Dr. Sara Seager

speaker

261 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3 Jun

Dr. Sara Seager’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Science Friday · Looking for life in the clouds of Venus · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

And Canada is really, really pushing people and encouraging everyone to think about that question.

So one thing is that when we want to go to Venus to search for very specific organic molecules, complex organics, but a long list of them, because we don't know what we're looking for, there are a number of miniature molecular sensors being developed in this area.

We're developing one in my lab.

Other ones like carbon nanotubes are out there.

And we're taking all these and we're trying to accelerate their development and usage in terms of their robustness in the field

And a more complicated thing to explain is selectivity.

Like how do you know you found the molecule that you're targeting?

And these have a lot of different uses.

They can be used for chemical threat detection.

They may have uses in agriculture and medicine in a lot of areas.

So it is kind of rare, but it happens that in space science, we invent something or we build things like medical imaging and

Even GPS came out of people experimenting with rockets.

But I do see a way, a path to making that more purposeful.

These crazy questions we're asking in the search for life, in the origin of life on Earth, in exoplanets, in space science, we really have to push the envelope.

Because we're going to extreme environments, we need more decimal places than we traditionally use here on Earth.

So there is room for pushing the envelope in astrobiology and in science, but purposely finding and exploiting and executing the impactful relevance we could have in society.

Yes, well, I have two reasons.

One is a kind of more thoughtful reason and one is the reality, okay?

So the thoughtful reason is that I love doing new things.

I'm really comfortable pushing the envelope, inventing new things, starting new fields.

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