The following is a conversation with Konstantin Batygin, Planetary Astrophysicist at Caltech,

interested in, among other things, the search for the distant, the mysterious Planet 9,

in the outer regions of our solar system. Quick mention of our sponsors, Squarespace,

Literati, Onnit, and Ni. Check them out in the description to support the podcast.

As a side note, let me say that our little sun is orbited by not just a few planets in the

planetary region, but trillions of objects in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud that extends

over three light years out. This to me is amazing, since Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our

sun, is only 4.2 light years away, and all of it is mostly covered in darkness. When I get a chance

to go out swimming in the ocean, far from the shore, I'm sometimes overcome by the terrifying

and the exciting feeling of not knowing what's there in the deep darkness. That's how I feel

about the edge of our solar system. One day, I hope humans will travel there, or at the very

least, AI systems that carry the flame of human consciousness. This is the Lux Friedman podcast,

and here's my conversation with Konstantin Batygin.

What is Planet Nine? Planet Nine is an object that we believe lives in the solar system beyond

the orbit of Neptune. It orbits the sun with a period of about 10,000 years, and is about five

earth masses. So that's a hypothesized object. There's some evidence for this kind of object.

There's a bunch of different explanations. Can you give an overview of the planets in our solar

system? How many are there? What do we know and not know about them at a high level?

All right. That sounds like a good plan. So look, the solar system basically is comprised of two

parts, the inner and the outer solar system. The inner solar system has the planets Mercury, Venus,

Earth, and Mars. Now, Mercury is about 40% of the orbital separation of where the Earth is.

It's closer to the sun. Venus is about 70% than Mars is about 160% further away from the sun than

is the Earth. These planets that we, one of them we occupy, are pretty small. They're

to leading order, sort of heavily overgrown asteroids, if you will. This becomes evident

when you move out further in the solar system and encounter Jupiter, which is 316 earth masses,

right? 10 times the size. Saturn is another huge one, 90 earth masses at about 10 times

the separation from the sun as is the Earth. And then you have Uranus and Neptune at 20 and 30,

respectively. For a long time, that is where the kind of massive part of the solar system ended.

But what we've learned in the last 30 years is that beyond Neptune, there's this expansive field

of icy debris, a second icy asteroid belt in the solar system. A lot of people have heard

of the asteroid belt, which lives between Mars and Jupiter, right? That's a pretty common thing

that people like to imagine and draw on lunchboxes and stuff. But beyond Neptune, there's a much

more massive and much more radially expansive field of debris. Pluto, by the way, it belongs to that

second icy asteroid belt, which we call the Kuiper belt. It's just a big object within that

population of bodies. Pluto, the planet. Pluto, the dwarf planet, the former planet, you know.

Why is Pluto not a planet anymore? I mean, it's tiny. We used to...

For size matters when it comes to planets. 100%. It's actually a fascinating story.

When Pluto was discovered in 1930, the reason it was discovered in the first place is because

astronomers at the time were looking for a seven Earth mass planet somewhere beyond Neptune.

It was hypothesized that such an object exists. When they found something, they interpreted that

as a seven Earth mass planet and immediately revised its mass downwards because they couldn't

resolve the object with the telescope. It looked like just a point mass star rather than a physical

disk. They said, well, maybe it's not seven. Maybe it's one. Then over the next 40 years,

Pluto's mass kept getting revised downwards, downwards, downwards until it was realized

that it's 500 times less massive than the Earth. Pluto's surface area is almost perfectly equal

to the surface area of Russia, actually. Russia is big, but it's not a planet.

Well, actually, we can touch more on that. That's another discussion. In some sense,

earlier in the century, Pluto represented our ignorance about the edges of the solar system.

Perhaps Planet Nine is the thing that represents our ignorance about now the modern

set of ignorances about the edges of our solar system. That's a good way to put it.

By the way, just imagining this belt of debris at the edge of our solar system is incredible.

Can you talk about it a little bit? What is the Kuiper belt and what is the Oort cloud?

Yeah. Okay. Look, the simple way to think about it is that if you imagine Neptune's orbit like

a circle, maybe a factor of one and a half, 1.3 times bigger on a radius of 1.3 times bigger,

you've got a whole collection of icy objects. Most of these objects are sort of the size of

Austin, maybe a little bit smaller. If you then zoom out and explore the orbits of the most

long period, the Kuiper belt object, these are the things that have the biggest orbits

and take the longest time to go around the sun, then what you find is that beyond a critical

orbit size, beyond a critical orbit period, which is about 4,000 years, you start to see

weird structure. All the orbits sort of point into one direction. All the orbits are kind of

tilted in the same way by about 20 degrees with respect to sun. This is particularly pronounced

in orbits that are not heavily affected by Neptune. There you start to see this weird dichotomy

where there are objects which are stable, which Neptune does not mess with gravitationally,

and unstable objects. The unstable objects are basically all over the place because they're

being kicked around by Neptune. The stable orbits show this remarkable pattern of clustering.

We, back I guess five years ago, interpreted this pattern of clustering as a gravitational

one way sign, the existence of a planet in a distant planet, something that is shepherding

and confining these orbits together. Of course, you have to have some skepticism when you're

talking about these things. You have to ask the question of, okay, how statistically significant

is this clustering? There are many authors that have indeed called that into question. We have

done our own analyses. Basically, just like with all statistics where there's multiple ways to

do the exercise, you can either ask the question of, if I have a telescope that has surveyed this

part of the sky, what are the chances that I would discover this clustering? That basically tells you

that you have zero confidence. That does not give you a confident answer one way or another.

Another way to do the statistics, which is what we prefer to do, is to say we have a whole night

sky of discoveries in the Kuiper Belt. If we have some object over there, which has

right ascension and declination, which is a way to say it's there on the sky, and it has

some brightness, that means somebody looked over there and was able to discover an object

of that brightness or brighter. Through that analysis, you can construct a whole map on the sky

of where all of the surveys that have ever been done have collectively looked. If you do the

exercise this way, the false alarm probability of the clustering on which the Planet 9 hypothesis

is built is about 0.4%. Wow. Okay. So there's a million questions here. One, when you say bright

objects, why are they bright? Are we talking about actual objects within the Kuiper Belt or the stuff

we see through the Kuiper Belt? This is the actual stuff we see in the Kuiper Belt. The way you go

about discovering Kuiper Belt objects is pretty easy. I mean, it's easy in theory, hard in practice.

All you do is you take snapshots of the sky, choose that direction and take the high exposure

snapshot, then you wait a night and you do it again, and then you wait another night and you

do it again. Objects that are just random stars in the galaxy don't move on the sky,

whereas objects in the solar system will slowly move. This is no different than if you're driving

down the freeway, it looks like trees are going by you faster than the clouds. This is parallax.

That's it. It's just they're reflecting light off of the sun and it's going back and hitting this.

There's a little bit of a glimmer from the different objects that you can see

based on the reflection from the sun. So there's actual light, but it's not darkness.

That's right. These are just big icicles, basically, that are just reflecting sunlight

back at you. It's then easy to understand why it's so hard to discover them because light has to

travel to something like 40 times the distance between the earth and the sun and then get

reflected back. Was it like an hour travel? Yeah, that's right. That's something like that,

because the earth to the sun is eight minutes, I believe. Yeah, in that order of magnitude.

So that's interesting. So you have to account for all of that, and then there's this huge amount of

data pixels that are coming from the pictures, and you have to integrate all of that together

to paint a high estimate of the different objects. Can you track them? Can you be like,

that's Bob? Yes, exactly. In fact, one of them is named Joe Biden. This is not even a joke.

Okay, is there a Trump one or no? No, actually, I don't know. I haven't checked for that, but

the way it works is if you discover one, you right away get a license plate for it.

Okay, so the first four numbers is the first year that this object has appeared in the data set,

if you will. And then there's this code that follows it, which basically tells you where in

the sky it is. So one of the really interesting Kuiper Belt objects, which is very much part of

the Planet Nine story is called VP113, because Joe Biden was vice president at the time, got

nicknamed Biden. VP113, got nicknamed Biden. Beautiful. What's the fingerprint for any particular

object? Like how do you know it's the same one? Or you just kind of like, yeah, from night to night,

you take a picture, how do you know it's the same object? Yeah, so the way you know is it appears

in almost exactly the same part of the sky except for moves. And this is why actually you need at

least three nights, because oftentimes asteroids, which are much closer to the earth, will appear

to move only slightly, but then on the third night will move away. So the third night is really there

to detect acceleration. Now, the thing that I didn't really realize until I started observing

together with my partner in crime and all this, Mike Brown, is just the fact that for the first

year when you make these detections, the only thing you really know with confidence is where

it is on the night sky and how far away it is. Okay, that's it. You don't know anything about

the orbit. Because over three days, the object just moves so little, right? That whole motion on

the sky is entirely coming from motion of the earth, right? So the earth is kind of the car,

the object is the tree, and you see it move. So then to get some confident information about

what its orbit looks like, you have to come back a year later, and then measure it again.

Oh, it just needs to do three nights and come back a year later and do another three nights.

Yeah. So you get the velocity, the acceleration from the three nights, and then you have the

maybe the additional information. Because an orbit is basically described by six

parameters. So you at least need six independent points, but in reality, you need many more

observations to really pin down the orbit well. And from that, you're able to construct for that

one particular object, an orbit, and then there's, of course, like how many objects are there?

There's like fourish thousand now. But in the future, that could be like millions?

Oh, sure. Oh, sure. So in fact, these things are hard to predict, but there's a new observatory

called the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is coming online maybe next year. I mean, with COVID,

these things are a little bit more uncertain, but they've actually been making great progress

with construction. And so that telescope is just going to scan the night sky every day

automatically. And just it's such an efficient survey that it might increase the census of

the distant Kuiper Belt, the things that I'm interested in by a factor of 100. I mean, that

would be that would be really cool. And yeah, that's an incredible... I mean, they might just find

Planet 9. I mean, that's almost like literally pictures, like visually. I mean, sure. Yeah.

The first detection you make, all you know is where it is in the sky and how far away it is.

If something is, you know, 500 times away from the sun, as far away from the sun as the earth,

you know that's Planet 9. That's when the story concludes. And then you can study it.

Now you can study it. Yeah. By the way, I'm going to use that as like, I don't know,

a pickup line or a dating strategy, like see the person for three days and then don't see them

at all and then see them again in a year to determine the orbit. And over time, you figure out

if sort of from a cosmic perspective, this whole thing works out. Yeah. I have no dating

advice to give. I was going to use this as a metaphor to somehow map it onto the human

condition. Okay. You mentioned the Kuiper Belt. What's the orb cloud? If you look at the Neptune

orbit as one, then the Kuiper Belt is like 1.3 out there. Yeah. And then we get farther and

farther into the darkness. What? So, okay, you've got the main Kuiper Belt, which is about,

say, 1.3, 1.5. Then you have something called the scattered disk, which is kind of an extension

of the Kuiper Belt. It's a bunch of these long, very elliptical orbits that hug the orbit of Neptune

but come out very far. So, that, the scattered disk with the current senses, like some of the

longest orbits we know of, have a semi major axis, so half the orbit length, roughly speaking,

of about 1,000, 1,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Wow. Now, if you keep moving

out, okay, eventually, once you're at sort of 10,000 to 100,000, roughly, that's where the

orb cloud is. Now, the orb cloud is a distinct population of icy bodies and is distinct from

the Kuiper Belt. In fact, it's so expansive that it ends roughly halfway between us and the next

star. Its edge is just dictated by, to what extent, does the solar gravity reach? Solar

gravity reaches that far. Yeah. So, it has to, wow. Yeah. In fact, imagining this is a little bit

overwhelming. So, there's a giant, like, vast, icy rock thingy. It's like a sphere. It's like,

you know, it's almost spherical structure that encircles the Sun and all the long period comets

come from the orb cloud. They come the way that they appear. I mean, for already, I don't know,

hundreds of years, we've been detecting that occasionally, like, a comet will come in and

it seemingly comes out of nowhere. Yeah. The reason these long period comets appear,

they're on very, very long time scales, right? These orb cloud objects that are sitting, you know,

30,000 times as far away from the Sun as is the Earth actually interact with the gravity of the

galaxy that tied, effectively, the tide that the galaxy exerts upon them and their orbits

slowly change in a long gate to the point where once they, their closest approach to the Sun,

starts to reach a critical distance where ice starts to sublimate, then we discover them as

comets because then ice comes off of them. They look beautiful on the night sky, etc. But they're

all coming from, you know, really, really far away. So, are any of them coming our way from

collisions? Like, how many collisions are there? Or is there a bunch of space for them to move

around? Yeah, it's completely collisionless. Out there, the physical radii of objects are so small

compared to the distance between them, right? It's just, it is truly a collisionless environment.

I don't know. I think that probably in the age of the solar system,

there have literally been zero collisions in the word cloud. Wow. When you, like, draw a picture

of the solar system, everything's really close together. So, everything, I guess, here's spaced

far apart. Do rogue planets like flying every once in a while and join? Not rogue planets,

but rogue objects from out there. Oh, sure. Oh, sure. Yeah. Join the party? Yeah, absolutely.

We've seen a couple of them in the last three or so years, maybe four years now. One, the first one

was the one called Ua Moa Moa. It's been all over the news. The second one was Comet Borisov,

discovered by a guy named Borisov. Yeah, so the way you know they're coming from elsewhere is,

unlike solar system objects, which travel on elliptical paths around the sun, these guys travel

on hyperbolic paths. So, they come in, say hello, and then they're gone. And the fact that they

exist is totally, like, not surprising, right? The Neptune is constantly ejecting

Kuiper belt objects into interstellar space. Our solar system itself is sort of leaking icy debris

and ejecting it. So, presumably, every planetary systems around other stars do exactly the same

thing. Let me ask you about the millions of objects that are part of the Kuiper belt and

the part of the ORE cloud. Do you think some of them have primitive life? It kind of makes you sad

if there's a primitive life there and they're just kind of like lonely out there in space.

How many of them do you think have life, like bacterial life? Probably an negligible amount.

Zero, you know, like zero with like a plus on top, right? Zero plus plus. Yeah.

So, you know, if you and I took a little trip to the interstellar medium, I think we would develop

cancer and die real fast, right? It's rough. Yeah, it's a pretty hostile radiation environment.

You don't actually have to go to the interstellar medium. You just have to leave the Earth's

magnetic field too, and then you're not doing so well suddenly. So, you know, this idea of,

you know, life kind of traveling between places, it's not entirely implausible, but you really

have to twist, I think, a lot of parameters. One of the problems we have is we don't actually

know how life originates, right? So, it's kind of a second order question of survival in the

interstellar medium and how resilient it is because we think you require water,

but, and that's certainly the case for the Earth, but, you know, we really don't know for sure.

That said, I will argue that the question of like, are there aliens out there is a very

boring question because the answer is, of course, there are. I mean, like, we know that

there are planets around almost every star. Of course, there are other life forms. Life is

not some specific thing that happened on the Earth, and that's it, right? That's a statistical

impossibility. Yeah, but the difficult question is, before even the fact that we don't know how

life originates, I don't think we even know what life is, like, definitionally. Like,

formalizing a kind of picture of, in terms of the mechanism we would use to search for life out

there, or even when we're on a planet to say, is this life? Is this rock that just moved from

where it was yesterday, life, or maybe not even rock, something else? I got to tell you, I want

to know what life is, okay, and I want you to show me. I think there's a song to basically accompany

every single thing we talk about today, and probably half of them are love songs, and somehow

we'll integrate George Michael into the whole thing. Okay, so your intuition is there's life

everywhere in our universe. Do you think there's intelligent life out there?

I think it's entirely plausible. I mean, it's entirely plausible. I think there's intelligent

life on Earth. So yeah, taking that, like, say, whatever this thing we got on Earth,

whether it's dolphins or humans, say that's intelligent. Definitely dolphins. I mean,

have you seen the dolphins? Well, they do some cruel stuff to each other. So if cruelty

is a definition of intelligence, they're pretty good. And then humans are pretty good on that

regard. And then there's like, pigs are very intelligent. I got actually a chance to hang

out with pigs recently. And they're, aside from the fact they were trying to eat me,

they're very, they love food. They love food, but there's an intelligence to their eyes that was

kind of like haunts me, because I also love to eat meat. And then to meet the thing, I later ate.

And that was very intelligent, and almost charismatic with the way it was expressing

it himself, herself, itself, was quite incredible. So all that to say is, if we have intelligent life

here on Earth, if we take dolphins, pigs, humans, from the perspective of like planetary science,

how unique is Earth? Okay, so Earth is not a common outcome of the planet formation process.

It's probably a something on the order of maybe a 1% effect. And by Earth, I mean,

not just an Earth mass planet, okay? I mean, the architecture of the solar system

that allows the Earth to exist in its kind of very temperate way.

One thing to understand, and this is, this is pretty crucial, right, is that the Earth itself

formed well after the gas disk that formed the giant planets had already dissipated.

You see, stars start out with, you know, the star and then a disk of gas and dust that encircles it,

okay? From this disk of gas and dust, big planets can emerge. And we have over the last two,

three decades discovered thousands of extra solar planets as an orbit of other stars.

What we see is that many of them are, you know, have these expansive hydrogen helium atmospheres.

The fact that the Earth doesn't is deeply connected to the fact that Earth took about 100

million years to form. So we missed that, you know, train, so to speak, to get that hydrogen

helium atmosphere. That's why, actually, we can see the sky, right? That's why the sky is,

well, at least in most places, that's why the atmosphere is not completely opaque.

With that, you know, kind of thinking in mind, I would argue that we're getting the kind of

emergent pictures that the Earth is, is not, you know, everywhere, right? We, there's sort of the

sci fi view of things where we go to some other star and we just land on random planets and they're

all Earth like, that's totally not true. But the even a low probability event, even if you're

imagine that Earth is a 1 in a million or 1 in a, you know, 1 in 10 million occurrence, there are

10 to the 12 stars in the galaxy, right? So you just, you always win by, by large numbers.

That's right, by supply.

They save you. Well, do you've hypothesized that our solar system wants to possess the

population of short period planets that were destroyed?

Our solar system wants to possess the population of short period planets that were destroyed by the

evil Jupiter migrating through the solar nebula. Can you explain?

If I was to say, what was the kind of, the key outcome of searches for extra solar planets,

it is that most stars are encircled by short period planets that are, you know, a few

Earth masses, right? So a few times bigger than the Earth and have orbital periods that kind of

range from days to weeks.

Now, if you go and ask the solar system, what's in our region, right? In that region,

it's completely empty, right? It's just, it's astonishingly hollow. And I think, you know,

from the sun is not some special star that decided that it was going to form the solar system.

So I think, you know, the natural thing to assume is that the same processes of planet

formation that occurred everywhere else also occurred in the solar system.

Following this logic, it's not implausible to imagine that the solar system once possessed

a system of intramercurian, like, you know, compact system of planets. So then we asked ourselves,

would such a system survive to this day? And the answer is no. At least our calculations

suggest it's highly unlikely because of the formation of Jupiter. And Jupiter's primordial

kind of wandering through the solar system would have sent this collisional field of debris that

would have pushed that system of planets onto the sun.

So was Jupiter, this primordial wandering, what did Jupiter look like? Like, why was it wandering?

It didn't have the orbit it has today?

We're pretty certain that giant planets like Jupiter, when they form, they migrate. The reason

they migrate is, you know, on a detailed level, perhaps difficult to explain, but, you know,

it's just in a qualitative sense that they form in this fluid disk of gas and dust. So it's kind

of like, okay, if I plop down a raft somewhere in the ocean, will it stay where you plop it down?

Or will it kind of get carried around? It's not really a good analogy because it's not like

Jupiter is being advected by the currents of, you know, gas and dust. But the way it migrates is

it carves out a hole in the disk and then through by interacting with the disk gravitationally,

right? It can change its orbit. The fact that the solar system has both Jupiter and Saturn,

here complicates things a lot, right? Because you have to solve the problem of the evolution of

the gas disk, the evolution of Jupiter's orbit in the gas disk, plus evolution of Saturn's and

their mutual interaction. The common outcome of solving that problem, though, is pretty easy to

explain. Jupiter forms its orbit shrinks, and then once Saturn forms, its orbit catches up

basically to the orbit of Jupiter, and then both come out. So there's this inward outward pattern

of Jupiter's early motion that happens sort of within the last million years of the lifetime

of the solar system's primordial disk. So while this is happening, if our calculations are correct,

which I think they are, you can destroy this inner system of few earth mass planets.

And then in the aftermath of all this violence, you form the terrestrial planets.

Where would they come from in that case? So Jupiter clears out the space,

and then there's a few terrestrial planets that come in, and those come in from the

disk somewhere, like one of the larger objects. Yeah, what actually happens in these calculations

is you leave behind a rather mass depleted, like, remnant disk, only a couple earth masses.

Yeah. So then from that remnant population, annulus of material over 100 million years,

by just collisions, you grow the earth and the moon and everything else.

You said annulus?

Annulus.

Annulus.

Annulus, yeah.

That's a beautiful word, what does that mean?

Well, it's like a disk that's kind of thin.

It's like a, yeah, it's something that is, you know, a disk that's so thin it's almost

flirting with being a ring.

Like, I was going to say this reminds me of Lord of the Rings.

So like this, the word just feels like it belongs in a token level.

Yeah.

Okay. So that's incredible. And so that, in your sense, as you said, like 1%, that's a rare.

The way Jupiter and Saturn danced and cleared out and, you know, cleared out the short period

debris and then changed the gravitational landscape, that's a pretty rare thing to...

It's rare and moreover, like, you don't even have to go to our calculations.

You can just ask the night sky, how many stars have Jupiter and Saturn analogs?

And the answer is Jupiter and Saturn analogs are found around only 10% of sunlight stars.

So they are, they themselves, like you kind of have to score an A minus or better on the test to,

you know, on the planet formation test to become a solar system analog, even in that basic sense.

And moreover, you know, lower mass stars, which are very numerous in the galaxy,

so called M dwarves, think like 0% of them, well, maybe like some negligible fraction

of them have giant planets. Giant planets are a rare, you know, outcome of planet formation.

One of the really big problems that remain unanswered is why.

We don't actually understand why they're so rare. How hard is it to simulate

all of the things they've been talking about, each of the things we've been talking about,

and maybe one day, all of the things we've been talking about and beyond? Meaning,

like from the initial primordial solar system, you know, a bunch of disks with,

I don't know, billions, trillions of objects in them, like simulate that such that you eventually

get a Jupiter and a Saturn, and then eventually you get the Jupiter and the Saturn that clear

out a disk, change the gravitational landscape, then Earth pops up, like that whole thing,

and then be able to do that for every other system in the, every other star in the galaxy,

and then be able to do that for other galaxies as well.

Yeah, so maybe start from the smallest simulation, like what is actually being done today?

I mean, even the smallest simulation is probably super, super difficult. Even just like one object

in the Kuiper ball is probably super difficult to simulate.

I mean, I think it's super easy. I mean, like, it's just not that hard. But, you know, let's,

let's ask the most kind of basic problem. Okay, so the problem of having a star and

something in orbit of it, that you don't need a simulation for, like, you can just write that

down on a piece of paper. This gravity would like, yeah, I guess, I guess it's important to try to,

you know, one way to simulate objects in our solar system is to build the universe from scratch.

Okay, we'll get to building the universe from scratch in a sec. But let me just kind of go

through the hierarchy of what, you know, what we do. Two objects. Two objects, analytically

solvable, like, we can figure it out very easily. If you just, you don't even, I don't think you,

yeah, you don't need to know calculus. It helps to know calculus, but you don't necessarily need

to know calculus. Three objects that are gravitationally interacting, the solution is chaotic.

Doesn't matter how many simulations you do, you, the answer loses meaning after, after some time.

I feel like that is a metaphor for dating as well, but gone.

Now look, yeah, so, so the fact that you go from analytically solvable to unpredictable,

you know, when you were, you know, when your simulation goes from two bodies to three bodies,

should immediately tell you that the exercise of trying to engineer a calculation where you form

this whole entire solar system from scratch and hope to have some predictive answer is, is a futile

one, right? We will never succeed at such a simulation. I just to clarify, you mean like

explicitly having a clear equation that generalizes the whole process enough to be able to make a

prediction? Or do you mean actually like literally simulating the objects as a hopeless pursuit

once it increases beyond three? The simulating them is not a hopeless pursuit, but the outcome

becomes a statistical one. What's actually quite interesting is I think we have all the equations

figured out, right? Like, you know, in order to really understand this, the formation of the

solar system is suffices to know gravity and magnetohydrodynamics. I mean, like the combination of

Maxwell's equations and, you know, Navier Stokes equations for the fluids, you need to know

quantum mechanics to understand the opacities and so on. But we have those equations in hand.

It's not that we don't have that understanding. It's that putting it all together

is A, very, very difficult, and B, if you were to run the same evolution twice, changing, you know,

the initial conditions by some infinitesimal amount, some, you know, minor change in your

calculation to start with, you would get a different answer. This is one, this is part

of the reason why planetary systems are so diverse. You don't have like a, you know, very predictive

path for you start with a disk of this mass and it's around this star. Therefore, you're going

to form the solar system, right? You start with this and therefore you will form this huge outcome,

huge set of outcomes, and some percentage of it will resemble the solar system.

You mentioned quantum mechanics and we're talking about cosmic scale objects. You've talked about

that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with Schrodinger's equation.

I sure did. Why? It's like, how does quantum mechanics become relevant when you consider

the evolution of objects in the solar system? Yeah. Well, let me take a, take a step back and

just say it like, I remember being, you know, utterly confused by quantum mechanics when I

first learned it. And the Schrodinger equation, which is kind of the parent equation of, of

that whole field, you know, seems to come out of nowhere, right? The way that, the way that I was

sort of explaining, I remember asking, you know, my professor is like, but where does it come from?

He's like, well, it's just like, don't worry about it. And just like calculate the hydrogen,

you know, energy levels, right? So it's like, I could do all the problems. I just

did not have any intuition for, for where this parent, you know, super important equation came

from. Now, down the line, I was, remember, I was preparing for my own lecture and I was trying to

understand how waves travel in self gravitating disks. So, you know, again, there's a very broad

theory that's already developed, but I was looking for some simpler way to explain it really

for the purposes of teaching class. And so I thought, okay, what if I just imagine a disk as an

infinite number of concentric circles, right, that interact with, with each other gravitationally?

That's a problem in some sense that I can solve using methods from like this late 1700s, right?

I can write down Hamiltonian, well, I can write down the energy function basically of their,

their interactions. And what I found is that when you take the continuum limit,

when you go from discrete circles that are talking to each other gravitationally to a

continuum disk, suddenly this gravitational interaction among them, right? The, the governing

equation becomes the Schrodinger equation. I had to think about that for a little bit.

Did you just unify quantum mechanics and gravity? No, this is not the same thing as like, you know,

fusing relativity and quantum mechanics. But it did, it did get me thinking a little bit.

So the fact that waves in astrophysical disks behave just like wave functions of, of particles,

kind of like an interesting analogy, because for me, it's easier to imagine waves traveling through,

you know, astrophysical disks or really just sheets of paper. And the reason this is that

analogy exists is because there's actually nothing quantum about the Schrodinger equation.

The Schrodinger equation is just a wave equation. And all of the interpretation that comes from it

is quantum, but the equation itself is not a quantum being.

So you can use it to model waves. It's not turtles, it's waves all the way down. You

could pick which level you picked the wave at. And so it could be at the solar system level

that you can use it. Right. And also it actually provides a pretty neat calculational tool because

it's difficult. So we just talked about simulations, but it's difficult to simulate

the behavior of astrophysical disks on time scales that are in between a few orbits and

their entire evolution. So it's over a time scale of a few orbits. You have, you do a hydrodynamic

simulation, right? You do that. Basically, that's something that you can do on a modern computer,

on a time scale of say a week. When it comes to their evolution over their entire lifetime,

you don't hope to resolve the orbits. You just kind of hope to understand how the system behaves

overall. In between, right, to get access to that, as it turns out, it's pretty, it's pretty cute.

You can use a Schrodinger equation to get the answer rapidly. So it's a calculational tool.

That's fascinating. By the way, astrophysical disks, how, what are they, how broad is this

definition? Okay. So astrophysical disks span a huge, huge amount of ranges. They start maybe

at the smallest scale. They start with actually Kuiper Belt objects. Some Kuiper Belt objects

have rings. So that's maybe the smallest example of an astrophysical disk. We've got this little

potato shaped asteroid, you know, which is, you know, sort of the size of LA or something. And

around it is, are some rings of icy matter. That object is a small astrophysical disk. Then you

have Saturn, the rings of Saturn. You have the next set of scale. You have the solar system

itself when it was forming. You have a disk. Then you have black hole disks. You have galaxies.

Discs are super common in the universe. The reason is that stuff rotates, right? I mean,

gravity works. Yeah. So, and those rings could be the material that composes those rings could be,

it could be gas, it could be solid, it could be anything. That's right. So the disk that made

from which the planets emerged was predominantly hydrogen and helium gas. On the other hand,

the rings of Saturn are made up of, you know, icicle, ice, little like

ice cubes this big, about a centimeter across. That sounds refreshing. So that's incredible.

Hydrogen and helium gas. So in the beginning, it was just hydrogen and helium around the sun.

How does that lead to the first formations of solid objects in terms of simulation?

Okay. Here's the story. So you're like, have you ever been to the desert?

Yes. I've been to the Death Valley and actually it was terrifying just as a total tangent,

I'm distracting you. But I was driving through it and I was really surprised because it was

at first hot. And then as it was getting into the evening, there's this huge thunderstorm,

like it was raining and it got freezing cold. I was like, what the hell? It was the apocalypse.

Yes. I feel like just sit there listening to Bruce Springsteen, I remember, and just thinking,

I'm probably going to die. And I was okay with it because Bruce Springsteen was on the radio.

Look, when you've got the boss, you know, you're ready to meet the boss. Yeah. So look, I mean,

it's a good line. It's true. Yeah. By the way, to continue on this tangent,

I absolutely love the Southwest for this reason. During the pandemic, I drove from LA to New Mexico

a bunch of times. The madness of weather. Yeah. The chaos of weather, the fact that it will be

blazing hot one minute and then it's just like, we'll decide to have a little thunderstorm,

maybe we'll decide to go back momentarily to like a thousand degrees and then go back to the

thunderstorm. It's amazing. That, by the way, is chaos theory in action, right? But let's get back

to talking about the desert. So in the desert, tumbleweeds have a tendency to roll because the

wind rolls them. And if you're careful, you'll occasionally see this family of tumbleweeds where

like there's like a big one and then a bunch of little ones that kind of hide in its wake, right?

And they're all rolling together and almost look like, you know, a family of ducks crossing a street

or something. Or for example, you know, if you watch Tour de France, right, you've got a whole

bunch of cyclists and they're like cycling, you know, within 10 centimeters of each other. They're

not BFFs, right? They're not trying to ride together. They are riding together to minimize the

collective, you know, air resistance, if you will, that they experience. Turns out solids

in the protoplanetary disk do just this. There's an instability wherein solid particles, right,

things that are a centimeter across will start to hide behind one another and form these clouds.

Why? Because cumulatively, that minimizes the solid component of this aerodynamic interaction

with the gas. Now these clouds, because they're kind of a favorable energetic condition for the

dust to live in, they grow, grow, grow, grow, grow until they become so massive that they collapse

under their own weight. That's how the first building blocks of planets form. That's how the

big asteroids got there. That's incredible. So is that simulatable or is it not useful to simulate?

No, no, that's simulatable. And people do these types of calculations. It's really cool. That's

actually, that's one of the many fields of planet formation theory that is really, really active.

Right now, people are trying to understand all kinds of aspects of that process. Because of

course, I've explained it as if there's one thing that happens, turns out it's a beautifully rich

dynamic. But qualitatively, formation of the first building blocks actually follows the same

sequence as formation of stars. Stars are just clouds of gas, hydrogen helium gas that sit in

space and slowly cool. And at some point, they contract to a point where their gravity overtakes

the thermal pressure support, if you will. And they collapse under their own weight,

and you get a little baby solar system. That's amazing. So do you think one day

it'll be possible to simulate the full history that took our solar system to what it is today?

Yes, and it will be useless. So you don't think your story, many of the ideas that you have about

Jupiter clear in the space, like retelling that story in high resolution is not that important?

I actually think it's important. But at every stage, you have to design your experiments,

your numerical computer experiments so that they test some specific aspect of that evolution. I

am not a proponent of doing huge simulations because even if we forget the information theory

aspect of not being able to simulate in full detail the universe, because if you do, then

you have made an actual universe. It's not the simulation. Simulation is, in some sense,

a compression of information. So therefore, you must lose detail. But that point aside,

if we are able to simulate the entire history of the solar system in excruciating detail,

I mean, it'll be cool, but it's not going to be any different from observing it, right? Because

theoretical understanding, which is what ultimately I'm interested in, comes from taking

complex things and reducing them down to something that, you know, some mechanism

that you can actually quantify. That's the fun part of astrophysics, just kind of

simulating things in extreme detail. We'll make cool visualizations, but that doesn't get you to

any better understanding than you had before you did the simulation.

If you ask very specific questions, then you'll be able to create very highly compressed,

nice, beautiful theories about how things evolve. And then you can use those to then

generalize to other solar systems, to other stars and other galaxies and say something

generalizable about the entire universe. How difficult would it be to simulate

our solar system such that we would not know the difference? Meaning, if we are living in a

simulation, is there a nice, think of it as a video game, is there a nice compressible way of

doing that? Or just kind of like you intuited with a three body situation, is just a giant mess

that you cannot create a video game that will seem realistic without actually building your

scratch? I'm speculating, but one of the, yeah, I know you have a deep understanding of this,

but for me, I'm just going to speculate that for at least in the types of simulations that we can

do today, inevitably, you run into the problem of resolution. It doesn't matter what you're

doing, it is discrete. Now, the way you would go about asking, what we're observing, is that a

simulation or is that some real continuous thing? You zoom in and try and find the grid scale, if

you will. Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting question and because the solar system itself

and really the double pendulum is chaotic, pendulum sitting on another pendulum

moves unpredictably once you let them go. You really don't need to inject any randomness

into a simulation for it to give you stochastic and unpredictable answers. Weather is a great

example of this. Weather has a typical weather systems have a lapen of time of a few days,

and there's a fundamental reason why the forecast always sucks two weeks in advance.

It's not that we don't know the equations that govern the atmosphere, we know them well. Their

solutions are meaningless though after a few days. The zooming in thing is very interesting. I think

about this a lot, whether there'll be a time soon where we would want to stay in video game worlds,

whether it's virtual reality or just playing video games. I think that time came in the 90s

and it's been that time. Well, it's not just came, it's accelerated. I just recently saw

that WoW and Fortnite were played 140 billion hours and those are just video games and that's

increasing very, very quickly, especially with the people coming up now and being born now and

become teenagers and so on. Let's have a thought experiment where it's just you and a video game

character inside a room. Where you remove the simulation, they need to simulate a lot of objects.

If it's just you and that character, how far do you need to simulate in terms of zooming in

for it to be very real to you, as real as reality? First of all, you mentioned zooming in,

which is fascinating because we have these tools of science that allow us to zoom in in all kinds

of ways in the world around us, but our cognitive abilities like our perception system as humans

is very limited in terms of zooming in. So we might be very easily fooled.

Some of the video games on the PS4 look pretty real to me. I think you would really have to

interrogate. I think even with what we have today, Ace Combat 7 is a great example. The way that the

clouds are rendered, it looks just like when you're flying on a real airplane, the kind of

transparency. I think that our perception is limited enough already to not be able to tell

some of the differences. There's a game called Skyroom. It's an Elder Scrolls world playing

game. I played it for quite a bit. I think I played it very different than others. There'll be

long searches of time where I would just walk around and look at nature in the game. It's

incredible. Oh, sure. It's just like the graphics is like, wow, I want to stay there. It was better.

I went hiking recently. It was as good as hiking. So look, I know what you mean. Not to go on a

huge video game tangent, but the third Witcher game was astonishingly beautiful, especially

like playing on a good hardware machine. This is pretty legit. That said,

I don't resonate with the I want to stay here. One of the things that I love to do

is to go to my boxing gym and box with the guy. There's nothing quite like that physical

experience. That's fascinating. That might be simply an artifact of the year you were born.

Maybe. Because if you're born today, it almost seems like stupid to go to a gym.

You go to a gym to box with the guy. Why not box with Mike Tyson? When you yourself,

in his prime, when you yourself are also an incredible boxer in the video game world.

For me, there's a multitude of reasons why I don't want to box with Mike Tyson.

No, I enjoy tea and I want to have an ear. No, but your skills in this meat space,

in this physical realm is very limited and takes a lot of work. You're a musician.

You're an incredible scientist. You only have so much time in the day, but in the video game

world, you can expand your capabilities and all kinds of dimensions that you can never have

possibly have time in the physical world. It doesn't make sense to be existing,

to be working your ass off in the physical world when you can just be super successful

in the video game world. But I still, you enjoy sucking at stuff?

Yeah, I really struggle to get better. I sure do. I think these days with music,

music is a great example. We just started practicing live with my band again after

not playing for a year. It was terrible. It was just a lot of the nuance, a lot of the detail

is just that detail that takes years of collective practice to develop. It's just lost, but it was

just an incredible amount of fun, way more fun than all the studio sitting around and playing

that I did throughout the entire year. There's something intangible or maybe tangible about

being in person. I sure hope you're wrong. That's not something that will get lost,

because I think there's such a large part of the human condition is to hang out. If we were doing

this interview on Zoom, I'd already be bored out of my mind. Exactly. I mean, there's something

to that. I'm almost playing devil's advocate, but at the same time, I'm sure people talk about

the same way at the beginning of the 20th century about horses, where they are much more efficient.

They're much easier to maintain than cars. It doesn't make sense to have all the ways that cars

break down. There's not enough infrastructure in terms of roads for cars. It doesn't make any

sense. Horses and nature, you could do the nature where you should be living more natural life.

Those are real. You don't want machines in your life that are going to pollute your mind

and the minds of young people, but then eventually just cars took over. In that same way, it just

seems... Going back to horses. You can play Red Dead Redemption. Redemption. You can ride

horses in the video game world. Let me return us back to Planet Nine. Always a good place to

come back to. Now that we did a big historical overview of our solar system, what is Planet

Nine? Planet Nine is a hypothetical object that orbits the solar system at an orbital period

of about 10,000 years. An orbit which is slightly tilted with respect to the plane of the solar

system, slightly eccentric. The object itself, we think, is five times more massive than the earth.

We have never seen Planet Nine in a telescope, but we have gravitational evidence for it.

This is where all the stuff we've been talking about, this clustering ideas, maybe you can speak

to the approximate location that we suspect. Also, the question I wanted to ask is,

what are we supposed to be imagining here? Because you said there are certain objects in

the Kuiper Belt that have a direction to them that they're all flocking in some way. That's

the sense that there's some gravitational object, not changing their orbit, but confining them.

Grouping their orbits together. What would happen if Planet Nine were not there? Is these orbits

that roughly share a common orientation, they would just disperse. They would just become

as a mutally symmetric point everywhere. Planet Nine's gravity makes it such that these objects

stay in a state that's basically anti aligned with respect to the orbit of Planet Nine

and sort of hang out there and kind of oscillate on timescale of about a billion years.

That's one of the lines of evidence for the existence of Planet Nine. There are others.

That's the one that's easiest to maybe visualize just because it's fun to think about orbits that

all point into the same direction. But I should emphasize that, for example, the existence of

objects, again, Kuiper Belt objects that are heavily out of the plane of the solar system,

things that are tilted by, say, 90 degrees, that's not, we don't expect that as an outcome

of planet formation. Indeed, planet formation simulations have never produced such objects

without some extrinsic gravitational force. Planet Nine, on the other hand, generates them very

readily. So that provides kind of an alternative population of small bodies in the solar system

that also get produced by Planet Nine through an independent kind of gravitational effect.

So there are basically five different things that Planet Nine does individually that are

like kind of maybe a one sigma effect where you'd say, yeah, okay, if that's all it was,

maybe it's not no reason to jump up and down. But because it's a multitude of these puzzles

that all are explained by one hypothesis, that's really the magnetism, the attraction of the

Planet Nine model. So can you just clarify? So most orbit, most planets in the solar system orbit

and approximately the same, so it's flat. Yeah, it's like one degree. The difference between

them is about one degree. But nevertheless, if we looked at our solar system, it would look,

and I could see every single object, it would look like a sphere.

The inner part where the planets are would look like flat. The Kuiper belt and the Asteroid belt

have a larger... It gets fatter and fatter and fatter and becomes a sphere.

That's right. And if you look at the very outside, it's polluted by this

quasi spheroidal thing. Nobody's, of course, ever seen the Oort cloud. We've only seen

comments that come from the Oort cloud. So the Oort cloud, which is this population of

distant debris, its existence is also inferred. You could say alternatively, there is a big

cosmic creature that occasionally is sitting at 20,000 AU and occasionally throws an icy

rock towards the sun like that. Spaghetti monster, I think it's called.

Okay. So it's a mystery in many ways, but you can infer a bunch of things about it.

By the way, both terrifying and exciting that there's this vast darkness all around us that's

full of objects that they're just throwing. It's actually astonishing that we have only

explored a small fraction of the solar system. That really kind of baffles me because,

remember, as a student studying physics, you do the problem where you put the earth around the sun,

you solve that and it's one line of math and you say, okay, well, that surely was figured out by

Newton. So all the interesting stuff is not in the solar system, but that, it's just plainly not

true. There are mysteries in the solar system that are remarkable that we are only now starting to

just kind of scratch the surface of. And some of those objects probably have some information

about the history of our solar system. Absolutely. Like a great example is small

meteorites. Small meteorites are melted. They're differentiated, meaning some of the

iron sinks to corn. You say, well, how can that be? Because they're so small that they wouldn't

have melted just from the heat of their accretion. Turns out the fact that the solar nebula, the

disk that made the planets was polluted by aluminum 26 isn't itself a remarkable thing. It means

the solar system did not form an isolation. It formed in a giant cloud of thousands of other

stars that were also forming, some of which were undergoing, going through a supernova

explosion, some of, and releasing these unstable isotopes that, of which we now see kind of the

traces of. It's so cool. Do you think it's possible that life from other solar systems was injected

and that was what was the origin of life on Earth? Yeah, the panspermy idea. That's seen as a low

probability event by people who studied the origin of life, but that's because then they would be

out of a job. Well, I don't think they'd be out of the job because you just then say you have to

figure out how life started there. But then you have to go there. We can study life on Earth much

easier. We could study it in the lab much easier because we can replicate conditions that are

from an early Earth much easier from a chemistry perspective, from a biology perspective.

You can intuit a bunch of stuff. You can look at different parts of Earth. To an extent,

I mean, the early Earth was completely unlike the current Earth. There was no oxygen.

One of my colleagues at Caltech, Joe Kirschnick, is certain, something like 100% certainty that

life started on Mars and came to Earth on Martian media rights. This is not a problem that I like

to kind of think about too much, like the origin of life. It's a fascinating problem, but it's

not physics and I just don't love it. It's the same reason you don't love, I thought you're a

musician. Music is not physics either, so why are you so into it? 100% physics. In all seriousness,

though, there are a few things that I really, really enjoy. I genuinely enjoy physics. I genuinely

enjoy music. I genuinely enjoy martial arts and I genuinely enjoy my family. I should have said that

all in a reverse order or something, but I like to focus on these things and not worry too much

about everything else. You know what I mean? Yes. Just because, like you said earlier,

there's a time constraint. You can't do it all. There's many mysteries all around us and they're

all beautiful in different ways. To me, that thing I love is artificial intelligence. Perhaps I love

it because eventually I'm trying to suck up to our future overlords. The question of, you said

there's a lot of kind of little pieces of evidence for this thing that's Planet 9. If we were to try

to collect more evidence or be certain, like a paper that says, like you drop it, clear, we're

done, what does that require? Does that require ascending probes out or do you think we can do

it from telescopes here on Earth? What are the different ideas for conclusive evidence for Planet

9? The moment Planet 9 gets imaged from a telescope on Earth, it's done. I mean, it's just there.

Can you clarify, because you mentioned that before, from an image, would you be able to tell?

Yes. From an image, the moment you see something, something that is reflecting sunlight back at you

and you know that it's hundreds of times as far away from the sun as the Earth, you're done.

So basically, if you have a really far away thing that's big, five times the size of Earth,

that means that is Planet 9. Could there be multiple objects like that? I guess...

In principle, yeah. I mean, there's no law of physics that doesn't allow you to have multiple

objects. There's also no evidence at present for there being multiple objects.

I wonder if it's possible, just like we're finding exoplanets where they're given the

size of the ore cloud, there's basically, it's rare and rare, but they're sprinkled, Planet 9,

10, 11, 12, some... Got 13. Yeah, it goes after that. I can just keep counting. So just something

about the dynamic system, it becomes lower and lower probability event, but they gather up,

would they become larger and larger maybe, something like that. I wonder, I wonder if

discovering Planet 9 will just be almost like a springboard, it's like, well, what's beyond that?

It's entirely plausible. The ore cloud itself probably holds about five Earth masses or seven

Earth masses of material. So it's not nothing. And it all ultimately comes down to,

at what point will the observational surveys sample enough of the solar system to

reveal interesting things? There's a great analogy here with Neptune and the story of

how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was not discovered by looking at the sky. It was discovered

by, it was discovered mathematically. So yeah, the orbit of Uranus, when Uranus was found,

this was 1781, it's the kind of tracking, both the tracking of the orbit of Uranus as well as

the reconstruction of the orbit of Uranus immediately revealed that it was not following

the orbit that it was supposed to. The predicted orbit deviated away from where it actually was.

So in the mid 1800s, a French mathematician by the name of Orban Le Verrier did a

beautifully sophisticated calculation which said, if this is due to gravity of a more distant planet,

then that planet is there. And then they found it. But the point is, the understanding of where to

look for Neptune came entirely out of celestial mechanics. This case with Planet 9 is a little

bit different because what we can do, I think relatively well, is predict the orbit and mass

of Planet 9. We cannot tell you where it is on its orbit. The reason is we haven't seen

the Kuiper Belt objects complete an orbit, their own orbit even once because it takes 4,000 years.

But I plan to live on as an AI being and I'll be tracking those orbits.

So it takes 4,000 or 5,000 years. I mean, it doesn't have to be AI. It could be longevity.

There's a lot of really exciting genetic engineering research. So you'll just be a

brain waiting for the orbit to complete for the basic Kuiper Belt objects.

That's right. That's kind of the worst reason to want to live a long time. Can the brain smoke

a cigarette? Can you just light one up while you're waiting?

But you're making me actually realize that the one way to explore the galaxy is by just sitting

here on Earth and waiting. So if we can just get really good at waiting, it's like a Moa Moa or

these interstellar objects that fly in, you can just wait for them to come to you. Same with

the aliens. You can wait for them to come to you. If you get really good at waiting,

then that's one way to do the exploration because eventually the thing will come to you.

Maybe the intelligent alien civilizations get much better at waiting and so they all decide

to give them theoretically to start waiting. It's just a bunch of ancient intelligent civilizations

of aliens all throughout the universe just sitting there waiting for each other.

Look, you can't just be good at waiting. You got to know how to chill. You can't just sit around

and do nothing. You got to know how to chill. I honestly think that as we progress, if the aliens

are anything like us, we enjoy loving things we do. It's very possible that we just figure out

mechanisms here on Earth to enjoy our life and we just stay here forever that exploration becomes

less and less of an interesting thing to do. So you basically, yes, wait and chill. You get

really optimally good at chilling and thereby exploring is not that interesting. So in terms

of 4,000 years, it would be nothing for scientists. We'll be chilling and just all kinds of scientific

explorations will become possible because we'll just be here on Earth.

So chill. So chill.

So chill. You have a paper out recently because you already mentioned some of these ideas,

but I'd love it if you could dig into it a little bit. Of course.

The injection of inner or cloud objects into the distant Kuiper Belt by Planet 9.

What is this idea of Planet 9 injecting objects into the Kuiper Belt?

Okay. Let me take a brief step back and say, when we do calculations of Planet 9, when we do the

simulations, as far as our simulations are concerned, sort of the Neptune, like kind of the

transneptunian solar system is entirely sourced from the inside. Namely, the Kuiper Belt gets

scattered by Neptune and then Planet 9 does things to it and aligns the orbits and so on.

Then we calculate what happens on the lifetime of the solar system. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

During the pandemic, one of the kind of questions we asked ourselves, and this is indeed something

we, Mike and I, Mike Brown, who's a partner in crime on this, and I do regularly, is we say,

how can we, A, disprove ourselves and B, how can we improve our simulations? What's missing?

One idea that maybe should have been obvious in retrospect is that all of our simulations

treated the solar system as some isolated creature, but the solar system did not form an

isolation. It formed in this cluster of stars. During that phase of forming together with thousands

of other stars, we believe the solar system formed this almost spherical population of icy debris

that sits maybe at a few thousand times the separation between the Earth and the Sun,

maybe even a little bit closer. If Planet 9 is not there, that population is completely dormant,

and these objects just slowly orbit the Sun, nothing interesting happens to them ever.

But when we realize that if Planet 9 is there, Planet 9 can actually grab some of those objects

and gravitationally reinject them into the distant solar system. So we thought, okay,

let's look into this with numerical experiments. Do our simulations, does this process work? And if

it works, what are its consequences? So it turns out indeed, not only does Planet 9 inject

these distant inner or cloud objects into the Kuiper belt, they follow roughly the same pathway

as the objects that are being scattered out. So there's this kind of two way river of

material, some of it is coming out by Neptune scattering, some of it is moving in. And if you

work through the numbers, you kind of, at the end of the day, that it has an effect on the best fit

orbit for Planet 9 itself. So if you realize that the data set that we're observing is not entirely

composed of things that came out of the solar system, but also things that got re injected back in,

then turns out the best fit Planet 9 is slightly more eccentric. That's kind of getting into the

weeds. The point here is that the existence of Planet 9 itself provides this natural bridge

that connects an otherwise dormant population of icy debris of the solar system with things that

we're starting to directly observe. So it can flow back, so it's not just the river flowing one way,

it's maybe a smaller stream go back and backwash. You want to incorporate that into the simulations

into your understanding of those distant objects when you're trying to make sense of the various

observations and so on. Exactly. That's fascinating. I got to ask you, some people think that many

of the observations that you're describing could be described by a primordial black hole. First,

what is a primordial black hole and what do you think about this idea? Yeah. So primordial black

hole is a black hole which is made not through the usual pathway of making a black hole,

which is that you have a star, which is more massive than 1.4 or so solar masses. Basically,

when it runs out of fuel, runs out of its nuclear fusion fuel, it can't hold itself up anymore and

just the whole thing collapses on itself. You create a simple way to think about it is you

create an object with zero radius that has mass but zero radius, singularity. Now, such black

holes exist all over the place. In the galaxy, there's in fact a really big one at the center

of the galaxy. That one's always looking at you when you're not looking. It's always talking

about you. And when you turn off the lights, it wakes up. That's right. So such black holes

are all over the place. When they merge, we get to see incredible gravitational waves that they

emit, etc. One plausible scenario, however, is that when the universe was forming, basically

during the Big Bang, you created a whole spectrum of black holes, some with masses of 5 Earth masses,

some with masses of 10 Earth masses, like the entire mass spectrum size, some the mass of

asteroids. Now, on the smaller end, over the lifetime of the universe, the small ones kind of

evaporate. And they're not there anymore. At least this is what the calculations tell us. But 5

Earth masses is big enough to not have evaporated. So one idea is that Planet 9 is not a planet,

and instead it is a 5 Earth mass black hole. And that's why it's hard to find. Now,

can we right away from our calculations say that's definitely true or that's not true? Absolutely

not. In fact, our calculations tell you nothing other than the orbit and the mass. And that means

the black hole, I mean, it could be a 5 Earth mass cup. It could be a 5 Earth mass hedgehog

or a black hole, or really anything that's 5 Earth masses will do, because the gravity of a

black hole is no different than the gravity of a planet. If the Sun became a black hole tomorrow,

it would be dark, but the Earth would keep orbiting it. This notion that, oh, black holes suck

everything in, that's like a sci fi notion. It's just mass. What would be the difference between

a black hole and a planet in terms of observationally? Observationally, the difference would be that you

will never find the black hole. The truth is, I never looked into this very carefully,

but there are some constraints that you can get just statistically to say, okay, if the Sun

has a binary companion, which is a 5 Earth mass black hole, then that means such black holes would

be extremely common, and you can sort of look for lensing events, and then you say, okay,

maybe that's not so likely. But that said, I want to emphasize that there's a limit to what

our calculations can tell you. That's the orbit and the mass.

So I think there's a bunch, like Ed Whitten, I think wishes it's a black hole, because I think

one exciting thing about black holes in our solar system is that we can go there and we can maybe

study the singularity somehow, because that allows us to understand some fundamental things about

physics. If it's a planet, it's a planet nine, we may not, and we go there, we may not discover

anything profoundly new. The interesting thing, perhaps you can correct me about, planet nine

is like the big picture of it, the whole big story of the Kuiper Belt and all those kinds of things.

It's not that planet nine would be somehow fundamentally different from, I don't know, Neptune

in terms of the kind of things we can learn from it. So I think that there's kind of a hope that

it's a black hole because it's an entirely new kind of object. Maybe you can correct me.

Yeah. I mean, of course here, my own biases creep in because I'm interested in planets around

other stars. And I would say, I would disagree that we wouldn't find things that would be truly

fundamentally new, because as it turns out, the galaxy is really good at making

five or three earth mass objects. The most common type of planet that we see, that we

discover orbiting around other stars is a few earth masses. In the solar system,

there's no analog for that. We go from one earth mass object, which is this one,

to skipping to Neptune and Uranus, which themselves are actually relatively poorly

understood, especially Uranus from the interior structure point of view. If planet nine is a

planet, going there will give us the closest window and to understanding what other planets look like.

And I will, I'll say this, that planets kind of in terms of their complexity on some logarithmic

scale fall somewhere between a star and an insect. And the insect is way more complicated than a star.

All kinds of physical processes and really biochemical processes that occur inside of an

insect that just make a star look like somebody is like playing with the spring or something.

So, I think it would be arguably more interesting to go to planet nine if it's a planet,

because black holes are simple. They're basically macroscopic particles.

Just like the style you mentioned, in terms of complexity. So, it's possible that planet nine

is supposed to be like homogeneous is like super, like heterogeneous is a bunch of cool

stuff going on that could give us intuition. I never thought about that, that it's just

basically earth number two in terms of size and gives us, starts giving us intuition that

could be generalizable to earth like planets elsewhere in the galaxy.

I mean, yeah, Pluto is also in the sense like, you know, Pluto is a tiny, tiny thing, right?

Just like, you would imagine it's just a tiny ball of ice like who cares. But the New Horizons

images of Pluto reveal so much remarkable structure, right? They reveal glaciers flowing,

and these are glaciers not made out of water ice, but, you know, CO ice. It turns out at those

temperatures, right, of like 40 or so Kelvin, water ice looks like metal, right? Just doesn't

flow at all. But then ice made up of carbon monoxide starts to flow. I mean, there's just

like all kinds of really cool phenomena that you otherwise just wouldn't really even imagine

that occur. So, yeah, I mean, there's a reason why I like planets.

Well, let me ask you, I find, as I read the idea that Ed Whitton was thinking about this

kind of stuff, fascinating. So, he's a mathematical physicist who's very interested in string theory,

won the field's medal for his work in mathematics. So, I read that he proposed a fleet of probes

accelerated by radiation pressure that could discover a planet nine primordial black holes

location. What do you think about this idea of sending a bunch of probes out there?

Yeah, look, the way the idea is a cool one, right? You go and you say, you know, launch them

basically isotropically, you track where they go. And if I understand the idea correctly,

you basically measure the deflection and you say, okay, that must be something

there since the probe trajectories are being altered.

Also, the measurement, the basic sensory mechanism is the, it's not like you have

sensors on the probes, it's more like you're, because you're very precisely able to capture,

to measure the trajectory of the probes, you can then infer the gravitational

fields and I think, I think that's the basic idea. You know, back a few years ago, we had

conversations like these with, you know, engineers from JPL, they more or less convinced me that

this is much more difficult than it seems because you don't, at that level of precision,

right? Things like solar flares matter, right? Solar flares, right, are completely

chaotic. You can't predict which, where a solar flare will happen. That will drive

radiation pressure gradients. You don't know where every single asteroid is. So like,

actually doing that problem, I think it's possible, but it's, it's not a trivial matter, right?

Well, I wonder, not just about Planet Nine, I wonder if that's kind of the future of doing

science in our solar system is to just launch a huge number of probes. So like a whole order of

magnitude, many orders of magnitude, larger numbers of probes and then start to infer a bunch

of different stuff, not just gravity, but everything else. So in this regard, I actually

think there is a huge revolution that's to some extent already started, right? The standard kind

of like timescale for a NASA mission is that you like propose it and it launches, I don't know,

like 150 years after you propose, I'm over exaggerating, but you know, it's just like some

huge development cycle and it gets delayed 55 times. Like that is not going away, right?

The really cutting edge things, you have to do it this way because you don't know what you're

building, so to speak. But the CubeSat kind of world is starting to, you know, provide an avenue

for like launching something that costs a few million dollars and has a turnaround timescale

of like a couple of years. You can imagine doing PhD theses where you design the mission,

the mission goes to where you're going and you do the science all within a time span of five,

six years. That has not been fully executed on yet, but I absolutely think that's on the horizon

and we're not talking a decade, I think we're talking like this decade. Yeah, and the companies

are accelerating all this with Blue Origin and SpaceX. There's a bunch of more CubeSat oriented

companies that are pushing this forward. Let me ask you on that topic, what do you think about

either one? Elon Musk with SpaceX going to Mars, I think he wants SpaceX to be the first

to put a first human on Mars. And then Jeff Bezos got to give him props, wants to be the first to

fly his own rocket out into space. You know, wasn't there a guy who like built his rocket out of

garbage? Yeah. This was like a couple years ago and somewhere in the desert he launched himself.

I'm not tracking this closely, but I think I am familiar with folks who built their own rocket

to try to prove the Earth is flat. Yes, that's the guy. He was also like he also jumped some limousine.

Truly revolutionary mind. You have to

greater men than either you or I. So look, it's been astonishing to watch how really over the

last decade the commercial sector took over this industry that traditionally has really

been like a government thing to do. Motivated primarily by the competition between nations

like the Cold War. And now it's motivated more and more by the natural forces of capitalism.

Yes, that's right. So, okay, here I have many ideas about I think on the one hand, right,

like what SpaceX has been able to do, for example, phenomenal. If that brings down the price of

SpaceX within that turnaround timescale for space exploration, which I think it inevitably will,

that's a huge boost to the human condition. The same time, right, if we're talking

astronomy, there also it comes at a huge cost. And the Starlink satellites is a great example

of that cost. At one point, in fact, I was just camping in the Mojave with a friend of mine,

and they saw this string of satellites just kind of appear and then disappear into nowhere. So that

is beginning to interfere with earth based observations. So I think there's tremendous

potential there. It's also important to be responsible about how it's executed.

Now, with Mars and the whole idea of exploring Mars, I don't have like strong opinions on whether

a manned mission is required or not required. But I do think the thing to keep in mind is that

I'm not signed on, if you will, to the idea that Mars is some kind of a safe haven that we can

escape to. Mars sucks. Living on Mars, if you want to live on Mars, you can have that experience

by going to the Mojave desert and camping, and it's just not a great...

It's interesting, but there's something captivating about that kind of mission of us

striving out into space, and by making Mars in some way habitable for at least months at a time,

I think would lead to engineering breakthroughs that would make life in many ways much better

on earth. It will come up with ideas we totally don't expect yet, both on the robotic side,

on the food engineering side, maybe we'll switch from... There'll be huge breakthroughs in insect

farming as exciting as I find that idea to be. In the ways we consume protein, maybe

it'll revolutionize, we do factory farming, which is full of cruelty and torture of animals,

we'll revolutionize that completely because of our... We shouldn't need to go to Mars to

revolutionize life here on earth, but at the same time, I shouldn't need a deadline to get

shit done, but I do need it. In the same way, I think we need Mars. There's something about

the human spirit that loves that longing for exploration. I agree with that thesis. Going

to the moon and that whole endeavor has captivated the imagination of so many, and it has led to

incredible ideas, really, and probably in nonlinear ways, not like, okay, we went to the moon,

therefore, some person here has thought of this. In that similar sense, I think space exploration

is... There's some real magnetism about it, and it's on a genetic level. We have this

need to keep exploring when we're done with a certain frontier, we move on to the next frontier.

All that I'm saying is that I'm not moving to Mars to live there permanently ever, and I think

that... I'm glad you noted the degradation of the earth. I think that is a true leading order

challenge of our time. Yeah, a great engineer. That's a bunch of engineering problems. I'm

most interested in this space because as I've read extensively, it's apparently very difficult to

have sex in space, and so I just want that problem to be solved because I think once we solve the

sex in space problem, we'll revolutionize sex here on earth, thereby increasing the fun on earth,

and the consequences of that can only be good. I mean, you've got a clear plan, right, and it

sounds like... I'm submitting proposals to NASA as we speak. That's right. I keep getting rejected.

I don't know why. Okay. You need better diagrams. Better pictures. I should have thought of that.

You a while ago mentioned that there's certain aspects in the history of the solar system and

earth that resulted... It could have resulted in an opaque atmosphere, but it didn't. We can see the

stars. Somebody mentioned to me a little bit ago... It's almost like a philosophical question for you.

Do you think the human society would develop as it did or at all if we couldn't see the stars?

It would be drastically different. If it ever did develop... So I think some of the early

developments of like... Fire. First of all, that atmosphere would be so hot because if you have

an opaque atmosphere, the temperature at the bottom is huge. So we would be very different

beings to start with. We'd have very different... It could be cloudy in certain kinds of ways

that you could still get. Okay. Think about like a greenhouse, right? A greenhouse is cloudy,

effectively, but it's super hot. Yeah, it's hard to avoid having an atmosphere. If you have an

opaque atmosphere, it's hard to... Venus is a great example. Venus is... I don't remember exactly how

many degrees, but it's hundreds in Celsius. It's not 100, it's hundreds. Even though it's only a

little bit closer to the sun, that temperature is entirely coming from the fact that the atmosphere

is thick. So it's just a sauna of sorts. Yeah, you go there, you feel refreshed after you come back.

But if you stay there, I mean, so, okay, take that as an assumption. This is a philosophical

question, not a biological one. So you have a life that develops under these extremely hot

conditions. Yeah, so let's see. So much of the early evolution of mankind was driven by exploration.

Yeah. Right. And the kind of interest in stars originated in part as a tool to guide that exploration.

Right? I mean, that in itself, I think would be a huge differential in the way that we

are of our evolution on this planet. Yeah, I mean, stars, that's brilliant. So even in that aspect,

but even in further aspects, astronomy just shows up in basically every single development

in the history of science up until the 20th century, it shows up. So I wonder without that,

if we would even get calculus. Yeah, look, that's a great point. Newton in part developed calculus

because he was interested in understanding, explaining Kepler's laws, right? In general,

that whole mechanistic understanding of the night sky, right, replacing a religious understanding

where you interpret, you know, this is, you know, this whatever fire god writing his,

you know, little chariot across the sky as opposed to, you know, this is some mechanistic set of

laws that transformed humanity and arguably put us on the course that we're on today, right?

The entirety of the last 400 years and the development of kind of our technological world

that we live in today was sparked by that, right? Abandoning an effectively, you know,

a non secular view of the natural world and kind of saying, okay, this can be understood. And if it

can be understood, it can be utilized, we can create our own variants of this. Absolutely,

we would be a very, very different species without astronomy. This I think extends

beyond just astronomy, right? There are questions like why do we need to spend money on X, right?

Where X can be anything like paleontology, right? The meeting patterns of penguins.

Yeah, that's like, that's right. I think, you know, there's a tremendous under appreciation

for the usefulness of useless knowledge, right? I mean, I didn't come up with this. This was a

little book by the guy who started the Institute for Advanced Studies. But, you know, it's so true,

so much of the electronics that are on this table, right, work on Maxwell's equations. Maxwell

wasn't sitting around in the 1800s saying, you know, I hope one day, you know,

we'll make, you know, a couple of mics. So, you know, a couple, you know, a couple guys can, you

know, have this conversation, right? That wasn't at no point was that the motivation. And yet,

you know, it gave us the world that we have today. And the answer is, if you are a purely

pragmatic person, if you don't care at all about kind of the human condition, none of this,

the answer is, you can tax it, right? Like the useless things have created

way more capital than useful things. And the sad thing, I mean, first of all, it's really important

to think about and it's brilliant in the following context. And like Neil deGrasse Tyson is this

book about the role of military based funding in the development of science. And then so much of

technological breakthroughs in the 20th century had to do with humans working on different military

things. And then the outcome of that had nothing to do with military. It had some military application,

but their impact was much, much bigger than military.

The splitting of the atom is kind of a canonical example of this. We all know the tragedy that,

you know, arises from splitting of the atom. And yet, you know, so much, I mean,

the atom itself does not care for what purpose it is being split. So,

So I wonder if we took the same amount of funding as we used for war and poured it into

like totally seemingly useless things like the mating patterns of penguins, we would get the

internet anyway. I think so. I think so. And, you know, perhaps more of the internet would have

penguins, you know? So we're both joking. But in some sense, like, I wonder, it's not the

penguins, because penguins is more about sort of biology, but all useless kind of tinkering and all

kinds of, in all kinds of avenues. And also because military applications are often

burdened by the secrecy required. So it's often like so much, the openness is lacking. And if we

learned anything from the last few decades is that when there's openness in science,

that accelerates the development of science. That's right. That's true. The openness of science

truly, you know, it benefits everybody. The notion that if, you know, I share my science with you,

then you're going to catch up and like know the same thing. That is a short sighted view point,

because if you catch up and you open, you know, you discover something that puts me in a position

to do the next step, right? So I absolutely agree with all of this. I mean, the kind of question

of like military funding versus non military funding is obviously a complicated one. But

at the end of the day, I think we have to get over the notion as a society that we are going to,

you know, pay for this and then we will get that, right? That's true if you're buying like,

I don't know, toilet paper or something, right? It's just not true in the intellectual pursuit.

That's not how it works. And sometimes it'll fail, right? Like sometimes like a huge fraction of what

I do, right? I come up with an idea. I think, oh, it's great. And then I work it out. It's totally

not great, right? It fails immediately. Failure is not a sign that the initial pursuit was worthless.

So failure is just part of this kind of this whole exploration thing. And we should fund more

and more of this exploration, the variety of the exploration. I think it was Linus Pauling or somebody

from, you know, that generation of scientists, you know, a good way to have good ideas is to have

a lot of ideas. So that's, I think that's true. If you are conservative in your thinking, if you

worry about proposing something that's going to fail and oh, what if, you know, like, I, there's no

science police that's going to come and arrest you for proposing the wrong thing. And, you know,

it's also just like, why would you, why would you do science if you're afraid of, you know,

you know, taking that step? It would be so much better to propose things that are plausible,

that are interesting, and then for a fraction of them to be wrong, then to just kind of, you know,

make incremental progress all your life, right? Speaking of wild ideas, let me ask you about

the thing we mentioned previously, which is this interstellar object a more and more.

Could it be space junk from a distant alien civilization?

You can't immediately discount that by saying absolutely it cannot. Anything can be space

junk. I mean, from that point of view, can any of the Kuiper Belt objects we see be space junk?

Anything on the night sky can in principle be space junk.

And Kuiper Belt would catch interstellar objects potentially and like,

force them into an orbit if they're like small enough?

Not the Kuiper Belt itself, but you can imagine like Jupiter family comments

being captured, you know, so you can actually capture things. It's even easier to do this very

early in the solar system. Like early in the solar system's life, while it's still in a cluster of

stars, it's unavoidable that you capture debris, whether it be natural debris or unnatural debris,

or just debris of some kind from other stars. That it's like a daycare center, right? Like

everybody passes their infections on to other kids. Yeah. You know, one more,

one more. There's been a lot of discussion about it. There's been a lot of interest in this over,

is it aliens or is it not? But let's like, if you just kind of look at the facts,

like what we know about it is it's kind of like a weird shape and it also accelerated,

you know, right? Like that's the two, those are the two interesting things about it.

There are puzzles about it and perhaps the most daring resolution to this puzzle is that

it's not, you know, aliens or it's not like a rock, it's actually a piece of hydrogen ice.

So this is a friend of mine, you know, Daryl Seligman, Greg Laughlin came up with this idea

that in giant molecular clouds that are just clouds of hydrogen helium gas that live in,

live throughout the galaxy at their cores, you can condense ice to become the hydrogen,

you know, icebergs, if you will. And then that explains many of the aspects of,

in fact, I think that explains all of the more mystery how it becomes elongated because basically

the hydrogen ice sublimates and kind of like a bar of soap that, you know, slowly kind of elongates

as you, as you strip away the surface layers, how it was able to accelerate because of a jet

that is produced from, you know, the hydrogen coming off of it, but you can't see it because

it's hydrogen gas, like all of this stuff kind of falls together nicely. I'm intrigued by that

idea truly because it's like, if that's true, that's a new type of astrophysical object.

And it would be produced by what's the monster that produced it initially, that kind of object.

So this is giant molecular, molecular clouds, they're everywhere. I mean, they are,

the fact that they exist is not... Are they rogue clouds or are they part of like an

oar cloud? No, no, no, they're rogue clouds. They're just floating about. Yeah. So if you go,

like, a lot of people imagine the galaxy as being a, you know, a bunch of stars, right? And

they're just orbiting, right? But the truth is, if you fly between stars, you run into clouds.

They don't have any large object that creates orbits, they're just floating about.

Just floating? But why are they floating together? Are they just float together for time and not?

Well, so these are the, these eventually become the nurseries of stars. So as they, as they cool,

they contract and, you know, then collapse into stars or into groups of stars. But some of them,

the starless molecular clouds, according to the calculations that Daryl and Greg did, can

then, can create these like icicles of hydrogen ice. I wonder why they would be flying so fast,

because they seem to be moving pretty fast at a quick pace.

You mean, one more?

One more, yeah.

That's just because of their acceleration due to, due to the sun. If you stop, I mean, it's like,

take something really far away, let it go, and the sun is here. By the time it comes close to the

sun, right, it's moving pretty fast. So that's an attractive explanation, I think, not so much,

because it's cool, but it makes a clear prediction, right, of when Verrubin Observatory comes online

next year or so, we will discover many, many more of these objects, right? And they have,

so I like, I like theories that are falsifiable and not just testable, but falsifiable. It's

good to have a falsifiable theory where you can say, that's not true. Aliens is one that's

fundamentally difficult to say, no, that's not aliens.

Well, the interesting thing to me, if you look at one alien civilization,

and then we look at the things it produces, in terms of if we were to try to detect the alien

civilization, there is like, say there's 10 billion aliens, there would probably be

trillions of dumb drone type things produced by the aliens, and then be many, many, many

more orders of magnitude of junk. So like, if you were to look for an alien civilization,

in my mind, you would be looking for the junk. That's the more efficient thing to look for.

So I'm not saying Amua Amua has any characteristics of space junk, but it kind of opened my eyes,

to the idea that we shouldn't necessarily be looking to the queen of the ant colony. We

should be looking at, I don't know, I don't know, like the traces of alien life that doesn't

look intelligent in any way, may not even look like life. It could be just garbage. We should be

looking for garbage. Just generically. Garbage that's producible by unnatural forces. I mean,

for me, at least that was kind of interesting, because if you have a successful alien civilization

that we would be producing many more orders of magnitude of junk, and that would be easier

potentially to detect. Well, so you have to produce the junk, but you have to also launch it.

So this is the, this is where let's, let's imagine, disposal. Yeah. But let's imagine we are a

successful civilization that, you know, has made it to space. We clearly have, right? And yes,

we're in the infancy of that pursuit. But, you know, we've launched, I don't know how many satellites.

Probably if you count GPS satellites, it must be at least thousands.

It's certainly thousands. I don't know if it's over 10,000, but it's on that order.

But it's on that, like a large order of magnitude. How many of the things that we've launched

will ever leave the solar system? I think two.

Two so far. Well, maybe the Voyager, the Voyager 1, Voyager 2. I don't know if the Pioneer.

So maybe three, like. Oh, there's also a Tesla Roadster out there.

That one, it will never leave the solar system. It'll just, I think that one will

eventually collide with Mars. That can be SpaceX's first Mars.

But look, so there is an energetic cost to interstellar travel, which is really hard to

overcome. And when we think about, you know, generically, what do we look for in an alien

civilization? Oftentimes, we tend to imagine that the thing you look for is the thing that we're

doing right now, right? So I think that, you know, if I look at the future, right, and for a while,

like, okay, if aliens are out there, they must be broadcasting in radio, right? That radio,

you know, the amount that we broadcast in radio has diminished tremendously in the last 50 years.

But we're doing a lot more computation, right? What are the signs of computation? Like,

that's a good, that's an interesting question to ask, right? Where, I don't know, I think

something on the order of a few percent of the entire electrical grid last year went to mining

Bitcoin, right? Well, there could be a lot of, in the future, different consequences of the

computation, which I mean, I'm biased, but it could be robotics. It could be artificial intelligence.

So we may be looking for intelligent looking objects, like that's what I meant by probes,

like things that move in kind of artificial ways.

But the emergence of AI is not an if, right? It's happening right in front of our eyes.

And the energetic costs associated with that are becoming, you know, a tangible problem.

So I think, you know, if you imagine kind of extrapolating that into the future, right,

what are the, you know, what becomes the bottleneck, right? The bottleneck might be

powering, you know, powering the AI, broadly speaking, not one AI, but powering that entire

AI ecosystem, right? So I don't know. I think, you know, space junk is kind of,

it's an interesting idea, but it's heavily influenced by like sci fi of 1950s, where by 2020,

we're all like, flying to the moon. And so we produce a lot of space junk. I'm not

sure if that's the pathway that alien civilizations take. I've also never seen an alien civilization.

That's true. But if your theory of chill turns out to be true, and then we don't,

you know, we don't necessarily explore, we seize the exploration phase of like alien civilizations

quickly sees the exploration phase of their efforts, then perhaps they'll just be chilling

in a particular space, expanding slowly, but then using up a lot of resources and then have to

have a lot of garbage disposal that sends stuff out. And the other, you know, the other idea was

that it could be a relay that you'll almost have like these GPS like markers, these sent throughout,

which I think is kind of interesting. It's similar to this probe idea of sending

a large number of probes out to measure gravitational,

to measure basically, yeah, the gravitational field, essentially. I mean, a lot of people

at Caltech or in MIT are trying to measure gravitational fields. And there's, there's a

lot of ideas of sending stuff out there that accurately measures those gravitational fields

to have a greater understanding of the early universe. But then you might realize that

communication through gravitation through gravity is actually much more effective than

than radio waves, for example, something like that. And then you send out, I mean, okay, if you're

an alien civilization that's able to have gigantic masses, like basically, we're getting there as a

civilization. No, we're not not even close. Well, I mean, I mean, like be able to sort of

play with black holes, that kind of thing. So we're talking about a whole another different

order of magnitude of masses, then it may be very effective to send signals via gravitational waves.

I actually, my sense is that all of these things are genuinely difficult to predict.

And I don't mean like to kind of shy away. I just, I really mean, if you think, if you take

imagination of what the future looked like from 500 years ago, right, it's just,

it is so hard to conceive of the impossible. So it's almost like, it's almost limiting to try and

imagine things that are an order of magnitude, or two orders of magnitude ahead in terms of

progress, just because you mentioned cars before, if you were to ask people what they wanted in

1870, it's faster buggies. So I think the whole kind of alien conversation inevitably gets limited

by our entire kind of collective astrophysical lack of imagination.

So to push back a little bit, I find that it's really interesting to talk about these wild ideas

about the future, whether it's aliens, whether it's AI, with brilliant people like yourself,

who are focused on very particular tools of science we have today to solve very particular

like rigorous scientific questions. And it's almost like putting on this wild dreamy hat,

like some percent of the time and say, like, what are like, what would alien civilizations

look like? What would alien trash look like? Well, what would our own civilization that

sends out trillions of AI systems out there, like how 9000, but 10,000 out there, what would

that look like? And you're right, any one prediction is probably going to be horrendously

wrong, but there's something about creating these kind of wild predictions that kind of opens up.

No, there's a huge magnetism to it, right? And some of it,

you know, I mean, some of the Jules Verne novels did a phenomenal job predicting the

future, right? That actually was a great example of what you're talking about,

like allowing your imagination to run free. I mean, I just hope, I just hope there's dragons.

That's, I love dragons. Yeah, dragons are the best.

But see, the cool thing about science fiction and these kinds of conversation,

it doesn't just predict the future, I think. Some of these things will create the future.

Planting the idea. The humans are amazing, like fake it till you make it.

Humans are really good at taking an idea that seems impossible at the time. And for

any one individual human, that idea is like planting a seed that eventually materializes

itself. It's weird. It's weird how science fiction can create science fiction.

And drive some of these. It drives the science.

Yeah, I agree with you. And I think in this regard, I'm like a sucker for sci fi.

It's all I listen to now when I run. And some of it is completely implausible,

right? And it's like, I don't care. It's both entertaining and it's just like

its imagination. You know about The Black Clouds book? I think it's by Fred Hoyle.

This has great connections with a lot of the advancements that are happening in NLP right now

with transformer models and so on. But it's just Black Cloud shows up in the solar system.

And then people try to send, and then it learns to talk back at you. So anyway,

we don't have to talk at all about it, but it's just something worth checking out.

With that on the alien front with The Black Cloud, to me, and the exact on the NLP front,

and also just explainability of AI, it's fascinating. Just a very question. Stephen

Wolfram looked at this with the movie Arrival. It's like, what would be the common language

that we would discover? The reason that's really interesting to me is we have aliens here on Earth.

Japanese. Japanese is the obvious answer. Japanese. Yeah, that would be the common.

And maybe it would be music, actually. That's more likely. It wouldn't be language. It would be

art that they would communicate. But I do believe that we have,

I'm with Stephen Wolfram on this a little bit, that to me, computation, like programs we write,

that they're kind of intelligent creatures. And I feel like we haven't found the common

language to talk with them. Like our little creations that are artificial are not born

with whatever that innate thing that produces language with us. And coming up with mechanisms

for communicating with them is an effort that feels like it will produce some incredible

discoveries. You can even think of, if you think that math has discovered, mathematics in itself

is a kind of... Oh yeah, it's an innate construction of the world we live in. I think we are

part of the way there because pre 1950, computers were human beings that would carry out arithmetic.

And I think it was Ulam who worked in Los Alamos at the time, like towards the end of

the Second World War, wrote something about how in the future computers will not be

just arithmetic tool, but will be truly an interactive thing with which you could do

experiments. At the time, the notion of doing an experiment, not like in the lab with some

beakers, but an experiment on a computer designing a miracle experiment was a new one.

70% of what I do is I write code, terrible code to be clear, but I write code that creates

an experiment which is a simulation. So in that sense, I think we're beginning to interact with

the computer in a way that you're saying, not as just a fancy calculator, not as just a call

and request type of thing, but something that can generate insights that are otherwise completely

unattainable. They're unattainable by doing analytical mathematics. Yeah, and there's with

AlphaFol2, we're now starting to crack open biology, so being able to simulate at first

trivial biological systems and hopefully down the line complex biological systems,

my hope is to be able to simulate psychological, like sociological systems like humans. A large

part of my work at MIT was on autonomous vehicles, and the fascinating thing to me was about

pedestrians, human pedestrians interacting with autonomous vehicles and simulating those systems

without murdering humans will be very useful, but nevertheless is exceptionally difficult.

When is my Mustang going to drive itself? I'm not even joking. It turns out it's much more

difficult than we imagined, and I suppose that's the kind of the progress of science

is just like going to Mars. It's probably going to turn out to be way more difficult than we

imagined. Sending out probes to investigate planet nine at the edge of our solar system

might turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined, but we do it anyway, and we figured

out in the end. Mars is great. Sending humans to Mars is way more complicated than sending

humans to the moon. You'd think just naively, but if they're in space, who cares? If you go there,

why don't you go there? Life support is an extremely expensive thing.

There's a bunch of extra challenges, but I disagree with you. I would be one of the

early people to go. I used to think not. I used to think I'd be one of the first maybe million

to go once you have a little bit of a society. I think I'm upgrading myself to the first like

$10,000. That's right, front of the cabin. Not completely front, but it would be interesting

to die. I'm okay with death sucks, but I like the idea of dying on Mars. Of all the places to die,

I've got to say in this regard, I don't want to die on Mars. I don't. No, no, I would much rather

die on Earth. Death is fundamentally boring. Death is a very boring experience. I've never

died before, so I don't know from first hand experience. As far as you know. It could be a

reincarnation, all those kinds of things. You mean where would you die if you had to choose?

Oh, man. Okay. There's a question of who I'd want to die with. I'd prefer not to die alone,

but surrounded by family would be preferable, where I think northern New Mexico, and I'm not

even joking. This is not a random place. Would that be your favorite place on Earth?

Not necessarily, favorite place on Earth to reside indefinitely, but it is one of the most

beautiful places I've ever been to. There's something attractive about going.

Returning to nature in a beautiful place. Let me ask you about another aspect of your life

that is full of beauty. Music. Okay. You're a musician. The absurd question I have to ask,

what is the greatest song of all time? Objectively speaking. The greatest song of all time.

I suppose that could change moment to moment, day to day, but if you were forced to answer for

this particular moment in your life, that's something that pops to mind. This could be

both philosophically, this could be technically as a musician, like what you enjoy, maybe lyrics.

Like for me, lyrics is very important, so I would probably, my choice would be lyrics based.

I don't want to answer in terms of just technical prowess. I think technical prowess is impressive.

It's impressive what can be done. I wouldn't place that into the category of the greatest

music ever written. Some classical music that's written is undeniably beautiful, but I don't

want to consider that category of music either just because, so if I was to limit the scope of

this philosophical discussion to the kind of music that I listen to, probably What's My Age Again

by Blink One and Two, it's just, it's a solid one. It's got, you know.

Said nobody ever. That's a good song. I don't even know if you're joking.

No, no, I am joking. It's a good one, but it's, yeah, I mean.

Oh, I think the back is a close second.

What's my age again? Oh, yeah.

No, I mean, it would probably, you know, songwriting wise, I think the Beatles came pretty close to.

Would they influential to you? Absolutely.

I was like the Beatles.

Yeah. Love the Beatles. I love the Beatles.

Would it be yesterday?

Yeah.

Like, I think Strawberry Fields Forever is one of, you know what one of my favorite Beatles songs is?

It's, you know, In My Life, right? That song. It's hard to imagine how whatever a 24 year old

wrote that. It is one of the most introspective pieces of music ever. You know, I'm a huge Pink Floyd

fan. And so I think, you know, if you were to, you can sort of look at the entire dark side of the

moon album and as, you know, getting pretty close up there to the pinnacle of what, you know, can be

created. So, you know, Time's a great song. Yeah. It's a great song.

Just the entirety of just the instruments, the lyrics, the feeling created by a song,

like Pink Floyd can create feelings, the entire experience. I mean, you have that with the wall

of just transporting you into another place. Songs don't, not many songs could do that as well.

Not many artists can do that as well as Pink Floyd did.

There are a lot of bands that you can kind of say, oh yeah, like if you take Blink 182, right?

If you have no idea, like if you are listening to sort of that type of pop punk for the first time,

it's difficult to differentiate between Blink 182 and like some 41 and the

thousand of other like lesser known bands that all sounded, they all had that sparkling production

feel. They all kind of sounded the same, right? With Pink Floyd, it's hard to find another band

that you're like, well, is this one Pink Floyd? Like you know when you're listening to Pink Floyd,

when you're listening to. The uniqueness, that's fascinating. You know, in the calculation

of the greatest song in the greatest band of all time, you could probably, you could probably

actually quantify this like scientifically, is like how unique, if you play different songs,

how well are people able to recognize whether it's this band or not? And that, you know,

that's probably a huge component to greatness. Like if the world would miss it if it was gone.

Yes, yes. But there's also the human story, things like I would say Output Johnny Cash's

cover of Hurt is one of the greatest songs of all time. And that has less to do with the song.

But your interaction with it?

The interaction with it, but also the human, the full story of the human. So like it's not just

if I just heard the song and be like, okay, that, but if it's the full story of it, also the video

component for that particular song. So like that, you can't discount the full experience of it.

Absolutely. You know, I have no confusion about not about being, you know, anywhere,

you know, in that link. But I just like, I sometimes think about, you know, music that is

being produced today feels oftentimes feels like, like kind of clothes, like clothes that you buy

at like H&M and you wear it three times before they rip and you throw away. So like, so much of it

is, it's not bad. It's just kind of forgettable, right? Like the fact that we're talking about Pink

Floyd in 2021 is in itself an interesting question. Why are we talking about Pink Floyd?

And it's, there's something unforgettable about them and unforgettable about the art that they

created. That could be the markets that like, so Spotify has created this kind of market where

the incentives for creating music that last is much lower because there's so much more music.

You just want something that shines bright for a short amount of time, makes a lot of money and

moves on. And I mean, the same thing you see with the news and all those kinds of things. We're

just living in a shorter and shorter, shorter like time scale in terms of our attention spans.

And that nevertheless, when we look at the long arc of history of music, perhaps there will be

some songs from today that will last as much as Pink Floyd. We're just unable to see it.

Yeah. Just the collected works of Nickelback. Exactly. You never know. You never know. Justin

Bieber, it could be a contender. I've recently started listening to Justin Bieber just to

understand what people are talking about. And I'll just keep my comments to myself on that one.

It's too good to explain. The words cannot capture the greatness that is the Bebes.

You as a musician, so you write your music, you play guitar, you sing. Maybe can you give

an overview of the role music has played in your life? You're one of the, you're a world class

scientist. And so it's kind of fascinating to see somebody in your position who is also a great

musician and still loves playing music. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't call myself a great musician.

One of the best of all time. That's right. We were saying offline confidence is like the most

essential thing about being a rock star. Exactly. The confidence and kind of like moodiness, right?

Yeah. Look, I mean, music plays an absolutely essential role in everything I do because I lose,

if I stop playing for one reason or another, say I'm traveling, I notably lose creativity in

every other aspect of my life, right? There's something, I don't view playing music as a

separate endeavor from doing science or doing whatever. It's all part of that same creative

thing, which is distinct from, I don't know, pressing a button or like. So it's not a break

from science. It's a part of your science. It's absolutely, it's a part of, I would say,

it's a thing that enables the science, right? The science would suck even more than it does

already without the music. And that means like the creating of the writing of the music or is it

just even playing other people's stuff? Is it the whole of it? Yeah. It's definitely both.

Yeah. And also just, I love to play guitar. I love to sing. My wife tolerates my

screeching singing and even kind of likes it. Yeah. So people should check out your stuff.

You have a great voice. So I love your stuff. Is there something you're super busy?

Is there something you can say about practicing for musicians, for guitar, for you're also in a

band? So like that whole, how you can manage that? Is there some tricks or some hacks to

being a lifelong musician while being like super busy? So I would say, you know,

the way that I optimize my life is I try to do the thing that I'm passionate about

in a moment and put that at the top of the priority list. There are moments when, you know,

you just, you feel inspired to play music. And if you're in the middle of something,

if you can avoid, if that can be put on hold, just do it, right? There are times when you

get inspired about something scientific, you know, I do my best to drop everything, go into that,

you know, mode of, or that isolated mode and execute upon that. So it's a chaotic, you know,

I think I have a pretty chaotic lifestyle where I'm always doing kind of multiple things and

jumping between what I'm doing. But at the end of the day, it's not like, you know, those moments

of inspiration are actually kind of rare, right? Like most of the time, all of us are just doing

kind of doing the stuff that needs to get done. If you do the disservice to yourself of saying,

oh, I'm inspired to, you know, do this calculation, figure this out. But I've got to answer email

or just like do something, something silly. You know, that is a, that is nothing more than the

service. And also, like I have some social media presence, but I mostly stay off of, you know,

social media to, you know, just frankly, because like, I don't kind of, I don't enjoy the mental

cycles that it. Yeah, it robs you of that. Yeah, those, those precious moments that could be filled

with inspiration in your, in your other pursuits. But there's something to maybe you and I are

different in this, like I tried to play at least 10 minutes of guitar every day, almost on the

technical side, like keeping that base of basic competence going. And I mean, the same way like

writers will get in front of a paper, no matter what, that kind of thing. It just feels like that

for my life has been essential to the daily ritual of it. Otherwise, days turn into weeks,

weeks turn into months and you haven't played guitar for months. No, no, I understand. For me,

I think it's, it's been like, if we have a gig coming up, we'll definitely. You need deadlines.

Yeah, that's right. No, like we will, we will sharpen up definitely, you know, especially

coming up to a gig. And it's like, you know, we're not trying to make money with this. This is like

just for the, for that satisfaction of doing something and doing something well, right?

But overall, I would say most, I play guitar most days, most days. And, you know, when I

put kids to sleep, I play guitar, you know, with them and we like, just make up random songs about,

you know, about our cat or something, you know, like we just do kind of random stuff.

But, you know, music is always involved in that process.

Keeping it fun. You have Russian roots?

I sure do.

Were you born in Russia?

I was.

Yeah.

When did you come here?

So, I came to the US in very, the very end of 99, but so I was like almost 14 years old.

But along the way, we spent six years in Japan. So, like we moved from Russia to Japan in 94.

And then to the US in 99. So, like elementary school.

Oh, interesting.

School in Japan.

So, elementary school in Japan.

Yeah.

So, that's interesting. Do you still speak Russian?

Sure.

Okay.

Okay. Maybe I'll, let me ask you in Russian, what do you remember about Russia?

It'd be interesting to hear you speak Russian.

Well, in general, I remember, I mean, I was eight when we left. And, of course, I remember everything in the first year, including the transition from 1991 to 1992, this turbulent period, and, of course, 1993.

I mean, I still remember very well how, at some point, Pepsi Cola appeared first, and then Coca Cola appeared, and then, I remember, I was, I don't know, six years old, and then I thought, how can it be that Coca Cola stole the product and did the same thing?

So, for people who don't speak Russian, Constantine was talking about basically his first in 1992 interaction with capitalism, which is Pepsi, and at first he discovered Pepsi, and then he discovered Coke, and he was confused how such theft could occur.

Yeah, like an intellectual property theft. And remember, Pepsi arrived to the Soviet Union first, and there was some, there's some complicated story, which I don't quite understand the details of, for a while, Pepsi, like, commanded submarines or something.

Yeah, Pepsi had like a fleet of Soviet submarines that it was.

It was sponsoring tanks and this fessing, and I remember, there's certain things that trickled in, like McDonald's, I remember that was a big deal, certain aspects of the West.

Absolutely, so, I mean, we went to McDonald's, and we stood, I mean, this is absurd, right, from kind of looking at it from today's perspective, but we stood in line for like six hours to get into this McDonald's, and, you know, I remember inside, it was just like,

a billion people, and I'm just taking a bite out of that Big Mac, and I'm like, wow.

What was it, an incredible experience for you? So, like, what is the taste of the West, like, did you enjoy it?

I enjoyed the fact that, I mean, this is like, this is getting into the weeds, but I really enjoyed the fact that the top of the bun had those seeds, you know, like, and I remember how on the commercials, like, the Big Mac would kind of bounce.

And I was like, the seeds, how do they inject the seeds into the bread, like, amazing, right? So, I think it was, uh, artistry.

Yeah, you enjoyed the artistry of the culinary experience.

Exactly, it was the, you know, it was the food art, that is the Big Mac.

Actually, I still don't know the answer to that, how do they get the sesame seeds on the bun?

It's better to not know the answer.

You just wander the mystery of it all, yeah, I remember it being exceptionally delicious, but I'm with you, I don't know, you didn't,

I mentioned how transformative Pepsi was, but to me, basically sugar based stuff, like Pepsi was, or Coke, I don't remember which one we partook in, but that was an incredible experience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And, you know, I think it's, you know, it was an important and formative period.

I sometimes, I guess, rely on that a little bit, you know, in my daily life, because I remember, like, the early 90s were real rough, you know, like, my parents were kind of on the, on the bottom of the spectrum in terms of, you know, in terms of financial well being.

So, kind of like, just when I run into trouble, not like, you know, money trouble, just any kind of trouble these days, it just kind of is not particularly meaningful when you compare it to that, that turbulent time of the early 90s.

And the other thing is, I think there's, there's like an advantage to, to being, you know, an immigrant, which is that you get, you go through the mental exercise of changing your environment completely early in your life, right?

You go, it's by no means, you know, pleasant in the moment, right? But, like, going into Japanese elementary school, right? Like, I didn't go to some, like, private, you know, thing. I just went to a regular, like, Japanese public elementary school, and that was the non Japanese person in my class.

So, just like the learning Japanese and just kind of. So, that's a super humbling experience in many ways was when you, like, made fun of all that kind of stuff. Oh, yeah. Being the outsider.

Oh, absolutely. But, you know, you kind of do, you kind of do that. And then you kind of, then you're just kind of are okay with, with stuff, you know what I mean?

And so, like, doing that again in middle school in the US, it was arguably easy because it was like, yeah, well, I've already done this before. So, I think it kind of prepares you mentally a little bit for, for switching up for whatever, you know, changes that will come up for the rest of, of your life.

So, I wouldn't trade that, that experience really for anything. It's a huge aspect of, of who I am. And I'm sure you can relate to a lot of this.

Yes. Is there advice from your life that you can give to young people today, high school, college, you know, about their career, or maybe about life in general?

I'm not like a career coach by life coach, right? Like, I'm definitely not a life coach. I don't have it all figured out. But I think there's a, there's a perpetual cycle of, you know, thinking that there is a, there's kind of like a template for success, right?

Maybe there is, but in my experience, I haven't seen it, right? You know, I would say people in high school, right? So much of their focus is on getting straight A's, filling their CV with this and this and this.

So that, it looks impressive, right? That, that is not, I think, a good way to optimize your life, right? Do the thing that fills your life with passion. Do the thing that fills your life with, with interest and, you know, do that perpetually, right?

A straight A student, you know, is really impressive, but also, you know, somewhat boring, right? So, so I, I think, you know, injection of more of that kind of interest into, into the lives of young people would go a long way in, in just both upping their level of happiness and then just kind of ensuring that looking forward,

they are not suffering from a, you know, perpetual condition of, oh, I have to satisfy these like, you know, check boxes to, to do well, right?

Because you can lose yourself in that whole process for the rest of your life. But it's nice if it's possible, like Max Tecmark was exceptionally good at this at MIT, figure out how you can spend a small part of your percent of your efforts, such that your CV looks really impressive.

Yeah, absolutely. There's no, like, without a doubt, like, that's, that's a baseline that you need to have.

And then spend, so like, spend most of your time doing like amazing things you're passionate about, but such that it kind of like Planet Nine produces objects that, that feed your CV, like, slowly over time.

So getting good grades in high school, maybe doing extracurricular activities or, or in terms of like, you know, for programmers that's producing code that you can show up on GitHub, like leaving traces, like, throughout your efforts such that your CV looks impressive to the rest of the world.

In fact, I mean, this is somewhat along the lines of what I'm talking about. See, like, getting like good grades is important, but grades are not a tangible, like, product.

Like, you cannot show your A and have your A live a separate life from you. Code very much does, right? Music very much takes on, you know, provided somebody else listens to it, right? Provide, like, takes on a life of its own.

That's kind of what I mean, right? Doing, doing stuff that, that can then get separated from, from you is, is exceptionally attractive, right? It's like a, it's like a fun, and it's, and it's also very impressive to others.

I think we're moving to a world where grades mean less and less, like certifications mean less and less. If you look at, especially again, in the computing fields, getting a degree, finishing your, currently just get it, finishing your degree, whether it's Bachelors or Masters of PhD is less important than the things you've actually put out into the world.

Right, right. And that's a fascinating kind of, that's great that in that sense, the meritocracy in its richest, most beautiful form is, is starting to win out.

Yeah, it's weird because like, you know, my understanding, and I'm not like, I don't know the history of science well enough to, to speak very confidently about this, but, you know, the advisor of my advisor of my advisor from undergrad, like, didn't have a PhD.

Right, so I think it was a more common thing back in the day, even in the academic sector, to, you know, not have, you know, Faraday, like Faraday didn't know algebra, right, and drew diagrams about, you know, magnetic fields, like his Faraday's law was derived entirely from intuition.

So, it is interesting to, to how the world of academia has evolved into a, you got to do this and then get PhD, then you have to postdoc once and twice and maybe thrice and then, like, you, you move on.

So, you know, it does, I do wonder, you know, if we're, you know, if there's a better approach.

I think we're heading there, but it's a fascinating historical perspective, like that we might have just tried this whole thing out for a while,

where we put a lot more emphasis on grades and certificates and degrees and all those kinds of things.

I think the difference historically is, like, we can actually, using the internet, show off the, show off ourselves and our creations better and better and more effectively,

whether that's code or producing videos or all those kinds of things.

That's right.

It can become a certified drone pilot.

Of all the things you want to pick, yeah, for sure.

Or you could just fly and make YouTube videos against hundreds of thousands of views with your drone and never getting a certificate.

That's probably illegal.

Don't do it.

What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?

So, you look at planets, they seem to orbit stuff without, without asking the why question.

And for some reason, life emerged on earth such that it led to big brains that can ask the big why question.

Do you think there's an answer to it?

I'm not sure what the question is.

Like, what do you think?

Meaning of life?

The meaning of life.

It's 42.

It's 42.

Yeah.

But, you know, aside from that, it's, you know, why, I think there is a big question.

Why, I think if the question you're asking is like, why we do all this, right?

Why we do all this.

It's part of the human condition, right?

Human beings are fundamentally, I feel like, non, like sort of stochastic and fundamentally interested in, in

kind of expanding our own understanding of the world around us.

And creating stuff to enable that understanding.

So, we're like stochastic, fundamentally stochastic.

So, like, there's just a bunch of randomness that really doesn't seem like it has a good explanation.

And yet, there's a kind of direction to our being that we just keep wanting to create and to understand.

That's right.

So, we're, you know, that claim to be anti science, right?

And yet, in their anti science, you know, discussion, like, well, like, if you're so, you know, scientific,

then how, why don't you explain to me how, I don't know, this works.

And like, it always, there's that fundamental seed of curiosity and interest that is common to all of us.

Is absolutely what makes us human, right?

And, and I'm in a privileged position of being able to, you know, to have that be my job, right?

I think as, you know, as time evolves forward, you know, and the kind of economy changes,

I mean, we're already starting to see, you know, a shift towards that type of, you know,

creative, you know, enterprise as being, as merging, taking over a bigger and bigger chunk of the sector.

It's not yet, I think, the dominant portion of the economy by any account.

But if we compare this to like, you know, the time when the dominant thing you would do would be to,

you know, go to a factory and do the same exact thing, right?

I think, you know, there is a tide there and things are sort of headed in that direction.

Yeah, life's becoming more and more fun.

I can't wait, honestly, what happens next.

You can't wait to just chill.

Just chill.

The terminal point of this is just chill and wait for those Kuiper Belt objects to complete one orbit.

I'm going to credit you with this idea.

I do hope that we definitively discover a proof that there is a Planet Nine out there in the next

few years so you can sit back with a cigar, a cigarette, or vodka, or wine and just say,

I told you so.

That's already happening.

I'm going to do that later today.

As I mentioned, confidence is essential to being a rock star.

I really appreciate you explaining so many fascinating things to me today.

I really appreciate the work that you do out there.

And I really appreciate you talking with me today.

Thanks, Constantine.

It was a pleasure.

Thanks for having me on.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Constantine Batigan.

And thank you to Squarespace, Literati, Onit, and NI.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the

Galaxy.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the

galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant

little blue green planet whose ape descendant life forms are so amazingly primitive that

they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

Thank you for listening.

I hope to see you next time.