Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Sarah Seager, a planetary scientist at MIT known
00:00:06 for her work on the search for exoplanets, which are planets outside of our solar system.
00:00:12 She’s an author of two books on this fascinating topic, plus in a couple days, August 18th,
00:00:18 her new book, a memoir called The Smallest Lights in the Universe, is coming out.
00:00:23 I read it and I can recommend it highly, especially if you love space and are a bit of a romantic
00:00:29 like me.
00:00:30 It’s beautifully written.
00:00:32 She weaves the stories of the tragedies and the triumphs of her life with the stories
00:00:36 of her love for and research on exoplanets, which represent our hope to find life out
00:00:43 there in the universe.
00:00:45 Quick summary of the ads.
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00:00:58 Just a quick side note.
00:00:59 Let me say that extraterrestrial life, aliens, I think represent our civilization longing
00:01:06 to make contact with the unknown, with others like us, or maybe others that are very different
00:01:12 from us, entities that might reveal something profound about why we’re here.
00:01:18 The possibility of this is both exciting and, at least to me, terrifying, which is exactly
00:01:25 where we humans do our best work.
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00:05:27 And now here’s my conversation with Sarah Seeger.
00:05:32 When did you first fall in love with the stars?
00:05:34 I think I’ve always loved the stars.
00:05:37 One of my first memory is of the moon.
00:05:39 I remember watching the moon and I was in the car with my dad who my parents were divorced
00:05:44 and he was driving me and my siblings to his house for the weekend and the moon was just
00:05:47 following me.
00:05:49 Just had no idea why that was.
00:05:51 So like looking up at the sky and there’s this glowing thing, how do you make sense
00:05:55 of the moon at that age?
00:05:57 Like age five.
00:05:58 There’s just no way you can.
00:05:59 I think it’s one of the great things about being a kid is just that curiosity that all
00:06:03 kids have.
00:06:04 You know, I was thinking because there’s these almost out there ideas of that our earth is
00:06:11 flat, floating about on the internet.
00:06:14 And it made me think, you know, when did I first realize that the earth is like this
00:06:21 ball that’s flying through empty space?
00:06:25 I mean, it’s terrifying.
00:06:27 It’s awe inspiring.
00:06:28 I don’t know how to make sense of it.
00:06:31 It’s hard because we live in our frame of reference here on this planet.
00:06:34 It’s nearly impossible.
00:06:35 None of us are lucky to go to see the curvature of earth.
00:06:38 I mean, do you remember when you realized, understood like the physics, like the layout
00:06:43 of the solar system?
00:06:45 Was it like, did you first have to take physics to really, like high school physics to really
00:06:51 take that in?
00:06:52 I think it’s hard to say.
00:06:53 I had this book when I was a child.
00:06:55 It was in French.
00:06:56 I grew up in Canada, where French is supposedly taught to all of us English speaking Canadians.
00:07:01 And it was this book in French was about the solar system, and I just love flipping through
00:07:05 it.
00:07:06 It’s hard to say how much, you know, you or I understand when we’re kids, but it was
00:07:10 really great book.
00:07:11 What about the stars?
00:07:12 When did you first learn about the stars?
00:07:14 Like I do have this very incredible distinctive memory.
00:07:17 And again, it had to do with my dad.
00:07:19 He took us camping.
00:07:20 Now, my dad was from the UK, and he was the type who you’d find wearing a tie on weekends.
00:07:26 So camping was not in his sphere, his comfort zone.
00:07:29 We had a babysitter.
00:07:31 Every summer we had a babysitter, and one summer we had Tom.
00:07:34 He was barely older than we were.
00:07:36 He was 14.
00:07:37 My brother was 12.
00:07:38 I would have been 11 or 10 maybe.
00:07:40 And we went camping because Tom said camping is the thing.
00:07:42 We should try it.
00:07:43 And I just remember I didn’t aim to see the stars, but I walked out of my tent in the
00:07:48 middle of the night, and I looked up, and wow, so many stars.
00:07:55 The dark night sky and all those stars just screaming at me.
00:07:59 I just couldn’t believe that.
00:08:00 Honestly, my first thought was, this is so incredible, mind blowing.
00:08:04 Why wouldn’t anyone have told me this existed?
00:08:07 Can anyone else see this?
00:08:08 Have you had an experience like that with anything?
00:08:12 Yeah.
00:08:13 I’ve had that.
00:08:14 I mean, I don’t know if maybe you can tell me if it’s the same.
00:08:17 I’ve had that with robots.
00:08:20 There’s a few robots I’ve met where I just fell in love with this.
00:08:23 Is anyone else seeing this?
00:08:25 Is anyone else seeing that here in a robot is our ability to engineer some intelligent
00:08:34 beings, intelligent beings that we could love, that could love us, that we can interact with
00:08:39 in some rich ways that we haven’t yet discovered?
00:08:44 Almost like when you get a puppy, instead of a dog, and there’s this immediate bond
00:08:49 and love, and on top of that, ability to engineer it, I had to just pause and hold myself.
00:08:58 I imagine, I don’t have kids, I imagine there’s a magic to that as well, where it’s a totally
00:09:03 new experience.
00:09:04 It’s like, what?
00:09:05 Well, yeah, the stars though, unlike kids or the puppy, it’s only a good thing.
00:09:13 So you felt, you weren’t terrified?
00:09:15 Like to me, when I look at the stars, it’s almost paralyzingly scary how little we know
00:09:23 about the universe, how alone we are.
00:09:26 I mean, somehow it feels alone.
00:09:28 I’m not sure if it’s just a matter of perspective, but it feels like, wow, there’s billions
00:09:34 of them out there and we know nothing about them.
00:09:39 And then also immediately to me, somehow mortality comes into it.
00:09:42 I mean, how did that make you feel at that time?
00:09:45 I think as a child without articulating it, I felt that same way.
00:09:48 Just like, wow, this is terrifying.
00:09:50 What’s out there?
00:09:51 Like, what is this?
00:09:52 What does it mean about us here?
00:09:55 You’re a scientist, an exo world class scientist, planetary scientist, astronomer.
00:10:02 Now I’m a bit of an idiot who likes to ask silly questions.
00:10:06 So some questions are a little bit in the realm of speculation, almost philosophical
00:10:12 because we know so little and one of the awesome things about your work is you’ve actually
00:10:17 put data and real science behind some of the biggest questions that we’re all curious
00:10:20 about.
00:10:21 But nevertheless, many of the questions might be a little bit speculative.
00:10:25 So on that topic, just in your sense, do you think we’re alone in the universe, human
00:10:33 beings?
00:10:34 Do you think there’s life out there?
00:10:36 Well, Lex, the funny thing is, is that as a scientist, I so don’t even want to answer
00:10:40 that.
00:10:41 I will answer it though, but I just love to say, yeah, we naturally resist that because
00:10:46 we want numbers and hard facts and not speculation.
00:10:49 But I do love that question.
00:10:51 It’s a great question and it’s one we all wonder about, but I have to give you the scientist
00:10:55 answer first, which is we’ll have the capability to answer that question soon, even starting
00:11:01 soon.
00:11:02 How do you define soon?
00:11:03 How do I define soon?
00:11:05 So much happened in the last hundred years.
00:11:07 Right, right.
00:11:08 And there’s a difference, right, if it’s 10 years or 20 years or a hundred years.
00:11:11 Yeah, there’s a difference in that.
00:11:14 Well, soon could be a decade or two decades.
00:11:18 Journalists usually don’t like that or the people want like tomorrow, they want the news.
00:11:23 But what it’s going to take is telescopes, space telescopes, or very sophisticated ground
00:11:28 or space telescopes to let us study the atmospheres of other planets far away and to look what’s
00:11:35 in the atmospheres and to look for water, which is needed for life as we know it, to
00:11:38 look for gases that don’t belong that we might attribute to life.
00:11:42 So we have to do some really nitty gritty astronomy.
00:11:45 So the promising way to answer this question scientifically is to look for hints of life.
00:11:51 That’s where like many of your ideas come in of what kind of hints might we actually
00:11:55 see about this life.
00:11:57 Right, right.
00:11:58 That’s exactly what we need to do.
00:11:59 And I like the word you chose, hint, because it’s going to be a hint.
00:12:02 It’s not going to be a 100% yay, we found it.
00:12:05 And then it will take future generations to do more careful work to hopefully even find
00:12:12 a way to send a probe to these distant exoplanets and to really figure this out for us.
00:12:17 I mean, we’ll talk about the details.
00:12:19 Those are fun, but like the back to the speculation, the zoomed out big picture is, yes, I believe
00:12:26 absolutely there is life out there somewhere.
00:12:30 Because the vastness of the universe is incredible.
00:12:33 It’s so breathtaking.
00:12:35 When we look at the night sky, if you can go to that dark sky, you can see many, many
00:12:40 hundred or even if you have good eyesight and you’re somewhere very dark, you could
00:12:43 see thousands of stars.
00:12:44 But in our galaxy, we have hundreds of billions of stars and our universe has hundreds of
00:12:51 billions of galaxies.
00:12:53 So think about all those stars out there.
00:12:57 And even if planets are rare, even if life is rare, just because the number of stars
00:13:02 is so huge, things have to come together somewhere, someplace in our universe.
00:13:06 Yeah.
00:13:07 So amazing to think that somebody might be looking up on another planet in a distant
00:13:14 galaxy.
00:13:15 I have to interrupt your reverie and get back to, in our lifetime at least, the short term.
00:13:22 We only have the nearest stars to look at.
00:13:24 It’s true that there are so many stars, so many hosts for planets that might have life.
00:13:29 But in the practical question of will we find it, it has to be a star quite close to Earth,
00:13:36 like a few light years, tens of light years, maybe hundreds of light years.
00:13:40 And by the way, you’ve introduced me to a tool of Eyes on Exoplanets, I think that NASA
00:13:46 has put together.
00:13:47 Eyes on Exoplanets.
00:13:48 It’s a great software.
00:13:49 You can download it.
00:13:50 It’s so cool.
00:13:51 But anyway, can you give a sense of who our neighbors are?
00:13:56 You said hundreds of light years.
00:14:00 How many stars are close by?
00:14:04 What’s our neighborhood like?
00:14:05 Are we talking about five, 10 stars that we might actually have a chance to zoom in on?
00:14:12 I’m talking about maybe a dozen or two dozen stars.
00:14:16 And those with planets that look suitable for us to follow up in detail.
00:14:22 For life.
00:14:23 Right.
00:14:24 But one thing that’s really exciting in this field is that the very nearest star to Earth
00:14:29 called Proxima Centauri, it’s part of the Alpha Centauri star system.
00:14:34 Cool name, by the way.
00:14:35 Yeah, Proxima.
00:14:36 Whoever names them.
00:14:37 Nearby.
00:14:38 Okay, but it sounds cooler than Proxima.
00:14:40 Proxima Centauri appears to have a planet around it.
00:14:44 It’s about an Earth mass planet in the so called habitable zone or the Goldilocks zone
00:14:49 of the host star.
00:14:50 So think about how incredible that is.
00:14:52 Like out of all the stars out there, even the very nearest star has planets and has
00:14:56 a planet of huge interest to us.
00:14:58 Yeah.
00:14:59 Okay.
00:15:00 So can we talk about that planet?
00:15:04 What does it mean to be maybe possibly habitable?
00:15:12 How does size come into play?
00:15:14 How does you know what we know about gases and what kind of things are necessary for
00:15:21 life?
00:15:22 You know, what are the factors that you make you think that it’s habitable?
00:15:26 And by the way, I mean, maybe one way to talk about that is people know about the Drake
00:15:31 equation, which is a very high level, almost framework to think about what is the probability
00:15:39 that, correct me if I’m wrong, that there’s life out there and intelligent life, I think.
00:15:46 I don’t know.
00:15:47 But then you have a equation named after you now, which I think nicely focuses in on the
00:15:54 more achievable and interesting part of that question, which is on whether there is habitable
00:16:01 planets out there or how many, I guess.
00:16:04 Right, right.
00:16:05 So the funny thing is, was one time I met Frank Drake and I asked if he minded if I
00:16:11 took his equation and kind of revamped it for this new field of exoplanet astronomy.
00:16:17 He was totally cool with it.
00:16:18 He’s totally cool.
00:16:19 He got total approval.
00:16:20 Well, maybe.
00:16:21 Okay.
00:16:22 So sorry.
00:16:23 I’m not sure if he’d actually read the stuff about my equation, but he was cool with it.
00:16:26 He was cool.
00:16:27 He was cool.
00:16:28 Okay.
00:16:29 So I just said like 15 different things, but maybe can you tell from your perspective,
00:16:33 what is the Drake equation and what is, sorry, the Seager equation?
00:16:37 Sure.
00:16:38 Well, the Drake equation, as you said, it’s a framework.
00:16:41 It’s a description of the number of civilizations out there of intelligent beings that are able
00:16:48 to communicate with us by radio waves.
00:16:53 So if you think of the movie Contact, you’ve seen Contact, right?
00:16:58 We’re listening in, actually.
00:16:59 It’s an active field of research, listening to other stars at radio wavelengths, hoping
00:17:03 that some intelligent civilizations are sending us a message.
00:17:07 And the Drake equation came like at the start of that whole field to put the factors down
00:17:12 on paper to sort of illustrate what is involved to kind of estimating.
00:17:18 And there’s no real estimate or prediction of how many civilizations are out there, but
00:17:21 it’s a way to frame the question and show you each term that’s involved.
00:17:25 So I took the Drake equation and I called it a revised Drake equation and I recast it
00:17:32 for the search for planets by more traditional astronomy means.
00:17:37 We’re looking at stars, looking for planets, looking for rocky planets, looking for planets
00:17:42 that are the right temperature for life, looking for planets that might have life that outputs
00:17:49 gases that we might detect in the future.
00:17:52 It’s the same spirit of the Drake equation.
00:17:53 It’s not going to give us any magic numbers.
00:17:55 So I’m going to say, hey, here’s exactly what’s out there.
00:17:58 It’s meant to kind of guide, guide of where we’re going.
00:18:01 So the Drake equation did, I mean the initial equation proposed actual numbers for those
00:18:06 variables, right?
00:18:07 Oh yes.
00:18:08 The equation proposed numbers and you can still plug your own numbers in.
00:18:12 And there’s this really cute website that lets you for both the Drake and my revised
00:18:15 equation plug in some numbers and see what you got.
00:18:19 So yeah.
00:18:20 Okay.
00:18:21 So what are, I mean, what are the variables, but maybe also what are like the critical
00:18:24 variables?
00:18:26 So in my equation, I set out to what are the numbers of inhabited planets that show signs
00:18:33 of life by way of gases in the atmosphere that can be attributed to life.
00:18:37 I could just walk through the terms as far as I’m aware.
00:18:39 So the first thing I say is what are the number of stars available?
00:18:43 And it’s not that those trillions and trillions of stars everywhere.
00:18:47 It’s what are available to like a specific search.
00:18:51 And so for example, the MIT led NASA mission TESS is surveying the sky, looking for all
00:18:57 kinds of planets, but it can also, it also has stars.
00:19:01 It has about 30,000 red dwarf stars.
00:19:04 So we just take a number of stars that a given survey can access.
00:19:08 So that’s what the number of stars is.
00:19:11 Then I wanted to know what kind of stars are quiet.
00:19:16 I called it fraction of those stars that is quiet.
00:19:19 In the case of TESS, the way it’s looking for planets is planets that transit the star.
00:19:23 They go in front of the star as seen from the telescope, but it turns out that some
00:19:27 stars are very active, they’re variable and they brighten and dim with time and that interferes
00:19:32 with our observation.
00:19:33 I apologize to interrupt.
00:19:35 So it’s a transiting planet.
00:19:37 So you’re really looking for a black blob, essentially that blocks the light.
00:19:42 We’re looking for a black blob that blocks the light and then trying to say something
00:19:45 about the size of the planet from the frequency of that black blobs appearance and the size
00:19:51 of that black blob, that kind of thing.
00:19:53 Yeah.
00:19:54 But let’s just say that out of all the stars there are accessible to whatever telescope,
00:19:58 some of them are just bad for whatever reason.
00:20:00 You’re not going to be able to find planets around them.
00:20:02 So I need to know the fraction of those that are, that are good.
00:20:05 So again, we have the number of stars, the fraction of them that we can actually find
00:20:09 planets around.
00:20:10 And by the way, is our sun one such, is our sun quiet?
00:20:16 Our sun is quiet.
00:20:17 Okay.
00:20:18 So I have actually two terms.
00:20:20 One describes how quiet they are and one is if we can find a planet around that star.
00:20:25 These transiting planets, for example, not all planets transit because the planet would
00:20:30 have to be orbiting that star in this kind of plane as viewed from you.
00:20:36 But if a star is, for example, orbiting in the plane of the sky, it will never transit.
00:20:40 It will never go in front of the star.
00:20:43 So in that case, we have to have a fraction that takes into account of that kind of geometric
00:20:47 factor.
00:20:48 And hopefully, I mean, you can assume that it’s uniformly distributed, hopefully.
00:20:52 Yes, we can assume and there’s evidence that it’s uniformly distributed, yes.
00:20:56 So then the next, so all of these factors so far, number of stars accessible to whatever
00:21:01 telescope you’re thinking about, how many stars are quiet, fraction of stars that are
00:21:06 quiet, fraction that are observable, in this case for the geometric factor, those are all
00:21:10 things we can measure.
00:21:11 And there’s one more term in the secret equation we can measure.
00:21:14 I call it fraction of planets in the habitable zone.
00:21:18 Because believe it or not, we have a handle on that for a certain set of stars.
00:21:23 We know from our, the Kepler Space Telescope that operated for a number of years, we have
00:21:28 estimates for how many planets are in the so called habitable zone of the host star
00:21:31 for a certain type of star.
00:21:33 So all those we have measurable.
00:21:34 And then like the Drake equation itself, there are some terms we can not measure.
00:21:39 And those ones, I call them FL, fraction of all those planets that have life on them.
00:21:46 Because we don’t know what that is.
00:21:47 And FS, I called for spectroscopy, the fraction that have, we can use our telescope and instrument
00:21:55 tools to look for light.
00:21:58 The FS was the ones that, the planets that have life that actually gives off a gas, a
00:22:03 useful gas that might accumulate in the atmosphere, so we could eventually observe it.
00:22:10 How do the FL and FS interplay?
00:22:12 So these are separate terms?
00:22:14 Separate terms.
00:22:15 And so?
00:22:16 So for example, you could imagine, so for example, you could imagine life, like us humans,
00:22:23 we breathe out carbon dioxide.
00:22:26 And our planet Earth, we already have a lot of carbon dioxide on it.
00:22:29 Well, we have hundreds of parts per million, but it has a really strong signal.
00:22:33 So us humans breathing out carbon dioxide, it’s not helpful for any intelligent beings
00:22:37 that are looking back at Earth, because there’s already a lot of, there’s already enough carbon
00:22:41 dioxide, we’re not adding to it.
00:22:43 So if there is life on a planet, and it’s outputting a boring gas that’s not helpful
00:22:47 for us to uniquely identify as being made by life versus just being there anyway, then
00:22:54 it’s not helpful.
00:22:55 So I separated those two terms out.
00:22:57 Soon I think we’ll have evidence that planets that can support life at least are common.
00:23:04 So okay, this is such an awesome topic, I have a million questions.
00:23:11 What okay, I know this is a little bit of speculation, but what’s your sense about that,
00:23:16 I think FS, which is like, that life would produce interesting gases that would be able
00:23:23 to detect, like, is there, one, is there scientific evidence and, and second, is there some intuition
00:23:30 around life producing gases with detectable hints in terms of chemistry?
00:23:36 So interestingly enough, that entire question relates to, I’m going to say almost my life’s
00:23:43 work, the work I’m doing now and the work I’m doing for the next 20 years, and I wish
00:23:46 I could give you a concrete number, like 1%, like on the worst days, it’s 1%, let’s say
00:23:51 in my mind.
00:23:52 You know, in the best days, it’s like 80%.
00:23:54 And I could actually go into a lot of detail here, but I’ll just give you the simplest
00:23:58 things.
00:23:59 So first of all, we make an assumption that like us, and our life here on Earth, life
00:24:05 uses chemistry.
00:24:07 So we use chemistry because we eat food, we breathe air, and we have metabolism that to
00:24:13 break down food to get energy to store energy, and then ultimately to use it.
00:24:18 And all life here has some kind of byproduct in doing all that, some kind of waste product
00:24:22 that goes into the atmosphere.
00:24:24 So I like to think that life everywhere uses chemistry.
00:24:28 Some people have imagined, like, let’s imagine like a windmill, like mechanical energy, just
00:24:34 getting energy and using it without storing it.
00:24:37 And if there was life like that, it might not need to output a gas.
00:24:40 So we make this basic assumption of chemistry, that’s the first thing.
00:24:44 The second more complicated thing that I and my team work on is what happens to the gas
00:24:47 once it is produced by life, it goes into the atmosphere.
00:24:51 And a lot of gas is just destroyed immediately, actually, by ultraviolet radiation or by oxygen.
00:24:59 Oxygen is incredibly destructive to a lot of gases.
00:25:03 So the gas can be produced by life, but it could be just completely destroyed by its
00:25:07 environment.
00:25:08 I guess we should pause on that, that you mentioned your life’s work.
00:25:13 This is just the beautiful idea that it’s kind of paralyzing when you look out there
00:25:19 and you wonder, is there a life out there?
00:25:22 It’s the first paralyzing, actually, before I encountered your work, I feel like an idiot.
00:25:27 But you know, it feels like there’s no tool to answer that question.
00:25:32 And then what you kind of provided is this cool idea that it might be possible to answer
00:25:40 that by looking at the gases.
00:25:41 I mean, that’s a really interesting, that’s a beautiful idea.
00:25:45 And yeah, so we could just pause on like, that’s a powerful tool, I think, to build
00:25:55 the intuition around, because I was totally clueless about it.
00:25:57 And that was kind of exciting.
00:25:59 I mean, I’m sure there’s folks probably early on in your life who were very skeptical about
00:26:05 this notion.
00:26:06 Well, maybe I’m not sure, but generally you would want to be skeptical, it’s like, well,
00:26:13 all these kinds of other things could generate gases, you know, all those kinds of things.
00:26:17 Oh, that’s so true.
00:26:18 And that’s a big part of this growing field is how to make sure that this gas isn’t produced
00:26:23 by another effect.
00:26:24 But I do want to, you know, again, pausing on that and going back a bit.
00:26:29 It’s incredible to think, but like, at least almost 100 years ago, there’s a record of
00:26:33 someone talking about the idea of a gas being an indicator of life elsewhere.
00:26:38 That idea was floating about somewhere.
00:26:40 Yes, it was totally floating about.
00:26:42 And it comes down to oxygen, which on our planet fills our atmosphere to 20% by volume.
00:26:48 And you know, we rely on oxygen to breathe.
00:26:50 You know, when you hear about the people in Mount Everest running out of air, they’re
00:26:54 really running out of oxygen, well, they’re running out of oxygen because the air is getting
00:26:57 thinner as they climb up the mountain.
00:27:01 But without plants and bacteria, there’s bacteria that also photosynthesizes and produces oxygen
00:27:08 as a waste product.
00:27:09 Without those, we would have virtually no oxygen.
00:27:13 Our atmosphere would be devoid of oxygen.
00:27:15 So yeah, if you were to analyze Earth, is oxygen the strong indicator here?
00:27:21 Oxygen is a huge indicator.
00:27:22 And that’s what we’re hoping, that there is an intelligent civilization not too far from
00:27:26 here around a planet orbiting a nearby star with the kind of telescopes we’re trying to
00:27:31 build.
00:27:32 And they’re looking back at our sun and they’ve seen our Earth and they see oxygen.
00:27:36 And they probably won’t be like 100.0% sure that there’s life making it.
00:27:41 But if they go through all the possible scenarios, they’ll be left with a pretty strong hint
00:27:45 that there’s life here.
00:27:46 Yeah.
00:27:47 Okay, but how do you detect that type of gases that are on the planet from a distance?
00:27:55 And that’s going back to that, that’s what people were skeptical about.
00:28:00 When I first started working on exoplanets a long time ago, people didn’t believe we
00:28:04 would ever, ever, ever study an exoplanet atmosphere of any kind.
00:28:09 And now dozens of them are studied.
00:28:11 There’s a whole field of people, hundreds of people working on exoplanet atmospheres
00:28:14 actually.
00:28:15 Wow.
00:28:16 But first there was a point where people didn’t even know there was exoplanets, right?
00:28:20 When was the first exoplanet detected?
00:28:23 The first exoplanet around a sun like star anyway was detected in the mid 1990s.
00:28:27 That was a big deal.
00:28:29 Kind of vaguely remember that.
00:28:30 Well, at the time it was a big deal, but it was also incredibly controversial.
00:28:34 Because in exoplanets, we only had one example of a planetary system, our own solar system.
00:28:41 And in our solar system, Jupiter, our big massive planet, is really far from our star.
00:28:48 And this first exoplanet around a sun like star was incredibly close to its star, so
00:28:53 close that people just couldn’t believe it was a planet actually.
00:28:56 So maybe zoom out, what the heck is an exoplanet?
00:29:00 An exoplanet is our name, like is the name that we call a planet orbiting a star other
00:29:05 than our sun.
00:29:07 Right.
00:29:08 Extrasolar, I guess is another.
00:29:09 You can call it extrasolar.
00:29:10 Okay.
00:29:11 Exoplanet is simpler.
00:29:12 But I think it’s worth pausing to remember that each one of those stars out there in
00:29:17 our night sky is a sun.
00:29:18 And you know, our sun has planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc.
00:29:23 And so for a long time, people have wondered, do those other stars or other suns have planets?
00:29:29 And they do.
00:29:30 And it appears that nearly every star has a planet, has a planet we call exoplanet.
00:29:34 And there are thousands of known exoplanets already.
00:29:37 So there’s already, yeah, like, there’s so many things about space that it’s hard to
00:29:42 put into one’s brain, because it starts filling it with awe.
00:29:47 So yeah, if you visualize the fact that the stars that we see in the sky aren’t just stars,
00:29:54 they’re like, they’re suns.
00:29:57 And they very likely, as you’re saying, would have planets around them.
00:30:03 There’s all these planets roaming about in this like, dimly lit darkness, with potentially
00:30:11 life.
00:30:12 I mean, it’s just mind blowing.
00:30:14 But maybe can you give a brief, like, history of discovering all the exoplanets?
00:30:23 So there’s no exoplanets in the 90s.
00:30:26 And then there’s a lot of exoplanets now.
00:30:28 So how did that come about?
00:30:29 So many planets.
00:30:31 How did it come about?
00:30:32 Well, maybe another way to ask is, what is the methodology that was used to discover
00:30:37 them?
00:30:38 I can say that.
00:30:39 But I’d like to just say something else first where, so exoplanets, you know, the line
00:30:43 between what is considered completely crazy.
00:30:47 And what is considered mainstream research, legit, is constantly shifting.
00:30:51 This is awesome.
00:30:52 Yeah.
00:30:53 So before, when I started on exoplanets, it was still sketchy.
00:30:56 Like, it wasn’t considered a career, a thing, a place where you should be investing.
00:31:01 And right now, now, today, it’s so many people are working in this field, a good, I don’t
00:31:06 know, at least 1000, probably more.
00:31:08 I don’t know if that sounds like a lot to you, but it’s a lot.
00:31:10 No, it’s a legitimate field of inquiry.
00:31:13 Yeah.
00:31:14 Legitimate field of inquiry.
00:31:15 And what’s helped us is everything that’s helped everyone else.
00:31:18 It’s software, it’s computers, it’s hardware.
00:31:21 It’s like our phones.
00:31:22 You have a fantastic detector in there.
00:31:23 Like, they didn’t always have that.
00:31:25 I don’t know if you remember the so called olden days.
00:31:28 We didn’t have digital cameras.
00:31:29 We had film.
00:31:30 You take a film camera, you send the film away, and eventually it comes back, and then
00:31:33 you see your pictures.
00:31:34 And they could all be horrible.
00:31:35 Yeah.
00:31:36 So yeah, I mean, digital.
00:31:37 It just changed everything.
00:31:38 Data changed everything.
00:31:39 Yeah, and so one thing that really helped exoplanets were detectors that were very sensitive.
00:31:45 Because when we’re looking for the transiting planets, what we’re doing is we’re monitoring
00:31:51 a star’s brightness as a function of time.
00:31:53 It’s like click, taking a picture of the stars every few seconds or minutes.
00:31:58 And we’re measuring the brightness of a star, like every frame.
00:32:02 And we’re looking for a drop in brightness that’s characteristic of a planet going in
00:32:06 front of the star, and then finishing its so called transit.
00:32:11 And to make that measurement, we have to have precise detectors.
00:32:15 And the detectors that are making the measurement, can you do it from Earth?
00:32:22 Are they floating about in space, like what kind of telescope?
00:32:25 So on the ground, people are using telescopes, small telescopes that are almost just like
00:32:30 a glorified telephoto lens.
00:32:32 And they’re looking at big swaths of the sky.
00:32:35 And from the ground, people can find giant planets like the size of Jupiter.
00:32:38 So it’s about 10 to 12 times the size of Earth.
00:32:41 We can find big planets, because we can reach about 1% precision.
00:32:46 So not sure how technical you want to get.
00:32:48 Well, how many pixels are we talking about?
00:32:53 You mentioned phones, there’s a bunch of megapixels, I think.
00:32:56 So for exoplanets, you want to think about it as like a pixel or less than a pixel, we’re
00:33:01 not getting any information.
00:33:03 But to be more technical, our telescope spreads the light out over many pixels, but we’re
00:33:08 not getting information.
00:33:09 We’re not tiling the planet with pixels.
00:33:12 It’s just like a point of light, or in most cases, we don’t even see the planet itself,
00:33:16 just the planet’s effect on the star.
00:33:17 But another thing that really helped was computers, because transiting planets are actually quite
00:33:22 rare.
00:33:23 I mean, they don’t all go in front of their star.
00:33:25 And so to find transiting planets, we look at a big part of the sky at once, or we look
00:33:29 at tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, or even in some cases, millions of stars at
00:33:34 one time.
00:33:35 And so you’re not going to do this by hand, going through a million stars, counting up
00:33:39 the brightness.
00:33:40 So we have computer software and computer code that does the job for us and counts the
00:33:47 brightness and looks for a signal that could be due to a transiting planet.
00:33:51 And I just finished a job called Deputy Science Director for the MIT led NASA mission test.
00:33:59 And it was my purview to make sure that we got the planet candidates, the transiting
00:34:05 light curves, out to the community so people could follow them up and figure out if they’re
00:34:10 actual planets or false positives.
00:34:13 So publish the data so that people could just, all the data scientists out there could crunch
00:34:19 and see if they can discover something.
00:34:21 They can discover something.
00:34:22 And in fact, the NASA policy for this mission is that all the data becomes public as soon
00:34:26 as possible.
00:34:28 It’s not as easy as it sounds, though, to download the data and look for planets.
00:34:33 But there is a group called PlanetHunters.org, and they take the data and they actually crowdsource
00:34:38 it out to people to look for planets.
00:34:40 Yeah.
00:34:41 And they often find signals that our computers and our team missed.
00:34:44 So we mentioned exoplanets.
00:34:46 What about Earth like, or I don’t know what the right distinction is, is it habitable
00:34:51 or is it Earth like planets, but what are those different categories and how can we
00:34:55 tell the difference and detect each?
00:34:57 Right, right.
00:34:58 So we’re not at Earth like planets yet.
00:35:01 All the planets we’re finding are so different from what we have in our solar system.
00:35:06 They’re just easier planets to find, but like…
00:35:08 In which way?
00:35:09 For example, there could be a Jupiter sized planet where an Earth should be.
00:35:14 We find planets that are the same size as Earth, but are orbiting way closer to their
00:35:20 star than Mercury is to our sun.
00:35:24 They’re so close that, because close to a star means they also orbit faster.
00:35:29 And some of these hot super Earths we call them, their year, their time to go around
00:35:33 their star is less than a day.
00:35:36 And they’re heated so much by their star, they’re heated so much by the star.
00:35:40 We think the surface is hot enough to melt rock.
00:35:42 So instead of running out by the bay or the river, you’ll have like liquid lava.
00:35:47 There’ll be liquid lava lakes on these planets, we think.
00:35:51 And life can’t survive.
00:35:53 Way too hot.
00:35:54 The molecules needed for life just wouldn’t be able to survive those temperatures.
00:35:59 We have some other planets.
00:36:00 One of the most mysterious things out there, factoid, if you will, is that the most common
00:36:07 type of planet we know about so far is a planet that’s in between Earth and Neptune size.
00:36:12 It’s two to three times the size of Earth.
00:36:15 And we have no solar system counterpart of that planet.
00:36:19 That is like going outside to the forest and finding some kind of creature or animal that
00:36:24 just no one has ever seen before and then discovering that is the most common thing
00:36:27 out there.
00:36:29 And so we’re not even sure what they are.
00:36:30 We have a lot of thoughts as to the different types of planet it could be, but people don’t
00:36:34 really know.
00:36:35 I mean, what are your thoughts about what it could be?
00:36:37 Well, one thought, and this is more when we want to be rather than might be, is that these
00:36:43 so called mini Neptunes, we call them, that they are water worlds, that they could be
00:36:48 scaled up versions of Jupiter’s icy moons, such that they are planets that are made of
00:36:54 more than half of water by mass.
00:36:57 And what’s the connection between water and life and the possibility of seeing that from
00:37:02 a gas perspective?
00:37:03 Okay, so all life on Earth needs liquid water.
00:37:07 And so there’s been this idea in astronomy or astrobiology for a long time called follow
00:37:12 the water, find water, that will give you a chance of finding life, but we could still
00:37:16 zoom out and the community consensus is that we need some kind of liquid for life to originate
00:37:24 and to survive because molecules have to react.
00:37:28 You don’t have a way that molecules can interact with each other.
00:37:31 You can’t really make anything.
00:37:32 And so when we think of all the liquids out there, water is the most abundant liquid in
00:37:38 terms of planetary materials.
00:37:39 There really aren’t that many liquids.
00:37:40 Like I mentioned, liquid rock, way too hot for life.
00:37:44 We have some really cold liquids, like almost gasoline, like ethane and methane lakes that
00:37:49 have been found on one of Saturn’s moons, Titan.
00:37:52 That’s so cold though.
00:37:53 And for exoplanets, we can’t study really cold planets because they’re just simply too
00:37:57 dark and too cold.
00:38:00 So we usually are just left with looking for planets with liquid water.
00:38:05 And to your point, remember as we talked about how planets are less than a pixel in that
00:38:12 way to say, so we can’t see oceans on planet.
00:38:15 We’re not going to see continents and oceans, not yet anyway, but we can see gases in the
00:38:19 atmosphere.
00:38:20 And if it’s a small rocky planet, and this is going into some more detail, if we see
00:38:26 a small rocky planet with water vapor in the atmosphere, we’re pretty sure that means there
00:38:31 has to be a liquid water reservoir because it’s not intuitive in any way, but water is
00:38:37 broken up by ultraviolet radiation from the star or from the sun.
00:38:42 And on most planets when water is broken up into H and O, the H, the hydrogen will escape
00:38:47 to space.
00:38:48 Because just like when you think of a child letting go of a helium filled balloon, it
00:38:53 floats upwards and hydrogen is a light gas and will leave from the planet.
00:38:58 So ultimately if you have water, unless there’s an ocean, like a way to keep replenishing
00:39:03 water vapor in the atmosphere, that water vapor should be destroyed by ultraviolet radiation.
00:39:08 Got it, so there’s a, okay, so there’s a need for liquid, I mean, I guess it was water.
00:39:16 Is water essential or are the liquids, I mean, the chemistry here is probably super complicated.
00:39:21 It does, but you know, there’s not an infinite number of liquids.
00:39:24 There’s maybe like five liquids that can exist inside or on the surface of a planet.
00:39:28 And water is the one that exists for the largest range of temperatures and pressures.
00:39:32 And it’s also the easiest type of planet for us to find and study is one with water vapor
00:39:37 rather than a cold planet that has ethane and methane lakes.
00:39:41 What’s your personal, in terms of solar systems and planets that you’re most hopeful about
00:39:48 in terms of our closest neighbors that you kind of have a sense that there might be somebody
00:39:57 living over there, whether it’s bacteria or somebody that looks like us.
00:40:02 I’m hopeful that every star nearby has a planet.
00:40:06 That has some life.
00:40:07 Because it almost has to for us to make progress.
00:40:09 We have to have that dream condition.
00:40:12 So the dream condition is like life is just super abundant out there.
00:40:16 Yeah, the dream, yes, the dream condition is that life is super abundant and it’s based
00:40:21 on the thought that if there is a planet with water and continents, that it also has the
00:40:27 ingredients for life and that the kind of base kernel thought is that if the ingredients
00:40:36 for life is there, life will form.
00:40:37 Life will form.
00:40:38 That’s what we’re holding on to.
00:40:39 With a relatively high probability.
00:40:41 Yes, that’s it.
00:40:43 Okay, let’s go into land of speculation.
00:40:46 What about intelligent life?
00:40:49 Us humans consider ourselves intelligent, surprisingly or unsurprisingly.
00:40:56 Do you think about from your perspective of looking at planets from a gas composition
00:41:02 perspective and in general of how we might see intelligent life and your intuition about
00:41:10 whether that life is even out there?
00:41:12 I think the life is out there somewhere.
00:41:14 The huge numbers of stars and planets.
00:41:17 I like to think that life had a chance to evolve to be intelligent.
00:41:21 I’m not convinced the life is anywhere near here, only because if it’s hard for intelligent
00:41:26 life to evolve, then it will be far away by definition.
00:41:29 Well, the sad thing is maybe from the artificial intelligence perspective is it makes me sad
00:41:36 there might be intelligent life out there that we’re just not like the pathways of evolution
00:41:43 can go in all these different directions where we might not be able to communicate with it
00:41:47 or even know that or even detect its intelligence or even comprehend its intelligence.
00:41:52 I’m convinced cats are more intelligent than humans that we’re just not able to comprehend
00:41:59 the measures, the proper measures of their intelligence.
00:42:04 My dog is so funny.
00:42:06 He’s a golden doodle.
00:42:07 His name’s Leo.
00:42:08 We joke that he’s either a really dumb dog and sorry, he’s not here to defend himself,
00:42:12 but he’s either really dumb or he’s a super genius just pretending to be dumb.
00:42:16 Yeah.
00:42:17 And it’s possible he’s a multidimensional projection of alien life here monitoring one
00:42:25 of the top scientists in the world trying to find aliens just to make sure that humans
00:42:33 don’t get out of hand.
00:42:34 That’s funny.
00:42:35 Oh, I’m definitely going to go in and ask him about that when I get home.
00:42:39 She’s onto something.
00:42:40 Yeah.
00:42:41 What might we look for in terms of signs of intelligent life?
00:42:46 From your toolkit, do you think there are things that we might be able to use or maybe
00:42:54 in the next couple of decades discover that would be different than life that’s like bacteria,
00:43:00 that’s primitive life?
00:43:03 I still love SETI, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
00:43:06 I like to hope that if there is a civilization out there, they’re trying to send us a message.
00:43:10 I think, like, think about it, I don’t know.
00:43:13 What are your thoughts?
00:43:14 Like, if you think about our Earth, there’s no structure we’ve built that intelligent
00:43:18 civilizations could see from far away.
00:43:20 There’s literally nothing, not even the Great Wall of China.
00:43:23 And so to think, like, why would this other civilization build a giant structure that
00:43:27 we could see?
00:43:28 Yeah, so with SETI, the idea is that we’re both trying to hear signals and send signals,
00:43:33 right?
00:43:34 Well, we haven’t sent one.
00:43:35 They call that METI, messaging.
00:43:37 And there’s a big kind of fear over METI, because do you want to tell them you’re here?
00:43:42 It’s kind of this, like, let’s wait till they call us.
00:43:45 Yeah.
00:43:46 It’s like a dating game, you have to, like, how many days do I wait before I call, kind
00:43:51 of thing.
00:43:52 Yeah.
00:43:53 But the funny thing is, if no one’s sending us a message, if everybody’s only listening,
00:43:57 how do you make progress?
00:43:59 That’s right.
00:44:00 And, I mean, but there’s also, there’s the Voyager spacecraft that we have these little
00:44:04 pixels of robots flying out all over the place.
00:44:09 Some of them, like the Voyager, reach out really far.
00:44:13 And they have some stuff on them.
00:44:15 Okay, I just…
00:44:16 We do, we have the Voyager, but they’re not really going anywhere in particular.
00:44:19 And they’re moving very, very slowly on a cosmic scale.
00:44:21 Yeah.
00:44:22 And me saying they’re far is kind of silly.
00:44:24 Yeah.
00:44:25 It’s all relative in astronomy.
00:44:26 It’s all relative.
00:44:27 Yeah.
00:44:28 Yeah.
00:44:29 I just…
00:44:30 So from the, if you look at Earth from an alien perspective, from visually and from
00:44:36 gas composition, I wonder if it’s possible to determine the degree of maybe productive
00:44:44 energy use.
00:44:45 I wonder if it’s possible to tell, like, how busy these Earthlings are.
00:44:51 Well, let’s zoom out again and think about oxygen.
00:44:55 So when cyanobacteria arose like billions of years ago and figured out how to harness
00:45:00 the energy of the sun for photosynthesis, they reengineered the entire atmosphere.
00:45:05 20% of the atmosphere has oxygen now.
00:45:09 Like that is a huge scale.
00:45:11 You know, they almost poisoned everything else by making this, what was apparently very
00:45:15 poisonous to everything that was alive.
00:45:17 But imagine…
00:45:18 So are we doing anything at that scale?
00:45:19 Like, are we changing anything at like 20% of the Earth with a giant structure or 20%
00:45:23 of this or 20% of that?
00:45:24 Like we aren’t actually.
00:45:26 Yeah.
00:45:27 Yeah.
00:45:28 That’s humbling to think that we’re not actually having that much of an impact.
00:45:32 I know.
00:45:33 But we are because in a way we’re destroying our entire planet.
00:45:35 But it’s humbling to think that from far away, people probably can’t even tell.
00:45:40 But from the perspective of the planet, when we say we’re destroying, you know, global
00:45:45 warming, all that kind of stuff, what we really mean is we’re destroying it for a bunch of
00:45:51 different species, including humans.
00:45:54 But like, I think the Earth will be okay.
00:45:55 Oh, the Earth will be, the Earth will remain, whatever happens to us, the Earth will still
00:46:00 be here.
00:46:01 And it’ll still be difficult to detect any difference.
00:46:03 Like it’s sad to think that if humans destroy ourselves, except potentially with nuclear
00:46:09 war, it’d be hard to tell that anything even happened.
00:46:12 Yeah.
00:46:13 It’s hard to tell from far away that anything happened.
00:46:15 What about, what are your thoughts now?
00:46:17 This is really getting into speculation land.
00:46:21 You’ve mentioned exoplanets were in the realm of, you know, this is beautiful edge between
00:46:28 science and science fiction.
00:46:31 That some of us, a rare few are brave enough to walk, I think in academia, you were brave
00:46:37 enough to do that.
00:46:39 I think in some sense, artificial intelligence sometimes walks that line a little bit.
00:46:47 There is so much excitement about extraterrestrial life and aliens in this world.
00:46:52 I mean, I don’t know what, how to comprehend that excitement, but to me, it’s great to
00:46:59 see people curious because to me, extraterrestrial life and aliens is at the core, a scientific
00:47:06 question.
00:47:08 And it’s almost looks like people are excited about science.
00:47:11 They’re excited by discovery, discovery, right?
00:47:16 And then the possibility that there’s alien life that visited earth or is here on earth
00:47:21 now is, is a excitement about discovery in your lifetime, essentially.
00:47:29 I mean, what do you make, what do you make of that?
00:47:33 There’s recent events where DARPA or DOD released footage of these unmanned aerial phenomena.
00:47:44 They’re calling them now UAP.
00:47:46 They got everybody like super excited.
00:47:48 Like maybe there is like what, what, what’s, what’s here on earth.
00:47:52 Do you follow the, this world of people who are thinking about aliens that are already
00:47:58 here or have visited?
00:48:00 I don’t really follow it.
00:48:01 They follow me.
00:48:02 Because in this field, if you’re a scientist of any kind, you get, people contact us, me.
00:48:11 There’s a lot of them about, Hey, I have stuff you should see, Hey, the aliens are already
00:48:15 here.
00:48:16 I need to tell you about it.
00:48:17 And I know there are people out there who really believe there’s a psychology to it.
00:48:22 There’s a psychology to it and it’s fascinating, but okay.
00:48:25 So it’s similar to artificial intelligence, but I still, but like you, I’m still enamored
00:48:29 with the point that it is out there and that people believe so strongly.
00:48:32 And that’s so many people out there believe, believe.
00:48:37 And I don’t know, I I’m not as allergic to it as some scientists are because ultimately
00:48:44 if aliens showed up or do show up or have showed up you know, these are going to be
00:48:50 very difficult to study scientific phenomena.
00:48:55 Like in, in fact, like going back to cats and dogs, like I just, I think we should be
00:49:01 more open minded about developing new tools and looking for intelligent life on earth
00:49:08 that we haven’t yet found.
00:49:10 Or even understanding the nature of our own intelligence because it kind of is an alien
00:49:15 life form, the thing that’s living, you know, in our skull.
00:49:19 It’s so true.
00:49:20 And we don’t understand consciousness.
00:49:21 Yeah.
00:49:22 It’s true.
00:49:23 We don’t understand how biology is hard, you know, unpacking it and working it all out.
00:49:28 It’s a stretch.
00:49:29 And they say too that our thinking mind is like the tip of a pyramid and that everything
00:49:34 else is happening under the hood and, but what is happening?
00:49:37 But the thing with, so the typical scientist response to, you know, are there aliens here
00:49:42 is that we need to see major evidence, not like a sketchy picture of something.
00:49:50 We need some cold hard evidence and we just don’t have that.
00:49:53 That’s exactly right.
00:49:54 Yeah.
00:49:55 But from my perspective, I admire people that dream and I think that’s beautiful.
00:50:00 The thing I don’t like, there’s two sides of the, of the folks that probably listened
00:50:05 to this, this podcast is, oh, those that dream, I think is beautiful, that, that wander what’s
00:50:12 out there, what’s here on earth.
00:50:14 And then the other ones who are very conspiratorial and thinking that stuff is being hidden and
00:50:19 it becomes about institutions.
00:50:20 Right, right, right.
00:50:21 Okay.
00:50:22 I got it.
00:50:23 I have a funny thing to talk about that.
00:50:24 So one of my colleagues had a really good answer to that and it’s not me saying this,
00:50:28 so I can say this, but he said, look, he works with NASA, not at NASA.
00:50:32 He works with government, not in the government.
00:50:35 It’s kind of mean, but he’d say, trust me, they couldn’t hide it if they tried.
00:50:37 Do you know what I’m saying?
00:50:39 Like, we’re not smart enough or good enough.
00:50:42 Not we or not me or not you, but whoever to cover it up.
00:50:45 It just, it’s sort of a myth.
00:50:47 Yeah.
00:50:48 It makes it sad because the people at NASA, the people at MIT, the people in academia,
00:50:57 the people in these institutions and yes, even in government are often trying, they’re
00:51:03 like just curious descendants of apes.
00:51:06 They’re just, they, they want to do good.
00:51:08 They want to discover stuff.
00:51:09 They’re not trying to hide stuff.
00:51:11 In fact, most of them would, in terms of leaks, would love to discover this and release this
00:51:18 kind of stuff.
00:51:19 There’s a, did you ever watch the show called The X Files?
00:51:23 Yeah.
00:51:24 Scully and Mulder.
00:51:25 Yeah.
00:51:26 And what I love actually, I used to put it up during my talks, my public talks.
00:51:29 There’s a picture of a UFO or what looks like UFO and it says, I want to believe.
00:51:35 So that’s, that’s where I think a lot of us are coming from.
00:51:38 I want to believe.
00:51:40 And it’s so great.
00:51:41 And one time I put that up and this very, very nice couple approached me really nervous
00:51:46 afterwards and they said, Hey, can we take you out for lunch sometime?
00:51:49 And I said, sure.
00:51:50 And they were like the nicest people.
00:51:52 And just one of many who has an alien, alien abduction story and the woman, um, could never
00:51:59 have kids.
00:52:00 They were older, but they didn’t have kids, which for them was a real source of regret.
00:52:02 But it was because the aliens who had abducted her had made it so that she couldn’t have
00:52:06 kids.
00:52:07 And she had apparently something implanted behind her ear, which was somehow unimplanted
00:52:12 later.
00:52:13 And they’re just so sincere and they’re such a lovely couple and they just wanted to share
00:52:18 their story.
00:52:19 That’s a, that’s a real, whatever that is, that’s the real thing.
00:52:23 The mystery of the human mind is more powerful than any alien or, I mean, it’s as interesting
00:52:30 I think as the universe.
00:52:32 And I think they’re somehow intricately linked, maybe getting a sense of numbers.
00:52:38 How many stars are there in, um, maybe, I don’t know what the radius that’s reasonable
00:52:46 to think about.
00:52:47 I don’t know if the observable universe is like way too big to think about, but in terms
00:52:52 of when we think about how many habitable planets there are, what are the numbers we’re
00:52:56 working with in your sense?
00:52:58 What are the scale?
00:52:59 Honestly, the numbers are probably like billions of trillions of stars.
00:53:03 Yeah.
00:53:04 You know, in the UK, I think, I don’t know if we do that here, but they will call a billion
00:53:07 trillion where you put like one billion followed by a trillion.
00:53:10 Yeah.
00:53:11 It’s kind of weird, but here, I don’t even know how to say the number 10 to the 20.
00:53:14 Like if you know what that is, that’s one followed by 20 zeros.
00:53:17 That’s a big number.
00:53:18 We don’t have a name for that number.
00:53:20 There’s so many per star.
00:53:22 I think we kind of mentioned this.
00:53:23 Is there a good sense, there’s probably argument about this, but per star, how many planets
00:53:30 are there?
00:53:31 We don’t have that number yet per se, you know, we’re not really there, but some people
00:53:35 think that there’s many planets per star.
00:53:38 There’s this analogy of filling the coffee cup, like, you know, you don’t usually just
00:53:43 pour one drop, you fill it.
00:53:45 And that planetary systems, we see stars being born that have a disc of gas and dust and
00:53:51 that ultimately forms planets.
00:53:53 So the idea, this kind of concept is that planets, so many planets form too many.
00:53:58 And eventually some get kicked out and you’re left with like a full planetary system, a
00:54:02 dynamically full system.
00:54:04 And so there have to be a lot because so many form and a bunch survive.
00:54:08 I mean, that makes perfect intuitive sense, right?
00:54:11 Like why wouldn’t that happen?
00:54:12 Right.
00:54:13 Well, there’s other thoughts too, though.
00:54:16 These big planets that are really close to the star, we think they formed far away from
00:54:20 the star where there’s enough material to form and they migrated inwards.
00:54:25 And some of these planets migrating inwards due to interaction with other planets or with
00:54:28 the disc itself, they may have cleared it out.
00:54:32 And kicked other planets out of the system.
00:54:34 So there’s a lot of ideas floating around.
00:54:36 We’re not entirely sure.
00:54:39 And what about Earth like planets?
00:54:41 That’s another level of uncertainty.
00:54:43 It’s a level of uncertainty.
00:54:44 If we think of an Earth like planet being an Earth around a sun in the same orbit, an
00:54:51 Earth like planet being an Earth sized planet in an Earth like orbit about a sun like star,
00:54:55 we’re not there yet.
00:54:56 You know, we’re not able to detect enough of those to give you a hard number.
00:55:00 Some people have extrapolated.
00:55:03 And they will say as many as one in five stars like our sun could be hosting a true Earth
00:55:08 like planet.
00:55:09 Wow.
00:55:10 On the topic of space exploration, there’s been a lot of exciting developments with NASA,
00:55:15 with SpaceX, with other companies successfully getting rockets into space with humans and
00:55:23 getting them to land back, especially with SpaceX.
00:55:27 What are your thoughts about Elon Musk and SpaceX, Crew Dragon, while working with NASA
00:55:33 to launch astronauts?
00:55:35 What’s your sense about these exciting new developments?
00:55:39 Well, SpaceX and other so called commercial companies are only good news for my field,
00:55:46 because they’re lowering the cost of getting to space by having reusable rockets.
00:55:50 It’s just been it’s incredible.
00:55:52 And we need cheaper access to space.
00:55:53 So from a very practical viewpoint, it’s all good.
00:55:56 Without getting people, there’s this dream that we have to go to Mars, boots on Mars.
00:56:01 Boots on Mars.
00:56:03 What do you think about that?
00:56:04 You mentioned probes.
00:56:06 What’s the value of humans?
00:56:08 Is that interesting to you from both scientific and a human perspective?
00:56:13 Human mostly.
00:56:14 I think it’s such in our desire to explore because part of what it means to be human.
00:56:19 So wanting to go to another planet and be able to live there for some time.
00:56:23 It’s just just what it means to be human.
00:56:26 You know, oftentimes in science and engineering, big, huge discoveries are made when we didn’t
00:56:32 intend to.
00:56:33 So often this kind of pure exploratory type of research or this pure exploration research,
00:56:37 it can lead to something really important like the laser, we couldn’t really live without
00:56:41 that now.
00:56:42 At the grocery, you scan your foods, there’s surgery that involves lasers, GPS, we all
00:56:46 use our GPS.
00:56:47 We don’t have GPS because someone thought, hey, it’d be great to have a navigation system.
00:56:53 And so I do support, I do, I just, but I really think it comes primarily just from the desire
00:56:58 to explore.
00:56:59 Do you think something, there’s a lot of criticism and a lot of excitement about Mars.
00:57:06 Do you think there’s value in trying to go to put humans on Mars, first of all, and second
00:57:12 of all, colonize Mars?
00:57:15 Do you think there’s something interesting that might come from there?
00:57:18 I’m convinced there will be something interesting.
00:57:20 I just don’t know what it is yet, but I don’t think, I don’t think having some commercial
00:57:24 value or value in the metric of something useful is really what’s motivating us.
00:57:29 So really, you see, exploration is a long term investment into something awesome that
00:57:33 eventually will be commercial value.
00:57:35 I do actually.
00:57:36 Yeah.
00:57:37 I do.
00:57:38 So what about visiting, okay, I apologize, but Amy, there’s an exciting longing to visit
00:57:48 Earth like planets elsewhere.
00:57:51 So what’s the closest Earth like planet you think is worth visiting and how hard is it?
00:57:59 Wow, it is very hard.
00:58:01 I mean, our nearest, call it Earth mass planet, it’s orbiting a star very different from
00:58:05 our own sun, an M Dwarf star, a small red star, Proxima Centauri.
00:58:10 It’s over four light years away and we can’t travel at the speed of light.
00:58:15 We can’t even travel, I mean, it would take tens of thousands of years to get there with
00:58:18 conventional methods.
00:58:19 So, you know, the movies like multigenerational, yeah, this movie Passenger, have you seen
00:58:23 that movie?
00:58:24 Passenger.
00:58:25 No.
00:58:26 It’s about a big spaceship that is traveling to another planet and everyone’s hibernating.
00:58:30 I won’t give you the spoiler alert because one person wakes up and then it’s kind of
00:58:33 a problem.
00:58:34 Okay, got it.
00:58:35 But yeah, the multigenerational ships, I mean, when you think about where we’re headed as
00:58:40 a species, maybe we don’t send people, maybe we end up sending raw biological materials
00:58:48 and instructions to print out humans, it sounds kind of farfetched, but already we’re printing
00:58:54 like liver cells in the lab and beating heart cells, we’re starting to reconstruct body
00:59:01 parts.
00:59:02 I mean, the thing is, it is so hard to get to another planet that this thought of printing
00:59:06 humans or printing life forms actually could be easier.
00:59:09 Yeah, that’s somehow so sad to think, to think of the idea that we would launch a successful
00:59:16 spaceship that has multigenerational, like non human life and it’s going to reach other
00:59:23 intelligent life and by the time they figure out where it came from, human civilization
00:59:30 will be extinct.
00:59:31 Wow.
00:59:32 Yeah, that is really, I mean, that’s, so that’s one, there’s a, there’s a tempting thing to
00:59:36 think about.
00:59:37 What are the possible trajectories?
00:59:38 So, you know, Elon keeps talking about multi planetary, us becoming multi planetary species.
00:59:47 I mean, sure, Mars is a part of that, but like the dream is to really expand outside
00:59:55 the solar system.
00:59:57 And it’s, it’s not clear, just like, as you said, like what the actual scientific engineering
01:00:02 steps that are required to take, it seems like so daunting, so daunting.
01:00:08 So like this, the smart thing seems to be to do the most achievable near daunting task,
01:00:15 even if there doesn’t seem to be a commercial application, which I think is colonizing
01:00:20 Mars.
01:00:21 But like from your perspective, is there some Manhattan project style, huge project in space
01:00:30 that we might want to take on and you’ve had roles.
01:00:34 You had scientists hat roles and then you also had roles in terms of being on like committees
01:00:39 and stuff, determining where funding goes and so on.
01:00:42 So like, is there a huge like multi trillion, we’ve been throwing the T word around recently
01:00:48 a lot, but these huge projects that we might want to take on?
01:00:52 Well, first of all, we want to find the planets like earth first, like just even finding those
01:00:56 earth like planets is a billion dollar endeavor, billions of dollars endeavor.
01:01:01 And that’s so hard because an earth is so small, so less massive, and so faint compared
01:01:06 to our sun.
01:01:08 It’s the proverbial needle in a haystack, but worse.
01:01:10 And we need very sophisticated space based telescopes to be able to find these planets
01:01:15 and to look, look at them and see which ones have water and which ones have signs of life
01:01:19 on them.
01:01:20 Yeah, the, the star shade project that you’re part of, star shade, star shade, yeah, this
01:01:24 is probably the most badass thing I’ve ever seen.
01:01:26 Right.
01:01:27 You know what’s interesting?
01:01:28 Can you describe what it is?
01:01:29 So what’s amazing about star shade is it was first conceived of in the 1960s.
01:01:34 Imagine that and revisited every decade until now when we think we can actually build it
01:01:38 and star shade is a giant specially shaped screen.
01:01:42 It is about, there’s different versions of it, but think about 30 meters in diameter.
01:01:47 So you’re blocking out the sun.
01:01:49 You’re effectively blocking out the star so that you can see the planet directly and star
01:01:54 shade would have a spacecraft attached to it and it would fly in space far away from
01:01:58 Earth’s gravity and it would have to formation fly with a space telescope.
01:02:03 So the idea is that star shade blocks out the starlight in a very careful way and it
01:02:08 has to block that starlight out so that the planet that is 10 billion times fainter than
01:02:13 the star, that only the planet light goes to the telescope.
01:02:17 Yeah.
01:02:19 So in formation, meaning the telescope flies in, you gave a presentation on this, but like
01:02:24 it, it would fly like in, um, this is extremely high precision endeavor.
01:02:30 Yeah.
01:02:31 We had this analogy like asking a friend to hold up a dime five miles away perfectly.
01:02:37 Like at the perfect line of sight with you.
01:02:40 And the shape of it is pretty cool.
01:02:41 I mean, uh, I don’t know exactly what the physics of that, like what the optics are
01:02:45 that require that shape.
01:02:47 I can tell you, it turns out that if you block out a star, imagine blocking out a star with
01:02:51 a circle circularly or a square shaped screen, you wouldn’t actually be blocking it because
01:02:57 the star acts like a wave.
01:02:58 The starlight can act like a wave and it would actually bend around the edges of the screen.
01:03:03 And so instead of blocking out the light, you’re expecting to see nothing.
01:03:06 You would see ripples and the analogy that I love to give, it’s like throwing a pebble
01:03:11 in a pond.
01:03:12 You know, you get those ripples, you get these concentric ripples and they go out and light
01:03:16 would do something quite similar.
01:03:18 You’d actually see ripples of light and those ripples of light, they’re actually way brighter
01:03:23 than the planet we’d be looking for.
01:03:26 So they would introduce this noise that’s a noise.
01:03:29 And so the star shade, it’s like a mathematical solution to the problem of diffraction it’s
01:03:33 called.
01:03:35 And this is what the first person who thought about star shape in the 1960s worked out the
01:03:39 mathematical shape or one salute, one family of solutions.
01:03:43 And the idea is that when the star shade, this very special shape, like a giant flower
01:03:48 with petals, when it blocks out the light, the light bends around the edges, but interacts
01:03:53 with itself in a way to give you a very, very dark image.
01:03:57 It would be like throwing a pebble in a pond and instead of getting ripples, the pond would
01:04:02 be perfectly smooth, like incredibly smooth to one part in 10 billion.
01:04:06 And all the waves would be on the outer edges, far away from where you drop that pebble.
01:04:11 And so this camera would be able to get some signal from the planet then.
01:04:19 Yes, and it would be hard because the planet is so faint.
01:04:22 But with the star out of the way, the glare of that bright, bright, bright star, with
01:04:25 that out of the way, then it becomes a much more manageable task.
01:04:30 So how do we get that thing out there?
01:04:32 We’re working with unlimited money.
01:04:34 Okay, we’re working with unlimited money.
01:04:35 We have some more engineering problems to solve, but not too many more.
01:04:39 We’ve been burning down our so called tall pole list.
01:04:43 What kind of list?
01:04:44 We call it technology tall pole.
01:04:47 It’s the phrase where you have to figure out what are your hardest problems and then break
01:04:51 those down to solve.
01:04:53 So the star shade, one of the really hard problems was how to formation fly at tens
01:04:57 of thousands of kilometers.
01:04:59 It’s like, wow, that is insane.
01:05:02 And the team broke that down actually into a sensing problem because of the star shade.
01:05:06 How do you see the star shade precisely enough to control it?
01:05:10 Because if you’re shining a flashlight, you know the beam spreads out.
01:05:13 So the star shade has a beacon, an LED or a laser, it’s going to spread out so much
01:05:17 by the time it gets to the telescope.
01:05:19 The problem wasn’t how do you tell the star shade how to move around fast enough to stay
01:05:23 in a straight line.
01:05:24 The problem was how are you able to sense it well enough?
01:05:27 So problems like that were broken down and money that came from NASA to solve problems
01:05:32 is put towards solving it.
01:05:34 So we’ve got through most of the hard problems right now.
01:05:37 Another one was that star shade, even though it’s looking at a star, light from our own
01:05:41 sun could hit the edges of the star shade and bounce off into the telescope, believe
01:05:46 it or not.
01:05:48 And that would actually ruin it because we’re trying to see this tiny, tiny signal.
01:05:52 So then the question is how do you make a razor thin edge?
01:05:55 Those pedal edges would have to be like a razor.
01:05:58 What materials can you use?
01:05:59 So there’s a series of problems like that.
01:06:01 Wow.
01:06:02 So there’s a materials problem in there?
01:06:03 Some of them.
01:06:04 Mm hmm.
01:06:05 Wow.
01:06:06 And there’s one.
01:06:07 So we almost finished solving all those problems and then it’s just a matter of building one
01:06:12 and testing it in a full scale size facility and then building the telescope.
01:06:18 It’s just a matter of time to build everything and get it, get it up for launch.
01:06:22 So this is an engineering close engineering project.
01:06:26 It’s a real engineering project.
01:06:28 I actually can tell you about two other projects that are not mine.
01:06:32 I like to call, call star shade mine because it was my project that I helped make it mainstream
01:06:38 without line is constantly shifting.
01:06:40 When I started, when I got this leadership role on star shade, I remember telling people
01:06:44 about it and it was definitely not on the mainstream okay line.
01:06:47 It was on the giggle factor side of the line and people would just laugh like that’s dead.
01:06:52 Like you can never formation fly or they’d say, why are you working on that?
01:06:55 That’s just so not, it’s not so awesome.
01:06:58 There’s a, there’s a few things you’ve done in your life and that’s when I first saw star
01:07:01 shade, I was like, what, really?
01:07:04 And then like it sinks in.
01:07:07 I mean, it’s the same thing I felt with like Elon Musk or certain people who do crazy stuff
01:07:11 and like, and then, and they get, they actually make it work.
01:07:15 I mean, if you get star shade information flying to like together, I mean, how awesome
01:07:22 is that if you actually make that happen, even like from a robot, I’m sorry, from the
01:07:27 robotics perspective, even if it doesn’t give us good data, that’s just like a cool
01:07:31 thing to get out there.
01:07:33 I mean, it’s really exciting.
01:07:34 Really cool.
01:07:35 So there’s two other topics that aren’t mine, but I still love them.
01:07:39 One of them, let’s just talk about it briefly because it’s not a probe, but it’s the idea
01:07:43 to send a telescope very far away to 500 times the earth sun distance.
01:07:47 And this is way farther than the Voyager spacecrafts are right now.
01:07:51 And to use our sun as a gravitational lens, to use our sun to magnify something that’s
01:07:56 behind it.
01:07:59 It’s got to sink in for a minute.
01:08:00 Exactly.
01:08:01 But I mean, I don’t know what the physics of that is, like how to use the sun.
01:08:05 In astronomy, and Einstein thought about this initially, we can use a massive objects, bend
01:08:11 space.
01:08:12 And so light that should be traveling like straight, it actually travels around the warped
01:08:16 space.
01:08:18 And somehow you figure out a way to use that for magnification.
01:08:23 You have a way to use that for magnification.
01:08:25 That’s right.
01:08:26 There are galaxies that are lensed, so called gravitational lens by intervening galaxy clusters
01:08:33 actually.
01:08:34 And there are microlensing events where stars get magnified as an unseen gravitational lens
01:08:40 star passes in between us and that very distant star.
01:08:43 It’s actually a real tool in astronomy.
01:08:45 Yeah, using gravitational lensing to magnify because it bends more rays towards you than
01:08:49 normally you’d normally see.
01:08:52 And again, we’re trying to get more higher resolution images that are basically boiled
01:08:58 down to light.
01:08:59 Well, it boils down to light.
01:09:01 And then you can maybe get more information about.
01:09:04 Well, in this case, you would ask me, let’s say, if this thing could get built, it would
01:09:10 take like something like they like to say 25 years to get from here to there, 25 years
01:09:15 and then it could send some information back to us.
01:09:18 And then you’d say, so Sarah, how many pixels?
01:09:20 And I wouldn’t say one or less than one.
01:09:21 I’d say, you know, it could be like 10 by 10 pixels, it could be 100 pixels, which would
01:09:26 be awesome.
01:09:27 I mean, that’s still crazy that we can get a lot of information from that.
01:09:30 Crazy, right.
01:09:31 And it’s crazy for a lot of other reasons, because again, you have to line up the sun
01:09:34 and your target.
01:09:35 You’d only have one telescope per target, because every star is behind the sun in a
01:09:39 different way.
01:09:42 So it’s a lot of complicated things.
01:09:43 What about the second?
01:09:44 The second one, it’s called star shot.
01:09:48 You know, star shot means like big dreams and it’s an initiative by the Breakthrough
01:09:53 Foundation.
01:09:55 And star shot is the concept to send thousands of little tiny spacecraft, which they now
01:10:02 call star chip.
01:10:03 So instead of star ship, it’s star chip.
01:10:06 And there’s a little chip and the star chip, so like sending like thousands of little turtles
01:10:13 being born, they’re not all going to make it.
01:10:15 The idea is to send lots of them, and each of these star chips, once they’re launched
01:10:20 into, I guess, low Earth orbit, they will deploy a solar sail that’s a few meters in
01:10:26 diameter.
01:10:27 And the idea is that on Earth, we would have a bank of, this one is still a bit on the
01:10:34 other side of the line, but we’d have a bank of telescopes with lasers that would be like
01:10:40 a gigawatt power and these lasers would momentarily shine upwards and accelerate, they’d hit these
01:10:48 sails.
01:10:49 They’d be like a power source for the sail and would accelerate the sails to travel at
01:10:54 about a 20th the speed of light.
01:10:57 Is that as crazy as it sounds?
01:10:59 Well, like any good engineering project, it has to be broken down into the crazy parts.
01:11:05 And the Breakthrough Initiative, like to their huge credit, is sponsoring, you know, getting
01:11:11 over these, actually, they’ve listed initially, they listed 19 challenges, so it’s broken
01:11:16 down to concrete things.
01:11:17 Like one of them is, well, you have to buy the land and make sure the airspace is okay
01:11:21 with you sending up that much power overhead.
01:11:24 Another one is you have to have material on the sail where the lasers won’t just vaporize
01:11:29 it.
01:11:30 So there’s a lot of issues, but anyway, these sails would be accelerated to 20th the speed
01:11:33 of light and their journey to the nearest star would no longer be tens of thousands
01:11:38 of years, but could be 20 years, okay, 20, so it’s not as bad as tens of thousands.
01:11:45 And these thousands or whatever, however many make it, they’ll go by the nearest star system
01:11:52 and snap some images and radio the information back to Earth because they’re traveling so
01:11:57 fast they can’t slow down, but they’ll zoom by, take some photos, send it back.
01:12:01 Hi, Rez.
01:12:02 See, just what I want you to pause on for a second is that just by making that a real
01:12:06 concept and the money given won’t make it happen, but what it’s done is it’s planted
01:12:11 the seed and it’s shifted that line from what is crazy to what is a real project.
01:12:15 It’s shifted it just ever so slightly enough, I think, to plant the seed that we have to
01:12:20 find a way to somehow find a way to get there.
01:12:23 That is, again, to stay on that, that is so powerful.
01:12:26 Make a big, crazy idea and break it down into smaller, crazy ideas, order it in a list,
01:12:34 and knock it out one at a time.
01:12:38 I don’t know, I’ve never heard anything more inspiring from an engineering perspective
01:12:43 because that’s how you solve the impossible things.
01:12:46 So you open your new book discussing Rogue Planet, PSO, J318, I never said this out loud,
01:12:55 PSO 1.522, so a Rogue Planet, which is just this poetic, beautiful vision of a planet
01:13:03 that, as you write, lurches across the galaxy like a rudderless ship wrapped in perpetual
01:13:10 darkness, its surface swept by constant storms, its black skies raining molten iron.
01:13:18 Just like the vision of that, the scary, the darkness, just how not pleasant it is for
01:13:27 human life, just the intensity of that metaphor, I don’t know.
01:13:32 And the reason you use that is to paint in a feeling of loneliness, I think, and despair.
01:13:43 And why, maybe on the planet side, why does it feel, maybe it’s just me, why does it feel
01:13:53 so profoundly lonely on that kind of planet?
01:13:57 Like what…
01:13:59 I think it’s because we all want to be a part of something, a part of a family, or a part
01:14:06 of a community, or a part of something.
01:14:10 And so, our solar system, and by the way, I only, it’s sort of like when you treat yourself
01:14:16 to like eating an entire tub of ice cream, like I sometimes treat myself to imagine things
01:14:21 like this and not just be so cut and dried.
01:14:25 But when you imagine that, this planet’s not part, because I don’t want to give emotions
01:14:28 to a planet per se, but the planet’s not part of anything.
01:14:31 It’s somehow, it’s just all on its own, just kind of out there without that warm energy
01:14:37 from its sun, it’s just all alone out there.
01:14:40 To me, it was this little discovery that I actually feel pretty good being part of this
01:14:45 solar system.
01:14:47 It felt like we have a sun, we have like a little family, and it felt like it sucked
01:14:52 for the rogue planet to just floating about, not floating, flying rudderless.
01:14:59 By the way, how many rogue planets are there in your sense?
01:15:04 We don’t know totally.
01:15:05 I mean, there’s some rogue planets that are just born on their own.
01:15:08 I know that sounds really weird to be, how can you be born an orphan?
01:15:11 But they just are, because most planets are born out of a disc of gas and dust around
01:15:17 a star.
01:15:18 But some of these small planets are like totally failed stars.
01:15:21 They’re so failed, they’re just small planets on their own.
01:15:24 But we think that there’s probably, honestly, there’s another path to a rogue planet.
01:15:29 That’s one that’s been kicked out of its star system by other planets, like a game of billiard
01:15:33 balls.
01:15:34 It just gets kicked out.
01:15:35 We actually think there’s probably as many rogue planets as stars.
01:15:39 No flying out there, fundamentally alone.
01:15:44 So the book is a memoir, is about your life, and it weaves both your fascination with planets
01:15:56 outside the solar system and the path of your life, and you lost your husband, which is
01:16:05 a kind of central part of the book that created a feeling of the rogue planet.
01:16:15 By the way, what’s the name of the book?
01:16:17 The name of the book is The Smallest Lights in the Universe.
01:16:21 What’s up with the title?
01:16:22 What’s the meaning?
01:16:23 The title has a double meaning.
01:16:25 On the face of it, it’s the search for other Earths.
01:16:27 Earths are so dim compared to the big, bright, massive star beside them.
01:16:32 Searching for the Earths is like searching for the smallest lights in the universe.
01:16:38 It has this other meaning, too.
01:16:42 I really hope that you or the other people listening never get to the place where you’ve
01:16:49 fallen off the cliff into this horrible place of huge despair.
01:16:56 And once in a while, you get a glimmer of a better life, of some kind of hope.
01:17:01 And those are also the smallest lights in the universe.
01:17:03 Well, maybe we can tell the full story before we talk about the glimmer of hope.
01:17:11 What did it feel like to first find out that your husband, Mike, was sick?
01:17:17 It was incredibly frustrating.
01:17:19 Like, lots of us have had some kind of problem that the doctors completely ignore.
01:17:25 Just that they kept blowing him off.
01:17:27 It’s nothing.
01:17:28 Are they paid to just say it’s nothing?
01:17:30 I mean, it’s just insane.
01:17:32 I was just so angry.
01:17:34 And we finally got to a point where he was really sick.
01:17:37 He was like in bed, not able to move, basically.
01:17:41 And it turned out all the things they ignored and not done any tests, he had like a 100%
01:17:47 blockage in his intestine.
01:17:48 Like 100%.
01:17:49 Like nothing could get out, nothing could get in.
01:17:53 And it was pretty, pretty shocking to even hear then that it could be nothing.
01:17:58 What was the progression of it in the context of the maybe the medical system, the doctors?
01:18:03 I mean, what did it feel like?
01:18:05 Did you feel like a human being?
01:18:08 I felt like a child.
01:18:11 Like the doctors were trying to water down the real diagnosis or treat us like we couldn’t
01:18:19 know the truth or they didn’t know.
01:18:21 You know, I felt mixed like, it’s not a good situation if you think the doctor either has
01:18:24 no idea what he or she is doing, or if the doctors purposely, let’s just say lying to
01:18:29 you to sugarcoat it.
01:18:30 Like, I didn’t know which one of it was, but I knew it was one of those.
01:18:34 What were the things he was suffering from?
01:18:37 Well, initially, he just had a random stomach ache.
01:18:39 I hate to say that out loud because I know a lot of people will have a random stomach
01:18:43 ache.
01:18:44 But so he just had a bad stomach ache and then, hmm, this is weird.
01:18:47 A few days later, another bad stomach ache, kind of gets worse.
01:18:50 Might go away for a few weeks, might come back.
01:18:52 And at the time, all I knew was my dad had had that same thing.
01:18:56 Not the same identical system, but he had these really weird pains and he ended up having
01:19:01 the worst diagnosis.
01:19:03 One of the worst diagnoses you can get from a random stomach ache is pancreatic cancer
01:19:07 because the time, the pancreas, like you can’t feel anything, so by the time you feel pain,
01:19:12 it’s too late.
01:19:13 It’s spread already.
01:19:14 So I was just like, beside myself, I’m like, this is like, wow, this guy, he’s got a random
01:19:19 stomach ache.
01:19:20 All I know is another man I loved had a random stomach ache and it didn’t end well.
01:19:24 How did you deal with it emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, as a scientist?
01:19:30 What was that like, that whole, because it’s not immediate.
01:19:34 It’s a long journey.
01:19:35 It’s a long journey and you don’t know where the diagnosis is going.
01:19:38 So anyone who’s suffered from a major illness, there’s like always branches in the road.
01:19:44 So he had this intestinal blockage.
01:19:47 I can’t imagine someone in their 40s having that and that be normal.
01:19:50 But the doctor is like, it could be nothing, could just cut it out.
01:19:54 You don’t need most of your intestine, it’s a repeating pattern.
01:19:56 Just cut that out, it could be fine.
01:19:57 But it ended up not being fine and he was diagnosed as being terminally ill.
01:20:01 Well, it really changed my life in a huge way.
01:20:04 First of all, I remember immediately one summer, the summer when this happened, I started asking
01:20:09 everyone I knew.
01:20:10 I would ask you, I don’t know if it’s smart of my job to put you on the spot, I’d say,
01:20:15 you have one year to live or two or three, what will you do differently about your life
01:20:19 now?
01:20:20 Lex, you have one year to live, what would you do?
01:20:26 I mean, it’s hard.
01:20:27 I don’t know if you want to answer that.
01:20:28 No, no, no.
01:20:29 I think about it a lot.
01:20:30 I mean, that’s a really good thing to meditate on.
01:20:33 We can talk about maybe why you bring that up, if it is or not a heavy question.
01:20:41 But I get, I think about mortality a lot and for me, it feels like a really good way to
01:20:52 focus in on is what you’re doing today, the people you have around you, the family you
01:20:57 have, does it bring you joy?
01:21:04 Does it bring you fulfillment?
01:21:07 And basically, for me, long ago, try to be ready to die any day.
01:21:19 So like today, I kind of woke up, look, if I was nervous about talking to you, I really
01:21:27 admire your work and the book is very good and it’s super exciting topic.
01:21:33 But then, you know, there’s this also feeling like, if this is the last conversation I have
01:21:37 in my life, you know, if I die today, will this be, will this be the right, like am I
01:21:43 glad today happened and it is, and I am glad today happened.
01:21:48 So that’s the way.
01:21:49 And that’s so unique.
01:21:50 I never got that answer from a single person.
01:21:54 The busyness of life, there’s goals, there’s dreams, there’s like planning, plans.
01:22:00 Very few people make it happen.
01:22:02 That’s what I learned.
01:22:04 And so a lot of these people.
01:22:05 Oh, like you run out of time.
01:22:07 It’s not so much you run out of time, but I’d come back later and be like, okay, why
01:22:09 don’t you do that?
01:22:10 And if that’s what you would do, if you’re going to die a year from now, why don’t you,
01:22:14 why don’t you make it real?
01:22:16 Simple things.
01:22:17 Spend more time with family.
01:22:18 Yeah.
01:22:19 Like why, why don’t you do that?
01:22:20 And that’s what I had an answer, it turns out, unless you usually, unless you have,
01:22:24 you really do have a pressing end of life, people don’t do their bucket lists or try
01:22:29 to change their career.
01:22:30 And some people can’t.
01:22:31 So we can’t, like for a lot of people, they can’t do anything about it.
01:22:33 And that’s, that’s fine.
01:22:34 But the ones who can take action for some reason, never do.
01:22:38 And that was one of the ways that Mike’s death or at the time his impending death really,
01:22:44 really affected me.
01:22:45 Cause you know, for these sick people, what I learned, he had a bucket list and he was
01:22:48 able to do some of the bucket lists.
01:22:50 It was awesome.
01:22:51 But he got sick pretty quickly.
01:22:54 So if you do only have a year to live, it’s ironic cause you can’t do, you can’t do the
01:22:58 things you wanted to do because you get too sick too fast.
01:23:01 What were the bucket list things for you that you realized like, what am I doing with my
01:23:05 life?
01:23:06 That was the major concept of him.
01:23:08 After he died, I didn’t know.
01:23:09 Like I, I was just lost because when something that profound happens, all the things I was
01:23:16 doing, most of the things I was doing were just meaningless.
01:23:20 It was so tough to, to find an answer for that.
01:23:23 And that’s when I settled on, I’m going to devote the rest of my life to trying to find
01:23:28 another earth and to find out, to find that we’re not alone.
01:23:37 What is that longing for connection with others?
01:23:42 What’s that about?
01:23:43 What do you think?
01:23:44 Why is that so full of meaning?
01:23:45 I don’t know why.
01:23:46 I mean, I think it’s how we’re hardwired.
01:23:48 Like one of my friends some time ago, actually when my dad died, he never heard someone say
01:23:54 this before, but he’s like, Sarah, you know, why are we evolved to take death so harshly?
01:24:01 Like what kind of society would we be if we just didn’t care people died?
01:24:05 That would be a very different type of world.
01:24:07 How would we as a species have got to where we are?
01:24:11 So I think that is tied hand in hand with why do we, why do we seek connection?
01:24:16 It’s just that what we were talking about before, that subconsciousness that we don’t
01:24:20 understand.
01:24:21 Yeah.
01:24:22 A couple, you know, the other side, the flip side of the coin of connection and love is
01:24:28 a fear of loss.
01:24:31 It’s like that was, again, I don’t know, that’s what makes you appreciate the moment is that
01:24:36 the thing ends.
01:24:37 Yeah.
01:24:38 It’s definitely a hard one.
01:24:40 The thing ends, but, and it’s hard to not, you wouldn’t want to limit.
01:24:45 Like it’s like my dog who I love so much, I’ll start to cry.
01:24:49 Like I can’t think about the end.
01:24:50 I know he’ll age much faster than I will.
01:24:52 And someday it will end.
01:24:53 Right.
01:24:54 But it’s too sad to think of, but should I not have got a dog?
01:24:57 Right.
01:24:58 Should I have not brought this sort of joy into my life because I know it won’t be forever.
01:25:02 It’s
01:25:03 well, there’s a, there’s a philosopher and his Becker who wrote a book, Denial of Death
01:25:08 and just, and warm with the cores.
01:25:11 And there’s another book talks about terror management theory, Sheldon Solomon.
01:25:16 I just talked to him a few weeks ago.
01:25:18 It’s a brilliant philosopher, psychologist that their theory, whatever you make of it
01:25:24 is that the fear of death is at the core of everything, everything we do.
01:25:32 So like you’re that you think you don’t think about the mortality of your dog, but you do.
01:25:40 And that’s what makes the experience rich.
01:25:42 Like there’s this kind of like in the shadows lurks the, the knowledge that this won’t
01:25:49 last forever.
01:25:51 And that makes every moment just special in some kind of a weird way that the moments
01:25:58 are special for us humans.
01:26:01 I mean, sorry to use romantic terms like love, but what do you make, what did you learn about
01:26:12 love from, from losing it, from losing your husband?
01:26:18 Well I learned to love the things I have more.
01:26:21 I learned to love the people that I have more and to not let the little things bother me
01:26:28 as much.
01:26:30 What about the rediscovery or like the discovery of the little lights in the darkness?
01:26:41 So you, the book, I think you’ve brilliantly described the dark parts of your journey.
01:26:52 But maybe can you talk about how you were able to rediscover the lights?
01:27:00 They came in many ways.
01:27:02 And the way like to think about it is like grief is an ocean, you know, with tiny islands
01:27:09 of the little, like, like the little lights.
01:27:10 And eventually that ocean gets smaller and smaller and the islands like become continents
01:27:15 with lakes.
01:27:17 So initially it’d be like the children laughing one day or my colleagues at work who rallied
01:27:22 around me and would take me away from my darkness to work on a project.
01:27:28 Later on it turned out to be a group of women my age, all widows, all with children in my
01:27:33 town.
01:27:35 And it would be, even though it was a bit morose getting together, still very joyful
01:27:40 at the same time.
01:27:42 What was the journey of rediscovering love like for you?
01:27:47 So refinding, I mean, is there some, by way of advice or insight about how to, how to
01:27:57 rediscover the beauty of life?
01:28:00 Of life.
01:28:01 It’s a hard one.
01:28:02 I think you just have to stay open to being positive and just to get out there.
01:28:09 Do you still think, do you still think about your own mortality?
01:28:13 So you mentioned that that was a thing that you meditate on as a question when it was
01:28:19 right there in front of you.
01:28:22 But do you still think about it?
01:28:23 I think I will after talking to you.
01:28:26 But no, it’s not really something I think about.
01:28:28 I mean, I do think about the search for another earth and will, will I get there?
01:28:33 Will I be able to conclude my search and is there one?
01:28:38 Like as time goes by, you know, that window to solve that problem gets smaller.
01:28:45 What would bring you, again, I apologize if this makes concrete the fact that life is
01:28:51 finite, but what, what would bring you joy if we discovered while you’re still here?
01:28:58 What would bring me joy?
01:28:59 Finding another earth, an earth like planet around a sun like star, knowing that there’s
01:29:04 at least one or more out there, being able to see water, that it has signs of water and
01:29:09 being able to see some gases that don’t belong.
01:29:12 So I know that the search will continue after I’m gone enough to fuel the next generation.
01:29:18 So just like opening the door and there’s like this glimmer of hope.
01:29:24 What do you think it will take to realize that?
01:29:25 I mean, we’ve talked about all these interesting projects, star shade, especially, but is there
01:29:29 something that you’re particularly kind of hopeful about in the next 10, 20 years that
01:29:36 might give us that, that exact glimmer of hope that there’s earth like planets out there?
01:29:43 I have to, I stand behind star shade in all cases, so, but there is this other kind of
01:29:48 field that I, that everyone is involved in because star shade is hard.
01:29:53 Earths are hard, but there are, there’s another category of planet star type that’s easier.
01:29:58 And these are planets orbiting small red dwarf stars.
01:30:02 They’re not earth like at all.
01:30:04 Think like earth cousin instead of earth twin, but there’s a chance that we might establish
01:30:08 that some of those have water and signs of life on them.
01:30:11 It’s nearer term than star shade and we’re all working hard on that too.
01:30:15 Let me ask by way of recommendations, I think a lot of people are curious about this kind
01:30:20 of stuff.
01:30:21 What three books, technical or fiction or philosophical or anything really had an impact
01:30:27 on your life and, and or you would recommend besides of course your book.
01:30:35 There’s one book I wish everyone could read.
01:30:38 I’m not sure if you’ve read it.
01:30:39 It’s actually a children’s book, like a young adult book.
01:30:42 It’s called the giver.
01:30:43 Yes.
01:30:44 And it is the book that kids in school read now.
01:30:48 And I only, sorry, that’s not, that’s wow.
01:30:52 Sorry, that, that caught me off guard.
01:30:57 So when I first came to this country, I didn’t speak much.
01:30:59 It’s really what made me, it had a profound impact on my life and a really important moment
01:31:05 because they give it to kids.
01:31:07 Like I think middle school, I think, or maybe elementary, something like that.
01:31:10 I’m so surprised you’ve even heard of this book.
01:31:12 Yeah.
01:31:13 So they give it, but like it’s the value of giving the right book to a person at the right
01:31:17 time.
01:31:18 Wow.
01:31:19 I was, I was, cause it’s very accessible.
01:31:22 Do we want to share what the story is without spoiling it?
01:31:25 Oh yeah, you can without spoiling, right?
01:31:28 It follows this boy in this very utopic society.
01:31:32 That’s like perfect.
01:31:33 It’s been all clean cut and made perfect actually.
01:31:35 And as he kind of comes of age, he starts realizing something’s wrong with his world.
01:31:41 And so it’s part of that question.
01:31:42 Are we going to evolve as, I mean, this isn’t what’s there, but it made me wonder, you know,
01:31:45 are we evolving to a better place?
01:31:47 Is there a day when we can eliminate, you know, poverty and hunger and crime and sickness
01:31:52 in this book, they pretty much have in a society that the boys in and sort of follows him.
01:31:58 And he becomes a chosen one to be like a receiver.
01:32:01 The givers, the old wise man who retains some of the harshness of the outside world so that
01:32:06 he can advise the people as a sort of boy comes of age and is chosen for the special
01:32:11 role.
01:32:12 He finds the world isn’t what he expects.
01:32:13 And I don’t know about you, but it was so profound for me because it jolts you out of
01:32:17 reality.
01:32:18 It’s like, Oh my God, what am I doing here?
01:32:19 I’m just going with the flow with my society.
01:32:22 How do I think outside the box and the confines of my society, which surely carries negative
01:32:26 things with it that we don’t realize today.
01:32:28 Yeah, and also in the flip side of that is if you do take a step outside the box on occasion,
01:32:36 what’s the psychological burden of that?
01:32:39 Like is that, is that a step you want to take?
01:32:42 Is that the journey you want to take?
01:32:44 What is that life like?
01:32:45 I don’t know.
01:32:46 I felt like from the book, you have to take it.
01:32:48 I found from the book, I never thought like now that you’re saying it, I see what you’re
01:32:52 saying.
01:32:53 The burden is huge, but I always felt like the answer is yes, you absolutely want to
01:32:56 know what’s outside.
01:32:57 But you can’t do that if you’re very, it’s hard to be objective about your own reality.
01:33:01 Yeah.
01:33:02 I mean, it’s a very human instinct, but, uh, it also, the book kind of shows that, uh,
01:33:08 it has an effect on you and this, it’s a really interesting question about our society and
01:33:14 taking a step out.
01:33:16 It’s by, uh, Lois Lowry, I think is how you pronounce it.
01:33:20 I really do hope everyone created it and it is a young adult book, but it’s still, it’s
01:33:24 incredibly, I’m really glad I only read it cause my kids got it for school.
01:33:27 I just thought, okay, well, why don’t I just see what this is about?
01:33:29 And I just, wow.
01:33:31 Yeah.
01:33:32 Yeah.
01:33:33 I think it’s also the value of education.
01:33:35 I think I’m surprised you mentioned, I’ve never really mentioned to anybody.
01:33:38 I’m sure a lot of people had the similar experience like me and maybe it’s a generational thing
01:33:44 though, because like the book came out, I think in the nineties.
01:33:46 So if you’re older than like me, that book didn’t exist when we were in middle school.
01:33:50 So I just do think a lot of people won’t have heard of it, but it’s an interesting question
01:33:54 of like those books.
01:33:58 I mean, I’m reminded often, I suppose the same is true with other subjects, but books
01:34:03 are special at the early age, like middle school, maybe early high school, those can
01:34:09 change like the direction of your life.
01:34:11 And also certainly teachers, they can change completely the direction of your life.
01:34:17 There’s so many stories about teachers of mathematics, teachers of physics, of any kind
01:34:24 of subjects basically changing the direction of a human’s life.
01:34:27 That’s like not to get on the whole, almost like a political thing, but you know, we,
01:34:36 we undervalue teachers.
01:34:38 It’s a special, it’s a special position that they hold.
01:34:42 That’s so true.
01:34:43 Yeah.
01:34:44 Well, I do have two other books or two other things.
01:34:46 One is something I came across just a few days ago, actually.
01:34:50 It’s actually a film called Picture a Scientist.
01:34:54 And when you picture a scientist, you probably don’t picture the women and women of color
01:34:59 in this film.
01:35:01 And it is a way to get outside your box.
01:35:03 I really think everyone interested in science, even just peripherally should watch this because
01:35:09 it is shocking and sobering at the same time.
01:35:12 And it talks about how, well, I think one of the messages across is, you know, we really
01:35:17 are like, I don’t know if we’re hardwired to just like people like ourselves, but we’re
01:35:22 excluding a lot of people and therefore a lot of great ideas by not being able to think
01:35:27 outside of how we’re all stereotyping each other.
01:35:30 So it’s, it’s, it’s hard to kind of convey that and you can just say, oh yeah, I want
01:35:34 to be more diverse.
01:35:35 I want to be more open, but it’s a nearly impossible problem to solve and the movie
01:35:38 really helps open people’s eyes to it.
01:35:42 This book I put third because unlike The Giver, people may not want to read it.
01:35:46 It’s not as relevant.
01:35:47 But when I was in my early twenties, I went to this big, this like 800 people large conference
01:35:56 run by the Wilderness Canoe Association in my hometown of Toronto.
01:36:00 And there was a family friend there who I met and he said, read this book, it’ll change
01:36:04 your life.
01:36:06 And it actually changed my life.
01:36:08 And it was a book called Sleeping Island by an author, PG Downs, who just coincidentally
01:36:13 lived in this area, lived in the Boston area and he was a teacher, I think at a private
01:36:17 school and every summer he would go to Canada with a canoe often by himself.
01:36:23 And he wrote this book maybe in the forties or fifties about a trip he took in the late
01:36:27 1930s.
01:36:28 And it was, I was just shocked that even at that time, although that was a long time ago,
01:36:32 there were large parts of Canada that were untouched by white people.
01:36:37 And he went up there and interacted like with the natives.
01:36:40 He called the book and had a subtitle that was called, there’s something like Journey
01:36:45 in the Barren Lands.
01:36:47 And when you go up North in Canada, you pass the tree line, just like on a mountain, if
01:36:50 you hike up a mountain, you get so far North there aren’t any trees.
01:36:53 And he wrote eloquently about the land and about being out there.
01:36:56 There weren’t even any maps of the region, like in that time.
01:37:00 And I just thought to myself, wow, like that you could just take the summer off and explore
01:37:04 by canoe and go and see what’s out there.
01:37:07 And it led to me just doing that, that very thing.
01:37:10 Of course it’s different now, but going out to where the road ends and putting the canoe
01:37:14 in the water and just, well, we had to have a plan.
01:37:16 We didn’t just explore, but go down this river, rivers with rapids and travel over lakes and
01:37:21 portages and just really live.
01:37:25 So just really explore, screw it.
01:37:27 That doesn’t like, it doesn’t explore just use from a topo map, from a topographical
01:37:31 map from the library.
01:37:33 There were scary elements about it, out of it, but part of the excitement or the joy
01:37:41 or the desire was to be scared, like it was to go out there and have live on the edge.
01:37:45 And persevere.
01:37:46 Yeah.
01:37:47 And persevere.
01:37:48 Yeah.
01:37:49 Do you have a advice that you would give to a young person today that would like to help
01:37:56 you maybe on the planetary science side, discover exoplanets or maybe bigger picture, just
01:38:03 succeed in life?
01:38:04 I do have some advice just to succeed.
01:38:06 It’s tough advice in a way, but it is to find something that you love doing that you’re
01:38:11 also very good at.
01:38:13 And in some ways the stars have to align because you’ve got to find that thing you’re good
01:38:17 at or the range of things, and it actually has to overlap with something that actually
01:38:21 you love doing every day.
01:38:23 So it’s not a tedious job.
01:38:26 That’s the best way to succeed.
01:38:27 What were the signals that in your own life were there to make you realize you’re good
01:38:33 at something?
01:38:35 What were you good at that made you pursue a PhD and it made you pursue the search?
01:38:44 I mean, that was the one sentence version.
01:38:46 In my case, it was a long slog and there were a lot of things I wasn’t good at initially.
01:38:51 But so initially, I was good at high school math.
01:38:53 I was good at high school science.
01:38:55 I loved astronomy and I realized those could all fit together.
01:38:58 Like the day I realized you could be an astronomer for a job, it has to be one of my top days
01:39:02 of my life.
01:39:03 I didn’t know that you could be that for a job and I was good at all those things.
01:39:08 And although my dad wanted me to do something more practical where he could be guaranteed
01:39:11 I could support myself was another option, but initially I wasn’t that good at physics.
01:39:16 It was a slog to just get through school and grad school is a very, very long time.
01:39:21 And ultimately, when faced with a choice and I had the luxury of choosing, knowing that
01:39:26 I was good at something and also loved it, it really carried me through.
01:39:29 Now, I asked some of the smartest people in the world the most ridiculous question.
01:39:34 We already talked about it a little bit, but let me ask again, why are we here?
01:39:42 I think you’ve raised this question in one of your presentations as like one of the things
01:39:47 that we kind of as humans long to answer and the search for exoplanets is kind of part
01:39:52 of that.
01:39:53 But what do you think is the meaning of it all, of life?
01:39:57 I wish I had a good answer for you.
01:40:02 I think you’re the first person ever who refused to answer the question.
01:40:07 It’s not so much refusing, I just, yeah, I mean, I wish I had a better answer.
01:40:11 It’s why we’re here.
01:40:12 It’s almost like the meaning is wishing there was a meaning, wishing we knew.
01:40:20 I love that.
01:40:21 That’s a great way to say it.
01:40:24 Sarah, like I said, the book is excellent.
01:40:27 I admired your work from afar for a while and I think you’re one of the great stars
01:40:33 at MIT.
01:40:34 It makes me proud to be part of the community.
01:40:37 So thank you so much for your work.
01:40:40 Thank you for inspiring all of us.
01:40:41 Thanks for talking today.
01:40:42 Thank you so much, Lynx.
01:40:45 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Seager.
01:40:47 And thank you to our sponsors, Public Goods, Power Dot, and Cash App.
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01:41:02 support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled I’m not
01:41:07 sure how.
01:41:08 Just keep typing stuff in until you get to the guy with the tie and the thumbnail.
01:41:14 And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Sagan, somewhere something incredible
01:41:20 is waiting to be known.
01:41:23 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.