Dr. Brian Keating
speaker
1,291 appearances
4 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Sep 2025
Dr. Brian Keating’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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They know exactly what phase and wavelength to correct in the mirror. And then they say it's almost as good as going into space. It corrects exactly the compensation. of the Earth's atmosphere with the combination of this deformable mirror.
And it was actually used by my colleague Andrea Ghez here at UCLA to measure the properties of stars orbiting around the black hole at the center of the Milky Way and test Einstein's theory of relativity. Without this on the twin 10-meter diameter Keck telescopes in Hawaii, she never would have won that Nobel Prize. So it's amazing technology, but it was classified.
It was so useful to astronomers, but it wasn't as useful as to the military. Remember, I said Galileo used his telescope to sell it to the military of Venice. It was immediately classified by the US military because if you think about a spy satellite, What's it doing? Well, it's staring down to Earth and it's looking at whatever on Earth. It's also going through the atmosphere.
It's going to have the same problems. So they wanted to use that and have this technological advantage over the Soviets probably in the 1970s and 80s. So they classified it. They didn't let many – astronomers could build things. They could deliver the finished product but they couldn't patent it. They couldn't use it. So Claire Max, as I said, she could have been super rich.
But it's interesting because now they're using it so it's bad enough to look from Earth to space. But as I said, if you imagine the Earth as having a slab of an atmosphere, imagine a sniper. The sniper is trying to make a kill shot. Jocko is out there trying to hit something five kilometers, three kilometers away or whatever. There's a lot of atmosphere in the way.
And if you're looking through an optical sight, that will also happen. So now they're actually using this optical – compensation and sniper scopes are using this technology, adaptive optics. So it's another way that astronomy has influenced military developments as well.
Well, yeah. I'm kind of an outlier. So just everyone should look to the actual experts in this field. But I have some rigorous kind of logical arguments that I believe the probability of – I would never say it's zero. But I think it's very low and I think I can substantiate that. The best part is I can't be falsified right now.
There's zero evidence that there's life anywhere else in the universe, period, full stop, end of sentence. There's no evidence, conclusive evidence.
I knew we'd get into drones. So the argument that it would somehow, first of all, transform our understanding of human place is inarguable to me. I believe that's true. Although in this movie Contact, it's a really wonderful movie. It's not cheesy science fiction. It was the first to like use a wormhole and all sorts of cool stuff as contrivances.
But in that movie, there's a scene where President Bill Clinton – is talking about the discovery that this fictitious character made, but he's actually talking about a meteorite that was discovered in Antarctica, and they just clipped that, and the meteorite was believed to have microbial life, and that meteorite's origin was inarguably from Mars, okay?
So the reasoning was, this is 1997, that there was a meteorite found in Antarctica, where it's easy to find meteorites.
That's in real life. That's in real life. In 1997, a scientist announced the discovery of a meteorite from Antarctica. It's called Allan Land Hills meteorite. And it had what they claimed were evidence of microbial life and even respiration byproducts of these microbial life forms. It was such a big deal that within minutes, Bill Clinton had a press conference on the White House lawn.
where he goes, this rock speaks to us from across the generations, and if confirmed, will undoubtedly revolutionize our understanding of the universe around us. Now, the movie clips that clip to make it seem like Ellie, the fictitious character, discovered SETI, extraterrestrial technology, not a microbe. But In the public's mind, that actual scientific discovery was never falsified.
It was certainly never confirmed. No one has ever come back to say that was correct and that we did find microbial evidence of microbial life on Mars. Now, how did that meteorite get there? Well, some asteroids hit Mars. the Moon, that's why it has craters on it.
It hits the Earth, that's why we have Meteor Crater Arizona, Winslow Arizona, Yucatan, Chicxulub, where the dinosaurs' doom was sealed by the giant impactor 66 million years ago. Those impacts occur on every planet every moon in our solar system.
So some asteroid hit the surface of Mars probably millions of years ago, ejected material, low gravity on Mars, low atmosphere, and that material has been orbiting around and eventually made its way and hit the Earth. Okay, so matter from Mars landed on the Earth. Does that make sense?
That's how I gave you – I have a lunar meteorite that I'm giving to you, again, as a token of my appreciation for all you do. That came the same way. Something hit the moon, blasted off some lunar – it's called breccia. It's the crust of the moon. Eventually made its way, landed in northwest Africa, and I bought a slice of it from a I got a dealer. I got a meteorite dealer.
And I got that for you, OK? So what's the lesson? Material gets exchanged from planet to planet. Now, I ask the following question. If that happened on Mars to the Earth, the Moon to the Earth, so too has material from the Earth been ejected since life emerged 3.7 billion years ago, there's literally millions of tons of Earth that's floating around in space. Some of that will have landed on Mars.
So someday we'll get there. We'll find some piece of it. Now, could some of it have a tardigrade on it? Could some of it have a protozoan on it? Obviously it could.
It could have – what's an adaptogen? I have no idea. An adaptogen? You talk about adaptogens.
Showing 1061–1080 of 1,291 · page 54 of 65
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