David Kipping
👤 PersonPodcast Appearances
Yeah, the James Webb Space Telescope is such an incredible instrument.
The data has just blown us away.
You know, when you build this thing and you look at it unfolding in space, you think there's so many ways it could go wrong that we all were just like, you know, this thing was 215 moving parts or something had to unfold.
The fact it just all worked was just remarkable.
And then when we got those first images, they just kind of blew us away as well, because we had sort of these engineering expectations of what it would do, but the data was just even better than that.
Of course, the first thing you want to do is point it to the most distant part of the universe and see what's out there in those darkest patches.
And so when it did that, yeah, it started finding a couple of things.
It started finding quasars, which are kind of the center of these very active galaxies.
These are supermassive black holes that have loads of crap falling in, and they're spewing out all this energy.
They're kind of feeding supermassive black holes.
And so we started detecting those way earlier than we thought the universe should be able to build them.
Because to make a supermassive black hole, I mean, these things are like 100 million solar masses, right?
Imagine that, 100 million suns have not only been born but died, gone through their entire life cycle, died, collapsed into a black hole, and then those black holes have presumably somehow merged together into this super behemoth of this 100 million solar mass thing.
So we're finding those just 300 million years after the Big Bang.
And that was like, hold on, that doesn't make any sense.
And similarly with the galaxies,
We were seeing these images, these galaxies, and you can date roughly how old they should be based off the redshift.
So the universe is expanding.
So therefore, if something is very far away from us and the universe is expanding, its light gets stretched more and more and more as it journeys over space.
And so we can use that redshift to kind of date how old these things are.
When we use those dates, we look at these images.
Again, they seem suspiciously too old.
You really shouldn't be able to form these things that early on in the universe.
And so that kind of puzzled us.
I think for the galaxy thing, there was a bit of a resolution there.
One of the resolutions is that we probably miscalculated how easy it is to form these galaxies in the first place.
So we had these models for galaxy formation.
We had these models for how stars should form, how quickly they should live.
But it was all essentially calibrated on what we see around us, like right here in this part of the universe, in the local universe.
And then we kind of realized that those same models probably need to be tweaked if you're going to apply them to the early universe where the density is so much higher, the gas temperature is much hotter.
Everything's just completely different in the early universe.
So when you kind of make those corrections, it actually looks like maybe it's actually possible to make those galaxies earlier than we thought.
So I think the galaxy problem is a bit easier to explain.
I think the quasar problem to me is more interesting.
How do you get those supermassive black holes so early?
There's a certain kind of maximum rate you can feed these things called the Eddington limit.
And that's sort of you throw mass into a black hole and so much energy is going in, some of it spews back out.
And the energy which spews back out stops other stuff coming in.
So there's a maximum limit.
You can't build a black hole faster, in principle, than this Eddington limit.
And yet, when you do the calculation, these black holes must have been fed what we call super Eddington, so faster than Eddington.
So something's wrong with our models, right?
We've got the universe age wrong, which I think is...
But I would say that's probably a much less likely solution.
Or we've got the astrophysics wrong.
Because we've got this, you know, like in particle physics, you've got the standard model, which includes like all the particles and the electron, the baryons, all these kind of stuff.
And in cosmology, we have a similar kind of model.
It's called lambda CDM.
And so the lambda stands for dark energy, and the CDM is cold dark matter.
So this is our standard model, and we have used it to explain so much stuff in the universe, Joe.
I mean, we're talking about the cosmic microwave background, oscillations in the sky, it's baryonic acoustic oscillations, the stretching in the universe, cepheids.
You can use it to explain so much stuff, and it works beautifully.
I mean, it works down to like the 0.01% level.
So if you say the universe age is wrong, you have to give that up.
So maybe it is wrong, but if you give that up, you have to come up with a radical new idea which can now explain all of this stuff at that same level of precision.
The much more likely answer in my book is that astrophysics, like the gas swirling around, the plasma colliding with each other, that's just more complicated in my mind than the natural model of just the simple expansion of the universe, which actually is a fairly simple geometric model.
That's what scientists love.
Every time we've built a telescope that is 10 times more precise than the last thing,
Every time we've done that, we have been surprised.
And so these early galaxies are a good example.
The cosmological experiments that are going on now, one of the big surprises is this thing called the Hubble tension.
Have you heard of that?
So Hubble tension is measuring the expansion rate of the universe.
How fast are things flying apart?
And you can do it two ways.
You can use the cosmic microwave backgrounds.
That's the earliest radiation that we can detect.
This is that stuff that's about 3 Kelvin warm.
You can detect in the microwave.
And this is the light which has traveled basically when the universe was 380,000 years old.
It's that light, and we see it in all directions.
That's how we know the Big Bang kind of didn't happen in one place.
It happened everywhere because you just see this light coming in from all directions.
And from studying that radiation, you can kind of get a model of the universe and then you can calculate using this model how fast should the universe be expanding today if I run the clock forward.
And then if you do that same experiment but locally, you actually measure the stars.
You measure the supernovae around us, these pulsating stars, and you actually measure how fast is stuff expanding, you get a different number.
And so this is really weird.
So somehow something's wrong, right?
Either our measurements of the local universe must be wrong in some way, or this model that we're using to calculate the whole history of the universe, something is wrong with that model.
So this is a very famous...
Growing problem in cosmology.
It's now what we call a five sigma level.
So that means the chance of this being random is just like zero, essentially.
It's just this is a real effect.
And now we just have to figure out who's wrong.
Is it the observers or is it the theorists?
Yeah, I swing between both ways.
I'll talk to my cosmology colleagues, and depending on who I talk to, they'll convince me either way.
That's disturbing that people are convinced.
They're trying to push.
I mean, we all have biases, right?
I mean, if you've spent, it's hard, right?
If you've spent 20 years of your life, you know, most of your academic career studying this one thing.
It's really hard to turn around and say, you know what, I screwed up.
The last 20 years of measurements, they were all wrong, and I have to eat humble pie.
But it has happened in some cases.
One of my favorite stories about this is the first exoplanet that was ever claimed, a planet around another star.
one of the first ones, it was wrong.
So it was a pulsar that had a planet, a supposed planet around it, on a six-month orbital period, so exactly half the Earth's orbital period around the sun.
And they saw this signal in their data, this pulsating star was doing something weird, and they figured out there was a six-month period around it.
So the dude published this paper, Matthew Bales, brilliant astronomer, and he realized later on it was wrong.
And instead of it being a real planet, he hadn't quite corrected the orbital eccentricity of the Earth.
So the Earth is not on a circular orbit.
Its eccentricity is 0.0167.
But that number hadn't been accounted for in the calculation.
And so he had to stand up in front of...
Hundreds of astronomers at this famous IOU meeting.
And he admitted he was wrong.
And he got a standing ovation.
It's one of the few times I've heard someone doing that.
I think we need to encourage people to concede that.
I mean, part of the journey of being a scientist is knowing what your own biases are.
And I remember one of my threads in my career has been trying to look for exomoons, moons around these exoplanets, which would be a first if we got them.
You know if I succeed at this.
There could be like, you know, golden prizes, award ceremonies.
Like, you kind of get that glimmer in your eye, like, oh, man, I could be memorialized for this success.
And so that's alluring, right?
It's kind of the same temptation as fame.
And I remember once we had this signal.
It was Kepler 90, no, PHTB was the name of the planet.
And we had this signal, and it kind of looked like just what we expect for an exomoon.
And I remember I was so excited.
I was at Harvard at the time.
I had to walk out of the building.
had to go to a park bench, and I had to just take deep breaths.
I was like, this could be it.
This is the thing I've been searching for.
I was almost hyperventilating with excitement.
And then I remember in that moment- That's how you know you're in the right job.
The passion was there for sure.
That is the job for you.
And I remember thinking to myself, after calming myself down a little bit,
I want this to be true too much.
Like this is, of all the people in the world, I want this to be true the most.
So therefore let's flip that round and I'm gonna have to be the greatest skeptic of this thing because I know I want it to be so bad.
that I have to correct the other direction.
And it ended up being bullshit.
I mean, it ended up being the telescope just misbehaved, had this weird effect called a sudden pixel dropout effect.
This weird anomaly happens one in like 100,000 times, but it just so happened to pop right then, right there in my data.
Yeah, we're still learning that.
We had this picture before we started finding exoplanets that everything would just be like the solar system.
We have these eight planets, circular orbits.
You have the rocky planets on the inside, the gas giants on the outside.
And we came up with this really elegant theory, this kind of nebula theory to try and explain that.
And did a great job, explained everything.
But then as soon as we started finding exoplanets, one of the first type of exoplanets we found was these hot Jupiters.
These are Jupiter-sized planets, which are about 20 times closer to their star than Mercury is around the sun.
And when those were first announced, nobody believed them.
People were like, you can't get a Jupiter there.
Jupiter is supposed to be 5 AU.
How do you get it parked almost onto the surface of the star?
It doesn't make any sense.
None of the planet formation models could explain that.
And it took until we found about 10 of them in a row that people started slowly changing their minds.
And the proof of the pudding was when one of them eclipsed its star.
So one of them actually passed right in front of the star, right at the moment it was supposed to, and we saw an eclipse.
And when that happened, everyone was like, all right, this is real.
But then we had to figure out how the hell do you do that?
So there was a long skeptical curve to get to that point.
And now we think the way to make those things
is there's probably Jupiters on the outside of the solar system.
They come too close to each other.
They're kind of wrestling almost.
They kind of excite each other.
One of them gets kicked out in a random direction.
And it can get flung into a highly eccentric orbit.
And a highly eccentric orbit over time will circularize.
So it doesn't want to stay on an eccentric orbit.
It wants to turn into a circle through the tidal interactions with the star.
So these things probably circularize really close onto their stars.
And it happens about 1% of star systems.
But it's an example of how diverse things are.
Another example is mini-Neptunes.
You ever heard of those planets?
So mini-Neptunes are these planets which are in between the size of the Earth and Neptune.
Neptune's about four times bigger than the Earth.
So these things are about twice the size of the Earth.
We don't have anything like that in the solar system.
So we don't know what it is.
Is it like a super-Earth, a mega-Earth?
Or is it a scaled-down version of Neptune?
Is it like an ocean world maybe of some kind?
And turns out that planet is the most common type of planet in the universe, as far as we can tell.
So that's kind of weird, right?
I mean, it seems like there's so many aspects of our solar system that are unusual.
Even having a Jupiter, only 10% of stars have a Jupiter, as far as we can tell.
10% of how many stars that have been observed?
Oh, at this point, I mean, we've observed hundreds of thousands of stars.
And we know about 6,000 exoplanets.
So of that population, you correct for the sassists, correct for the ones you've missed.
Even so, I mean, these Jupiter's the easiest ones to find, right?
They bobble the star a ton.
So they're pretty easy to spot.
So we're pretty confident that sun-like stars, it's kind of not typical for them to have these Jupiter-sized planets.
And we've got two of them.
So that seems interesting to our own origin in the solar system.
And similarly, having eight planets, that's pretty unusual.
We don't see many systems with that many planets packed together.
How many solar systems are binary solar systems as opposed to having a single star?
Yeah, about half of all stars live in binary systems.
It's actually Alpha Centauri AB.
That's the nearest star system to us.
And it's actually a trinary.
There's Alpha AB that go around each other really close.
And then there's Proxima Centauri, which is on the outside.
And actually, just this morning, Joe, just this morning, there was an announcement of a giant planet around Alpha Centauri.
We don't know if it's confirmed yet, but it's kind of in the habitable zone, so the distance where, in principle, you could have liquid water on the surface of a rocky planet.
So it is a candidate for a planet?
So it hasn't been completely confirmed?
James Webb just spotted it.
James Webb spotted it just come out today.
So there's three photos that James Webb took.
Maybe they'll be in this article somewhere.
It took three images, and in one of those images, it captures an actual photo of the planet.
You can see the planet in direct light.
That's how powerful James Webb is.
And it's a nearby star, so it's easy to image.
That S1, that's the planet you're looking at.
So you have to block out the star in the middle because the star is like a billion times brighter than the planet.
So you have to suppress it with all this advanced chronograph technology that James Webb has.
But when you do that and you zoom right in, you see this little planet there.
It's probably about the same size as Saturn.
It's probably a big boy.
Yeah, it's got to connect to something pop culture, otherwise people are like... Yeah, it's got to get you somehow.
It's probably more like, you know, the three-body problem, the books and the show?
Is the Trisolarans, and they live there.
So there's the three stars, Trisolaran, and the dynamics is so crazy that it pushes these planets into these highly eccentric and twisted orbits.
And that's exactly what this planet appears to be.
So this planet actually looks more like, rather than Avatar, it actually looks more like Trisolaran or Solaris, whatever it's called.
Pull that article back up again, please, Jamie.
It looks like it's about 100 times heavier than the Earth.
So that's about Saturn.
But it's only a candidate, right?
So we need to get more images of it to confirm that it's real.
So I'm sure James Webb will point back at it.
But, I mean, look at it.
It looks pretty convincing.
I mean, how do you get that big blob of light sat there?
So I think the signal-to-noise is really good.
It kind of works, but it makes some bad predictions.
So Bode's law is essentially looking at the separation between the planets and the solar system.
So Venus, for instance, well, Mercury is about 0.4 AU.
So there seems to be a pattern.
And I think it's like a fraction of 1.5 or something in terms of like take the last one and just multiply that 1.5 and you roughly get to the next one.
And is it dependent upon the mass of the planet?
It's just purely their spacing.
So it was – yeah, it has some problems.
It doesn't particularly work that well.
It predicts there's a planet where the asteroid belt is.
And obviously there isn't one there.
But maybe you could argue something happened.
That's probably why the asteroid belt is there, right?
But then more problematically, people have tried to apply this to exoplanets.
So you've got these multi-planet systems, and we know of like maybe three or four planets, and there's gaps.
And so you can say, okay, let's use Bode's law and predict, okay, there should be a planet right here.
And then people have done the observations.
They've like dialed in and put all the telescopes on and be like, where's that planet?
Sometimes they found the planets there, but usually not.
It's not that predictive.
How common are asteroid belts?
We can't detect asteroid belts.
Right, that's the question.
Then we'd be back to Bode's Law.
But Bode's Law, I guess it's actually really a statement.
There's a great dynamicist at Princeton, Scott Tremaine, and he showed this, that if you just try to pack plants as close as you can, like just shove them in like sardines into the solar system, some of them will become unstable and just get kicked out, and the ones that are left will follow Bode's Law.
So it's not so much a statement of like, you know, some deity is putting these plants at the right places.
It's that if you just cram stuff in as much as you can, that's what you end up with.
Like you just can't cram plants any closer together.
So what is our current belief system when it comes to the formation of solar systems?
It appears to be very common.
I mean, when we look at the data we have from the Kepler mission, NASA's extraordinary successful mission, it detected itself something like 4,000 exoplanets.
And that tells us that on average, every single star has a planet.
So as far as we can tell, it's pretty hard for a star not to have planets.
It's like par for the course for that to happen.
That was a big breakthrough.
the second thing is as we kind of alluded to there's a huge diversity in them and the actual story we normally describe how they form is that there's some you know giant molecular cloud we call it so basically a giant cloud of hydrogen in space stuff that could have been blown off from a previous supernova or something or maybe even in the early universe just primordial gas from the big bang just this leftover hydrogen gas and if there's be some areas where there'll be slightly higher density in some areas where there's slightly lower density just due to random fluctuations
And the higher densities will self-gravitate.
So gravity wants to make, it's like a greedy algorithm, wants to make everything get denser and denser and denser, super greedy.
It's relentless, gravity.
And that's why eventually we end up with black holes, right?
Because it just refuses to lose black holes.
Gravity always wants to win the game.
So eventually these clouds collapse, and the thing that stops them from collapsing into a black hole is that you start getting fusion in the center, right?
Because the temperatures get so hot as you compress this gas that you basically make a star in the center.
And the stuff that's left over on the outside, that disk of material, because the star kind of blasts out of its poles and kind of pummels all the gas from north and south, you end up with a disk of material, the centrifugal forces, like spinning a pizza ball, which kind of force it into a disk.
And then from that disk, you start to coalesce again, just some areas are slightly denser, some areas are slightly less dense, and gravity again takes over and starts to collapse things together.
So we have this story, but there's lots of parts of the story that we don't understand.
So we know how to go, for instance, from pebbles, if you start off with pebbles.
And imagine them kind of bouncing around.
We can imagine sticking them into boulders.
We kind of understand how that could happen.
But we don't quite understand how to do some of the steps like go all the way from dust, which presumably at one point was just dust.
How do you go from dust all the way up to pebbles, all the way up to these boulders, all the way up to planetesimals?
That whole story we don't understand.
We've got bits of it where we think we understand it, but the whole thing we don't.
Yeah, this is a hugely, huge active area of research.
People are simulating dust on supercomputers, trying to stick it together, figure out what happened.
I mean, you've got trillions and trillions of particles of dust randomly moving around and...
So solving the equations to calculate their motion is one of the most challenging things ever.
Maybe AI will help a big part with that.
Yeah, I mean, our star is – I mean, those big stars, those are actually rare, right?
So those are the giant stars of the universe, and most stars are not that big.
What is the biggest one that we found?
Oh, I don't know the name, but yeah, I think you're talking about stars which are probably filling up to the orbit of Jupiter type size.
And these things are barely stars at that point.
Like if you actually, if you could zoom in a spaceship and look at the surface, it would, the gravity would be so weak at that point, right?
Because the mass hasn't changed of the star.
In fact, if anything, it's lost mass.
So it's barely got enough gravity to hold that thing together.
So the thing is like fluctuating.
It's like a giant sheet that someone's waving up and down.
So that's why those stars have these wild fluctuations in brightness because they're just kind of undulating on their surface.
That's the name of the biggest one, I guess.
And what's crazy is that the most common type of star in the universe is even smaller than the sun.
Yeah, the most common type of star in the universe is a red dwarf.
75% of all stars are red dwarfs.
Only 10% of stars look like our sun.
So already that's kind of odd.
You kind of think all things being equal, how can we not live around a red dwarf?
Yeah, the difference is it's always easier to make a small thing, right?
It's kind of like having crumbs down your sofa or something, like breaking up, right?
It's easier to have small, dusty things than it is to have huge pieces of cookies still left in the bottom of your sofa.
So generally, it's pretty hard for the conditions to come together to make a gigantic, supermassive star.
In the early universe, those conditions were present more often because it was just so dense.
But as we go forward in time, it gets harder and harder to make those super huge behemoths.
These stars, they're called the type three population stars.
And we haven't found one of those.
James Webb might be able to detect one.
Those would be the first stars ever born.
They're like the primordial pristine stars that would be uncontaminated by any metals.
So our sun has a ton of metals in it.
We can use that to figure out how old they are and their history.
But the first stars would have been just these pure, pristine hydrogen helium things.
We'd love to be able to see what they look like because we've never seen one of those up close.
But generally, yeah, the smaller you are, the easier it is to make that star.
Yeah, those stars would be the first stars.
So you're probably looking at 100 million years after the Big Bang.
So, yeah, you'd have to look back to, you know, 13.7, 13.8 billion years ago.
Is the James Webb capable of seeing that?
I think it's possible.
Yeah, I don't think there's consensus on this.
I've seen some people say it might just about be possible and others say it's completely impossible.
You need the next generation.
But I think if we're lucky, it could just happen.
The ultimate... I mean, I love this idea of thinking about what would an alien do?
How would an alien observe...
the earth if they had you know unbounded technology what would be the limit and a lot of us think that the ultimate telescope would be uh to use the sun as a telescope so the sun has intense gravity and it bends light so this was an experiment that arthur eddington did to prove einstein right general relativity he took photographs of the stars during a lunar total eclipse
And he noticed that stars seem to shift right next to the sun.
And so he used that to figure out how much light bends.
So whenever you have light bending, that's a telescope.
So you can take light that's coming from behind the sun.
And that focus point, we know where it is.
It's about 550 times further out than we are around the sun.
And if you just travel out in a line from that point, it's called a focal line, you put a telescope there, it would essentially have the collecting area of the sun.
So you could image continents, rivers, even cities on a nearby exoplanet if you could put something there.
That is the ultimate in my book for what an alien would do.
If they want to observe Earth, they would just put behind their sun, they'd stick one of those telescopes, and they'd be able to monitor a hell of a lot about the Earth from there.
I mean, even with this telescope, you can't see people.
You wouldn't be able to image us.
You wouldn't be able to read the headlines on a newspaper on someone's doorstep.
It's not powerful enough to do that.
If you want to do that, you'd have to visit the system.
And so we're talking about doing that as well.
So there was this project Starshot that wanted to fly a probe directly towards the nearest star, fly by super fast, snap a photo, and beam it back.
Because that way you could actually get even better resolution, right?
You could really dial in and see roads and structures on the surface.
How long would it take for that beam to get back to us?
Well, it's four light years away, 4.2 light years away.
So it would take four years?
Yeah, and it would take about 20 years to do the journey at the speeds they were talking.
They want to get 20% the speed of light.
So they'd take 20 years, take a photo, so 24 years altogether.
So this was Yuri Milner's brainchild, and his dream was that he could see a photo in his lifetime of another Earth-like planet.
And that's pretty much the best way we have to really pull that off.
Is there work being done to try to make that happen?
Yeah, so I'm not sure the current status of Starshot.
Yuri put $100 million up, I believe, for his own money.
And I think Mark Zuckerberg came in on it and they were like, we're going to try and do this.
I wasn't part of that project, but I was inspired by it.
And I actually came up with a twist on it recently called TARS from Interstellar.
You know TARS from the movie?
It's like a robot thing that's in the movie.
And so I came up with a twist on their idea.
So let me explain their idea quickly first and then I'll give you my twist.
Their idea is like if you really want to go to the nearest star system, you're not going to do it with a giant spaceship.
That's just, you know, we can't build anything that advanced right now.
The most realistic thing we can do is to get a tiny, thin sheet of material, like imagine a piece of mylar, a piece of aluminum foil, and blast it with light, with a laser.
And so they're talking about sort of 100 gigawatts of laser power, right?
So just kind of crazy amounts of energy.
So here's the sail being ejected.
And then back on the Earth, you're going to have this huge array of
of mega lasers, and they're all gonna point up at this thing and blast it.
So this thing will accelerate due to just light from the sun, but this is like on steroids, right?
You're just kind of bumping it up to whatever speed you want.
When people saw this idea, physicists saw this idea, there was a lot of questions about how, isn't that gonna destroy the sail?
You're firing a 100 gigawatt laser at a sail?
Isn't that gonna obliterate the thing?
So this thing has to be outrageously shiny to avoid burning up in the beam.
And then, of course, how do you... What if it hits dust on the way?
That's why it's on its side now.
So it's twisted over on its side to try and avoid smashing into dust particles on its journey.
Hopefully a flock of birds doesn't catch a stray.
And here it comes into Proxima Centauri, into the Alpha Centauri system.
There's Proxima down the right.
And so it's going to fly past...
There is actually a planet there.
We know there's a planet there.
It's going to fly past it and try and snap a photo.
And then beam that bad boy back.
I mean, how do you even get the data transmission rate to beam an image back?
Just imagine if it gets there and we see lights.
Yeah, obviously if it's completely recognizable, there's nothing we can really do to detect it.
But when we look – I mean we basically know two things about the universe in terms of life in it.
We know that we have not been colonized, right, as far as we can tell.
Depends on whose YouTube videos you watch.
Let's talk about a hard colonization where it's literally- They're everywhere.
It's transforming the freaking planet into machines.
That clearly has not happened here.
We're not gray goo on the surface.
So we know that hasn't happened.
And we also know, and the universe, the galaxy's old.
It's 13 billion years old.
So there's a heck of a lot of time for that to happen.
One of the strangest facets of our technology is that it's already fast enough to explore the whole galaxy.
If you take Voyager 2, it was traveling at 15 kilometers per second.
So that would get you across the entire diameter of the galaxy in 2 billion years.
And the galaxy is 13 billion years.
So Voyager 2, at Voyager 2 speeds, crappy alien technology out there could already have spanned the whole thing if they just arrived early enough.
And this is called fact A, Hart's fact A. This clearly hasn't happened.
That's one thing we know for sure.
And the other thing we know for sure is that when we look out, we don't see, you know, we look at these stars like Stevenson and Proxima Centauri, we don't see engineering on them.
as far as we can tell.
We don't see stars which are obviously got megastructures around them, obviously been engineered in weird ways.
Yeah, I mean, huge structures could be built around these things like Dyson spheres, and people have talked about doing it for messaging.
You could put sheets of material that were planet-sized, and as they block light from the star, that would create a Morse code.
You could actually message people
For billions of years, you would just build these stable sheets of material, and they would just orbit around, no power system required, right?
An orbit doesn't require power.
It would just orbit around for billions of years, and every time an eclipse is the star, there could be some intricate pattern of pulses.
And so that way you could communicate for a very long time.
You know, we thought of all these wild ideas, and we just don't see any of that.
So it does seem, as far as we can tell, that the universe is completely natural.
And that is mind-blowing because you're right.
Like it seems if it's happened here, why the hell shouldn't it happen elsewhere?
Why isn't someone else got AI going crazy?
Why hasn't someone else gone even further than that, gone to the next level?
And the thing that really drives me wild with this is the Earth is like a paradise.
If you look at these other stars, these other planets, the Earth is unusual.
Most stars do not have an Earth-like planet.
It's like a level of maybe 1%, 2% at best.
And yet, here we have the Earth.
It not only is an Earth-like planet, has the right conditions for life, it has life on it.
So an alien could use their sun-sized telescope to figure that out.
They would know we were here.
They would know not only we're here, but that there is complex life on this planet.
So for three and a half, three billion years, there was just simple life, just single-celled life on this planet.
Multicellular life is a recent thing.
So presumably that's rare, right?
If most of the time it's single-celled, most of the planets out there, presumably even if they have life on them, are in that state.
And then further, there's us here, right?
And we're going through this transitional point as a human society.
So you think if you're an anthropologist, this would be like an incredibly fascinating world to study.
I think there's almost like a tourism paradox.
How come Earth is the perfect place to visit?
And yet we don't see any super obvious signs.
Some people feel differently about that.
But certainly astronomers, we don't see in our telescope data spaceships flying around through our field of view.
Yeah, if you want to do a proper anthropology experiment, you don't want to interfere with the experiment.
But then the problem with that is it becomes essentially unscientific.
So if you come up with a hypothesis that says there's aliens here, but they're completely by definition undetectable to us, then it's not like it's an incredible idea.
It doesn't mean the idea is wrong.
It just means science is not going to have the tools to answer that question.
Of course, because there's no evidence.
Sagan, I think, had this famous example like this dragon where he said –
Imagine I've got Carl Sagan, imagine he had like this pet dragon and he'd talk to people and say, I've got a pet dragon in the room with me.
And they'd be like, well, where is it?
Oh, you can't see it because it's invisible.
So they'd walk across the room and they'd try to touch it and be like, I can't feel it.
It's like, oh yeah, you can't feel it either.
It's also impervious to touch.
So they'd be like, okay, so I'll put my infrared goggles on and try and see the heat signature.
Oh, you can't see that either.
It doesn't emit any radiation.
So you can just keep going and going and saying it's just completely imperceptible.
You can have that idea that you have a pet invisible, imperceptible dragon.
But I can't address that with the tools of science.
So I'm not saying it's a crazy idea.
It's just that I can't think of a way to actually test it.
Like everyone, I'm fascinated by it.
Something shady going on.
Yeah, I'd love to make this ingestible to science.
That's sort of been my goal.
Like, how can science take a hold of this?
And, you know, when we do these experiments, I mean, I told you about this moon that I thought I'd found, and it turned out it was the instrument being crazy.
Because sometimes instruments do crazy stuff that we don't understand.
So the only way to figure that out is to get hold of the instrument.
We need to get it in our labs and take that thing apart and test it and calibrate it, et cetera.
And we don't have access to those military devices.
So we can't even do that experiment.
But I can imagine thinking about how to do that.
One of the big numbers we don't know, even with the visual reports, is the false positive rate.
So this is a key number in science.
Whenever you do an experiment, you need to know how often does the experiment produce something that's spurious, the false positive rate.
Now, in the US, there's about 28,000 pilots across all military branches, and they fly something like 200 hours per year on average.
So that's 5.6 million hours
in the air every year, in one year.
Now let's say a pilot, one in every 10,000 hours that they fly, they make a mistake.
They misidentify a balloon for UAP or whatever it is.
That's an incredibly low, by the way, error rate to have.
But even then, you'd end up with 560 UAPs a year made that way.
All spurious, all not real, just from human error.
So the only way, and that's actually pretty similar to Project Blue, but Project Blue found about 742 per year was being reported.
So, you know, I made that number up, one in 10,000.
But we need to know what that number is.
If it turns out there's an excess, like the error rate is 100,000, then that Project Blue number is super interesting.
And it would be an excess.
And we'd say we've detected something.
There's a real anomaly here that we have to look at.
But the problem is we don't know what that number is.
I mean, you'd have to somehow put these pilots in like simulators or something where you have complete control conditions for thousands of hours and somehow test how often do they make these mistakes.
Yeah, but even so, I'm just giving you sort of ballpark.
I mean, the NASA UAP task force was similar kind of numbers.
You're getting like hundreds per year of these sorts of events, right?
I don't think that's a crazy number to throw around.
So the whole point is that whatever numbers you choose...
you have to know the error rate of the experiment.
And we could imagine making that legit and doing it.
There's actually one of the recommendations of the task force, the NASA UAP task force, was to develop an app on people's phones, iPhones, because they have magnometers on them, they have GPS, they have the camera, these high-resolution images.
So there's enough instrumentation on there, and it's all the same, and we understand that technology, that you could have 10 people video the same UFO,
And you'd be able to triangulate the position, the speed, get the distance to it.
You'd get all that kind of information.
And so there is actually, I think there's an app called Enigma you can now download that does this.
There's some independent apps which have been developed to do this.
Yeah, for UAP spotting.
Actually, I chatted to one of the developers and they said, yeah, things were going crazy that week.
What was that all about?
It really sucks that we live in an age of drones and so many Starlink satellites because if you see something in the sky now, your immediate reaction is that's probably a human-controlled vehicle.
If you could go back to the 1940s and 1930s, if you had UAP reports then, I think they'd be more convincing because that's pre-Sputnik.
There shouldn't be anything in orbit of the Earth at that point.
So that would be more compelling.
But of course, we can't rewind the tape.
Yeah, I think it depends what your goal is.
If your goal is to convince yourself that aliens are out there because you saw a UFO, I think that's easy enough to do.
But most people in that world, they want more than that.
They want me to believe it.
They want you to believe it.
They want everyone to believe it to come along for the ride.
It's like having a religious guy come knock your door, like, join my church.
It's not enough for them to have the personal belief.
And so if you really want to convince everyone, that's going to naturally include the skeptics, the doubters.
It's going to include the scientists.
If you want to bring everyone in with you, then the standard of evidence is going to be pretty damn good.
It's got to be really strong.
And we're just not there.
There's too many ways out right now.
But then why the UFOs at all?
Just the existence, as long as we have nukes, there is a chance every year that some guy will push that button, right?
We have this tribalism in us, this competition, and that has undoubtedly led... All the greatest innovations in science often happen during war, right?
You have the invention of radio.
So many advances in avionics and flight happened during the wars.
Munitions, all this kind of stuff.
It pushes us, it drives us to innovate, to get one over our neighbors.
And maybe that is the universal story of the universe, is a double-edged sword.
And that's the solution to the Great Filter.
The silver lining of this would be, well, not for us necessarily, but the silver lining would be if other civilizations do this, there's kind of like this supernova effect in astronomy, and it's true for planets as well, that the easiest stars to discover are the supernovae, right?
Because they just shine so freaking bright.
They can outshine an entire galaxy, right?
Because they're going nuts.
It only lasts for maybe a few months or so, but the star is outshining an entire freaking galaxy during that time.
It is like a nuclear war going on inside that star.
And similarly, the first planets we found, the hot Jupiters, are freaks.
They are not normal things.
They're like the loud Lindsay Lohan in the room screaming at us.
It's super easy to see.
There's no way you can miss them.
They're obnoxious planets.
You can't not detect them.
And so by analogy, we've seen this so many times in astronomy, the first thing we detect, the first example of something we detect is often not typical.
It's often that loud asshole version of the thing.
And so maybe the first civilization we detect will be like that.
If they were on their deathbed, they're about to nuke each other to hell, they have a good motivation to reach out to us because they've got nothing to lose.
We might be worried right now because maybe we could see we've got a future ahead of us, but if you think this is it, I'm done, what have you got to lose?
You may as well send a message out saying, hey, we were here.
Please help us if you can because we're about to go to hell.
Well, the Starshot thing, I remember some team members talked about that.
I was in some of the meetings and they said, maybe we should like lace human DNA into the sail.
So when it hits this planet, at least our DNA, because it's looking grim here.
At least then there's like a seed of us.
Yeah, I love seeing them.
The Museum of Natural History has this awesome exhibit.
And you can just see them crawling all across the museum.
And, yeah, my kids and I were just like, yeah.
What you're describing is actually kind of similar to, there's a guy called Robin Hanson, an economist, and he has this idea called loud aliens, grabby aliens, and he says the thing we do
as an intelligent species, is transform our environment.
If you're a deer and you come across New York City, it's not like you're going to miss that thing.
It's right in front of you.
There's no way you can miss it.
So how come we don't see beehives in the stars?
I mean, this is kind of the fundamental problem.
And he argues that that is an innate thing that an intelligent species should do.
He's coming from the economic...
Economic sides, that's kind of how economists think about things, is this kind of growing exponential expansion of capitalism, essentially, across the universe.
And yet we don't see it.
So his explanation is that it's happening, but it's a wave of colonization.
It's spreading at the speed of light.
And if it spreads close to the speed of light, you don't see it until it hits you.
You can't perceive it because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
So here's this prediction.
I'm a little bit skeptical about it for various reasons.
But yeah, people have thought about that and suggested it.
My own take is that the most likely form of alien contact we'll have
will actually be with a future inhabitant of the earth so the earth has about a billion years left on the clock a long time right so it's four and a half billion years old and it's had complex life for about 600 million years 700 million years roughly so there's another roughly a billion to go and
where we should have the same kind of stable climatic conditions we have now.
And once you've got the eukaryote cell, photosynthesis, all these advanced biological innovations, they don't go away.
They persist in the genetic heritage.
So even if something happens to us, and obviously I'm not hoping that would happen,
But if something happened to us, I don't think you're going to extinguish every human.
I don't think you're going to extinguish every octopus, every raven.
And there's intelligence across the animal kingdom, like chimp.
It's all over the place.
Intelligence, my provocative claim, is one of these great events that have happened in evolutionary sense.
It's very speculative, this idea, I have to say.
But like how photosynthesis emerged and plants emerged, that was an event which changed the history of the planet forever.
Intelligence, I think, is the same thing.
It's here and you can't get rid of it.
It's like an infestation.
It's too advantageous to species to be intelligent not to do it once they've discovered that genetic solution.
So I think we will have beings on this planet a billion years.
It will probably happen many times.
There'll be civilizations which will emerge and they'll be like, what the fuck did these humans do?
like they'll be astonished at the shit we got up to and uh there'll be a lesson there for them but it's always an opportunity for us to contact them because we could leave them a message right we could put a beacon on the moon we could put something there and we could be like hey guys this is everything we learned this is all our science this is all our art these are our songs unload an update every couple of years right do like a foundation type thing and i think i think that is
If I had to bet on the odds of what is the most likely way we're going to make contact with another intelligent species in a meaningful way, I think it's going to be descendants of us.
Deep descendants who will be a completely different species.
They're going to do it.
It kind of creates a problem though for the Fermi paradox, right?
Because then if this is the inevitable outcome and maybe you can explain why we don't see engineered stars because –
a chimpanzee brain is basically just not smart enough to ever do that.
No matter how hard we try, our dumb little brains will never figure that out.
And maybe the electronic brain's not motivated to do it.
I mean, that's where it gets tricky.
Like, what is the motivation of this new thing we're creating?
One might imagine all he wants to do is solve math problems or something, right?
But whatever it is, if it's driven by computation,
That computation is limited by energy.
And we all know this, right, because the amount of energy these data centers are now consuming for, you know, for meta and for chat GBT, like it's gigantic.
So these AI civilizations will be very energy hungry.
And you'd think that'd be something that, you know, harvesting stellar energy on a massive scale, you'd think that'd be something we'd see.
So to me, actually, if anything, kind of exacerbates the Fermi paradox, right?
Because if you imagine they're roaming around, all they'd want to do is basically turn planets into computers.
Next planet, let's just turn that whole thing into computer substrate.
Let's just harvest all the goddamn energy off that star.
You'd be like a virus just transforming the universe from state A to state B. That would be your one reasonable goal because then you could do more computation, more computation, more computation.
If that's your only goal, it does pose more of a problem.
It seems that we're the first, right?
Because we don't see that happening elsewhere.
Yeah, but if those drones are doing labor, they're doing work, that's energy, right?
So I think, I mean, maybe you can get around- Right, but what is the energy?
I don't think that matters because unless we don't understand thermodynamics, but probably the strongest thing we have is the conservation of energy in thermodynamics, right?
If you do computation in these data centers or even on your laptop, it warms up, right?
And there's no way around that, right?
Whenever you put energy in, that same energy has to come back out.
Otherwise, it's just sort of trapped in there forever.
So the conservation of energy demands that energy has to come back out or come at a different temperature.
It could come out as neutrinos.
It could come out as gravitational waves.
But it has to come back out in some way.
So normally, you know, when we look for these advanced civilizations, we've done searches for these things.
And they're really just energy transformers.
It's probably not even worth saying like Dyson sphere or some particular structure.
It's just something that converts star energy.
That's what we've searched for.
And we've searched for over 100,000 nearby stars for them.
There's not a single one that shows that behavior.
And 100,000 galaxies around us.
And we don't see it on mass scale in any of those galaxies.
So unless they're doing something that goes against thermodynamics, they have super magical technology we can't imagine.
And it's hard to believe that story makes sense.
And I guess in terms of their behavior, what I say to you is you kind of are falling into what we sometimes call the monocultural fallacy, some of my colleagues call.
And that's the imagining that all of these alien AGI's or biologicals, whatever they are, they all do the same thing.
Everyone does exactly the same thing.
But there's probably going to be a diversity of behaviors, right?
It's pretty rare that everyone in the room wants to do exactly the same thing.
So it's not unreasonable.
There'll be some loud civilization, there'll be some quiet ones, there'll be some blowing themselves up in nukes, there'll be some who are pacifists.
I mean, infinite diversity and infinite combinations.
Well, I think I'm a little bit controversial because I'm one of the few colleagues of mine.
Well, I'm not a colleague of myself, but one of the few astronomers I know who concede that we might be alone.
I'm open to that idea.
I'm not saying it's true.
Well, we don't have any evidence that we're not alone.
So it is a possibility.
It really kind of pisses me off, to be honest, when an astronomer is interviewed in a situation like this.
And they're asked, do you think there are aliens out there?
And so, yeah, of course, how can there not be?
How can there not, the universe is so big, blah, blah, billions of stars, of course, ergo, there must be aliens.
But we have no idea what the probability of life starting is.
I mean, even to make a moderate-sized protein,
A protein is just a chain of amino acids, and there's about 20 that go into making a protein.
And a moderate-sized protein has 150 proteins in a row connected together.
So the chance of amino acids randomly coming together to make even a moderate-sized protein is 20 to the power of 150.
So that's 10 to the power of 195, right?
So one with 195 zeros after it.
It's just incredibly unlikely that would happen by chance.
And we've never observed it in the lab.
No one's ever got amino acids to spontaneously form anything like a life form or proteins in a laboratory setting.
There's some unknown mechanism that accelerates that process, and we just haven't found it yet.
But it's also plausible it was just incredibly unlikely.
And maybe if you look out across 10 to the 22 stars in our universe, observable universe, there's just one success –
Now, the universe is probably infinite, so probably if you travel far enough, you'll eventually come to someone else.
But by all intents and purposes, we may as well be alone in that case, because they're outside our observable universe, so who cares what they're up to?
So I'm open to that possibility.
I'm not saying it's likely, but I think as a good scientist, I can't tell you, yeah, of course there is, because that's now falling into experimenter's bias.
I'm deciding what the answer is before I've done the experiment.
My job is to figure out the answer.
Like, boy, we better not fuck this up.
We are essentially the only, we may be the way the universe is conscious, right?
We are the way the universe is self-aware.
And so it's kind of wild that we live during the period where this is all happening.
You could have been born any one of the hundreds of thousands, million years humans have been on this planet.
You could have been born at any point in human history.
And we all happen to be, all of us listening, happen to be born at the time that humanity is going through this growing pains of figuring out probably the most deep, provocative problem we're ever going to face as a civilization.
And if anything, that pushes me towards the simulation hypothesis, right?
Because if you were going to study a period, this would be probably one of the most interesting periods that you'd want to study.
As a teacher, as a professor, it's a nightmare, right?
Because in the classroom, students are all using it.
There's been a trend we've noticed that students who take labs, so that's like practical experiments in the laboratory, their scores are always crappy, but then all their other exams and everything else they're doing, the homework assignments, they're all great.
And so it seems like that has flipped.
It used to always be kind of the other way around.
So it seems like whenever you have to do something where you don't have access to chat GPT, suddenly you're doing worse than you used to because we're getting already hooked on it.
We're already so dependent on it that the students are just using this as a crutch to get through their studies.
So what are we even doing anymore as professors?
So our IQ could just slip off a cliff.
It seems kind of weird.
We're being hit by all sides right now.
There's threat of nuclear war.
There's climate change.
There's contamination in our food.
It's just like everything all at once.
And then asteroids, which I wanted to talk to you about.
Yeah, this is a photo.
It just dropped yesterday.
And this is from the Hubble Space Telescope.
So, yeah, Avi was suggesting this could be alien, an alien spacecraft of some kind.
He's obviously done this before with Oumuamua, which you might remember.
I think he came on here and talked about that.
I don't like throwing shit at other scientists.
That's just not how I jam.
I try to be respectful and appreciative of his contributions, of any scientist's contributions.
And I think some of his work, I was actually referencing some of his work just the other day to get inspired for another paper.
So he's had a huge impact in so many different areas.
I do think he's off base on this one, but he doesn't need to be persecuted for that.
I just think he's made the wrong call.
With this particular object, there was three reasons, I think, why he thought this could be alien.
One was the size of the thing appeared to be really big.
So it was unclear originally whether it was an asteroid or a comet.
And that makes a big difference.
If it's a comet, then it's probably a really small thing surrounded by puffy dust around it.
So what you see is actually not the true size.
The true size is much smaller than what you see.
It's just all the coma, as we call it, around it.
If it's an asteroid, then that whole thing is a giant rock, right?
It's freaking huge in that case.
It'd be like 10 to 20 kilometers bigger than Mount Everest.
It'd be a huge piece of rock.
But you know, I think Abby's probably made the wrong bet on that one because as we saw in the in the Hubble image That there's a freaking coma on that thing.
There's no doubt and we've actually imaged it with Hubble Space Telescope James yesterday So it is a comet.
It discredits the idea because his idea was if it's 10 to 20 kilometers in size, that just shouldn't happen.
That's too big by chance for a rock to stray into the solar system that's that big because there just shouldn't be that many big rocks lurking around in deep space.
If it's a smaller comet, there's actually a size estimate now that puts it at a couple of kilometers, I think, as the upper limit.
Yeah, so that makes it, if it's 300 meters across, I mean, it's just a completely normal comet.
Yeah, because you can see this diffuse coma all around it.
There's actually, even today, there was a paper on Published.
that detected water coming off it.
Which is what comets do.
They produce OH emission as they fly through.
So we know without any doubt it's a comet at this point.
But there's still some weird things.
It's moving really freaking fast.
That was the other thing Avi pointed out.
It's moving 58 kilometers per second, which is...
Yeah, hugely quick through the solar system.
I think that just means it's old.
So generally what happens is as rocks hang out in deep space, they encounter other stars.
And every time they encounter a star, they get slingshotted basically.
So they kind of speed up a little bit every time they encounter something.
So generally you expect that the older something is, the more it's been pumped up in terms of its speed.
So Oumuamua was moving really slowly.
And Ivy said it's moving suspiciously slowly, therefore it's aliens.
And then for this one, it's moving really fast.
And I'd be saying it's moving so fast, it's suspicious, therefore it's aliens.
So I think that doesn't really jive.
I think that doesn't make any sense.
It's probably just an old rock that's about 7 billion years old.
And that's cool because it's older than the solar system, right?
So if we intercept that thing, we could sample material from not only another star system, but before even a whole solar system existed.
Well, it's going to be here in October, right?
It's already about maybe two and a half AU from the sun.
It will pass behind the sun in October and then come on its way back out.
So James Webb is observing it right now or just a couple of days ago was observing it.
And then it will observe again on the way out in November.
So it's going to be behind the sun.
So that was the other thing Avi was pointing out was the trajectory is a little bit suspicious because it kind of goes behind the sun.
We can't observe it when it's at closest approach.
That's called perihelion.
We can't observe it then because it just happens to be behind the sun.
And it comes very close to Mars as well.
So it comes within about 0.2 astronomical units of Mars.
So it's not like it would be a threat to Mars.
It's still really far out.
But it comes suspiciously close, Avi claimed.
And to me, I don't buy that as evidence for aliens because if they're aliens, they seem more interested in Mars than they do the Earth.
Why would you choose your closest approach to be when you can't even observe the Earth at all because you're behind the sun?
And the closest planet you come to...
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me as to what the motive there would be.
So, yeah, and I think the fact now it just clearly looks like a comet kind of pours a lot of cold water on it.
But I do think it's not a crazy idea that this could be happening.
It's a valid scientific hypothesis that there could be stuff going through our solar system, which is not natural.
And we're going to detect hundreds of these things with the Rubin telescope.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
So I think there's an exciting future for this field to try and intercept these things.
There's a mission the Europeans are building called the Comet Interceptor.
It's going to launch in 2029.
And that's just going to hang out in deep space waiting for the next one to come.
And they haven't necessarily committed to an interstellar object at this point, but they could do it.
And they could turn on the engines and catch up with that thing, sample it, land on it.
I mean, that would be dope.
That'd be landing on an exoplanet.
That'd be like seeing stuff from another entire star system for the first time.
We've done it with... The Japanese have done it a couple of times, I think, with comets.
Amino acids are all over the place.
They're in deep space.
They're on these comets.
So amino acids are common.
Organic molecules are common.
I mean, we never touched a protein anywhere.
So there's a big step.
You know, you've got the jigsaw pieces, but no one has seen the jigsaw pieces magically arrange themselves into the right position.
I don't know how likely it is for the Earth because it doesn't really help, I don't think, in any meaningful way.
So maybe you'd say that it depends what you're talking about, panspermia between star systems or panspermia just between the planets in the solar system.
Oh, yeah, this was 67P.
Yeah, the Rosetta mission landed on Comet 67P, yeah.
Look at all that dust coming off the thing.
That's what's happening to Atlas right now.
If you could go on the surface of Atlas, it would probably look something like that.
It's so wild when you realize these things are real.
You look at the images of the Mars landers or landing on Titan.
You realize this isn't something you look through a telescope for the first time.
You're like, this isn't fiction.
This stuff's really out there.
And there's not just this.
making exoplanets across the entire galaxy.
It's so mind-bending when you just stop and take a breath and think about what the hell is out there.
No, this is ESA mission, I think.
Yeah, it was that mission.
Yeah, it kind of got stuck in the ravine, which is kind of unfortunate, actually, where it landed.
Because it could have been even more breathtaking if it got a better spot.
Yeah, I mean, there could be all kinds of weird life out there, right?
I mean, what about if it's just like a fungus, right?
The whole plant is a fungus, and that's it.
It's never known other life forms at all, and that's just its whole thing.
I mean, it's certainly possible.
I think the problem is that you look at the genetic heritage of life and this tree of life and you kind of rewind the tape.
There was a great study that's done recently in Nature by Moody et al.
And I found it really inspiring, this paper, because they had dated what's called Luca, which is the last universal common ancestor.
So we have a huge number of genes which are the same as each other.
But even with giraffes, octopuses, plants, there's a huge number of overlap.
So you can kind of retrace the tree and figure out what was the organism that started it all, that lived at the bottom of this tree.
And that's called Luca.
And that thing, they've now age-dated it to live 4.2 billion years ago.
So the oceans formed about 4.4 billion years ago.
And 200 million years after that, you've got organisms.
These things would have been all over the planet, all over the place.
There was a whole ecosphere at that point of these things.
So that was quick that life got going.
And that to me is probably the most compelling reason to believe that life is common.
I mean, Europa could have life on the weird exoplanet.
So it's certainly possible there's life all over the place.
I think what's interesting about the cosmic zoom out perspective of life is why do we live not where we live, but when we live in the history of the universe.
So the universe is about 13.8 billion years old.
But it should last for trillions, trillions of years.
There will still be stars in a trillion years from now.
There'll be those red dwarf stars I talked about at the beginning.
So we often say stars are kind of like James Deans of the universe, like the brighter you burn, the shorter your life.
And so these little puny red dwarf stars, they're so pitiful.
They're only about 100 times the mass of Jupiter, 80 times the mass of Jupiter.
So sometimes people call Jupiter like a failed star.
If you make Jupiter...
80 times more massive, it would have burned.
It would have had nuclear fusion.
And those stars, they last for a freaking long time, like trillions of years.
And we know they have planets around them.
We've even found Earth-sized planets at the right distance for liquid water around those stars.
And they appear to be really quite common around those stars.
So the mystery is, you know, if you run the calculation, I was doing this a couple of days ago,
there's about a one in a thousand chance that you would live at this early point in the history of the universe, all things being equal.
If these stars legitimately could have planets around them and biospheres whenever they want throughout their history, then you would be very... It's kind of like reading a book and opening a random page and you happen to land on the first couple of pages of the book.
And that's where we land.
That is very difficult to understand for me.
I think all things being equal, you should expect to live at the end of the universe or the middle of the universe or something.
And it makes me think there's something wrong with these red dwarf stars.
Maybe they're just not allowed or the other alternative is a cataclysm.
There's something that happens to the universe itself that makes it totally inhospitable to life in the future.
That's the other way around it.
And that's kind of what this Robin Hanson grabby aliens is trying to do, this loud aliens.
There might be AI comes along.
It just takes over everything.
And you can't live a trillion years from now because there's nothing left.
It's all just AGI at that point.
So biological beings could not emerge then.
So we have to come at the beginning because otherwise we wouldn't be here.
It's kind of philosophy rather than science, I'd say.
I did write a paper about it a while ago, and I just kind of pushed back against something Elon Musk said about this.
So he said, in a quote, something like, there's a billion to one chance that we don't live in a simulation.
And he was just sort of running the numbers of sort of, you know, if they run trillions and trillions of simulations, then what's the chance you're in the real one?
The problem with that assumption is that you have to assume it's possible to make lifelike simulations.
And we don't know that's true.
So, again, putting my good scientist hat on, once we've demonstrated that it's possible, then I will agree with Elon Musk on that fact.
But until that has been demonstrated, then I'm just going to give it 50-50 odds.
But I love this, and I know you've had Sean Carroll on here, I think, before.
He has a really clever comment about the simulation hypothesis that I've sort of been thinking about a little bit.
Maybe you call it like Carroll's contradiction, if you like.
And it's the idea that if we are simulated, and we ourselves start making our own simulations in the future, and those simulations make their own simulations, you get this kind of hierarchy.
And eventually there'll be some bottom level because every time we run a computer, it's got a finite amount of computational power.
So therefore, the inhabitants of that computer must necessarily have less computational resources than we do, right?
Because we could run a whole bunch of them.
They live in just one machine.
So they only have access to what's in there.
So every level has less and less fidelity, less computational power.
And eventually you'd get to a level where it was kind of like Donkey Kong from the 1980s or something, right?
Where simulations are just really crappy.
for them it would be impossible to do simulations so that i kind of call this the sewer of reality there must be a sewer a bottom level where you just lack the resources to do simulations and if you think about it most civilizations would in fact live in the sewer because because of the fanning out of this tree they would be the most populous type of simulation out there
So then you have this contradiction.
And the contradiction is that we most likely live in a simulation that can't do simulations, but we're assuming that simulations are possible.
All those memories could be... They'd be bullshit.
I woke up this morning.
It's a little bit similar to Bolson Brains.
So Bolson Brains is the idea that
you know, over infinite time, you could just have random particles in space come together to make a brain.
It's incredibly unlikely, but like monkeys on a typewriter, there is a chance of that happening.
And that brain would have all of your memories.
It would, you know, all of the sensations you experience in this moment, but it would only live for a moment and then it would just randomly fall apart.
And if you run the calculation, there should be infinitely more of those than there should be things like us.
And so this is actually a problem cosmologists – some of them take it seriously.
Some of them think it's silly.
But it is a problem that you end up with this kind of ridiculous conclusion that none of this should be real if you follow this logical conclusion.
There's no need for such consistency in that case, right?
There's no reason why if you're a boss and brain that randomly popped up, you could have total inconsistencies in your universe that don't make any sense because that would be actually a more likely random occurrence than everything follows a single thread.
So that, yeah, I tend to think that our lives are probably real.
There's not much more we can do about it.
But it's not really science because, as you said, it's indiscernible.
Even if there were, you know, people talk about glitches in the matrix and stuff like this and looking for weird stuff.
But, you know, any good simulator would be able to just rewind the tape, right?
If they had an error in their code, we do this all the time, we code in our lab.
And if there's an error in your code, you just rewind the simulation a little bit, delete the error, and then start again from where you just left off again.
So you wouldn't have any discernible glitches.
So I think it would be totally indiscernible.
And thus, if it's no experiment we can do, it fails the litmus test of being science.
It's something possible.
I mean, this kind of goes in waves, cultural waves, right?
So if you go back to Victorian times, it was kind of common knowledge that aliens existed.
Everyone thought Mars had aliens on it, right?
It was just like, yeah, of course Mars has aliens on it.
The moon probably has creatures on it.
Like, of course there are.
And they probably look like us.
And then if you go forward in time, it became unfashionable to believe that.
Sagan came along and he said, you know, we must be humble.
And he had this kind of call for humility he'd often make.
He spoke so poetically, I actually kind of disagree with him about that statement.
Because I think by making a call for humility and saying, therefore, there's lots of aliens out there, because otherwise it's arrogant to say we're the only ones.
I don't like that emotional language because it's kind of playing with your emotions rather than your logic a little bit, right?
So I'd rather let's just do the experiment and find out rather than say you're an arrogant asshole because you think you're alone.
That's kind of making me think, oh, I don't want to disagree with Sagan and say we're alone.
To me, that's a bit of almost like preemptive emotional bullying to try and push you into a certain position.
I mean, this is what I'm saying.
The times keep swinging and swinging, but people often call back to this humility thing.
Sometimes when I say that we might be alone, people say, you must be so arrogant.
You must be like a super Christian or something to believe this.
And none of that's true.
It's just I'm just trying to be objective like it's possible.
That's all I'm saying, dude.
Yeah, let's just go out and figure it out.
And it would be wild if we're the only place in the observable universe.
My guess is there's life elsewhere in other galaxies, though.
I think a natural explanation for all of this stuff we see would be that these AIs do pop up.
And these berserker civilizations pop up, as they're called, and they just go around and they just cause mayhem in their galaxies.
They just convert them all into computers, whatever the hell they're up to.
They're just causing mayhem.
We could not be born in that galaxy.
The same reason why we can't be born in a distant future where the robots have taken over.
We can't be born in that galaxy.
So maybe 99% of galaxies, that's the way it is.
And we necessarily would have to be born in the backwater because we couldn't be born in Manhattan.
We couldn't be born in the center of all this activity because we wouldn't be here to talk about it.
So I think we call this extra galactic settee.
So looking at other galaxies to look for alien life.
To me, this is a really underserved and important scientific endeavor that we should get involved in because those are almost like decoupled from us.
Because their history has no impact, really, unless you believe that they can travel all the way from one galaxy to another.
But that's really hard.
But all things being equal, I think you'd say they are decoupled test tubes.
Those test tubes got nothing to do with us.
So that gives us a fair chance.
But looking at our own galaxy, it may be that we can't conclude aliens are common or rare because it's kind of linked to us.
Their activity could affect our existence.
And so it's hard to make inferences in that situation.
Yeah, I mean, maybe there were.
There could have been all sorts of weird stuff happening before modern astronomy was able to get involved.
Yeah, I think the past is incredibly insightful.
And have you heard of the Eemian period?
Have you heard of this period in the past?
So we live in the Holocene, which is an interglacial period.
And you need the interglacial period for a stable climate to have farming, agriculture,
You can't live in an ice age, right?
Because otherwise you just can't grow crops.
So about 10,000 years ago, we transitioned into this Holocene.
And then you see civilization emerge all over the world, right?
Not just in one place in the fertile crescent, but also in South America.
It's just, it seems like there was some sort of random coincidence where just civilization started, right?
And, of course, it's most likely because of the climate.
The climate had got to a point where humans could figure out how to manipulate the stable conditions to grow crops and farm animals and things.
But there was another period, about 120,000 years ago, called the Eemian, which is the last interglacial period.
So modern anatomic humans should have been around then, right?
120,000 years ago, we were here.
You could have taken one of those babies and put it in our society and really wouldn't know the difference.
Probably had the same brainpower we do and yet as far as we can tell even though that period lasted for about 15,000 years of an apparently stable climate Civilization didn't begin so I find that really fascinating there was almost like a second there was a second opportunity a previous opportunity for us to get this ball going and
And we didn't figure it out that first time around.
Yeah, they might not have gone as far as us, right?
They might have got to some kind of Neolithic stage, but they never got to an industrial stage or they never got to a space age.
You'd have to ask an anthropologist that.
Certainly a space age.
They certainly don't have nuclear power plants.
Certainly the fuel deposits don't appear to have been depleted, the oil reserves.
They don't see plastic everywhere from a previous generation.
Because we've created so much concrete and plastic that I've spoken to anthropologists who say there's no way you could miss human, in a geological sense, in the future.
Even if all of our cities had eroded away,
The plastic that we have produced would produce such a huge signature.
You'd see this like layer in your rocks.
So it'd be pretty hard to miss us.
And you've heard the Cerulean hypothesis, this idea that could have been like a past civilization.
Maybe the dinosaurs, for instance, could have had like technology and civilization.
I've never heard that.
Adam Frank, he was on here a few years ago.
Maybe it was before he came up with this idea.
But yeah, he has this fun idea called the Cerulean Hypothesis.
It's kind of borrowed from sci-fi.
I think the word's Cerulean or Silurian.
Not sure how to say it.
But yeah, he had this idea that maybe there was someone 50 million years ago on this planet, a civilization.
And over that time scale, a lot of it does, as you correctly say, get eroded.
It's really difficult to put strong limits on them.
But I think at the stage we're at now, with the amount of plastic and concrete we've made, and also just having stuff on the moon, right?
We've imaged the moon every centimeter of that damn thing.
There's no other stuff on the surface except for what we've put there.
So at this point, we can be pretty confident there was never a space age civilization in the past, despite the fact there appear to be opportunities.
And so maybe the emergence of civilization requires just the right conditions in some certain way.
But then it is spooky that it happened now.
It's like when you talk to a World War I veteran.
It's crazy the world they lived in.
When you certainly probably need a critical mass of humans, right?
You probably need enough that there are some humans who can just not do the farming, not be involved in hunting.
They can just sit on the side and just use their brains to think about problems.
It's probably really hard.
So the question is, if you reran the tape, if we could go back and rerun the Holocene over, is the emergence of...
the Neolithic Revolution, eventually even all the way to the Industrial Age, is that an inevitable thing that just always happens?
Or would there be other realities where we were just quite happy living as hunter-gatherers?
Which is a good motivation for doing simulation, right?
Because we would love to—you want to rewind the clock.
That would be—let's let the Egyptians take over.
Let's see what happens in that world, right?
I mean, that would be a fun—kind of the biggest tragedy I find of being alive now is—
is I want to know, I'm fascinated by our story as humans, and I want to know how it ends.
I want to know what is the future?
What does it look like in 1,000 years?
I mean, we should still be anatomically kind of not evolved too much at that point, all things being equal.
So I'm fascinated by us.
I think we are the most fascinating thing that's ever happened to this planet.
And I think it's such a shame that my finite lifetime means I will never know where this incredible story eventually goes to.
I wonder if it's more of a cultural feedback.
Because, you know, Adam wrote a book about UFOs, recent Adam Frank.
And he was telling me about their story that when the first UFOs started to be reported, the first flying saucers, like around Roswell in the 50s, that...
There was a farmer or something that was being interviewed, and he saw something.
And a journalist came and interviewed him about what he saw, and he described something.
And it was not a flying saucer, but the journalist misheard him and wrote down flying saucer.
And then in the years that followed, there was an explosion in the number of eyewitness reports of flying saucers.
But it all happened after...
It came into print that this concept had almost been the idea, like a meme, had been put out there.
And once the memes there of the greys or the flying saucers, when you're in those delusional states or whatever it is, you know, you're in some kind of weird...
a perceptional state, it is possible that your brain reaches for something and it reaches it and it finds that meme and it's like, that could be that, that could be that, that makes sense because that's all it's got for context.
So yeah, my guess would be it's more of a cultural phenomenon, but you should chat to a sociologist or psychologist about that because I'm sure they'd have a much more informed opinion about what's going on there.
Yeah, there is a phenomena called gestalt reconfiguration that psychologists talk about.
And I know about this term from Mars.
and the claim of Martian canals that used to be there.
There's this phenomena, it's called, there's these laws of gestalt reconfiguration.
It's sort of like closure.
Like if you see dots that almost make a circle, your brain will kind of make it a circle in its mind.
Continuation, that if you see like dot dash lines, your brain will see a continuous line almost.
It will fill in the gaps almost.
And so the same thing is thought to have happened to this famous astronomer, Percival Lowell, in the late 19th century.
So about he was like this like super rich dude from in a Boston area.
He was from a wealthy family of industrialists and he got really into astronomy.
And so he was convinced life was out there.
A, he was wealthy, so had means.
B, he thought life was out there.
There was a quote from his memoir and it was something like, that what we call life is an inevitable detail of cosmic evolution as gravitation itself.
So he just thought like, it's just, this always happens.
And on top of that, he'd been told by the Boston ophthalmologist that he had the best eyesight the ophthalmologist had ever seen.
So he had these three things in his head.
He had, I've got the means so I can do it.
I've got the best eyesight anyone's ever had.
And I believe that aliens are out there.
So he looked at Mars and he saw these...
four-inch telescope or something, like a really blurry small telescope.
But he was able to make out these little patterns, and he thought they were canal systems because he saw that going up all around the United States at the time.
He even did it for Mars, and he saw – this is crazy.
He saw these – he drew a similar kind of picture.
Maybe you can Google it, Jamie, Percival Lowell Venus, and you'll get these kind of spokes.
And he saw these maps of Venus that, of course, were wrong,
And they look like the back of an eye.
They look like the blood vessels on the back of an eye.
And so ophthalmologists actually think that's what he was seeing.
So if you go to the left, the next one down, yeah, that one there.
So that's the image he drew on the right, and that's the image of the back of an eye.
And his eyesight, it's thought, was so good, he was seeing reflections of light in his own eyeball.
And was seeing his own blood vessels.
His eyesight was freaking awesome.
He was correct about that.
But he misinterpreted it to be living things on Mars.
So I think this story is fascinating because it's a real warning shot of if you really believe aliens are out there, you're convinced about it, every time you see something weird, that's where your brain goes to first.
No, well, it really freaked me out Nothing that I could say was something that I could go there was this time No Well, I haven't either and I think a lot of astronomers are in that same boat and it I think that's kind of strange What you think the professional people who start the sky for a living?
would probably have the most number to rack up unless we're all in a conspiracy or something.
But I guess the problem is there's all sorts of weird crap out there that we just don't understand.
In the NASA UAP Task Force, they found this.
Maybe you can find, Jamie, red sprite lightning.
There's these lightning events that go upside down.
And it happens in the upper atmosphere.
And for years and years, pilots were reporting this, and nobody believed them.
They were like, this is bullshit.
You're kind of upside down, red light.
What the fuck are you talking about?
And then people started videoing it.
And once they got videos and high resolution photos, you have to have like a shutter frame rate of like one over 100,000 seconds or something crazy to capture these things.
And until like the 1980s, we just thought this was basically a myth.
And then we realized this is going on in our own atmosphere and we didn't even know about it.
Right, if you saw that.
Yeah, same thing with ball lightning.
I guess that one's maybe a little bit less... I think they've maybe made examples in the laboratory, but no one's got hard video of it in a real-world setting.
There's no hard video of ball lightning?
I haven't seen his video, but he's normally pretty grounded.
You know, my sister, when I was a kid, used to make me come into her bedroom and check for ball lightning.
She'd heard the stories and it chases you around.
So she'd be like, look behind the curtain.
And she's my older sister.
I was like a little seven-year-old having to look around her room to make sure.
But it's one of those things that you get kind of terrified of the notion of it.
It's not a field I follow closely.
I do worry about getting my pilot's license at the moment, so I'm having to learn a lot about weather and different weather phenomena.
So that's been kind of fun learning about different conditions for lightning and stuff.
But, yeah, ball lightning I can safely say as a pilot I've never seen before.
I'm always looking out for it.
I'm like, man, everyone else seems to have seen these things.
How come I've not seen one?
This doesn't make sense.
That shifted the Overton window.
I mean, that's actually made, to be honest, that's made the kind of stuff we do, the SETI work we do.
So SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, we've kind of rebranded it these days as technosignatures.
But that used to be the sort of thing that Congress would always ding and be like, you can't do that.
You can't have taxpayer money going to Lincoln Frailings.
But ever since, you know, the UFO, the UAP phenomena really caught on, the Overton window has shifted.
And now what we do seems completely like, if anything, like too traditional and too, you know, we're too conservative in our approaches compared to what other people want to do.
He's trying to do Project Galileo, right, to actually look for UFOs in the atmosphere and stuff.
And I think it's a valid point.
You can't say that looking for aliens on an exoplanet is good science, but looking for aliens in the atmosphere is not science.
You can design an experiment to do it.
It's still scientific.
There's no magical reason why once it enters the atmosphere, it suddenly doesn't become science.
So I think that's a good argument why we should do it.
It's because I can't believe maybe some of them are pulling our leg and bullshitting it for the fame or whatever.
But there's so many credible people that have come forward.
It's difficult to pass what's going on.
But I do believe everyone's fallible.
As I said, there's so many millions of hours in the air of these pilots and things.
There's so many people, so many cell phones, so much out there.
It's not surprising that one in a million times
um a mistake or something could happen and it's all about knowing that spurious rate like how often does do you just randomly generate bullshit in this whole system that we've got and we don't know what that bullshit occurrence rate is so as a scientist it's hard to make to pass it um i don't think we can ingest it realistically unless you know every time they say they've got the disclosure thing right we're going to get disclosure soon and every time it feels like we don't get the craft we don't get the technology you know we don't get a body
So, yeah, sure, if you give me the technology and let me dissect it in my lab, then I could be convinced.
But every time it seems like it's, we get all the way up to that point where it's like, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen, and then.
Is this gonna be a thing?
They're like pulling on your heartstrings.
It's like a girl who keeps texting you, saying like, we'll go on a date, it's gonna be great next time, and then she just lets you down every time.
Yeah, they're not very good pilots, right?
I mean, it's a great story.
I just need to see the evidence.
Oh, it's the best story.
I think it's just it could be.
I mean, in Iceland, most people believe in fairies.
And if you go back 100 years, most people believe that most people in Iceland believe in fairies.
What do they think they are?
Elves, maybe elves or fairies is that word they use, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I guess my point is that whenever you have this weird stuff, Aliens is... I read about this recently.
Aliens is almost too good of an explanation.
Because it can explain everything.
There's nothing you can't explain with aliens, right?
And yet, so it has, I call it unbounded explanatory capability.
You can explain absolutely fucking everything.
It's God of the gaps, quite literally.
Whenever you see something odd, you can just inject your God to explain that.
And yet at the same time, on the other side of the coin, it also has unbounded avoidance capacity.
Because you could say to me,
Look, I saw a UFO at this site on Monday, on Tuesday, and on Wednesday.
So come Thursday and we'll see it together because it's happening every day.
And I come with you, I don't see it.
Okay, well, I guess it changed its mind.
It didn't happen today.
That doesn't disprove what you saw.
And similarly, people have said, we've surveyed the surface of Mars.
We don't see any life on it.
I can't disprove there's life on Mars.
There could be life underneath a rock that we just haven't turned over yet.
You can never disprove.
You can't prove a negative.
So they could always it could always be there.
So aliens is almost unscientific as a hypothesis because it can explain everything.
And yet there's no experiment I can do to ever prove it's wrong.
And that that puts it in a very precarious position scientifically.
Yeah, I would just say whatever your hypothesis is, the most constructive thing to do is to think about how can we prove or disprove it.
I mean, we can argue about history, but I think the most constructive thing is just to design an experiment.
You know, Avi's idea of Project Galileo is a good one.
Like, we should try and survey the sky more systematically.
And we've got now the Vera Rubin telescope, which is doing, like, literally a movie of the entire sky every night.
So I think as we grow in our capabilities, it's going to get harder and harder for this UAP hypothesis to evade all of these facilities that we're building in a public domain.
This is public data, not military data.
controlled facilities.
So they camouflage themselves.
But then you're starting to get into this exponentially contrived.
Because they're in our heads and they know everything.
So then it becomes unfalsifiable.
So we're sort of leaving the world of science.
But I think when we think about as a scientist, like we're doing this experiment with JWST for exoplanets, like we are looking for life right now with James Webb and
There was even a claim for a planet K2-18b.
There was a claim a few months ago.
It's thought to be an ocean world.
It's about two and a half times the size of the Earth.
And we detected this molecule with weak significance.
I want to emphasize that.
It was only weakly detected, called dimethyl sulfide.
And I think it's the same molecule which gives truffles that smell that they have.
And it's something that bacteria and phytoplankton make on the Earth.
So they detected the hint of this molecule, and as far as we know, only life can make this molecule on the Earth.
We don't have any other process that can make it except for living creatures.
And so it was a lot of excitement about that.
And it turned out, in that case, with follow-up observations, it maybe is not as secure as they thought.
It actually doesn't appear to be there anymore.
But I guess the point is that James Webb can do the experiment.
It is sensitive enough to look at a planet which is 100 light years away and detect the molecular signatures of living creatures on that planet.
So we are entering a very exciting era where we can look at their planets.
We don't have to wait for them to visit us anymore.
We can actually start surveying where they're at and seeing what's up.
And that's just simple life, of course.
That's not even technological life.
So I think we're going to get answers.
And the only way to do this is to keep supporting missions like NASA's mission with these future observatories that are trying to get us to that point.
We're trying to build a mission now called the Habitable Worlds Observatory, HWO.
It'll probably get renamed at some point, like HWO.
I think it would be like the Carl Sagan Observatory, probably, would be a rebranding for it, is my hunch.
And that thing's trying to take photos, like we saw with Alpha Centauri.
It's trying to do photos, but of Earth-sized planets.
JWST can't image Earth-sized planets.
This thing will be able to take photos of Earths around other stars.
And it will see the pale blue dot of light of that other world.
And we'll get its chemical fingerprint.
We'll be able to sniff its atmosphere.
We'll pull their pants down, right?
We'll get the whole thing.
So the aliens can't hide from us forever.
Our technology is getting to the point where we're going to find them in their own home.
Yeah, it was a long process.
I mean, almost as soon as Hubble launched, they started planning the successor to Hubble, which was James Webb.
It was famously over budget.
I think the original budget was supposed to be $800 million and ended up costing $10 billion.
It just went completely overblown.
But this was because there was some bad contractors.
Astronomers tend to underestimate that.
budgets a little bit when they're planning these things out.
And there's inflation.
So these things, you know, if you do a project over 20 years, which is what it ended up taking, because it was 1995, I think, and then we got it in sort of, was it 2021, 2022, actually ended up getting in the sky.
So it took a long time, right, for that project to develop.
We are starting the HWA project now.
There's already design teams, working groups that are putting the first, you know, blueprints together of what this thing would look like.
But, of course, it's in jeopardy because the White House wanted to slash the NASA science budget by 50%, which basically just ends that entire program.
There's about 40 NASA missions that would end in that White House budget.
But, fortunately, the Senate readjusted it back up to pretty much last year's levels.
I have lobbied, but you only talk to the aides, right?
That's all you end up talking to.
We actually, for the first time in human civilization, we have the ability to do the experiment, is there life on another planet?
This is some of the images from the Hubble?
It's just a huge field of view, Roman.
Yeah, Roman should be flying.
Roman, interestingly, it's military technology.
So apparently the NSA had two Hubble-class space telescopes in their basement.
They just were like, said to NASA, by the way, we're not using these.
They're out of date for us.
And NASA took it and turned it into Roman.
They just have them lying around.
That's what I'm talking about.
Yeah, I think, as I said earlier, whenever we improve our instrumentation, our precision, by a factor of anywhere from 3 up to 10, let's say, in that ballpark, like a big improvement, you get surprises.
You find stuff you never expected in the universe.
And we've seen that every time.
Yeah, I think whenever you listen to the universe in a different way.
So we were, for years and years, we've just been using our eyes, basically optical light to look at the universe and X-rays and radio waves.
And then recently we started doing LIGO, and LIGO is listening for gravitational waves from the universe instead.
So it's like listening to the acoustic oscillations of the universe rather than seeing it.
And again, as soon as we started doing that, we discovered tons and tons of merging black holes, and it's just totally transformed our idea of how black holes merge and form.
So whenever we do something we've never done before, look in a different way, the universe constantly surprises us.
So it's not going to be a single mission.
It's not going to be, we should all just put all our eggs in this one basket of Habitable Worlds Observatory.
We need to have this multi-pronged attack of let's just keep pushing everything and making sure it's a significant improvement from what came before in terms of their sensitivity and making sure the scientists actually interpret the data at the end of the day, right?
do science unless the data is A, public, and then B, people are actually there to study it.
So those are the two key ingredients.
Just have great telescopes and great people.
Is funding the biggest bottleneck for it right now?
I mean, HWO, we're talking about a mission that's going to cost at least $10 billion.
And the NASA budget is about $25, $26 billion.
So, it's eating up already.
I mean, if you built it in one year, it would eat up almost half of the budget.
So, it's impossible for that mission to be built in a year, even though probably we could if we had the money.
Maybe in a year or two, you could probably build something like that.
So, yeah, if you doubled NASA's budget, it would come twice as fast.
For sure, you'd have it in maybe five years rather than waiting to…
That's what we're talking about.
It's just kind of depressing when you think about it.
Yeah, I think Carl Sagan had a quote once.
He said that the entire SETI program was equivalent to one attack helicopter.
If you did the entire SETI in its maximal form, it would have been the cost of one attack helicopter.
Dude, if I was president, I'd go ham.
Yeah, I mean, it's only 6.5 meters, so it's limited.
They couldn't really make it any bigger because you couldn't get a rocket that could fit it.
So actually Starship could launch that thing without any unfolding.
200 points of failure, it could actually pretty much fit inside the fuselage of Starship.
And even better, it would cost less because a huge cost in these Space Huskies is making them really light.
So the mirrors are like these special honeycomb structures to make them super light so they're low cost to launch.
But if you have Starship, it can launch like 100 tons, I think it is.
You could literally just take these ground-based telescopes you already have and just shove them in there and, you know, obviously put some chassis on it.
But you could – it would be way, way cheaper to launch these things.
So, I mean, I'm very excited about the prospect of having heavy launch capabilities that Starship give us.
That plus investment in something like these kind of giant telescope designs, we could launch some truly gargantuan things into space and probe those atmospheres and see those aliens and what they're up to.
So, yeah, I would say the future can be bright because we have the means to do it if we have the will to do it.
You kind of like the overview effect.
You heard that with astronauts when they go up to space and they see the Earth.
I think we should launch all our presidents into space.
Oh, that's a good idea.
Bring them back, but let them have that overview because I think that is... Launch it with Katy Perry.
Yeah, that doesn't even do it justice.
Yeah, I think what makes me sometimes sad as an astronomer is sometimes people say, what's the point of looking for life out there?
I care about the bread on the table economy and jobs and factories and stuff like that.
I care about the things that really directly affect my life.
But I think there has to be things that we do as humans
existential things like, are we alone in the universe?
How can it be a bigger question than that?
Maybe even better than that.
And when you see something like that, you realize that there's more to this life than just substance, of just staying alive for the sake of staying alive.
There are grander things than what we have on this planet.
Yeah, the inequality right now is so out of control in this country, in the world.
Yeah, it is kind of ridiculous that in astronomy, you know, we used to always be completely federally supported.
There was some private funding, but by and large, it was...
pushed and pulled by federal grants and federal money.
And I think that's generally healthy, right?
Because then everyone can apply for it.
It's not about being mates with Jeff Bezos or being friends with certain high-influenced people.
But we get into this stage increasingly where private money is having a big influence, even in astronomy and other fundamental sciences as well.
And then the people that succeed end up being not necessarily the Einsteins, the most brilliant people.
They're just the people that have the right connections and can pull the strings and
We're on the island at the right time.
And that's just kind of gross.
And that's where we're at.
So when you get that, you know, if you do go, I've never been to space.
I've certainly seen the clear night skies.
But I think when you look out, you see not countries and boundaries.
We're all in this together.
This tiny little fragile thing.
Like we could fuck this up so easily, but we could also make it so glorious if we were together.
That's the cop delusion, right?
It's wishing for that fatherly figure...
to come down and teach me the air of my ways and look after us.
And that's just, look, the cavalry ain't coming, Joe.
It's on our skin to solve this freaking problem.
But I mean, it's hard because you became like the top podcast and because there's competition and that competition probably drove you to make the podcast better and better and better.
And similarly, as a scientist, we're in competition with each other.
So there's almost a capitalist system embedded into science that I want to not like crush my enemy or something.
I'm not trying to crush the other scientists, but I certainly have.
I know what the level field is.
And if you want to stand out, you have to.
And so that drives me to become... I'm definitely influenced by competition.
And it makes me a better scientist when I know someone's breathing down my neck at my data.
Let's just crank out the hours.
We're going to do the best we can.
But if I know no one's looking at my data set, and I've got three years to myself, I'm just going to chill.
I'm just going to be like, there's no urgency here.
Let's think about other things.
that competition like you said it's really double-edged and i don't know we need to figure out a way to to channel it because um you know i did martial arts as a kid a lot and one of the things i really do with style i did taekwondo i did a bit of muay thai um and i did some shotokan karate but mostly taekwondo and i learned a lot from that and just mentally about myself
I really want my kids to do martial arts because I feel like it's just a transformative experience for learning how to master yourself.
And one of the things I really learned was how to channel negative feelings into something productive.
So I was feeling really cut up about a breakup with a girlfriend at the time.
I was just beating the crap out of these punch bags.
I was going training every night, every session I could get my hands on.
And then it ended up turning me into this like beast.
I got a six pack and I was training with a national squad.
And, you know, I got pretty decent.
And it was it wasn't I was aiming to do that.
It was just an outlet for this anger.
And then I looked back at it and realized, hey, I've managed to turn this negative thing into something really productive.
And I've tried to, whenever I have those kind of feelings, I always try to twist them in the same way.
I remember when I first arrived at Harvard, I had the same thing.
I arrived at Harvard and all the names in the corridors were famous professors.
And I was just freaking out.
I was like, fuck, I've
I'm going to have coffee with this guy, these legends.
How am I going to handle a conversation with these dudes?
And I remember I was kind of like a bit of an outcast because I wasn't in anyone's group at the time.
And I remember walking down the corridor and hearing them laugh at me.
saying, oh, here comes the moon.
I heard there's a moon guy in the group or something.
They thought the idea of looking for moons was crazy.
So they're all kind of laughing.
I came around the corridor and, you know, kind of like, yeah, you know, it was kind of awkward.
And I felt like they all looked down at me and they probably did back then.
And after a few years, I really, I know I earned their respect because I was out publishing them and I was driven by that competition.
I was like, I'm going to show you, I'm going to prove to you how good I am.
by publishing twice what you publish.
I'm going to do better science, I'm going to do more of it.
I'm going to make myself so good, you can't ignore me.
It'd be ridiculous to ignore what I'm doing because I'm so far ahead of you.
That's what I wanted to do.
And I got to a point where I knew they wanted me in their group now.
They were like, oh, come join our group.
And I didn't let them get close because I knew I performed better when I play that game in my head that everyone's against me.
It was just sort of a mind fuckery.
And it's that same thing as martial arts.
It's like learning what are the tricks, the hacks that make you operate well, but being conscious of it.
And I think as a society, if we can do that, there's a hack.
Competition is a hack that makes us super productive.
But it's just a way, can we hack it and channel it in a conscious way towards a productive outcome?
But from the martial arts that you must have a competitive drive there, right?
That's how it has to be.
In science, it so often goes both ways, though.
It's the same in comedy and science.
I mean, you think about Isaac Newton, who's famously such an asshole.
A lot of comics like that, too.
Gets to the top and then spends most of his subsequent career just crushing other people down.
And there's that need to be singly recognized as I want everyone to see that it's just me and it's only me.
But there's scientists, I think we all...
admire and get on with the best are actually the ones who are collaborative, who like comedy, like Cher, and want to do it together.
So I think there's a lot to... Sometimes comedians and scientists should interact more, I think.
When I was a student, there used to be this thing called FameLab, and they used to get stand-up comedians to come in and teach scientists how to talk to the public, how to do scientific communication.
And they said it's the same...
It's the same kind of thing.
You have to have the kind of the balls to stand up there and just put yourself in that situation.
It helps if you have an English accent.
Talking about the Cosmos.
It doesn't come with an American accent.
Yeah, so I think there's a lot ... Public speaking is something that a lot of scientists ... It's the same, because there's so many brilliant scientists, and they just can't handle this kind of situation.
Yeah, it's unfortunate.
I've slept through a few lectures in my time.
Do you think you could teach someone to be Sagan-esque?
Yeah, I learned that through YouTube.
You know, I do a lot of YouTube communication.
And when I first started the channel, I remember I was copying.
I was looking at other stuff that I see was doing well.
And I was trying to like transplant that style of video onto my own.
it wasn't me it was it was it was kind of like um too animated too you know i'm more of a chill person and this was like hey let's talk about space yeah that's just like not it just it doesn't jive with me that much but i put it on and then i was doing this for a while and we we just kind of flatlined in subscribers after a while and i was like
I think I'm going to pat this in.
But before I do, I'll just make one or two videos the way I really want to do it.
And so I made these like super deep dive and I kind of opened up a little bit personally.
And you have to be a little bit vulnerable to let your, you know, I'm a romantic.
So I wanted that romantic vibe.
element of astronomy to come out.
Why am I so passionate about the stars?
What are the deep questions that moved me since I was a kid?
You have to let that personality come out.
And once people realize why you personally are so fascinated by this, it becomes infectious.
And then they start to get the same bug.
So yeah, I learned as a communicator that certainly being willing to be vulnerable, it feels very strange as a scientist to talk about vulnerability and emotional connection.
But unless you let that in, it becomes dry.
It becomes inaccessible.
I always think with Alanis Morissette's
Me and my dad talk about that album all the time.
There's so much rawness in that damn album.
You can't imitate that.
Because no one wants to see a copy.
You want to see something fresh.
That's what makes it exciting.
That's why I don't do those shows anymore.
I used to do a few of those and I got sick of it for that exact... I remember I was talking about a supernova once on camera.
I went to the show and the director was behind the camera.
I was like, can we just try it bigger?
And I was like, that's just not what I'm about.
Can we just bring it down?
And yeah, I think being on YouTube is great because you get to just authentically talk the way you want to talk.
You'll find an audience.
Yeah, that's what makes it good because you're engaged with the topic.
Yeah, it is kind of sad that kids label YouTuber as the number one job.
Well, they influencer, I think, is the number one job.
Yeah, because it used to be astronaut, right?
And now YouTuber, social media star is like, yeah, my kids both have YouTube channels.
They're obsessed with it.
Every day we threw a premiere of one of their videos they've made around the house.
It's definitely influenced kids now.
They aspire for that.
But it has some great elements.
With that kind of attention, I just think... My kids' channel is only me, I think, that watches this, unfortunately.
And I think, yeah, but you're totally right.
I mean, the feedback loop is potentially really damaging.
And I'm so glad that I grew up in an era without cell phones.
I can't imagine how I would have got through life if I had Twitter at my fingertips or Facebook or whatever it was growing up because that just adds a whole new stress.
And you hear these stories of kids at school where the boys saying to their girlfriends, well, you need to send me photos of you.
And then they get these photos and they send it around the school as a joke.
And there's all this kind of weird fucked up bullying going on.
and we didn't have to deal with any of that shit growing up.
Like, it's so much simpler.
I mean, my son was saying to me, oh, I'm friends with this other kid at camp because he's got 100 subscribers, and that's become a thing, right?
Like, how many subscribers or followers you have sort of forms, like, a popularity rank in even real-world settings, and...
There's so much pressure on the kids in a way we never experienced.
And the more cognitive burden you have like that, the less you can focus on the things you're truly passionate about and discovering what you want to do in your life.
Yeah, it's going to be very challenging for these kids.
Now chat GBTs out, like an extra virtual girlfriends or whatever they'll probably have on there.
My channel's called Cool Worlds.
So you can head to youtube.com slash at cool worlds.
We also have a podcast, the Cool Words Lab podcast.
And if you want to support a real research program, that's my team, the Cool Words Lab at Columbia University.
You can just head to coolwordslab.com slash support.
Head over there and you're for the price of a coffee per month.
You can actually support real astronomy research.
Let's do this again sometime.