David Kipping

whether we're really ready to progress to the next stage of our development.

Yeah, I mean, I've been searching for maximum gains for most of my professional career.

And I think a lot of my colleagues think I'm kind of crazy to still be doing it.

You know, after five years of not finding anything, I think most people would probably try doing something else.

I even had people say that to me.

They said, you know, professors, and I remember at a cocktail party, he took me to the side, an MIT professor, and he said...

you know, you should just look for Hot Jupiters.

They're everywhere.

You can write papers.

They're so easy to find.

And I was like, yeah, but Hot Jupiters, they're not interesting to me.

I want to do something that I feel intellectually pushes me to the edge.

And it's maybe a contribution that not no one else could do, but maybe...

is not certainly the thing that anybody could do.

I don't want to just be the first to something for the sake of being first.

I want to do something that feels like a meaningful intellectual contribution to our society.

And so this ExoMoon problem has been haunting me for years to try and solve this.

Now, as I said, we looked for years and years using Kepler,

And the closest we ever got was just a hint that this one star, Kepler-1625, has a Jupiter-like planet in orbit of it.

And that Jupiter-like planet is on a 287-day period, so it's almost the same distance as the Earth around the Sun, but for Jupiter.