.
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It's the easiest way to do space travel outside of the solar system is having the things come
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I like that way of putting it.
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And it would be nice to just land on it.
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And first of all, really importantly, detect it early and then land on it with a really
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nice spacecraft and study the hell out of it.
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If there's a chance it's aliens, alien life, it just feels like such a cheap way, inexpensive
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way to get information about alien life or something interesting that's out there.
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And I'm not sure if an ice shard from another planetary system will be interesting, but
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it very well could be.
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It could be totally new sets of materials.
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It could be, tell us about composition of planets we don't quite understand.
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And it's just nice when, especially in the case of a Moa Moa, I guess it was pretty
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It would have been nice to, don't go there, they come to us, I don't know.
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That's what makes me quite sad.
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It's a missed opportunity.
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And whether you think it's aliens or not, it's a missed opportunity, but we weren't
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prepared and we will be prepared for the next ones.
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So there's been a movement in astronomy more towards what's called time domain astronomy.
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So kind of monitoring the whole sky all the time at all wavelengths.
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That's kind of the goal.
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And so we expect to detect many more of these in the future, even though these were the
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first two we saw, our potential to detect them is only increasing with time.
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And so there will be more opportunities and based on these two, we now can actually sit
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and think about what we'll do when the next one shows up.
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I also, what it made me realize, I know I didn't really think through this, but it made
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me realize if there is alien civilizations out there, the thing we're most likely to
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see first would be space junk.
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My stupid understanding of it.
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And the second would be really dumb kind of, you could think of maybe like relay nodes
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or something objects that you need to have a whole lot of for particular purposes of
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like space travel and so on.
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Like a speed limit signs or something, I don't know, whatever we have on earth, a lot of
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It's not alien aliens in themselves.
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It's like artifacts that are useful to the engineering in the systems that are engineered
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by alien civilizations.
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So like it would, we would see a lot of stuff in terms of setting, in terms of looking for
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alien life and trying to communicate with it.
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Maybe we should be looking not for like smart creatures or systems to communicate with.
link |
Maybe we should be looking for artifacts or even as dumb as like space junk.
link |
It just kind of reframed my perspective of like, what are we looking for as signs?
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Cause there could be a lot of stuff that doesn't have intelligence, but gives us really strong
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signs that there's somewhere is life or intelligent life.
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And yeah, that made me kind of, I know it might be dumb to say, but reframe the kind
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of thing that we should be looking for.
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So the benefit of looking for intelligent life is that we perhaps have a better chance
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of recognizing it.
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We couldn't necessarily recognize what an alien stop sign look like.
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And maybe the theorists are the people who sort of model and try to understand slow system
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objects are pretty good at coming up with models for anything.
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I mean, maybe a mua mua was a stop sign, but we're clever enough that we could come up
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with some physical explanations for it.
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And then we all want to go with the simplest possible, we all want to believe the sort
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of most skeptical possible explanation.
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And so we missed it because we're too good at coming up with alternate explanations for
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And it's such an outlier, such a rare phenomenon that we can't study a hundred or a thousand
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We have to, we had just one.
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And so the science almost destroys the possibility of something special being there.
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It's like Johnny Ive, this designer of Apple, I don't know if you know who that is.
link |
He's the lead designer.
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He's the person who designed the iPhone and all the major things.
link |
And he talked about, he's brilliant, one of my favorite humans on earth and one of the
link |
best designers in the history of earth.
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He talked about like when he had this origins of an idea, like in his baby stages, he would
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not tell Steve Jobs because Steve would usually like trample all over it.
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He would say, this is a dumb idea.
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And so I sometimes think of the scientific community in that sense, because the weapon
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of the scientific method is so strong at its best that it sometimes crushes the out of
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the box outlier evidence.
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We don't get a lot of that evidence because we don't have, we're not lucky enough to have
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a lot of evidence.
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So we have to deal with just special cases and special cases could present an inkling
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of something much bigger, but the scientific method user tramples all over it.
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And it's hard to know what to do with that because the scientific method works, but at
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the same time, every once in a while, it's like a balance.
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You have to do 99% of the time, you have to do like scientific rigor, but every once in
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a while, this is not you saying, me saying, smoke some weed and sit back and think, I
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wonder, you know, it's the Joe Rogan thing.
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It's entirely possible that it's alien space junk.
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I completely agree.
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And I think that most scientists do speculate about these things.
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It's just at what point do you act on those things?
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So you're right that the scientific method has inherent skepticism, and for the most
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part, that's a good thing because it means that we're not just believing crazy things
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But it's an interesting point that requiring that high level of rigor occasionally means
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that you will miss something that is truly interesting because you needed to verify it
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three times and it wasn't verifiable.
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I also think like when you communicate with the general public, I think there's power
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in that 1% speculation of just demonstrating authenticity as a human being, as a curious
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I think too often, I think this is changing, but I saw, I've been quite disappointed in
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my colleagues throughout 2020 with the coronavirus.
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There's too much speaking from authority as opposed to speaking from curiosity.
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There's some of the most incredible science has been done in 2020, especially on the virology
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And the kind of being talked down to by scientists is always really disappointing to me as opposed
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Like the things we, there's a lot of uncertainty about the coronavirus, but we know a lot of
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this stuff and we speak from scientists from various disciplines, speak from data in the
link |
face of that uncertainty.
link |
And we're curious, we don't know what the hell is going on.
link |
We don't know if this virus is going to evolve, mutate.
link |
We don't know if this virus or the next one might destroy all human civilization.
link |
You can't speak with certainty.
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In fact, I was on a survey paper about masks, something I don't talk much about because
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I don't like politics, but we don't know if masks work, but there's a lot of evidence
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to show that they work for this particular virus.
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The transmission of the virus is fascinating actually.
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The biomechanics of the way viruses spread is fascinating.
link |
If it wasn't destructive, it would be beautiful.
link |
And we don't know, but it's inspiring to apply the scientific method to the best of our ability,
link |
but also to show that you don't always know everything and to, perhaps not about the virus
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as much, but other things speculate.
link |
What if, you know, what if it's the worst case and the best case?
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Because that's ultimately what we are, descendants of apes that are just curious about the world
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Yeah, I'll just add to that, not on the topic of masks, but on the topic of curiosity.
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I mean, I think that's, astronomy and planetary sciences, a field are a little, are unique
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because for better and for worse, they don't directly impact humanity.
link |
So you know, we're not studying virology to prevent transmission of, you know, illness
link |
We're not characterizing volcanoes on earth that could destroy cities.
link |
We, it really is a more curious and in my opinion, playful scientific field than many.
link |
So for better and worse, we can kind of afford to pursue some of the speculation more because
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human lives are not in danger if we speculate a little bit too freely and get something
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In the space of AI, I am worried that we're sometimes too eager, speaking for myself,
link |
to like flip the switch to on just to see like what happens.
link |
Maybe sometimes we want to be a little bit careful about that because bad things might
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Is there books or movies in your life long ago or recently that were inspiring, had an
link |
impact on you that you would recommend?
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So many that I just don't know where to start with it.
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So I love reading.
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I read obsessively.
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I've been reading fiction and a little bit of nonfiction, but mostly fiction obsessively
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since I was a child and just never stopped.
link |
So I have some favorite books.
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None of them are easy readings.
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So I definitely, I mean, I recommend them for somebody who likes an intellectual challenge
link |
in the books that they read.
link |
So maybe I should go chronologically.
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I have at least three.
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I'm not going to go through 50 here.
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Yeah, I'd love to also like maybe ideas that you took away from what you mentioned.
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Why they were so compelling to me.
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One of the first books that really captured my fascination was Nabokov's book Pale Fire.
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Are you familiar with it?
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So I read it actually for a class.
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It's one of the few books I've ever read for a class that I actually really liked.
link |
And the book is, it's in some sense a puzzle.
link |
He's a brilliant writer, of course, but the book is like, it's formatted like a poem.
link |
So there's an introduction, a very long poem and footnotes, and you get partway through
link |
it before realizing that the whole thing is actually a novel, unless you sort of read
link |
up on it going in.
link |
But the whole thing is a novel and there's a story that slowly reveals itself over the
link |
course of all of this and kind of reveals this just fascinating character basically
link |
and how his mind works in this story.
link |
The idea of a novel also being a kind of intellectual puzzle and something that slowly reveals itself
link |
over the course of reading was really fascinating to me and I have since found a lot more writers
link |
In a contemporary example that comes to mind is Kazuo Ishiguro, who's pretty much all of
link |
his books are like slow reveals over the course of the book and like nothing much happens
link |
in the books, but you keep reading them because you just want to know like what the reality
link |
is that he's slowly revealing to you.
link |
The kind of discovery oriented reading maybe.
link |
What's the second one?
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Perhaps my favorite writer is Renier Maria Rilke.
link |
Are you familiar with him?
link |
No, also not familiar.
link |
You're hitting hidden ones.
link |
I mean, I know in the book of Well, but I've never read Pale Fire, but Rilke, I've never,
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I know it's a very difficult read, I know that much.
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All of these are difficult reads.
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I think I just, I read for in part for an intellectual challenge, but Rilke, so he wrote
link |
one thing that might be characterizable as a novel, but he wrote a lot of poetry.
link |
I mean, he wrote this series of poems called the Duino Elegies that were very impactful
link |
for me personally, just emotionally, which actually it kind of ties in with astronomy
link |
in that there's a sense in which we're all going through our lives alone and there's
link |
just this sense of profound loneliness in the existence of every individual human.
link |
I think I was drawn to astronomy in part because the sort of vast spaces, the kind of loneliness
link |
and desolateness of space made the sort of internal loneliness feel okay.
link |
In a sense, it like gave companionship and that's how I feel about Rilke's poetry.
link |
He turns the kind of desolation and loneliness of human existence into something joyful and
link |
almost meaningful.
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Yeah, there's something about melancholy, I don't know about Rilke in general, but like
link |
contemplating the melancholy nature of the human condition that makes it okay.
link |
I got gentle from an engineering perspective, think that there is so much loneliness we
link |
haven't explored within ourselves yet and that's my hope is to build AI systems that
link |
help us explore our own loneliness.
link |
I think that's kind of what love is and friendship is, is somebody who in a very small way helps
link |
us explore our own loneliness, like they listen, we connect like two lonely creatures connect
link |
for a time and it's like, oh, like acknowledge that we exist together for a brief time, but
link |
in a somewhat shallow way, I think relative to how much it's possible to truly connect
link |
as two consciousnesses.
link |
So AI might be able to help on that front.
link |
So what's the third one?
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Actually, you know, I hadn't realized until this moment, but it's yet another one of these
link |
kind of slow reveal books.
link |
It's a contemporary Russian, I think Russian American writer named Olga Grushin and she
link |
wrote this just phenomenal book called The Dream Life of Sukhanov that I read this year.
link |
Maybe it was last year for the first time and it's just a really beautiful, this one
link |
you could call a character study, I think of a Russian father coming to terms with himself
link |
and his own past as he potentially slowly loses his mind.
link |
Well, that's apparent from the beginning.
link |
I hope I don't think it's a spoiler.
link |
Decline into madness.
link |
So all of these are really heavy.
link |
I just, I don't have anything lighter to recommend.
link |
Ishiguro is the light version of this.
link |
Well, heavy has a certain kind of beauty to it in itself.
link |
Is there advice you would give to a young person today that looks up to the stars and
link |
wonders what the heck they want to do with their life?
link |
So career, science, life in general, you've for now chosen a certain kind of path of curiosity.
link |
What insights do you draw from that that you can give us advice to others?
link |
I think for somebody, I would not presume to speak to giving people advice on life and
link |
humanity overall, but for somebody thinking of being a scientist.
link |
So there are a couple of things, one sort of practical thing, which is career wise,
link |
I hadn't appreciated this going into science, but you need to, so the questions you're working
link |
on and the techniques you use are both of very high importance, maybe equal importance
link |
for being happy in your career.
link |
If there are questions you're interested in, but the techniques that you need to use to
link |
do them are tedious for you, then your job is going to be miserable even if the questions
link |
So you have to find, but if the techniques that you use are things that excite you, then
link |
your job is fun every day.
link |
So for me, I'm fascinated by the solar system and I love telescopes and I love doing data
link |
analysis, playing with data from telescopes, coming up with new ways to use telescopes
link |
and so that's where I have found that mesh.
link |
But if I was interested in, you know, the dynamical evolution of the solar system, how
link |
the orbits of things evolve, then I would need to do a different type of work that I
link |
would just not find as appealing and so it just wouldn't be a good fit.
link |
And so it sort of seems like an unromantic thing to have to think about the techniques
link |
being the thing you want to work on also, but it really makes a profound difference
link |
for I think your happiness and your scientific career.
link |
I think that's really profound.
link |
It's like the thing, the menial tasks.
link |
If you enjoy those, that's a really good sign that that's the right path for you.
link |
I think David Foster Wallace said that the key to life is to be unborable.
link |
So basically everything should be exciting.
link |
I don't think that's feasible, but you should find an area where everything is exciting.
link |
I mean, depending on the day, but you could find the joy in everything, not just the big
link |
exciting things that everyone thinks is exciting, but the details, the repetitive stuff, the
link |
menial stuff, the stuff that takes years, the stuff that involves a lot of failure and
link |
all those kinds of things that you find that enjoyable.
link |
That's actually really profound to focus on that because people talk about like dreams
link |
and passion and goals and so on, the big thing, but that's not actually what takes you there.
link |
What takes you there is every single day, putting in the hours, and that's what actually
link |
makes up life is the boring bits.
link |
If the boring bits aren't boring, then that's an exciting life because when you were talking
link |
so romantically and passionately about IO, I remember the poem by Robert Frost.
link |
So let me ask you, let me read the poem and ask what your opinion is.
link |
That's called Fire and Ice.
link |
I could almost recite this from memory.
link |
Some say the world will end in fire.
link |
From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire.
link |
But if I had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction
link |
ice is also great and would suffice.
link |
So let me ask, if you had to only choose one, would you choose the world to end in fire,
link |
in volcanic eruptions, in heat and magma, or in ice, frozen over?
link |
I've always been a fan of chaos and the idea of things just slowly getting cold and stopping
link |
and dying is just so depressing to me.
link |
So much more depressing than things blowing up or burning or getting covered by a lava
link |
Somehow the activity of it endows it with more meaning to me, maybe.
link |
I've just now had this vision of you in action films where you're walking away without looking
link |
back and this explosion's behind you and you put on shades and then it goes to credits.
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Catherine, this is awesome, I think your work is really inspiring.
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The kind of things we'll discover about planets in the next few decades is super cool and
link |
I hope, I know you said there's probably not life in one of them, but there might be and
link |
I hope we discover just that.
link |
And perhaps even on Io, within the volcanic eruptions, there's a little creature hanging
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on that we'll one day discover.
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Thank you so much for wasting all your valuable time with me today, it was really awesome.
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Yeah, likewise, thank you for having me here.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Catherine Duclear and thank you to Fundrise,
link |
Blinkist, ExpressVPN and Magic Spoon.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan.
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On Titan, the molecules that have been raining down like mana from heaven for the last four
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billion years might still be there, largely unaltered, deep frozen, awaiting for the chemists
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.