back to indexKonstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System | Lex Fridman Podcast #201
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The following is a conversation with Konstantin Batygin, planetary astrophysicist at Caltech,
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interested in, among other things, the search for the distant, the mysterious, Planet Nine,
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in the outer regions of our solar system.
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Quick mention of our sponsors, Squarespace, Literati, Onnit, and Ni.
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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 our little sun is orbited by not just a few planets in
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the planetary region, but trillions of objects in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud that
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extends over three light years out.
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This to me is amazing, since Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, is only 4.2 light
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years away, and all of it is mostly covered in darkness.
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When I get a chance to go out swimming in the ocean far from the shore, I'm sometimes
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overcome by the terrifying and the exciting feeling of not knowing what's there in the
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That's how I feel about the edge of our solar system.
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One day, I hope humans will travel there, or at the very least, AI systems that carry
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the flame of human consciousness.
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This is the Lux Friedman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Konstantin Batygin.
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What is Planet Nine?
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Planet Nine is an object that we believe lives in the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune.
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It orbits the sun with a period of about 10,000 years, and is about five Earth masses.
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So that's a hypothesized object.
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There's some evidence for this kind of object.
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There's a bunch of different explanations.
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Can you give like an overview of the planets in our solar system?
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How many are there?
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What do we know and not know about them at a high level?
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That sounds like a good plan.
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So look, the solar system basically is comprised of two parts, the inner and the outer solar
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The inner solar system has the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
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Now Mercury is about 40% of the orbital separation of where the Earth is.
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It's closer to the sun, Venus is about 70%, then Mars is about 160% further away from
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the sun than is the Earth.
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These planets that we, one of them we occupy, right, are pretty small, okay?
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They're two leading order sort of heavily overgrown asteroids, if you will.
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And this becomes evident when you move out further in the solar system and encounter
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Jupiter, which is 316 Earth masses, right, 10 times the size.
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You know, and Saturn is another huge one, 90 Earth masses at about 10 times the separation
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from the sun as is the Earth, and then you have Uranus and Neptune at 20 and 30 respectively.
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For a long time, that is where the kind of massive part of the solar system ended.
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But what we've learned in the last 30 years is that beyond Neptune, there's this expansive
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field of icy debris, a second icy asteroid belt in the solar system.
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A lot of people have heard of the asteroid belt, which lives between Mars and Jupiter,
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That's a pretty common thing that people like to imagine and draw on lunch boxes and stuff.
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But beyond Neptune, there's a much more massive and much more radially expansive field of
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Pluto, by the way, it belongs to that second, you know, icy asteroid belt, which we call
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It's just a big object within that population of bodies.
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Wow, Pluto the planet.
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Pluto the dwarf planet, the former planet, you know.
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Why is Pluto not a planet anymore?
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I mean, it's tiny.
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So size matters when it comes to planets.
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It's actually a fascinating story.
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When Pluto was discovered in 1930, the reason it was discovered in the first place is because
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astronomers at the time were looking for a seven Earth mass planet somewhere beyond Neptune.
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It was hypothesized that such an object exists.
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When they found something, they interpreted that as a seven Earth mass planet and immediately
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revised its mass downward because they couldn't resolve the object with the telescope.
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So it looked like just a point mass, you know, star rather than a physical disk.
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They said, well, maybe it's not seven, maybe it's one, right?
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And then, so over the next, you know, I guess 40 years, Pluto's mass kept getting revised
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downwards, downwards, downwards until it was realized that it's like 500 times less massive
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I mean, like Pluto's surface area is almost perfectly equal to the surface area of Russia
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And you know, Russia is big, but it's not a planet.
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Well, I mean, actually we can touch more on that.
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That's another discussion.
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So in some sense, earlier in the century, Pluto represented kind of our ignorance about
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the edges of the solar system.
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And perhaps planet nine is the thing that represents our ignorance about now the modern
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set of ignorances about the edges of our solar system.
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That's a good way to put it.
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By the way, just imagining this belt of astral debris at the edge of our solar system is
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Can you talk about it a little bit?
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What is the Kuiper belt and what is the Oort cloud?
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So look, the simple way to think about it is that if you imagine, you know, Neptune's
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orbit like a circle, right?
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Kind of maybe a factor of one and a half, 1.3 times bigger on a radius of 1.3 times
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bigger, you've got a whole collection of icy objects.
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Most of these objects are sort of the size of Austin, you know, maybe a little bit smaller.
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If you then zoom out and explore the orbits of the most long period Kuiper belt object,
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these are the things that have the biggest orbits and take the longest time to go around
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in, then what you find is that beyond a critical orbit size, beyond a critical orbit period,
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which is about 4,000 years, you start to see weird structure, like all the orbits sort
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of point into one direction.
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And all the orbits are kind of tilted in the same way by about 20 degrees with respect
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This is particularly pronounced in orbits that are not heavily affected by Neptune.
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So there you start to see this weird dichotomy where they're objects which are stable, which
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Neptune does not mess with gravitationally, and unstable objects.
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The unstable objects are basically all over the place because they're being kicked around
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The stable orbits show this remarkable pattern of clustering.
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We back, I guess, five years ago interpreted this pattern of clustering as a gravitational
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one way sign, the existence of a planet in a distant planet, right?
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Something that is shepherding and confining these orbits together.
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Of course, right, you have to have some skepticism when you're talking about these things.
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You have to ask the question of, okay, how statistically significant is this clustering?
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And there are many authors that have indeed called that into question.
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We have done our own analyses and basically, just like with all statistics where there's
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kind of multiple ways to do the exercise, you can either ask the question of if I have
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a telescope that has surveyed this part of the sky, what are the chances that I would
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discover this clustering?
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That basically tells you that you have zero confidence, right?
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That does not give you a confident answer one way or another.
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Another way to do the statistics, which is what we prefer to do, is to say we have a
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whole night sky of discoveries in the Kuiper Belt, right?
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And if we have some object over there, which has right ascension and declination, which
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is a way to say it's there on the sky, and it has some brightness, that means somebody
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looked over there and discovered an object, was able to discover an object of that brightness
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Through that analysis, you can construct a whole map on the sky of kind of where all
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of the surveys that have ever been done have collectively looked.
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So if you do the exercise this way, the false alarm probability of the clustering on which
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the Planet Nine hypothesis is built is about 0.4%.
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Wow, okay, so there's a million questions here.
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One, when you say bright objects, why are they bright?
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Are we talking about actual objects within the Kuiper Belt or the stuff we see through
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This is the actual stuff we see in the Kuiper Belt.
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The way you go about discovering Kuiper Belt objects is pretty easy.
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I mean, it's easy in theory, right?
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All you do is you take snapshots of the sky, right?
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Use that direction, say, and take a high exposure snapshot.
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Then you wait a night and you do it again, and then you wait another night and you do
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Objects that are just random stars in the galaxy don't move on the sky, whereas objects
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in the solar system will slowly move.
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This is no different than if you're driving down the freeway, it looks like trees are
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going by you faster than the clouds, right?
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It's they're reflecting light off of the sun and it's going back and hitting this.
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There's a little bit of a glimmer from the different objects that you can see based on
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the reflection from the sun.
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So like there's actual light, it's not darkness.
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These are just big icicles basically that are just reflecting sunlight back at you.
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It's then easy to understand why it's so hard to discover them because light has to travel
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to something like 40 times the distance between the earth and the sun and then get reflected
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Was that like an hour travel?
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Yeah, that's right.
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That's something like that because the earth to the sun is eight minutes, I believe.
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Something in that order of magnitude.
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So that's interesting.
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So you have to account for all of that.
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And then there's a huge amount of data, pixels that are coming from the pictures and you
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have to integrate all of that together to paint a sort of like a high estimate of the
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different objects.
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Can you track them?
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Can you be like, that's Bob?
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Like, can you like?
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In fact, one of them is named Joe Biden.
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I mean, I'm not like, this is not even a joke, right?
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Is there a Trump one or no?
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I don't know for that.
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But like the way it works is if you discover one, you right away get a license plate for
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So like the first four numbers is the first year that this object has appeared on, you
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know, in the data set, if you will.
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And then there's like this code that follows it, which basically tells you where in the
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So one of the really interesting Kuiper Belt objects, which is very much part of the Planet
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Nine story is called VP113, because Joe Biden was vice president at the time, you know,
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got nicknamed Biden.
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He got nicknamed Biden.
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What's the fingerprint for any particular object?
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Like how do you know it's the same one?
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Or you just kind of like, yeah, from night to night, you take a picture, how do you know
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it's the same object?
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So the way you know is it appears in almost exactly the same part of the sky except for
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move, but it moves.
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But this is why actually you need at least three nights because oftentimes asteroids,
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which are much closer to the earth, like will appear to move only slightly, but then on
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the third night will move away.
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So that third night is really there to detect acceleration.
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Now the thing that I didn't really realize until, you know, I started observing together
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with my partner in crime in all this, Mike Brown, is just the fact that for the first
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year when you make these detections, the only thing you really know with confidence is where
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it is on the night sky and how far away it is, okay?
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It's all about the orbit because over three days the object just moves so little, right?
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That whole motion on the sky is entirely coming from motion of the earth, right?
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So the earth is kind of the car, the object is the tree and you see it move.
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So then to get some confident information about what its orbit looks like, you have
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to come back a year later and then measure it again.
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So three nights then come back a year later and do another three nights so you get the
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velocity of the acceleration from the three nights and then you have the maybe the additional
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Because an orbit is basically described by six parameters.
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So you at least need six independent points, but in reality you need many more observations
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to really pin down the orbit well.
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And from that you're able to construct for that one particular object and orbit and then
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there's of course, like how many objects are there?
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There's like four ish thousand now.
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But like the, in the future that could be like millions.
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So in fact these things are hard to predict, but there's a new observatory called the Vera
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Rubin Observatory, which is coming online maybe next year.
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I mean with COVID these things are a little bit more uncertain, but they've actually been
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making great progress with construction.
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And so that telescope is just going to sort of scan the night sky every day automatically
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and just, it's such an efficient survey that it might increase the census of the distant
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Kuiper Belt, the things that I'm interested in by a factor of a hundred.
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I mean that would be, that would be really cool.
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And yeah, that's a, that's an incredible...
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I mean they might just find planet nine.
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Like almost like literally pictures, like visually.
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Like the first detection you make, all you know is where it is in the sky and how far
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If something is, you know, 500 times away from the sun, as far away from the sun as
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is the earth, you know that's planet nine.
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That's when the story concludes and then you can study it.
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Now you can study it.
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By the way, I'm going to use that as like, I don't know, a pickup line or a dating strategy,
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like see the person for three days and then don't see them at all and then see them again
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in a year to determine the orbit.
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And over time you figure out if sort of from a cosmic perspective, this, this whole thing
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I have no dating advice to give.
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I was going to use this as a metaphor to somehow map it onto the human condition.
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You mentioned the Kuiper Belt.
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What's the Oort cloud?
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If you look at the Neptune orbit as a one, then the Kuiper Belt is like 1.3 out there
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and then we get farther and farther into the darkness.
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What's the Oort cloud?
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So okay, you've got the kind of main Kuiper Belt, which is about say 1.3, 1.5.
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Then you have something called the scattered disc, which is kind of an extension of the
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It's a bunch of these long, very elliptical orbits that hug the orbit of Neptune, but
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come out very far.
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So that, the scattered disc with the current senses, like the, some of the longest orbits
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we know of have a semi major axis.
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So half the orbit length, roughly speaking of about a thousand, thousand times the distance
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between the earth and the sun.
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Now if you keep moving out, okay, eventually once you're at sort of 10,000 to 100,000 roughly,
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that's where the Oort cloud is.
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Now the Oort cloud is a distinct population of icy bodies and is distinct from the Kuiper
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In fact, it's so expansive that it ends roughly halfway between us and the next star.
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It's edge is just dictated by to what extent does the solar gravity reach.
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Solar gravity reaches that far?
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So it has to, wow, imagining this is a little bit overwhelming.
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So there's like a giant, like vast icy rock thingy.
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It's like a sphere.
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It's like, it's an almost spherical structure that engulfs, that encircles the sun and all
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the long period comets come from the Oort cloud.
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They come, the way that they appear, I mean, for already, I don't know, hundreds of years
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we've been detecting and occasionally like a comet will come in and it seemingly comes
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The reason these long period comets appear on very, very long timescales, right?
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These Oort cloud objects that are sitting 30,000 times as far away from the sun as is
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the earth actually interact with the gravity of the galaxy, the tide, effectively the tide
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that the galaxy exerts upon them and their orbits slowly change and they elongate to
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the point where once they, their closest approach to the sun starts to reach a critical distance
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where ice starts to sublimate, then we discover them as comets because then the ice comes
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They look beautiful in the night sky, et cetera, but they're all coming from really, really
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So is there, are any of them coming our way from collisions?
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Like how many collisions are there or is there a bunch of space for them to move around?
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Yeah, there's zero.
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It's completely collisionless out there.
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The physical radii of objects are so small compared to the distance between them, right?
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It's just, it is truly a collisionless environment.
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I think that probably in the age of the solar system have literally been zero collisions
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in the Oort cloud.
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So if you like draw a picture of the solar system, everything's really close together.
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So everything I guess here is spaced far apart.
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Do rogue planets like fly in every once in a while and join?
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Not rogue planets, but rogue objects from out there.
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We've seen a couple of them in the last three or so years, maybe four years now.
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The first one was the one called Uamuamua and it's been all over the news.
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The second one was Comet Borisov discovered by a guy named Borisov.
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Yeah, so the way you know they're coming from elsewhere is unlike solar system objects which
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travel on elliptical paths around the sun, these guys travel on hyperbolic paths.
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So they come in, say hello and then they're gone.
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And the fact that they exist is totally like not surprising, right?
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The Neptune is constantly ejecting Kuiper belt objects into interstellar space.
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Our solar system itself is sort of leaking icy debris and ejecting it.
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So presumably every planetary systems around other stars do exactly the same thing.
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Let me ask you about the millions of objects that are part of the Kuiper belt and part
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of the Oort cloud.
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Do you think some of them have primitive life?
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It kind of makes you sad if there's like primitive life there and they're just kind of like lonely
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out there in space.
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Like how many of them do you think have life, like bacterial life?
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Probably a negligible amount.
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Zero with like a plus on top.
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So, you know, if you and I took a little trip to the interstellar medium, I think we would
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develop cancer and die real fast, right?
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It's a pretty hostile radiation environment.
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You don't actually have to go to the interstellar medium.
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You just have to leave the earth's magnetic field too.
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And then you're not doing so well suddenly.
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So you know, this idea of, you know, life kind of traveling between places, it's not
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entirely implausible, but you really have to twist, I think, a lot of parameters.
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One of the problems we have is we don't actually know how life originates, right?
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So it's kind of a second order question of survival in the interstellar medium and how
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resilient it is because we think you require water, but, and that's certainly the case
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for the earth, but you know, we really don't know for sure.
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That said, I will argue that the question of like, are there aliens out there is a very
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boring question because the answer is, of course there are.
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I mean, like we know that there are planets around almost every star.
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Of course there are other life forms.
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Life is not some specific thing that happened on the earth and that's it, right?
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That's a statistical impossibility.
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Yeah, but the difficult question is before even the fact that we don't know how life
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originates, I don't think we even know what life is like definitionally, like formalizing
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a kind of picture of, in terms of the mechanism we would use to search for life out there
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or even when we're on a planet to say, is this life?
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Is this rock that just moved from where it was yesterday life or maybe not even a rock,
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I got to tell you, I want to know what life is, okay?
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And I want you to show me.
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I think there's a song to basically accompany every single thing we talk about today and
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probably half of them are love songs and somehow we'll integrate George Michael into the whole
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So your intuition is there's life everywhere in our universe.
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Do you think there's intelligent life out there?
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I think it's entirely plausible.
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I mean, it's entirely plausible.
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I think there's intelligent life on earth and so yeah, taking that, like say whatever
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this thing we got on earth, whether it's dolphins or humans, say that's intelligent.
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Definitely dolphins.
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I mean, have you seen the dolphins?
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Well, they do some cruel stuff to each other.
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So if cruelty is a definition of intelligence, they're pretty good and then humans are pretty
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good in that regard.
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And then there's like pigs are very intelligent.
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I got actually a chance to hang out with pigs recently and they're, aside from the fact
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they were trying to eat me, they love food, they love food, but there's an intelligence
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to their eyes that was kind of like haunts me because I also love to eat meat and then
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to meet the thing I later ate and that was very intelligent and almost charismatic with
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the way he was expressing himself, herself, itself was quite incredible.
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So all that to say is if we have intelligent life here on earth, if you take dolphins,
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pigs, humans, from the perspective of like planetary science, how unique is earth?
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So earth is not a common outcome of the planet formation process.
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It's probably a something on the order of maybe a 1% effect.
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And by earth, I mean not just an earth mass planet, okay?
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I mean the architecture of the solar system that allows the earth to exist in its kind
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of very temperate way.
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One thing to understand and this is pretty crucial, right, is that the earth itself formed
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well after the gas disk that formed the giant planets had already dissipated.
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You see stars start out with, you know, the star and then a disk of gas and dust that
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encircles it, okay?
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From this disk of gas and dust, big planets can emerge.
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And we have over the last two, three decades discovered thousands of extra solar planets
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as an orbit or other stars.
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What we see is that many of them have these expansive hydrogen helium atmospheres.
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The fact that the earth doesn't is deeply connected to the fact that earth took about
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100 million years to form.
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So we missed that, you know, train, so to speak, to get that hydrogen helium atmosphere.
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That's why actually we can see the sky, right?
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That's why the sky is, well, at least in most places, that's why the atmosphere is not completely
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With that, you know, kind of thinking in mind, I would argue that we're getting the kind
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of emergent pictures that the earth is not, you know, everywhere, right?
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There's sort of the sci fi view of things where we go to some other star and we just
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land on random planets and they're all earth like.
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That's totally not true.
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But even a low probability event, even if you imagine that earth is a one in a million
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or one in 10 million occurrence, there are 10 to the 12 stars in the galaxy, right?
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So you just, you always win by, that's right, by supply.
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Well, you've hypothesized that our solar system once possessed a population of short period
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planets that were destroyed by the evil Jupiter migrating through the solar nebula.
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Well, if I was to say what was the kind of the key outcome of searches for extra solar
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planets, it is that most stars are encircled by short period planets that are, you know,
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a few earth masses, right?
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So a few times bigger than the earth and have orbital periods that kind of range from days
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Now if you go and ask the solar system what's in our region, right, in that region, it's
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completely empty, right?
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It's just, it's astonishingly hollow.
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And think, you know, from the sun is not some, you know, special star that decided that it
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was going to form the solar system.
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So I think, you know, the natural thing to assume is that the same processes of planet
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formation that occurred everywhere else also occurred in the solar system.
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Following this logic, it's not implausible to imagine that the solar system once possessed
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a system of intra Mercurian, like, you know, compact system of planets.
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So then we asked ourselves, would such a system survive to this day?
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And the answer is no, at least our calculations suggested it's highly unlikely because of
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the formation of Jupiter.
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And Jupiter's primordial kind of wandering through the solar system would have sent this
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collisional field of debris that would have pushed that system of planets onto the sun.
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So was Jupiter, this primordial wandering, what did Jupiter look like?
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Like, why was it wandering?
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It didn't have the orbit it has today?
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We're pretty certain that giant planets like Jupiter, when they form, they migrate.
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The reason they migrate is, you know, on a detailed level, perhaps difficult to explain,
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but just in a qualitative sense, they form in this fluid disk of gas and dust.
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So it's kind of like, okay, if I plop down a raft somewhere in the ocean, will it stay
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where you plop it down or will it kind of get carried around?
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It's not really a good analogy because it's not like Jupiter is being advected by the
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currents of gas and dust, but the way it migrates is it carves out a hole in the disk and then
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by interacting with the disk gravitationally, it can change its orbit.
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The fact that the solar system has both Jupiter and Saturn here complicates things a lot because
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you have to solve the problem of the evolution of the gas disk, the evolution of Jupiter's
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orbit in the gas disk, plus evolution of Saturn's and their mutual interaction.
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The common outcome of solving that problem, though, is pretty easy to explain.
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Jupiter forms, its orbit shrinks, and then once Saturn forms, its orbit catches up basically
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to the orbit of Jupiter and then both come out.
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So there's this inward outward pattern of Jupiter's early motion that happens sort of
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within the last million years of the lifetime of the solar system's primordial disk.
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So while this is happening, if our calculations are correct, which I think they are, you can
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destroy this inner system of, you know, few Earth mass planets.
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And then in the aftermath of all this violence, you form the terrestrial planets.
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Where would they come from in that case?
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So Jupiter clears out the space, and then there's a few terrestrial planets that come
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in and those come in from the disk somewhere, like one of the larger objects?
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What actually happens in these calculations, you leave behind a rather mass depleted, like
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remnant disk, only a couple Earth masses.
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So then from that remnant population, annulus of material, over a hundred million years,
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by just collisions, you grow the Earth and the Moon and everything else.
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That's a beautiful word.
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What does that mean?
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Well, it's like a disk that's kind of thin.
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It's like a, yeah, it's something that is, you know, a disk that's so thin it's almost
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flirting with being a ring.
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Like I was going to say, this reminds me of Lord of the Rings, so like this, the word
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just feels like it belongs in a token though.
link |
So that's incredible.
link |
And so that, in your senses, you said like 1%, that's a rare, the way Jupiter and Saturn
link |
danced and cleared out the short period debris and then changed the gravitational landscape.
link |
That's a pretty rare thing too.
link |
And moreover, like you don't even have to go to our calculations.
link |
You can just ask the night sky, how many stars have Jupiter and Saturn analogs?
link |
The answer is Jupiter and Saturn analogs are found around only 10% of Sun like stars.
link |
They themselves, like you kind of have to score an A minus or better on the planet formation
link |
test to become a solar system analog, even in that basic sense.
link |
And moreover, you know, lower mass stars, which are very numerous in the galaxy, so
link |
called M dwarfs, think like 0% of them, well, maybe like a negligible fraction of them have
link |
Giant planets are a rare, you know, outcome of planet formation.
link |
One of the really big problems that remain unanswered is why.
link |
We don't actually understand why they're so rare.
link |
How hard is it to simulate all of the things that we've been talking about, each of the
link |
things we've been talking about, and maybe one day, all of the things we've been talking
link |
I mean, like from the initial primordial solar system, you know, a bunch of disks with, I
link |
don't know, billions, trillions of objects in them, like simulate that such that you
link |
eventually get a Jupiter and a Saturn, and then eventually you get the Jupiter and the
link |
Saturn that clear out a disk, change the gravitational landscape, then Earth pops up, like that whole
link |
thing, and then be able to do that for every other system in the, every other star in the
link |
galaxy, and then be able to do that for other galaxies as well.
link |
Maybe start from the smallest simulation, like what is actually being done today.
link |
I mean, even the smallest simulation is probably super, super difficult.
link |
Even just like one object in the Kuiper belt is probably super difficult to simulate.
link |
I mean, I think it's super easy.
link |
I mean, like, it's just not that hard.
link |
But you know, let's ask the most kind of basic problem, okay?
link |
So the problem of having a star and something in orbit of it, that you don't need a simulation
link |
for, like you can just write that down on a piece of paper.
link |
There's gravity, like yeah, I guess it's important to try to, you know, one way to simulate objects
link |
in our solar system is to build the universe from scratch.
link |
Okay, we'll get to building the universe from scratch in a sec.
link |
But let me just kind of go through the hierarchy of what, you know, what we do.
link |
Two objects, analytically solvable, like we can figure it out very easily if you just,
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I don't think you, yeah, you don't need to know calculus.
link |
It helps to know calculus, but you don't necessarily need to know calculus.
link |
Three objects that are gravitationally interacting, the solution is chaotic.
link |
Doesn't matter how many simulations you do, the answer loses meaning after some time.
link |
I feel like that is a metaphor for dating as well, but go on.
link |
Now look, yeah, so the fact that you go from analytically solvable to unpredictable, you
link |
know, when your simulation goes from two bodies to three bodies should immediately tell you
link |
that the exercise of trying to engineer a calculation where you form the entire solar
link |
system from scratch and hope to have some predictive answer is a futile one, right?
link |
We will never succeed at such a simulation.
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I feel like, just to clarify, you mean like explicitly having a clear equation that generalizes
link |
the whole process enough to be able to make a prediction, or do you mean actually like
link |
literally simulating the objects is a hopeless pursuit once it goes beyond three?
link |
The simulating them is not a hopeless pursuit, but the outcome becomes a statistical one.
link |
What's actually quite interesting is I think we have all the equations figured out, right?
link |
You know, in order to really understand this, the formation of the solar system, it suffices
link |
to know gravity and magnetohydrodynamics, I mean, like a combination of Maxwell's equations
link |
and Navier Stokes equations for the fluids.
link |
You need to know quantum mechanics to understand the capacities and so on.
link |
But we have those equations in hand.
link |
It's not that we don't have that understanding, it's that putting it all together is A, very,
link |
very difficult, and B, if you were to run the same evolution twice, changing, you know,
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the initial conditions by some infinitesimal amount, some, you know, minor change in your
link |
calculation to start with, you would get a different answer.
link |
This is one, this is part of the reason why planetary systems are so diverse.
link |
You don't have like a, you know, very predictive path for you start with a disk of this mass
link |
and it's around this star, therefore you're going to form the solar system, right?
link |
You start with this and therefore you will conform this huge outcome, huge set of outcomes,
link |
and some percentage of it will resemble the solar system.
link |
You mentioned quantum mechanics and we're talking about cosmic scale objects.
link |
You've talked about that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with Schrodinger's
link |
Like, how does quantum mechanics become relevant when you consider the evolution of objects
link |
in the solar system?
link |
Well, let me take a step back and just say, like, I remember being, you know, utterly
link |
confused by quantum mechanics when I first learned it.
link |
And the Schrodinger equation, which is kind of the parent equation of that whole field,
link |
you know, seems to come out of nowhere, right?
link |
The way that I was sort of explaining it, I remember asking, you know, my professor
link |
is like, but where does it come from?
link |
And I'm like, well, it's just like, don't worry about it and just like calculate the
link |
hydrogen, you know, energy levels, right?
link |
So it's like I could do all the problems.
link |
I just did not have any intuition for where this parent, you know, super important equation
link |
Now, down the line, I was, remember, I was preparing for my own lecture and I was trying
link |
to understand how waves travel in self gravitating disks.
link |
So you know, again, there's a very broad theory that's already developed, but I was looking
link |
for some simpler way to explain it really for the purposes of teaching class.
link |
And so I thought, okay, what if I just imagine a disk as an infinite number of concentric
link |
That interact with each other gravitationally.
link |
That's a problem in some sense that I can solve using methods from like the late 1700s.
link |
I can write down Hamiltonian, well, I can write down the energy function basically of
link |
their interactions.
link |
And what I found is that when you take the continuum limit, when you go from discrete
link |
circles that are talking to each other gravitationally to a continuum disk, suddenly this gravitational
link |
interaction among them, right?
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The governing equation becomes the Schrodinger equation.
link |
I had to think about that for a little bit.
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Did you just unify quantum mechanics and gravity?
link |
No, this is not the same thing as like, you know, fusing relativity and quantum mechanics.
link |
But it did get me thinking a little bit.
link |
So the fact that waves in astrophysical disks behave just like wave functions of particles
link |
is kind of like an interesting analogy because for me it's easier to imagine waves traveling
link |
through, you know, astrophysical disks or really just sheets of paper.
link |
And the reason this is, that analogy exists is because there's actually nothing quantum
link |
about the Schrodinger equation.
link |
The Schrodinger equation is just a wave equation and all of the interpretation that comes from
link |
it is quantum, but the equation itself is not a quantum being.
link |
So you can use it to model waves.
link |
It's waves all the way down.
link |
You can pick which level you pick the wave at.
link |
So it could be at the solar system level that you can use it.
link |
And also it actually provides a pretty neat calculational tool because it's difficult.
link |
So we just talked about simulations, but it's difficult to simulate the behavior of astrophysical
link |
disks on timescales that are in between a few orbits and their entire evolution.
link |
So it's over a timescale of a few orbits, you have, you do a hydrodynamic, you know,
link |
simulation, right?
link |
You do that, basically that's something that you can do on a modern computer on a timescale
link |
When it comes to their evolution over their entire lifetime, you don't hope to resolve
link |
You just kind of hope to understand how the system behaves in between, right?
link |
To get access to that, as it turns out, it's pretty, it's pretty cute.
link |
You can use, you can use the Schrodinger equation to get the answer rapidly, so it's a calculational
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
So astrophysical disks, how, what are they?
link |
How broad is this definition?
link |
So astrophysical disks span a huge, huge amount of ranges.
link |
They start maybe at the smallest scale.
link |
They start with actually Kuiper belt objects.
link |
Some Kuiper belt objects have rings.
link |
So that's maybe the smallest example of an astrophysical disk.
link |
You've got this little potato shaped asteroid, you know, which is, you know, sort of the
link |
size of LA or something, and around it are some rings of icy matter.
link |
That object is a small astrophysical disk.
link |
Then you have Saturn, the rings of Saturn.
link |
You have the next set of scale, you have the solar system itself when it was forming, you
link |
Then you have black hole disks.
link |
You have galaxies.
link |
Disks are super common in the universe.
link |
The reason is that stuff rotates, right?
link |
So, and those rings could be the material that composes those rings could be, it could
link |
be gas, it could be solid, it could be anything.
link |
So, the disk that made from which the planets emerged was predominantly hydrogen, helium,
link |
On the other hand, the rings of Saturn are made up of, you know, icicle, ice, little
link |
like ice cubes this big, about a centimeter across.
link |
Sounds refreshing.
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So, that's incredible.
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Hydrogen, helium, gas.
link |
So, in the beginning, it was just hydrogen and helium around the sun.
link |
How does that lead to the first formations of solid objects in terms of simulation?
link |
So, you're like, have you ever been to the desert?
link |
I've been to the Death Valley and actually it was terrifying, just a total tangent, I'm
link |
But I was driving through it and I was really surprised because it was, at first, hot.
link |
And then as it was getting into the evening, there's this huge thunderstorm, like it was
link |
raining and it got freezing cold.
link |
I'm like, what the hell?
link |
It was the apocalypse.
link |
I had to like just sit there listening to Bruce Springsteen, I remember, and just thinking,
link |
I'm probably going to die and I was okay with it because Bruce Springsteen was on the radio.
link |
But look, when you've got the boss, you're ready to meet the boss.
link |
That's a good line.
link |
By the way, to continue on this tangent, I absolutely love the Southwest for this reason.
link |
During the pandemic, I drove from LA to New Mexico a bunch of times.
link |
The madness of weather?
link |
The madness of weather, the fact that it will be blazing hot one minute and then it's just
link |
like, we'll decide to have a little thunderstorm, maybe we'll decide to go back momentarily
link |
to like a thousand degrees and then go back to the thunderstorm.
link |
It's that, by the way, is chaos theory in action.
link |
But let's get back to talking about the desert.
link |
So, in the desert, tumbleweeds have a tendency to roll because the wind rolls them.
link |
And if you're careful, you'll occasionally see this family of tumbleweeds where there's
link |
like a big one and then a bunch of little ones that kind of hide in its wake and are
link |
all rolling together and almost looks like a family of ducks crossing the street or something.
link |
Or for example, if you watch Tour de France, you've got a whole bunch of cyclists and they're
link |
like cycling within 10 centimeters of each other.
link |
They're not BFFs, right?
link |
They're not trying to be, trying to ride together.
link |
They are riding together to minimize the collective air resistance, if you will, that they experience.
link |
Turns out solids in the protoplanetary disk do just this.
link |
There's an instability wherein solid particles, things that are a centimeter across will start
link |
to hide behind one another and form these clouds.
link |
Because cumulatively, that minimizes the solid component of this aerodynamic interaction
link |
Now, these clouds, because they're kind of a favorable energetic condition for the dust
link |
to live in, they grow, grow, grow, grow, grow until they become so massive that they collapse
link |
under their own weight.
link |
That's how the first building blocks of planets form.
link |
That's how the big asteroids got there.
link |
That's incredible.
link |
So that, is that simulatable or is it not useful to simulate?
link |
No, no, that's simulatable.
link |
And people do these types of calculations.
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That's actually, that's one of the many fields of planet formation theory that is really,
link |
really active right now.
link |
People are trying to understand all kinds of aspects of that process because of course
link |
I've explained it, you know, like as if there's one thing that happens.
link |
Turns out it's a beautifully rich dynamic, but qualitatively, formation of the first
link |
building blocks actually follows the same sequence as formation of stars, right?
link |
Stars are just clouds of gas, hydrogen, helium, gas that sit in space and slowly cool.
link |
And at some point they, you know, contract to a point where their gravity overtakes the
link |
thermal pressure support, if you will.
link |
And they collapse under their own weight and you get a little baby solar system.
link |
So do you think one day it will be possible to simulate the full history that took our
link |
solar system to what it is today?
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And it will be useless.
link |
So you don't think your story, many of the ideas that you have about Jupiter clear in
link |
the space, like retelling that story in high resolution is not that important.
link |
I actually think it's important, but at every stage you have to design your experiments,
link |
your numerical computer experiments so that they test some specific aspect of that evolution.
link |
I am not a proponent of doing huge simulations because even if we forget the information
link |
theory aspect of not being able to simulate in full detail the universe, because if you
link |
do, then you have made an actual universe.
link |
It's not the simulation, right?
link |
Simulation is in some sense a compression of information.
link |
So therefore you must lose detail.
link |
But that point aside, if we are able to simulate the entire history of the solar system in
link |
excruciating detail, I mean, it'll be cool, but it's not going to be any different from
link |
observing it, right?
link |
Because theoretical understanding, which is what ultimately I'm interested in, comes from
link |
taking complex things and reducing them down to something that, you know, some mechanism
link |
that you can actually quantify.
link |
That's the fun part of astrophysics, just kind of simulating things in extreme detail
link |
is we'll make cool visualizations, but that doesn't get you to any better understanding
link |
than you had before you did the simulation.
link |
So if you ask very specific questions, then you'll be able to create like very highly
link |
compressed, nice, beautiful theories about how things evolved, and then you can use those
link |
to then generalize to other solar systems, to other stars and other galaxies, and then
link |
say something generalizable about the entire universe.
link |
How difficult would it be to simulate our solar system such that we would not know the
link |
Meaning, if we are living in a simulation, is there a nice, think of it as a video game,
link |
is there a nice compressible way of doing that, or just kind of like you intuited with
link |
a three body situation is just a giant mess that you cannot create a video game that will
link |
seem realistic without actually building your solar system from scratch?
link |
I'm speculating, but one of the, yeah, I know you have a deep understanding of this, but
link |
for me, I'm just going to speculate that for at least in the types of simulations that
link |
we can do today, inevitably, you run into the problem of resolution, right?
link |
Doesn't matter what you're doing, it is discrete.
link |
Now, the way you would go about asking, you know, what we're observing, is that a simulation
link |
or is that, you know, some real continuous thing, is you zoom in, right?
link |
You zoom in and try and find the, you know, the grid scale, if you will.
link |
Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting question, and because the solar system itself and really,
link |
you know, the double pendulum is chaotic, right?
link |
From sitting on another pendulum, it moves unpredictably once you let them go.
link |
You really don't need to, like, inject any randomness into a simulation for it to give
link |
you stochastic and unpredictable answers.
link |
Weather is a great example of this.
link |
Weather has a lapen of time of, you know, typical weather systems have a lapen of time
link |
And there's a fundamental reason why the force forecast always sucks, you know, two weeks
link |
It's not that we don't know the equations that govern the atmosphere, we know them well.
link |
Their solutions are meaningless, though, after a few days.
link |
The zooming in thing is very interesting.
link |
I think about this a lot, whether there'll be a time soon where we would want to stay
link |
in video game worlds, whether it's virtual reality or just playing video games.
link |
I mean, I think that time, like, came in, like, the 90s, and it's been that time.
link |
Well, it's not just came, I mean, it's accelerated.
link |
I just recently saw that WoW and Fortnite were played 140 billion hours, and those are
link |
And that's, like, increasing very, very quickly, especially with the people coming up now,
link |
being born now and become, you know, becoming teenagers and so on.
link |
Let's have a thought experiment where it's just you and a video game character inside
link |
a room, where you remove the simulation, they need to simulate sort of a lot of objects.
link |
If it's just you and that character, how far do you need to simulate in terms of zooming
link |
in for it to be very real to you, as real as reality?
link |
So like, first of all, you kind of mentioned zooming in, which is fascinating, because
link |
we have these tools of science that allow us to zoom in, quote unquote, in all kinds
link |
of ways in the world around us.
link |
But our cognitive abilities, like our perception system as humans, is very limited in terms
link |
So we might be very easily fooled.
link |
Some of the video games, like, on the PS4, like, look pretty real to me, right?
link |
I think, you know, you would really have to interrogate, I mean, I think even with what
link |
we have today, like, I don't know, Ace Combat 7 is a great example, right?
link |
Like, I mean, the way that the clouds are rendered, it's, I mean, it looks just like
link |
when you're flying, you know, on a real airplane, the kind of transparency.
link |
I think that the, you know, our perception is limited enough already to not be able to
link |
tell some of the, you know, some of the differences.
link |
There's a game called Skyrim.
link |
It's an Elder Scrolls role playing game.
link |
And I just, I played it for quite a bit.
link |
And I think I played it very different than others.
link |
Like, there'll be long stretches of time where I would just walk around and look at nature
link |
It's just like the graphics is like, wow, I want to stay there.
link |
I went hiking recently.
link |
It was like as good as hiking.
link |
So look, I know what you mean.
link |
Not to go on a huge video game, you know, tangent, but like the third, like, Witcher
link |
game was astonishingly beautiful, right?
link |
Especially like playing on a good hardware machine, it's like, this is pretty, this is
link |
That said, um, you know, I, I don't resonate with the, I want to stay here, you know, like
link |
one of the things that I love to do is to go to my like boxing gym and, and box with
link |
Like that's, there's, there's nothing quite like that physical, you know, experience.
link |
that's fascinating.
link |
That might be simply an artifact of the year you were born maybe because if you're born
link |
today, it almost seems like stupid to go to a gym, like you're going to a gym to box with
link |
Why not box with Mike Tyson when you yourself is like in his prime, when you yourself are
link |
also an incredible boxer in the video game world.
link |
For me, there, there's a multitude of reasons why I don't want to box with Mike Tyson.
link |
I enjoy teeth, you know, and I want to have an ear.
link |
No, but your, your skills in this meat space, in this physical realm is very limited and
link |
takes a lot of work and you're, you're a musician, you're an incredible scientist.
link |
You only have so much time in the, in the day, but in the video game world, you can
link |
expand your capabilities and all kinds of dimensions that you can never have possibly
link |
have time in the physical world.
link |
And so that, it doesn't make sense like to, to be existing, to be working your ass off
link |
in the physical world when you can just be super successful in the video game world.
link |
But I still, you enjoy sucking and stuff.
link |
Yeah, I really struggling to get better.
link |
I mean, I think like these days with music, music is a great example, right?
link |
We just started, you know, practicing live with my band again, you know, after not playing
link |
for a year and you know, it's just, it was terrible.
link |
Like it was just kind of a lot of the nuance, you know, a lot of the detail is just that
link |
detail that takes, you know, years of collective practice to develop.
link |
It's just lost, but it was just an incredible amount of fun, way more fun than all the like
link |
studio, you know, sitting around and playing that I did, you know, throughout the entire
link |
So I think there's something, there's something intangible or maybe, maybe tangible about
link |
being, being in person.
link |
I sure hope you're wrong and that, you know, we, that's not something that will get lost
link |
because I think there's like such a large part of the human condition is to hang out.
link |
If we were doing this interview on zoom, right?
link |
I mean, I'd already be, I'd already be bored out of my mind.
link |
I mean, there's something to that.
link |
I mean, I'm almost playing devil's advocate, but at the same time, you know, I'm sure people
link |
talk about the same way at the beginning of the 20th century about horses, where they're,
link |
they are much more efficient, they're much easier to maintain than cars.
link |
It doesn't make sense to have, you know, all the ways that cars break down and there's
link |
not enough infrastructure in terms of roads for cars.
link |
It doesn't make any sense.
link |
Like horses and like nature, you could do the nature, like where, you know, you should
link |
be living more natural life.
link |
You don't want machines in your life that are going to pollute your mind and the minds
link |
of young people, but then eventually just cars took over.
link |
So in that same way, it just seems, going back to horses, I'm just, you know, well,
link |
you can be, you can play, what is it?
link |
Red dead, red dead redemption, redemption, and that you can ride horses in the video
link |
So let me return us back to planet nine.
link |
Always a good place to come back to.
link |
So now that we did a big historical overview of our solar system, what is planet nine?
link |
Planet nine is a hypothetical object that orbits the solar system, right?
link |
On orbital period of about 10,000 years and an orbit, which is slightly tilted with respect
link |
to the plane of the solar system, slightly eccentric and the object itself we think is
link |
five times more massive than the earth.
link |
We have never seen planet nine in a telescope, but we have gravitational evidence for it.
link |
And so this is where all the stuff we've been talking about, this clustering ideas, maybe
link |
you can speak to the approximate location that we suspect.
link |
And also the question I wanted to ask is what are we supposed to be imagining here?
link |
Because you said there are certain objects in the Kuiper Belt that are kind of have a
link |
direction to them that they're all like flocking in some kind of way.
link |
So that's the sense that there's some kind of gravitational object, not changing their
link |
orbit, but kind of confining them, like grouping their orbits together.
link |
See, what would happen if planet nine were not there is these orbits that roughly share
link |
a common orientation, they would just disperse, right?
link |
They would just become as a mutually symmetric point everywhere.
link |
Planet nine's gravity makes it such that these objects stay in a state that's basically anti
link |
aligned with respect to the orbit of planet nine and sort of hang out there and kind of
link |
oscillate on a timescale of about a billion years.
link |
That's one of the lines of evidence for the existence of planet nine.
link |
That's the one that's easiest to maybe visualize just because it's fun to think about orbits
link |
that all point into the same direction, but I should, you know, emphasize that, for example,
link |
the existence of objects, again, Kuiper Belt objects that are heavily out of the plane
link |
of the solar system, things that are tilted by say 90 degrees, that's not, we don't expect
link |
that as an outcome of planet formation.
link |
Indeed, planet formation simulations have never produced such objects without some extrinsic
link |
gravitational force.
link |
Planet nine, on the other hand, generates them very readily, so that provides kind of
link |
an alternative, you know, population of small bodies in the solar system that also get produced
link |
by planet nine through an independent kind of gravitational effect.
link |
So they're kind of, there's basically five different things that planet nine does individually
link |
that are like kind of maybe a one sigma effect where you'd say, yeah, okay, if that's all
link |
it was, maybe it's not, no reason to jump up and down, but because it's a multitude
link |
of these puzzles that all are explained by one hypothesis, that's really the magnetism,
link |
the attraction of the planet nine model.
link |
So can you just clarify, so most orbit, most planets in the solar system orbit at approximately
link |
the same, so it's flat.
link |
Yeah, it's like one degree.
link |
The difference between them is about one degree.
link |
But nevertheless, if we looked at our solar system, it would look, and I could see every
link |
single object, it would look like a sphere.
link |
The inner part where the planets are would look like, you know, flat, right?
link |
The Kuiper belt and the asteroid belt have a larger, it gets fatter and fatter and fatter
link |
and becomes a sphere.
link |
And if you look at the very outside, it's polluted by this quasi spheroidal thing.
link |
Nobody's of course ever seen the Oort cloud, right?
link |
We've only seen comments that come from the Oort cloud so that the Oort cloud, which is
link |
this, right, population of distant debris, its existence is also inferred.
link |
You could say alternatively, there is, you know, there's a big cosmic creature that occasionally,
link |
you know, sitting at 20,000 AU and occasionally throws an icy rock towards the sun like that.
link |
Spaghetti monster, I think it's called.
link |
I mean, so it's a mystery in many ways, but you can kind of infer a bunch of things about
link |
And by the way, both terrifying and exciting that there's this vast darkness all around
link |
us that's full of objects that they're just throwing.
link |
It's actually kind of astonishing, right, that we have only explored a small fraction
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of the solar system, right?
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That really kind of baffles me because I remember as a student, you know, studying physics,
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you know, you do the problem where you put the earth around the sun, you solve that and
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like, it's one line of math and you say, okay, well, that surely was figured out by Newton.
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So like all the interesting stuff is not in the solar system, but that it's just plainly
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There are mysteries in the solar system that are remarkable that we are only now starting
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to just kind of scratch the surface of.
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And some of those objects probably have some information about the history of our solar
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Like a great example is, you know, small meteorites, right?
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Small meteorites are melted, right?
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They have, they're differentiated, meaning some of the iron sinks, you say, well, how
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Because they're so small that they wouldn't have melted just from the heat of their accretion.
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Turns out the fact that the solar nebula, the disk that made the planets was polluted
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by aluminum 26 is in itself a remarkable thing.
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It means the solar system did not form in isolation.
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It formed in a giant cloud of thousands of other stars that were also forming, some of
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which were undergoing, you know, going through supernova explosions, some of, and releasing
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these unstable isotopes that, of which we now see kind of the traces of.
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Do you think it's possible that life from other solar systems was injected and that
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was what was the origin of life on Earth?
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Yeah, the Panspermia idea.
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That's seen as a low probability event by people who studied the origin of life, but
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that's because then they would be out of a job.
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Well, I don't think they'd be out of the job because you just then say, you have to figure
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out how life started there.
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But then you have to go there.
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We can study life on Earth much easier.
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We could study it in the lab much easier because we can replicate conditions there from an
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early Earth much easier from a chemistry perspective, from a biology perspective.
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You can intuit a bunch of stuff.
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You can look at different parts of Earth and just.
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To an extent, I mean, the early Earth was completely unlike the current Earth, right?
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There was no oxygen.
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So one of my colleagues at Caltech, Joe Kirshnik, is certain, something like 100% certainty
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that life started on Mars and came to Earth on Martian meteorites.
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This is not a problem that I like to kind of think about too much, like the origin of
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It's a fascinating problem, but you know, it's not physics and I just like, I just don't
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It's the same reason you don't love, I thought you're a musician, so music is not physics
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So why are you so into it?
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It's 100% physics.
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No, no, look, in all seriousness though, there are a few things that I really, really enjoy.
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I genuinely enjoy physics.
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I genuinely enjoy music.
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I genuinely, you know, enjoy martial arts and I genuinely enjoy my family.
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I should have said that all in a reverse order or something, but I like to focus on these
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things and not worry too much about everything else.
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You know what I mean?
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Just because there is a, like you said earlier, there's a time constraint.
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You can't do it all.
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There's many mysteries all around us.
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And they're all beautiful in different ways.
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To me, that thing I love is artificial intelligence that perhaps I love it because eventually
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I'm trying to suck up to our future overlords.
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The question of, you said there's a lot of kind of little pieces of evidence for this
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thing that's Planet Nine.
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If we were to try to collect more evidence or be certain, like a paper that says, like
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you drop it, clear, we're done.
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What does that require?
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Are sending probes out or do you think we can do it from telescopes here on earth?
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What are the different ideas for conclusive evidence for Planet Nine?
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The moment Planet Nine gets imaged from a telescope on earth, it's done.
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I mean, it's just there.
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Can you clarify it?
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Cause you mentioned that before from an image, would you be able to tell?
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So from an image, the moment you see something, something that is reflecting sunlight back
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at you and you know that it's hundreds of times as far away from the sun as the earth,
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So you're thinking, so basically if you have a really far away thing that's big, five times
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the size of earth, that means that is Planet Nine.
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Could there be multiple objects like that?
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In principle, yeah.
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I mean, there's no law of physics that doesn't allow you to have multiple, there's also no
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evidence at present for there being multiple.
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I wonder if it's possible, just like we're finding exoplanets, whether given the size
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of the Oort Cloud, there's basically, it's rarer and rarer, but there are sprinkled Planet
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Nine, 10, 11, 12, like these, some.
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It goes after that.
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I can just keep counting.
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So just something about the dynamic system, it becomes lower and lower probability event,
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but they gather up, they become larger and larger maybe, something like that.
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I wonder if discovering Planet Nine will just be almost like a springboard, it's like, well,
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what's beyond that?
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It's entirely plausible.
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The Oort Cloud itself probably holds about five earth masses or seven earth masses of
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Right, so it's not nothing.
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And it all ultimately comes down to at what point will the observational surveys sample
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enough of the solar system to kind of reveal interesting things.
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There's a great analogy here with Neptune and the story of how Neptune was discovered.
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Neptune was not discovered by looking at the sky, right?
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It was discovered mathematically, right?
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So yeah, the orbit of Uranus, when Uranus was found, this was 1781, both the tracking
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of the orbit of Uranus as well as the reconstruction of the orbit of Uranus immediately revealed
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that it was not following the orbit that it was supposed to, right?
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The predicted orbit deviated away from where it actually was.
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So in the mid 1800s, right, a French mathematician by the name of Orban Le Verrier did a beautifully
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sophisticated calculation which said if this is due to gravity of a more distant planet,
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then that planet is there, okay?
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And then they found it.
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But the point is the understanding of where to look for Neptune came entirely out of celestial
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The case with Planet Nine is a little bit different because what we can do I think relatively
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well is predict the orbit and mass of Planet Nine.
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We cannot tell you where it is on its orbit.
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The reason is we haven't seen the Kuiper Belt objects complete an orbit, their own orbit,
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even once because it takes 4,000 years.
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But I plan to live on as an AI being, and I'll be tracking those orbits as, you know,
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So it takes 4,000 or 5,000 years.
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I mean, it doesn't have to be AI.
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It could be longevity.
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There's a lot of really exciting genetic engineering research.
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So you'll just be a brain waiting for the, your brain waiting for the orbit to complete
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for the basic Kuiper Belt objects.
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That's like kind of the worst reason to want to live a long time, right, just like can
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the brain like smoke a cigarette?
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Can you just like light one up while you're waiting or?
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But you're making me actually realize that the one way to explore the galaxy is by just
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sitting here on Earth and waiting.
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So if we can just get really good at waiting, it's like a mua mua or these interstellar
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objects that fly in, you can just wait for them to come to you.
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Same with the aliens.
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You can wait for them to come to you.
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If you get really good at waiting, then that's one way to do the exploration because eventually
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the thing will come to you.
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Maybe that's the, maybe the intelligent alien civilizations get much better at waiting,
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and so they all decide, so game theoretically, to start waiting, and it's just a bunch of
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like ancient intelligent civilizations of aliens all throughout the universe, they're
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just sitting there waiting for each other.
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Look, you can't just be good at waiting.
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You gotta know how to chill, okay?
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Like you can't just like sit around and do nothing.
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You gotta be, you gotta know how to chill.
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I honestly think that as we progress, if the aliens are anything like us, we enjoy loving
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things we do, and it's very possible that we just figure out mechanisms here on Earth
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to enjoy our life, and we just stay here on Earth forever, that exploration becomes less
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and less of an interesting thing to do, and so you basically, yes, wait and chill.
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You get really optimally good at chilling, and thereby exploring is not that interesting,
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so in terms of 4,000 years, it would be nothing for scientists.
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We'll be chilling and just all kinds of scientific explorations will become possible because
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we'll just be here on Earth.
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You have a paper out recently, because you already mentioned some of these ideas, but
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I'd love it if you could dig into it a little bit.
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The injection of inner Oort Cloud objects into the distant Kuiper Belt by Planet Nine.
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What is this idea of Planet Nine injecting objects into the Kuiper Belt?
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Okay, let me take a brief step back, and when we do calculations of Planet Nine, when we
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do the simulations, as far as our simulations are concerned, sort of the Neptune, like kind
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of the transneptunian solar system is entirely sourced from the inside, namely the Kuiper
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Belt gets scattered by Neptune, and then Planet Nine does things to it and aligns the orbits
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and so on, and then we calculate what happens on the lifetime of the solar system, yada,
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During the pandemic, one of the kind of questions we asked ourselves, and this is indeed something
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we, Mike and I, Mike Brown, who's a partner in crime on this, and I do regularly, is we
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say how can we A, disprove ourselves, and B, how can we improve our simulations?
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Like what's missing?
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One idea that maybe should have been obvious in retrospect is that all of our simulations
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treated the solar system as some isolated creature, right?
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But the solar system did not form in isolation, right?
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It formed in this cluster of stars, and during that phase of forming together with thousands
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of other stars, we believe the solar system formed this almost spherical population of
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icy debris that sits maybe at a few thousand times the separation between the Earth and
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the Sun, maybe even a little bit closer.
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If Planet Nine's not there, that population is completely dormant, and these objects just
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slowly orbit the Sun.
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Nothing interesting happens to them ever, but when we realize that if Planet Nine is
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there, Planet Nine can actually grab some of those objects and gravitationally reinject
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them into the distant solar system.
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So we thought, okay, let's look into this with numerical experiments.
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Do our simulations, does this process work, and if it works, what are its consequences?
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So it turns out, indeed, not only does Planet Nine inject these distant inner Oort cloud
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objects into the Kuiper Belt, they follow roughly the same pathway as the objects that
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are being scattered out.
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So there's this kind of river, two way river of material.
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Some of it is coming out by Neptune scattering, some of it is moving in.
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And if you work through the numbers, you kind of, at the end of the day, it has an effect
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on the best fit orbit for Planet Nine itself.
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So if you realize that the data set that we're observing is not entirely composed of things
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that came out of the solar system, but also things that got reinjected back in, then turns
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out the best fit Planet Nine is slightly more eccentric.
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That's kind of getting into the weeds.
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The point here is that the existence of Planet Nine itself provides this natural bridge that
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connects an otherwise dormant population of icy debris of the solar system with things
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that we're starting to directly observe.
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So it can flow back, so it's not just a river flowing one way, it's maybe a smaller stream
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You want a backwash, you want to incorporate that into the simulations, into your understanding
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of those distant objects when you're trying to make sense of the various observations
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That's fascinating.
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I gotta ask you, some people think that many of the observations that you're describing
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could be described by a primordial black hole.
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First, what is a primordial black hole and what do you think about this idea?
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So primordial black hole is a black hole which is made not through the usual pathway of making
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a black hole, which is that you have a star, which is more massive than 1.4 or so solar
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masses and basically when it runs out of fuel, runs out of its nuclear fusion fuel, it can't
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hold itself up anymore and just the whole thing collapses on itself, right?
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You create a, I mean one, I guess, simple way to think about it is you create an object
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with zero radius, that has mass but zero radius, that singularity.
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Now such black holes exist all over the place.
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In the galaxy, there's in fact a really big one at the center of the galaxy that's like,
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that one's always looking at you when you're not looking, okay, and it's always talking
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And when you turn off the lights, it wakes up.
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So such black holes are all over the place.
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When they merge, we get to see incredible gravitational waves that they emit, etc, etc.
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One kind of plausible scenario, however, is that when the universe was forming, basically
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during the Big Bang, you created a whole spectrum of black holes, some with masses of five Earth
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masses, some with masses of 10 Earth masses, like the entire, you know, mass spectrum size,
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some the massive asteroids.
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Now on the smaller end, over the lifetime of the universe, the smaller ones kind of
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evaporate and they're not there anymore.
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At least this is what we, what the calculations tell us.
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But five Earth masses is big enough to not have evaporated.
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So one idea is that Planet Nine is not a planet and instead it is a five Earth mass black
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And that's why it's hard to find.
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Now can we right away from our calculations say that's definitely true or that's not true?
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We can't, in fact, our calculations tell you nothing other than the orbit and the mass.
link |
And that means the black hole, I mean, it could be a five Earth mass, you know, cup.
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It could be a five Earth mass hedgehog or a black hole or really anything that's five
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Earth masses will do because the gravity of a black hole is no different than the gravity
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of a planet, right?
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If the sun became a black hole tomorrow, it would be dark, but the Earth would keep orbiting
link |
And like this notion that, oh, black holes suck everything in, it's not, that's like
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What would be the difference between a black hole and a planet in terms of observationally?
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Probably the difference would be that you will never find the black hole, right?
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The truth is they're kind of, I'm actually not, you know, I never looked into this very
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carefully, but there are some constraints that you can get just statistically and say,
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okay, if the sun has a binary companion, which is a five Earth mass black hole, then that
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means such black holes would be extremely common and, you know, you can sort of look
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for lensing events and then you say, okay, maybe that's not so likely.
link |
But you know, that said, I want to emphasize that there's a limit to what our calculations
link |
That's the orbit and the mass.
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So I think there's a bunch, like Ed Witten, I think wishes it's a black hole because I
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think one exciting things about black holes in our solar system is that we could go there
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and we can maybe study the singularity somehow because that allows us to understand some
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fundamental things about physics.
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If it's a planet, so planet nine, we may not, you know, and we go there, we may not discover
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anything profoundly new.
link |
The interesting thing, perhaps you can correct me about planet nine is like the big picture
link |
The whole big story of the Kuiper belt and all those kinds of things.
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It's not that planet nine would be somehow fundamentally different from, I don't know,
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Neptune in terms of, in terms of the kind of things we could learn from it.
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So I think that there's kind of a hope that it's a black hole because it's an entirely
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new kind of object.
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Maybe you can correct me on that.
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I mean, of course here, my own biases creep in because I'm interested, you know, in planets
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around other stars.
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And I would say, I would disagree that, you know, we wouldn't find things that would be
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truly, you know, fundamentally new because as it turns out, the galaxy is really good
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at making five or three earth mass objects, right?
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The most common type of planet that we see, that we, you know, discover orbiting around
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other stars is a few earth masses.
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In the solar system, there's no analog for that, right?
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We go from one earth mass object, which is this one and to skipping to Neptune and Uranus,
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which themselves are actually relatively poorly understood, especially Uranus from the interior
link |
structure point of view.
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If planet nine is a planet, going there will give us the closest window into understanding
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what other planets look like.
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And I will, you know, I'll say this, that, you know, planets kind of in terms of their
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complexity on some logarithmic scale fall somewhere between a star and an insect, right?
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An insect is way more complicated than a star, right?
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Just all kinds of physical processes and really biochemical processes that occur inside of
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an insect that just make a star look like, you know, somebody is like playing with a
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spring or something, right?
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So the, I think, you know, it would be, you know, arguably, you know, more interesting
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to go to, you know, to go to planet nine if it's a planet, because black holes are simple.
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They're just kind of, they're basically macroscopic like particles, right?
link |
And so just like a star that you mentioned in terms of complexity.
link |
So it's possible that planet nine is supposed to being like homogeneous is like super like
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heterogeneous is a bunch of cool stuff going on that could give us an intuition.
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I never thought about that, that it's basically Earth number two in terms of size and gives
link |
us, starts giving us intuition that could be generalizable to Earth like planets elsewhere
link |
I mean, yeah, Pluto is also in the sense like, you know, Pluto is a tiny, tiny thing, right?
link |
Just like you would imagine that it's just a tiny ball of ice, like who cares, but the
link |
New Horizons images of Pluto reveal so much remarkable structure, right?
link |
They reveal glaciers flowing and these are glaciers not made out of water ice, but you
link |
know, CO ice, it turns out at those temperatures, right, of like 40 or so Kelvin, water ice
link |
looks like metal, right?
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It just doesn't flow at all, but then ice made up of carbon monoxide starts to flow.
link |
I mean, there's just like all kinds of really cool phenomena that you otherwise just wouldn't
link |
really even imagine that occur.
link |
So yeah, I mean, there's a reason why I like planets.
link |
Well, let me ask you, I find as I read the idea that Ed Witten was thinking about this
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kind of stuff fascinating.
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So he's a mathematical physicist who's very interested in string theory, won the Fields
link |
Medal for his work in mathematics.
link |
So I read that he proposed a fleet of probes accelerated by radiation pressure that could
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discover a Planet Nine primordial black holes location.
link |
What do you think about this idea of sending a bunch of probes out there?
link |
Yeah, look, the way the idea is a cool one, right?
link |
You go and you say, you know, launch them basically, isotropically, you track where
link |
And if I understand the idea correctly, basically measure the deflection and you say, okay,
link |
that must be something there since the probe trajectories are being altered.
link |
Oh, so the measurement, the basic sensory mechanism is the, it's not like you have senses
link |
It's more like you're, because you're very precisely able to capture, to measure the
link |
trajectory of the probes, you can then infer the gravitational fields.
link |
I think that's the basic idea.
link |
You know, back a few years ago, we had conversations like these with, you know, engineers from
link |
They more or less convinced me that this is more, much more difficult than it seems because
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you don't, at that level of precision, right?
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Things like solar flares matter, right?
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Solar flares, right, are completely chaotic.
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You can't predict which, where a solar flare will happen.
link |
That will drive radiation pressure gradients.
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You don't know where every single asteroid is.
link |
So like actually doing that problem, I think it's possible, but it's not a trivial matter,
link |
Well, I wonder, not just about Planet 9, I wonder if that's kind of the future of doing
link |
science in our solar system is to just launch a huge number of probes.
link |
So like a whole order of magnitude, many orders of magnitude, larger numbers of probes, and
link |
then starting for a bunch of different stuff, not just gravity, but everything else.
link |
So in this regard, I actually think there is a huge revolution that's to some extent
link |
already started, right?
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The standard kind of like timescale for a NASA mission is that you like propose it and
link |
it launches, I don't know, like 150 years after your proposal.
link |
I'm over exaggerating, but you know, it's just like some huge development cycle and
link |
it gets delayed 55 times, like that is not going away, right?
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The really cutting edge things, you have to do it this way because you don't know what
link |
you're building, so to speak.
link |
But the CubeSat kind of world is starting to provide an avenue for like launching something
link |
that costs a few million dollars and has a turnaround timescale of like a couple of years.
link |
You can imagine doing PhD theses where you design the mission, the mission goes to where
link |
you're going, and you do the science all within a time span of five, six years.
link |
That has not been fully executed on yet, but I absolutely think that's on the horizon and
link |
we're not talking a decade, I think we're talking like this decade.
link |
Yeah, and the company is accelerating all this with Blue Origin and SpaceX, and there's
link |
a bunch of more CubeSat oriented companies that are pushing this forward.
link |
Well let me ask you on that topic, what do you think about either one?
link |
Elon Musk with SpaceX going to Mars, I think he wants SpaceX to be the first to put a first
link |
human on Mars, and then Jeff Bezos, gotta give him props, wants to be the first to fly
link |
his own rocket out into space.
link |
Wasn't there a guy who like built his rocket out of garbage?
link |
This was like a couple years ago, and somewhere in the desert he launched himself.
link |
I'm not tracking this closely, but I think I am familiar with folks who built their own
link |
rocket to try to prove the earth is flat.
link |
Yes, that's the guy I'm talking about, he also jumped some limousine.
link |
Truly revolutionary mind, you have to have greater men than either you or I.
link |
It's been astonishing to watch how really over the last decade the commercial sector
link |
took over this industry that traditionally has really been a government thing to do.
link |
Motivated primarily by the competition between nations, like the Cold War, and now it's motivated
link |
more and more by the natural forces of capitalism.
link |
That's right, so here I have many ideas about it.
link |
I think on the one hand, like what SpaceX has been able to do, for example, phenomenal.
link |
If that brings down the price of space exploration, that turnaround time scale for space exploration,
link |
which I think it inevitably will, that's a huge boost to the human condition.
link |
The same time, if we're talking astronomy, it comes at a huge cost, and the Starlink
link |
satellites is a great example of that cost.
link |
In fact, I was just camping in the Mojave with a friend of mine, and they saw this string
link |
of satellites just kind of appear and then disappear into nowhere.
link |
That is beginning to interfere with Earth based observations, so I think there's tremendous
link |
potential there, it's also important to be responsible about how it's executed.
link |
Now with Mars and the whole idea of exploring Mars, I don't have strong opinions on whether
link |
a manned mission is required or not required, but I do think the thing to keep in mind is
link |
that I'm not signed on, if you will, to the idea that Mars is some kind of a safe haven
link |
that we can escape to.
link |
Living on Mars, if you want to live on Mars, you can have that experience by going to the
link |
Mojave Desert and camping, and it's just not a great experience.
link |
Well it's interesting, but there's something captivating about that kind of mission of
link |
us striving out into space, and by making Mars in some ways habitable for at least like
link |
months at a time, I think would lead to engineering breakthroughs that would make life in many
link |
ways much better on Earth.
link |
It will come up with ideas we totally don't expect yet, both on the robotics side, on
link |
the food engineering side, on the, maybe we'll switch from, there'll be huge breakthroughs
link |
in insect farming, as exciting as I find that idea to be, in the ways we consume protein.
link |
Maybe it'll revolutionize, we do factory farming, which is full of cruelty and torture of animals,
link |
we'll revolutionize that completely because of our, we shouldn't need to go to Mars to
link |
revolutionize life here on Earth, but at the same time, I shouldn't need a deadline to
link |
get shit done, but I do need it.
link |
And then in the same way, I think we need Mars.
link |
There's something about the human spirit that loves that longing for exploration.
link |
I agree with that thesis, the going to the moon, right, and that whole endeavor has captivated
link |
the imagination of so many, and it has led to incredible ideas, really, and probably
link |
in nonlinear ways, not like, okay, we went to the moon, therefore some person here has
link |
In that similar sense, I think space exploration is, there's some real magnetism about it,
link |
and it's on a genetic level.
link |
We have this need to keep exploring when we're done with a certain frontier, we move on to
link |
the next frontier.
link |
All that I'm saying is that I'm not moving to Mars to live there permanently ever, and
link |
I think that, I'm glad you noted the kind of degradation of the Earth.
link |
I think that is a true kind of the leading order challenge of our time.
link |
That's a great engineering, that's a bunch of engineering problems.
link |
I'm most interested in space, because as I've read extensively, it's apparently very difficult
link |
to have sex in space, and so I just want that problem to be solved, because I think once
link |
we solve the sex in space problem, we'll revolutionize sex here on Earth, thereby increasing the
link |
fun on Earth, and the consequences of that can only be good.
link |
I mean, you can, you've got a clear plan, right, and it sounds like, you know.
link |
I'm submitting proposals to NASA as we speak.
link |
I keep getting rejected, I don't know why.
link |
You need better diagrams.
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I should have thought of that.
link |
You a while ago mentioned that, you know, there's certain aspects in the history of
link |
the solar system and Earth that resulted, it could have resulted in an opaque atmosphere,
link |
but it didn't, we couldn't see the stars.
link |
And somebody mentioned to me a little bit ago, and it's almost like a philosophical
link |
Do you think humans, like human society would develop as it did, or at all, if we couldn't
link |
It would be drastically different.
link |
Just if it ever did develop.
link |
So I think some of the early developments, right, of like, you know, fire, you know.
link |
First of all, that atmosphere would be so hot, because, you know, if you have an opaque
link |
atmosphere, the temperature at the bottom is huge.
link |
So we would be very different beings to start with.
link |
We'd have very different.
link |
It could be cloudy in certain kinds of ways that you could still get.
link |
Think about like a greenhouse, right?
link |
A greenhouse is cloudy, effectively, but it's super hot.
link |
It's hard to avoid having an atmosphere.
link |
If you have an opaque atmosphere, it's hard to, right.
link |
Venus is a great example, right?
link |
Venus is, I don't remember exactly how many degrees, but it's hundreds in Celsius, right?
link |
It's not a hundred, it's hundreds.
link |
Even though it's only a little bit closer to the sun, that temperature is entirely coming
link |
from the fact that the atmosphere is thick.
link |
So it's just a sauna of sorts.
link |
You go there, you know, you feel refreshed after you come back, you know.
link |
But if you stay there, I mean, so, okay, take that as an assumption.
link |
This is a philosophical question, not a biological one.
link |
So you have a life that develops under these extremely hot conditions.
link |
So much of the early evolution of mankind was driven by exploration, right?
link |
And the kind of interest in stars originated in part as a tool to guide that exploration,
link |
I mean, that in itself, I think would be a huge, you know, a huge differential in the
link |
way that we, you know, our evolution on this planet.
link |
I mean, stars, that's brilliant.
link |
So even in that aspect, but even in further aspects, astronomy just shows up in basically
link |
every single development in the history of science up until the 20th century, it shows
link |
So I wonder without that, if we would have, if we would even get like calculus.
link |
Yeah, look, that's a great, I mean, that's a great point.
link |
Newton in part developed calculus because he was interested in understanding, explaining
link |
Kepler's laws, right?
link |
In general, that whole mechanistic understanding of the night sky, right, replacing a religious
link |
understanding where you interpret, you know, this is, you know, this whatever fire god
link |
riding his, you know, a little chariot across the sky, as opposed to, you know, this is
link |
some mechanistic set of laws that transformed humanity and arguably put us on the course
link |
that we're on today, right?
link |
The entirety of the last 400 years and the development of kind of our technological world
link |
that we live in today was sparked by that, right?
link |
Understanding an effectively, you know, a non secular view of the natural world and
link |
kind of saying, okay, this can be understood and if it can be understood, it can be utilized,
link |
we can create our own variants of this.
link |
Absolutely, we would be a very, very different species without astronomy.
link |
This I think extends beyond just astronomy, right?
link |
There are questions like why do we need to spend money on X, right?
link |
Where X can be anything like paleontology, like, right?
link |
The mating patterns of penguins.
link |
Yeah, that's like, that's right.
link |
I think, you know, there's a tremendous under appreciation for the usefulness of useless
link |
I mean, that's brilliant.
link |
I didn't come up with this, this is a little book by the guy who started the Institute
link |
for Advanced Studies, but, you know, it's so true, so much of the electronics that are
link |
on this table, right, work on Maxwell's equations.
link |
Maxwell wasn't sitting around in the 1800s saying, you know, I hope one day, you know,
link |
we'll make, you know, a couple mics so, you know, a couple, you know, a couple guys can
link |
have this conversation, right?
link |
That wasn't at no point was that the motivation, and yet, you know, it gave us the world that
link |
The answer is if you are a purely pragmatic person, if you don't care at all about kind
link |
of the human condition, none of this, the answer is, you can tax it, right, like, useless
link |
things have created way more capital than useful things.
link |
And the sad thing, first of all, it's really important to think about, and it's brilliant
link |
in the following context, like Neil deGrasse Tyson has this book about the role of military
link |
based funding in the development of science, and then so much of technological breakthroughs
link |
in the 20th century had to do with humans working on different military things.
link |
And then the outcome of that had nothing to do with military, it had some military application,
link |
but their impact was much, much bigger than military.
link |
The splitting of the atom is a kind of a canonical example of this.
link |
We all know the tragedy that, you know, arises from splitting of the atom, and yet, you know,
link |
so much, I mean, the atom itself does not care for what purpose it is being split.
link |
So I wonder if we took the same amount of funding as we used for war and poured it into
link |
like totally seemingly useless things, like the mating patterns of penguins, we would
link |
get the internet anyway.
link |
I think so, I think so, and, you know, perhaps more of the internet would have penguins,
link |
So we're both joking, but in some sense, like, I wonder, it's not the penguins, because penguins
link |
is more about sort of biology, but all useless kind of tinkering and all kinds of avenues,
link |
and also because military applications are often burdened by the secrecy required.
link |
So it's often like so much, the openness is lacking, and if we've learned anything for
link |
the last few decades is that when there's openness in science, that accelerates the
link |
development of science.
link |
That openness of science truly, you know, it benefits everybody, the notion that if,
link |
you know, I share my science with you, then you're going to catch up and like know the
link |
That is a short sighted viewpoint, because if you catch up and you open, you know, you
link |
discover something that puts me in a position to do the next step, right?
link |
So I absolutely agree with all of this.
link |
I mean, the kind of question of like military funding versus non military funding is obviously
link |
a complicated one, but at the end of the day, I think we have to get over the notion as
link |
a society that we are going to, you know, pay for this, and then we will get that, right?
link |
That's true if you're buying like, I don't know, toilet paper or something, right?
link |
It's just not true in the intellectual pursuit.
link |
That's not how it works, and sometimes it'll fail, right?
link |
Like sometimes, like a huge fraction of what I do, right?
link |
I come up with an idea, I think, oh, it's great, and then I work it out, it's totally
link |
It fails immediately.
link |
Failure is not a sign that the initial pursuit was worthless, so failure is just part of
link |
this kind of this whole exploration thing, and we should fund more and more of this exploration,
link |
the variety of the exploration.
link |
I think it was Linus Pauling or somebody from, you know, that generation of scientists, you
link |
know, a good way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.
link |
So I think that's true.
link |
If you are conservative in your thinking, if you worry about proposing something that's
link |
going to fail and, oh, what if, you know, like, there's no science police that's going
link |
to come and arrest you for proposing the wrong thing, and, you know, it's also just like,
link |
why would you do science if you're afraid of, you know, taking that step?
link |
It'd be so much better to propose things that are plausible, that are interesting, and then
link |
for a fraction of them to be wrong than to just kind of, you know, make incremental progress
link |
all your life, right?
link |
Speaking of wild ideas, let me ask you about the thing we mentioned previously, which is
link |
this interstellar object Amuamua.
link |
Could it be space junk from a distant alien civilization?
link |
You can't immediately discount that by saying absolutely it cannot.
link |
Anything can be space junk.
link |
I mean, from that point of view, can any of the Kuiper Belt objects we see be space junk?
link |
Everything on the night sky can, in principle, be space junk.
link |
And Kuiper Belt would catch interstellar objects potentially and, like, force them into an
link |
orbit if they're, like, small enough?
link |
Not the Kuiper Belt itself, but you can imagine, like, Jupiter family comets being captured,
link |
So you can actually capture things.
link |
It's even easier to do this very early in the solar system, like, early in the solar
link |
system's life while it's still in a cluster of stars.
link |
It's unavoidable that you capture debris, whether it be natural debris or unnatural
link |
debris, or just debris of some kind from other stars.
link |
It's like a daycare center, right?
link |
Like, everybody passes their infections on to other kids.
link |
You know, Amuamua, there's been a lot of discussion about it, and there's been a lot of interest
link |
in this over, like, is it aliens or is it not?
link |
It's, like, if you just kind of look at the facts, like, what we know about it is it's
link |
kind of, like, a weird shape, and it also accelerated, you know?
link |
Like, that's the two, those are the two interesting things about it.
link |
There are puzzles about it, and perhaps the most daring resolution to this puzzle is that
link |
it's not, you know, aliens or it's not, like, a rock, it's actually a piece of hydrogen
link |
So, this is a friend of mine, you know, Daryl Seligman, Greg Laughlin, came up with this
link |
idea that in giant molecular clouds that are just clouds of hydrogen, helium, gas that
link |
live throughout the galaxy, at their cores, you can condense ice to become these hydrogen,
link |
you know, icebergs, if you will.
link |
And then that explains many of the aspects of, in fact, I think that explains all of
link |
the Oumuamua mystery, how it becomes elongated, because basically the hydrogen ice sublimates
link |
and kind of like a bar of soap that, you know, slowly kind of elongates as you strip away
link |
the surface layers, how it was able to accelerate because of a jet that is produced from, you
link |
know, the hydrogen coming off of it, but you can't see it because it's hydrogen gas, like,
link |
all of this stuff kind of falls together nicely.
link |
I'm intrigued by that idea, truly, because it's like, if that's true, that's a new type
link |
of astrophysical object.
link |
And it would be produced by, what's the monster that produced it initially, that kind of object?
link |
So these giant molecular clouds, they're everywhere.
link |
I mean, the fact that they exist is not...
link |
Are they rogue clouds or are they part of like an Oort cloud?
link |
No, no, they're rogue clouds.
link |
They're just floating about?
link |
Yeah, so if you go, like, a lot of people imagine the galaxy as being a, you know, a
link |
bunch of stars, right, and they're just orbiting, right?
link |
But the truth is, if you fly between stars, you run into clouds.
link |
They don't have any large object that creates orbits, so they're just floating about?
link |
But why are they floating together?
link |
Or they just float together for a time and not...
link |
Well, so these eventually become the nurseries of stars.
link |
So as they cool, they contract and, you know, then collapse into stars or into groups of
link |
And some of them, the starless molecular clouds, according to the calculations that Daryl
link |
and Greg did, can create these, like, icicles of hydrogen ice.
link |
I wonder why they would be flying so fast, because they seem to be moving pretty fast
link |
You mean Oumuamua?
link |
Oh, that's just because of the acceleration due to the sun.
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If you stop, it's like, take something really far away, let it go, and the sun is here.
link |
By the time it comes close to the sun, right, it's moving pretty fast.
link |
So that's an attractive explanation, I think, not so much because it's cool, but it makes
link |
a clear prediction, right, of when Vera Rubin Observatory comes online next year or so.
link |
We will discover many, many more of these objects, right?
link |
And they have, so I like theories that are falsifiable.
link |
Not just testable, but falsifiable.
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It's good to have a falsifiable theory where you can say, that's not true.
link |
Aliens is one that's fundamentally difficult to say, no, that's not aliens.
link |
Well, the interesting thing to me, if you look at one alien civilization, and then we
link |
look at the things it produces, in terms of if we were to try to detect the alien civilization,
link |
there is like, say there's 10 billion aliens, there would probably be trillions of dumb
link |
drone type things produced by the aliens, and then be many, many, many more orders of
link |
magnitude of junk.
link |
So if you were to look for an alien civilization, in my mind, you would be looking for the junk.
link |
That's the more efficient thing to look for.
link |
So I'm not saying Oumuamua has any characteristics of space junk, but it kind of opened my eyes
link |
to the idea that we shouldn't necessarily be looking to the queen of the ant colony.
link |
We should be looking at, I don't know, I don't know, traces of alien life that doesn't look
link |
intelligent in any way, may not even look like life.
link |
It could be just garbage.
link |
We should be looking for garbage.
link |
Well, garbage that's producible by unnatural forces.
link |
For me at least, that was kind of interesting, because if you have a successful alien civilization,
link |
that we will be producing many more orders of magnitude of junk, and that would be easier
link |
potentially to detect.
link |
Well, so you have to produce the junk, but you have to also launch it.
link |
So this is the, this is where, I mean, let's, let's imagine.
link |
But let's imagine we are a successful civilization that, you know, has made it to space.
link |
We clearly have, right?
link |
And yes, we're in the infancy of that pursuit, but, you know, we've launched, I don't know
link |
how many satellites.
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If you count GPS satellites, it must be at least thousands.
link |
It's certainly thousands.
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I don't know if it's over 10,000, but it's on that order.
link |
But it's on that, like a large order of magnitude.
link |
How many of the things that we've launched will ever leave the solar system?
link |
Well, maybe the Voyager, the Voyager 1, Voyager 2, I don't know if the Pioneer.
link |
Oh, there's also a Tesla Roadster out there.
link |
That one, it will never leave the solar system.
link |
It'll just, I think that one will eventually collide with Mars.
link |
That can be SpaceX's first Mars destination.
link |
But look, so there's an energetic cost to interstellar travel, which is really hard
link |
And when we think about, you know, generically, what do we look for in an alien civilization,
link |
oftentimes we tend to imagine that the thing you look for is the thing that we're doing
link |
So I think that, you know, if I look at the future, right, and for a while, like, okay,
link |
if aliens are out there, they must be broadcasting in radio, right?
link |
That radio, you know, the amount that we broadcast in radio has diminished tremendously in the
link |
But we're doing a lot more computation, right?
link |
What are the signs of computation?
link |
Like that's a good, that's an interesting question to ask, right?
link |
Where I don't know, I think something on the order of a few percent of the entire electrical
link |
grid last year went to mining Bitcoin, right?
link |
Yeah, there could be a lot of in the future, different consequences of the computation,
link |
which I mean, I'm biased, but it could be robotics, it could be artificial intelligence.
link |
So we may be looking for intelligent looking objects, like that's what I meant by probes,
link |
like things that move in kind of artificial ways.
link |
But the emergence of AI is not an if, right?
link |
It's happening right in front of our eyes.
link |
And the energetic costs associated with that are becoming, you know, a tangible problem.
link |
So I think, you know, if you imagine kind of extrapolating that into the future, right?
link |
What are the, you know, what becomes the bottleneck, right?
link |
The bottleneck might be powering, you know, powering the AI, broadly speaking, not one
link |
AI, but powering that entire AI ecosystem, right?
link |
So I don't know, I think, you know, space junk is an is kind of, it's an interesting
link |
idea, but it's heavily influenced by like sci fi of 1950s, where by 2020, we're all
link |
like, flying to the moon.
link |
And so we produce a lot of space junk, I'm not sure if that's the pathway that alien
link |
civilizations take, I've also never seen an alien civilization.
link |
But if your theory of chill turns out to be true, and then we don't, you know, we don't
link |
necessarily explore, we seize the exploration phase of a, like alien civilizations quickly
link |
seize the exploration phase of their, of their efforts, then, then perhaps they'll just be
link |
chilling in a particular space, expanding slowly, but then using up a lot of resources
link |
and then have to have a lot of garbage disposal that sends stuff out.
link |
And the other, you know, the other idea was that it could be a relay that you'll almost
link |
have like these GPS like markers, these sent throughout, which I think is kind of interesting.
link |
It's similar to this probe idea of sending a large number of probes out to measure gravitational
link |
to measure basically, yeah, the gravitational field, essentially, I mean, a lot of people
link |
at Caltech or at MIT are trying to measure gravitational fields.
link |
And there's, there's a lot of ideas of sending stuff out there that accurately measures those
link |
gravitational fields to have a greater understanding of the early universe.
link |
But then you might realize that communication through gravitation, through gravity is actually
link |
much more effective than, than radio waves, for example, something like that.
link |
And then you send out, I mean, okay, if you're an alien civilization that's able to have
link |
gigantic masses, like basically, we're getting there as a, as a civilization, no, we're not
link |
Well, I mean, I mean, like be able to sort of play with black holes, that kind of thing.
link |
So we're talking about a whole nother order of magnitude of masses, then it may be very
link |
effective to send signals via gravitational waves.
link |
I actually my sense is that all of these things are genuinely difficult to predict, you know,
link |
and I don't mean like, to kind of shy away, I just I really mean, if you think if you
link |
take imagination of what the future will look like from, you know, 500 years ago, right?
link |
It's just, it is so hard to conceive of the impossible, right?
link |
So it's, it's almost like, you know, it's almost limiting to try and imagine things
link |
that are an order of magnitude, you know, or two orders of magnitude ahead in terms
link |
of progress, just because, you know, you mentioned cars before, you know, if you were to ask
link |
people what they wanted in 1870, it's faster buggies, right?
link |
So so I think the whole like, kind of, you know, alien conversation inevitably gets gets
link |
limited by by our entire kind of collective astrophysical lack of imagination.
link |
So to push back a little bit, I find that it's really interesting to talk about these
link |
wild ideas about the future, whether it's aliens, whether it's AI, with brilliant people
link |
like yourself, who are focused on very particular tools of science, we have today, to solve
link |
very particular, like rigorous scientific questions.
link |
And it's almost like putting on this wild dreamy hat, like some percent of the time
link |
and say, like, what are like, what would alien civilizations look like?
link |
What would alien trash look like?
link |
Well, what would our own civilization that sends out trillions of AI systems out there,
link |
like how 9000, but 10,000 out there, what would that look like?
link |
And you're right, any one prediction is probably going to be horrendously wrong.
link |
But there's something about creating these kind of wild predictions that kind of opens
link |
No, there's a huge magnetism to it, right?
link |
And some of some of it, you know, I mean, some of the Jules Verne novels did a phenomenal
link |
job predicting the future, right?
link |
That actually was a great example of what you're talking about, like allowing your imagination
link |
I mean, I just hope, I just hope there's dragons.
link |
That's like, I love dragons are the best.
link |
But see, the cool thing about science fiction and these kinds of conversations, it doesn't
link |
just predict the future, I think.
link |
Some of these things will create the future.
link |
Taking the idea, the humans are amazing, like fake it till you make it.
link |
Humans are really good at taking an idea that seems impossible at the time.
link |
And for any one individual human, that idea is like, it's like planting a seed that eventually
link |
materializes itself.
link |
It's weird how science fiction can create science fiction, it drives the science.
link |
I agree with you, and I think in this regard, you know, I'm like a sucker for sci fi.
link |
It's all I listen to like now when I run and some of it is completely implausible, right?
link |
And it's just like, I don't care.
link |
It's both entertaining and, you know, it's just like, it's imagination.
link |
You know about the black clouds book, I think this is by Fred Hoyle.
link |
This is like, this has great connections with sort of a lot of the advancements that are
link |
happening in NLP right now, right, with transformer models and so on.
link |
But you know, it's this black cloud shows up in the solar system and then, you know,
link |
people try to send radio and then it learns to talk back at you, you know.
link |
So anyway, we don't have to talk at all about it, but it's just, it's something worth checking
link |
With that, on the alien front, with the black cloud, to me, exactly, on the NLP front, and
link |
also just explainability of AI, it's fascinating.
link |
Just the very question, Stephen Wolfram looked at this with the movie Arrival, it's like,
link |
what would be the common language that we would discover?
link |
The reason that's really interesting to me is we have aliens here on earth now.
link |
Japanese, oh yeah.
link |
Japanese is the obvious answer.
link |
Japanese, yeah, that would be the common, maybe it would be music, actually.
link |
That's more likely.
link |
It wouldn't be a language.
link |
It would be art that they would communicate.
link |
But you know, I do believe that we have, I'm with Stephen Wolfram on this a little bit,
link |
that to me, computation, like programs we write, that, you know, that they're kind of
link |
intelligent creatures and I feel like we haven't found the common language to talk with them.
link |
Like our little creations that are artificial are not born with whatever that innate thing
link |
that produces language with us and like, coming up with mechanisms for communicating with
link |
them is an effort that feels like it will produce some incredible discoveries.
link |
You can even think of, if you think that math has discovered, mathematics in itself is a
link |
Oh yeah, it's an innate construction of the world we live in.
link |
I think we are, you know, part of the way there because pre 1950, right, computers were
link |
human beings that would carry out arithmetic, right?
link |
And I think it was Ulam who worked in Los Alamos at the time, like towards the end of
link |
the second world war, wrote something about how, you know, in the future, right, computers
link |
will not be just arithmetic tool, but will be truly an interactive, you know, thing with
link |
which you could do experiments, right?
link |
At the time, the notion of doing an experiment, not like in the lab with some beakers, but
link |
an experiment on a computer, designing an experiment, a numerical experiment was a new
link |
Like, you know, 70% of what I do is I design, you know, I write code, terrible code to be
link |
clear, like, but, you know, I write code that creates an experiment, which is a simulation.
link |
So in that sense, I think we're beginning to interact with the computer in a way that
link |
you're saying, not as just a, you know, fancy calculator, not as just a, you know, call
link |
and request type of thing, but, you know, something that can generate insights that
link |
are otherwise completely unattainable, right there, unattainable by doing analytical mathematics.
link |
And there's, with AlphaFold 2, we're now starting to crack open biology, so being able to simulate
link |
at first trivial biological systems and hopefully down the line, complex biological systems.
link |
My hope is to be able to simulate psychological, like sociological systems, like humans.
link |
I've, you know, a large part of my work at MIT was on autonomous vehicles, and the fascinating
link |
thing to me was about pedestrians, human pedestrians interacting with autonomous vehicles and simulating
link |
those systems without murdering humans would be very useful, but nevertheless is exceptionally
link |
Yeah, I would say so.
link |
When is my Mustang gonna drive itself?
link |
I'm not even joking, it's like, yeah.
link |
It turns out it's much more difficult than we imagined, and I suppose that's the kind
link |
of, the progress of science is just like, you know, going to Mars, it's probably going
link |
to turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined.
link |
Sending out probes to investigate Planet 9 at the edge of our solar system might turn
link |
out to be way more difficult than we imagined, but we do it anyway, and we figure it out
link |
It's actually, Mars is a great, I mean, going, sending humans to Mars is way more complicated
link |
than sending humans to the moon.
link |
You'd think, just like naively, both are in space, who cares, like, if you go there, why
link |
don't you go there, you know, just life support is an extremely expensive thing, yeah.
link |
There's a bunch of extra challenges, but I disagree with you, I would be one of the early
link |
I used to think not, I used to think I'd be one of the first maybe million to go once
link |
you have a little bit of a society, I think I'm upgrading myself to the first like 10,000.
link |
Yeah, that's right, front of the cabin.
link |
Not completely front, but like, it would be interesting to die, I'm okay with, death sucks,
link |
but I kind of like the idea of dying on Mars.
link |
Of all the places to die, I gotta say, in this regard, like, I don't wanna die on Mars.
link |
No, no, I would much rather die on Earth.
link |
I mean, death is fundamentally boring, right, like, death is a very boring experience, but
link |
I mean, I've never died before, so I don't know from first hand experience.
link |
As far as you know.
link |
It could be reincarnation, all those kinds of things.
link |
So you mean, where would you die?
link |
If you had to choose?
link |
Oh, man, okay, so I would definitely, there's a question of who I'd wanna die with, I prefer
link |
not to die alone, but like, surrounded by family would be preferable, where I think
link |
Northern New Mexico, and I'm not even joking, like, this is not a random place, it's just
link |
Would that be your favorite place on Earth?
link |
Not necessarily, like, favorite place on Earth to reside, you know, indefinitely, but it
link |
is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to.
link |
So you know, there's something, I don't know, there's something attractive about going,
link |
Returning to nature in a beautiful place.
link |
Let me ask you about another aspect of your life that is full of beauty, music.
link |
You're a musician.
link |
The absurd question I have to ask, what is the greatest song of all time, objectively
link |
The greatest song of all time.
link |
I suppose that could change moment to moment, day to day, but if you were forced to answer
link |
for this particular moment in your life, that's something that pops to mind, this could be
link |
both philosophically, this could be technically as a musician, like what you enjoy, maybe
link |
Lyrics is very important, so I would probably, it would be, my choice would be lyrics based.
link |
I don't want to answer in terms of just technical, you know, technical prowess.
link |
I think technical prowess is impressive, right?
link |
It's just like, it's impressive what can be done.
link |
I wouldn't place that into the category of the greatest music ever written.
link |
Some classical music that's written is undeniably beautiful, but I don't want to consider that
link |
category of music either, just because, you know, so if I have to limit the scope of this
link |
philosophical discussion to, you know, the kind of music that I listen to, you know,
link |
probably What's My Age Again by Blink 182, it's just, you know, it's a solid one.
link |
It's got, you know.
link |
That's a good song.
link |
I don't know if you're joking.
link |
It's a good one, but it's, yeah, I mean.
link |
I was going to come back as a close second.
link |
What's My Age Again, oh, yeah.
link |
No, I mean, it would probably, you know, songwriting wise, I think The Beatles came pretty close
link |
Were they influential to you?
link |
I love The Beatles.
link |
Let it be yesterday.
link |
Like, I think Strawberry Fields Forever is one.
link |
You know what one of my favorite Beatles songs is?
link |
It's, you know, In My Life, right?
link |
It's hard to imagine how, whatever, a 24 year old wrote that.
link |
It is one of the most introspective pieces of music ever.
link |
You know, I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan, and so I think, you know, if you were to, you can
link |
sort of look at the entire Dark Side of the Moon album as, you know, getting pretty close
link |
up there to the pinnacle of what, you know, can be created, so, you know, Time is a great
link |
It's a great song.
link |
Just the entirety of just the instruments, the lyrics, the feeling created by a song,
link |
like Pink Floyd can create feelings.
link |
The entire experience, I mean, you have that with The Wall of just transporting you into
link |
Songs don't, not many songs could do that as well.
link |
Not many artists can do that as well as Pink Floyd did.
link |
There are a lot of bands that you can kind of say, oh yeah, like if you take Blink 182,
link |
You have no idea, like if you are listening to sort of that type of pop punk for the first
link |
time, it's difficult to differentiate between Blink 182 and like Sum 41 and the thousand
link |
of other like lesser known bands that all sounded, they all had that sparkling production
link |
feel, they all kind of sounded the same, right?
link |
With Pink Floyd, it's hard to find another band that you're like, well, is this one Pink
link |
Like you know when you're listening to Pink Floyd what you're listening to.
link |
The uniqueness, that's fascinating.
link |
You know, in the calculation of the greatest song in the greatest band of all time, you
link |
could probably, you could probably actually quantify this like scientifically, is like
link |
how unique, if you play different songs, how well are people able to recognize whether
link |
it's this band or not?
link |
And that, you know, that's probably a huge component to greatness.
link |
Like if the world would miss it if it was gone.
link |
But there's also the human story things, like I would say I would put Johnny Cash's cover
link |
of Hurt as one of the greatest songs of all time.
link |
And that has less to do with the song.
link |
But your interaction with it.
link |
Interaction with it, but also the human, the full story of the human.
link |
You're like, it's not just, if I just heard the song, I'd be like, okay.
link |
But if it's the full story of it, also the video component for that particular song.
link |
So like that, you can't discount the full experience of it.
link |
You know, I have no confusion about not, about being, you know, anywhere, you know, in that
link |
league, but I just like sometimes think about, you know, music that is being produced today
link |
feels oftentimes, it feels like kind of clothes, like clothes that you buy at like H&M and
link |
you wear it three times before they rip and you throw away.
link |
So like so much of it is, it's not bad, it's just kind of forgettable, right?
link |
Like the fact that we're talking about Pink Floyd in 2021 is in itself an interesting
link |
Why are we talking about Pink Floyd?
link |
And there's something unforgettable about them and unforgettable about the art that
link |
That could be the markets that like, so Spotify has created this kind of market where the
link |
incentives for creating music that lasts is much lower because there's so much more music.
link |
You just want something that shines bright for a short amount of time, makes a lot of
link |
money and moves on.
link |
And I mean, the same thing you see with the news and all those kinds of things, we're
link |
just living in a shorter and shorter, shorter like a time scale in terms of our attention
link |
And that, nevertheless, when we look at the long arc of history of music, perhaps there
link |
will be some songs from today that will last as much as Pink Floyd, we're just unable to
link |
Just the collected works of Nickelback.
link |
It could be a contender.
link |
I've recently started listening to Justin Bieber just to understand what people are
link |
And I'll just keep my comments to myself on that one.
link |
It's too good to explain in words.
link |
The words cannot capture the greatness that is the Biebs.
link |
You as a musician, so you write your own music, you play guitar, you sing.
link |
Maybe can you give an overview of the role music has played in your life?
link |
You're one of the, you're a world class scientist.
link |
And so it's kind of fascinating to see somebody in your position who is also a great musician
link |
and still loves playing music.
link |
Well, I wouldn't call myself a great musician.
link |
I'm like, you know.
link |
One of the best of all time.
link |
Like we were saying offline, confidence is like the most essential thing about being
link |
It's the confidence and kind of like moodiness, right?
link |
Look, I mean, music plays an absolutely essential role in everything I do because I lose, if
link |
I stop playing for one reason or another, say I'm traveling, I notably lose creativity
link |
in every other aspect of my life, right?
link |
There's something, I don't view, you know, playing music as a separate endeavor from
link |
doing science or doing whatever.
link |
It's all part of that same creative thing, which is distinct from, I don't know, pressing
link |
a button or like, you know.
link |
So it's not a break from science, it's a part of your science.
link |
Absolutely, it's a part of, I would say, you know, it's a thing that enables the science,
link |
The science would, you know, suck even more than it does already without the music.
link |
And that means like the creating of the writing of the music or is it just even playing other
link |
Is it the whole of it?
link |
It's definitely both.
link |
And also just, you know, I love to play guitar, I love to sing, you know.
link |
My wife tolerates my screeching singing, you know, and even kind of likes it.
link |
Yeah, so people should check out your stuff.
link |
You have a great voice, so I love your stuff.
link |
Is there something, you're super busy, is there something you can say about practicing
link |
for musicians, for guitar, you're also in a band, so like that whole, how you can manage
link |
Is there some tricks, is there some hacks to being a lifelong musician while being like
link |
So I would say, you know, the way that I optimize my life is I try to do, you know, the thing
link |
that I'm passionate about in a moment and put that at the top of the priority list.
link |
There are moments when, you know, you just, you feel inspired to play music and if you're
link |
in the middle of something, if you can avoid, if that can be put on hold, just do it, right?
link |
There are times when you get inspired about something scientific, you know, I do my best
link |
to drop everything, go into that, you know, mode of, that isolated mode and execute upon
link |
It's a chaotic, you know, I think I have a pretty chaotic lifestyle where I'm always
link |
doing kind of multiple things and jumping between what I'm doing.
link |
But at the end of the day, it's not like, you know, those moments of inspiration are
link |
actually kind of rare, right?
link |
Like most of the time, all of us are just doing kind of, doing the stuff that needs
link |
If you do the disservice to yourself of saying, oh, I'm inspired to, you know, do this calculation,
link |
figure this out, but I've got to answer email or just like do something silly, you know,
link |
that is nothing more than disservice.
link |
And also, like I have some social media presence, but I mostly stay off of, you know, social
link |
media to, you know, just frankly, cause like, I don't kind of, I don't enjoy the mental
link |
cycles that it, that it takes over.
link |
Yeah, it robs you of that, the, yeah, those precious moments that could be filled with
link |
inspiration in your, in your other pursuits.
link |
But there's something to, maybe you and I are different in this, like I tried to play
link |
at least 10 minutes of guitar every day, like almost on the technical side, like keeping
link |
that base of basic competence going.
link |
And I mean, the same way like writers will get in front of a paper no matter what, that
link |
kind of thing, it just feels like that for my life has been essential to the daily ritual
link |
Why does days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and you haven't played guitar
link |
No, no, I, I, I understand.
link |
For me, I think it's, it's been like, if we have a gig coming up, we'll definitely
link |
You need deadlines.
link |
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
link |
No, like we, we will, we will sharpen up definitely, you know, especially coming up to a gig.
link |
It's like, you know, we're not trying to make money with this.
link |
This is like, just for the, for that satisfaction of doing something and doing something well,
link |
But overall, I would say most, I play guitar most days, most days.
link |
And you know, when I put kids to sleep, I play guitar, you know, with them and we like,
link |
just make up random songs about, you know, about our cat or something, you know, like
link |
we just do kind of random stuff.
link |
But you know, music is always involved in that process.
link |
Yeah, keeping it fun.
link |
You have Russian roots?
link |
Were you born in Russia?
link |
When did you come here?
link |
So, I came to the US in very, the very end of 99.
link |
But so I was like, almost 14 years old.
link |
But along the way, we spent six years in Japan.
link |
So like, we moved from Russia to Japan in 94, and then to the US in 99.
link |
So did like elementary school, middle school in Japan.
link |
So elementary school in Japan.
link |
So, that's interesting, dad.
link |
Do you still speak Russian?
link |
Ты по русски говоришь?
link |
Okay, maybe I'll, let me ask you, in Russian, что ты помнишь о России?
link |
It'd be interesting to hear you speak Russian.
link |
В общем, в целом, я помню, то есть мне было восемь, когда
link |
мы уехали, и, конечно, как сказать, помню в первом
link |
приближении всё, включая вот переход, там, 91, 92 год,
link |
вот этот вот, вот этот турбулентный период, и ещё, естественно,
link |
То есть ещё я очень хорошо помню, как в какой то момент
link |
сначала появилась пепси кола, а потом появилась
link |
Я потом, я помню, я был лет, не знаю, в шесть, и я потом,
link |
как так может быть, что кока кола украла продукт и
link |
сделала то же самое?
link |
То есть я никогда, я долго думал, что и пепси, и кока
link |
колу изобрели, типа, в 92 году.
link |
So for people who don't speak Russian, Konstantin was talking
link |
about basically his first, in 1992, interaction with capitalism,
link |
which is Pepsi, and at first he discovered Pepsi, and then he
link |
discovered Coke, and he was confused how such, how such
link |
theft could occur.
link |
Yeah, like an intellectual property theft.
link |
And remember, Pepsi arrived to the Soviet Union first,
link |
and there was some, there's some complicated story which I
link |
don't quite understand the details of.
link |
For a while, Pepsi like commanded submarines or
link |
Yeah, Pepsi had like a fleet of Soviet submarines that it
link |
They were sponsoring tanks and this fascinating.
link |
And I remember, there's certain things that trickled in, like
link |
McDonald's, I remember that was a big deal.
link |
Certain aspects of the West.
link |
So, I mean, we went to McDonald's, and we stood on, I mean,
link |
this is, this is absurd, right, from, kind of looking at it
link |
from today's perspective, but we stood in line for like six
link |
hours to get into this McDonald's, and I remember inside
link |
it was just like a billion people, and I'm just taking a
link |
bite out of that Big Mac, and we're like, wow.
link |
What was it, an incredible experience for you?
link |
So, like, what is this taste of the West like?
link |
I enjoyed the fact that, I mean, this is like, this is getting
link |
into the weeds, but I really enjoyed the fact that the top of
link |
the bun had those seeds, you know, like, and I remember how
link |
on the commercials, like, the Big Mac would kind of bounce.
link |
I was like, the seeds, how do they inject the seeds into the
link |
So, I think it was...
link |
But you enjoyed the artistry of the culinary experience.
link |
It was the, you know, it was the food art that is the Big Mac.
link |
Actually, I still don't know the answer to that.
link |
How do they get the sesame seeds on the bun?
link |
It's better to not know the answer.
link |
You just wander the mystery of it all.
link |
Yeah, I remember it being exceptionally delicious, but I'm with you, I don't know, you didn't
link |
mention how transformative Pepsi was, but to me, basically sugar based stuff, like Pepsi
link |
was, or Coke, I don't remember which one we partook in, but that was an incredible experience.
link |
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
link |
And, you know, I think it's, you know, it was an important and formative period.
link |
I sometimes, I guess, rely on that a little bit, you know, in my daily life, because I
link |
remember, like, the early 90s were real rough, you know, like my parents were kind of on
link |
the bottom of the spectrum in terms of, you know, in terms of financial well being.
link |
So kind of like just when I run into trouble, not like, you know, money trouble, just any
link |
kind of trouble these days, it just kind of is not particularly meaningful when you compare
link |
it to that turbulent time of the early 90s.
link |
And the other thing is, I think there's like an advantage to being, you know, an immigrant,
link |
which is that you go through the mental exercise of changing your environment completely early
link |
in your life, right?
link |
You go, it's by no means, you know, pleasant in the moment, right, but like going into
link |
Japanese elementary school, right, like, I didn't go to some, like, private, you know,
link |
thing, I just went to a regular, like, Japanese public elementary school, and I was the non
link |
Japanese person in my class.
link |
So just like to learn Japanese and just kind of.
link |
So that's a super humbling experience in many ways was when you like made fun of all that
link |
Being the outsider.
link |
But, you know, you kind of do, you kind of do that, and then you kind of, then you just
link |
kind of are okay with stuff, you know what I mean?
link |
And so like doing that, again, in middle school in the US, it was arguably easy, because I
link |
was like, yeah, well, I've already done this before.
link |
So I think it kind of prepares you mentally a little bit for switching up for whatever,
link |
you know, changes that will come up for the rest of your life.
link |
So I wouldn't trade that, that experience really for anything.
link |
It's a huge aspect of who I am, and I'm sure you can relate to a lot of this.
link |
Is there advice from your life that you can give to young people today, high school, college,
link |
you know, about their career, or maybe about life in general?
link |
I'm not like a career coach, but I'm definitely not a life coach.
link |
I don't have it all figured out.
link |
But I think there's a perpetual cycle of, you know, thinking that there is a, there's
link |
kind of like a template for success, right?
link |
Maybe there is, but in my experience, I haven't seen it, right?
link |
You know, I would say people in high school, right?
link |
So much of their focus is on getting straight A's, filling their CV with this and this and
link |
this so that it looks impressive, right?
link |
That is not, I think, a good way to optimize your life, right?
link |
Do the thing that fills your life with passion.
link |
Do the thing that fills your life with interest.
link |
And you know, do that perpetually, right?
link |
A straight A student, you know, is really impressive, but also, you know, somewhat boring,
link |
So, I think, you know, injection of more of that kind of interest into the lives of young
link |
people would go a long way in just both upping their level of happiness and then just kind
link |
of ensuring that, looking forward, they are not suffering from a, you know, perpetual
link |
condition of, oh, I have to satisfy these, like, you know, check boxes to do well, right?
link |
Because you can lose yourself in that whole process for the rest of your life, but it's
link |
nice if it's possible, like Max Tegmark was exceptionally good at this at MIT, figure
link |
out how you can spend a small part of your, percent of your efforts that, such that your
link |
CV looks really impressive.
link |
There's no, like, without a doubt, like, that's a baseline that you need to have.
link |
And then, so like, spend most of your time doing like amazing things you're passionate
link |
about, but such that it kind of like Planet Nine produces objects that feed your CV, like,
link |
Like getting good grades in high school, maybe doing extracurricular activities or in terms
link |
of like, you know, for programmers that's producing code that you can show up on GitHub,
link |
like leaving traces, like, throughout your efforts, such that your CV looks impressive
link |
to the rest of the world.
link |
In fact, I mean, this is somewhat along the lines of what I'm talking about, see, like,
link |
getting like good grades is important, but grades are not a tangible, like, product.
link |
You cannot, you know, show your A and have your A live a separate life from you.
link |
Code very much does, right?
link |
Music very much takes on, you know, provided somebody else listens to it, like, takes on
link |
a life of its own.
link |
That's kind of what I mean, right?
link |
Creating stuff that can then get separated from you is exceptionally attractive, right?
link |
It's like a fun and...
link |
And it's also very impressive to others.
link |
I think we're moving to a world where grades mean less and less, like certifications mean
link |
If you look at, especially again in the computing fields, getting a degree, finishing your,
link |
especially just finishing your degree, whether it's bachelor's or master's or PhD is less
link |
important than the things you've actually put out into the world.
link |
And that's a fascinating kind of, that's great that in that sense, the meritocracy is in
link |
its richest, most beautiful form is starting to win out.
link |
Yeah, it's weird because like, you know, my understanding, and I'm not like, I don't know
link |
the history of science well enough to speak very confidently about this, but, you know,
link |
the advisor of my advisor of my advisor from undergrad, like didn't have a PhD, right?
link |
So I think it was a more common thing back in the day, even in the academic sector to,
link |
you know, not have, you know, Faraday, like Faraday didn't know algebra and drew diagrams
link |
about, you know, magnetic fields and Faraday's law was derived entirely from intuition.
link |
So it is interesting to how the world of academia has evolved into a, you've got to do this
link |
and then get PhD, then you have to postdoc once and twice and maybe thrice and then like
link |
So, you know, it does, I do wonder, you know, if we're, you know, if there's a better approach.
link |
I think we're heading there, but it's a fascinating historical perspective, like that we might
link |
have just tried this whole thing out for a while where we put a lot more emphasis on
link |
grades and certificates and degrees and all those kinds of things.
link |
I think the difference historically is like we can actually, using the internet, show
link |
off ourselves and our creations better and better and more effectively, whether that's
link |
code or producing videos or all those kinds of things.
link |
I want to become a certified drone pilot.
link |
Of all the things you want to pick, yeah, for sure.
link |
Or you could just fly and make YouTube videos against hundreds of thousands of views with
link |
your drone and never getting a certificate.
link |
That's probably illegal.
link |
What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
link |
So you look at planets, they seem to orbit stuff without asking the why question.
link |
And for some reason, life emerged on Earth such that it led to big brains that can ask
link |
the big why question.
link |
Do you think there's an answer to it?
link |
I'm not sure what the question is.
link |
The meaning of life.
link |
But aside from that, I think the question you're asking is why we do all this, right?
link |
Why we do all this.
link |
It's part of the human condition, right?
link |
Human beings are fundamentally, I feel like, sort of stochastic and fundamentally interested
link |
in kind of expanding our own understanding of the world around us.
link |
And creating stuff to enable that understanding.
link |
So we're like stochastic, fundamentally stochastic.
link |
So like there's just a bunch of randomness that really doesn't seem like it has a good
link |
explanation and yet there's a kind of direction to our being that we just keep wanting to
link |
create and to understand.
link |
There are people that claim to be anti science, right?
link |
And yet in their anti science discussion, they're like, well, if you're so scientific,
link |
then why don't you explain to me how, I don't know, this works.
link |
And like it always, there's that fundamental seed of curiosity and interest that is common
link |
That is absolutely what makes us human, right?
link |
And I'm in a privileged position of being able to have that be my job, right?
link |
I think as time evolves forward and the kind of economy changes, I mean, we're already
link |
starting to see a shift towards that type of creative enterprise as taking over a bigger
link |
and bigger chunk of the sector.
link |
It's not yet, I think, the dominant portion of the economy by any account.
link |
But if we compare this to sometime when the dominant thing you would do would be to go
link |
to a factory and do the same exact thing, I think there's a tide there and things are
link |
sort of headed in that direction.
link |
Yeah, life's becoming more and more fun.
link |
Honestly, what happens next?
link |
I can't wait to just chill.
link |
The terminal point of this is just chill and wait for those Kuiper Belt objects to complete
link |
I'm going to credit you with this idea.
link |
I do hope that we definitively discover a proof that there is a Planet 9 out there in
link |
the next few years so you can sit back with a cigar or cigarette or vodka or wine and
link |
just say, I told you so.
link |
That's already happening.
link |
I'm going to do that later tonight.
link |
As I mentioned, confidence is essential to being a rock star.
link |
I really appreciate you explaining so many fascinating things to me today.
link |
I really appreciate the work that you do out there and I really appreciate you talking
link |
Thanks, Constantine.
link |
It was a pleasure.
link |
Thanks for having me on.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Constantine Batygin and thank you to
link |
Squarespace, Litterati, Onnit, And, and I.
link |
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to
link |
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm
link |
of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
link |
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant
link |
little blue green planet whose ape descendant life forms are so amazingly primitive that
link |
they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.