Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Now, you know, we probably couldn't land. We could... You know, so maybe we take 30 years to build, 10 years to get there, 10 years to get the picture back. Okay, you're dead, but your kids are, you know what I mean? So it becomes now this multi-generational project. How long did it take to build the pyramids? How long did it take to build the giant cathedrals, right?
Those were multi-generational projects. And I think we're on the cusp. of that kind of project. I think that would probably unite humans. I think it would play a big role. I think it would be helpful. I mean, human beings are a mess, let's face it.
But I think having that, that's why I always say to people, discovery of life, of any kind of life, even if it was microbial life, it wouldn't matter, that to know that we're not an accident, to know that there is probably, if we found one example of life, we'd know that we're not an accident and there's probably lots of life and that we're a community.
We're part of a cosmic kind of community of life and who knows what life has done. We don't really, all bets are off with life.
I was really skeptical. I was like, okay, guys, all right, sure.
Yes, like a single pixel.
Hot, usually far away from the, you know, reasonably far away from the star. I think JWST is really kind of at the hairy edge of being able to do much with this. What's more important, I think, for JWST is the spectra. And the problem with spectra is that there's not sexy pictures. It's like, hey, look at this wiggly line.
But be able to find and characterize atmospheres around terrestrial exoplanets is the critical next step. That's where we are right now. In order to look for life, we're going to be, we need to find planets with atmospheres, right? And then we need to be able to do this thing called characterization, where we look at the spectral fingerprints for what's in the atmosphere. Is there carbon?
Is there carbon dioxide? Is there oxygen? Is there methane? And that's the most exciting thing. For example, there was this planet K2-18b, which they did a beautiful job getting the spectra. And the spectra indicated it may be an entirely new kind of habitable world called a hycian world. Hycian meaning hydrogen ocean world.
And that is a kind of planet that it would be a, you know, kind of in the super earth sub Neptune domain we were talking about, you know, maybe eight times that mass of the earth. But it's got a layer of hydrogen, an atmosphere of hydrogen. Hydrogen is an amazing greenhouse gas. So hydrogen will keep the planet underneath it warm enough that you could get liquid water.
You can get a giant ocean of liquid water. And that's an entirely different kind of planet that could be habitable planet. You know, it could be a 60 degree warm ocean. So the data that came out of JWST for that planet was good enough to be able to indicate like, oh yeah, you know what? The models, from what we understand about the models, this looks like it could be a Hycian world.
Yeah. And so isn't that amazing? It's 120 light years away, but we can see into the atmosphere. We can see into the atmosphere so well that we can be like, oh, look, methane. Methane was a five sigma detection. Like you knew that the data were so good that it was like the gold standard of science.
You know what's great about megastructures is, first of all, it's fun to say. Who doesn't want to say megastructure? Alien megastructure, right? Every morning I'm looking for an opportunity to say that. So the Ur example of this is the Dyson sphere, right? Which is amazing because, you know, it was literally 1960 that this idea came up.
Yeah, the Dyson sphere. So Freeman Dyson, one of the greatest physicists ever, who was very broad-minded and thought about a lot of different things, he recognized that when a civilization – as civilizations progress, what they're going to need is ever more energy to do ever more amazing things. And what's the best energy source in a solar system? It's the star, right?
So if you surrounded the star with solar collecting machines, sunlight collecting machines, and the limit of this would be to actually build a sphere, an actual sphere around your star that had all solar panels on the inside, you could capture every photon the star produced, which is, you know, this...
insane amount of light you would have enough power now to do anything to re-engineer your solar system um so that was a dyson sphere turns out that a dyson sphere doesn't really work because it's unstable you know but a dyson swarm is and that's really what he meant you know this large collection of large orbiting structures that were able to collect light
People started to say, yeah, it was like a sphere. And we actually almost thought we might have found one of these back with a Bajoyan star. We saw, you know, the way we detect planets is through the transit method where the planet passes in front of the star and there's a dip in the starlight. It's a little eclipse basically. Yeah. And we know exactly what they should look like.
And then with this one star, there were these really weird transits where like it was like this little dragon's tooth. And then there'd be another one and another one and another one and then nothing and then three more. And in the paper that was written about this, they suggested they, you know, they went through the list of, oh, it could be comets, could be chunks of a broken up planet.
And it could also be an alien megastructure. And of course the news picked up on this and like everybody's, you know, newsfeed the next day, alien megastructure is discovered. Turns out, sadly, they were not alien megastructures. They were probably gas or dust clouds. But it raised the possibility like, oh, these are observable. And people have worked out the details of what they would look like.
You don't really need direct imaging. You can do transits, right? They're big enough that when they pass in front of the star, they're going to produce a little blip of light because that's what they're supposed to, right? They're absorbing starlight. So people did have worked out like, well, a square one or a triangular one.
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