Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Clara Souza Silva, a quantum astrochemist at Harvard
00:00:04 specializing in spectroscopy of gases that serve as possible signs of life on other planets,
00:00:11 most especially the gas phosphine.
00:00:14 She was a coauthor of the paper that in 2020 found that there is phosphine in the atmosphere
00:00:20 of Venus and, thus, possible extraterrestrial life that lives in its atmosphere.
00:00:26 The detection of phosphine was challenged, reaffirmed, and is now still under active
00:00:31 research.
00:00:32 Quick mention of our sponsors, Onnit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed.
00:00:38 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
00:00:41 As a side note, let me say that I think the search for life on other planets is one of
00:00:45 the most important endeavors in science.
00:00:47 If we find extraterrestrial life and study it, we may find insights into the mechanisms
00:00:53 that originated life here on Earth, and more than life, the mechanisms that originated
00:00:58 intelligence and consciousness.
00:01:00 If we understand these mechanisms, we can build them.
00:01:04 But more than this, the discovery of life on other planets means that our galaxy and
00:01:09 our universe is teeming with life.
00:01:11 This is humbling and terrifying, but it is also exciting.
00:01:15 We humans are natural explorers.
00:01:17 For most of our history, we explored the surface of the Earth and the contents of our minds.
00:01:22 But now, with spacefaring vessels, we have a chance to explore life beyond Earth, their
00:01:27 physics, their biology, and perhaps the contents of their minds.
00:01:33 This is the Lux Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Clara Souza Silva.
00:01:40 Since you’re the world expert in, well, in many things, but one of them is phosphine,
00:01:45 would it technically be correct to call you the queen of phosphine?
00:01:52 I go for Dr. Phosphine.
00:01:54 Queen is an inherited title, I feel.
00:01:57 But you still rule by love and power, so, but while having the doctor title, I got it.
00:02:05 Kindness.
00:02:06 Kindness.
00:02:07 Kindness.
00:02:08 In September 2020, you coauthored a paper announcing possible presence of phosphine
00:02:13 in the atmosphere of Venus, and that it may be a signature of extraterrestrial life.
00:02:21 Big maybe.
00:02:22 Big maybe.
00:02:23 There was some pushback, of course, from the scientific community that followed, friendly,
00:02:29 loving pushback.
00:02:31 Then in January, another paper from University of Wisconsin, I believe, confirmed the finding.
00:02:37 So where do we stand in this saga, in this mystery of what the heck is going on, on Venus
00:02:44 in terms of phosphine and in terms of aliens?
00:02:46 Let’s try to break it down.
00:02:50 The short answer is we don’t know.
00:02:53 I think you and the rest of the public are now witnessing a pretty exciting discovery,
00:02:59 but as it evolves, as it unfolds, we did not wait until we had, you know, years of
00:03:07 data from 10 different instruments across several layers of the atmosphere.
00:03:14 We waited until we had two telescopes with independent data months apart, but still,
00:03:21 the data is weak.
00:03:23 It’s noisy.
00:03:24 It’s delicate.
00:03:25 It’s very much at the edge of instrument sensitivity, sensitivity, and so we still don’t even know
00:03:31 if it is phosphine.
00:03:33 We don’t even really know if the signal is real.
00:03:35 People still disagree about that.
00:03:37 I think at the more philosophical end of how this happened, I think it is a distinction,
00:03:44 and myself and other coauthors were talking about this, it’s a distinction between hypothesis
00:03:49 generation and hypothesis testing.
00:03:52 Now hypothesis testing is something that I think is the backbone of the scientific method,
00:04:01 but it has a problem, which is if you’re looking through very noisy data and you want to test
00:04:05 the hypothesis, you may by mistake create a spurious signal.
00:04:10 The safest, more conservative approach is hypothesis generation.
00:04:14 You see some data and you go, what’s in there?
00:04:17 With no bias.
00:04:18 Now this is much safer, much more conservative, and when there’s a lot of data, that’s great.
00:04:24 When there isn’t, you can clean the noise and take out the signal with it.
00:04:28 The signal with a bath water, whatever the equivalent of the analogy would be.
00:04:33 And so I think the healthy discourse that you described is exactly this.
00:04:37 There are ways of processing the data, completely legitimate ways, checked by multiple people
00:04:41 and experts where the signal shows up and then phosphine is in the atmosphere of Venus,
00:04:47 and some where it doesn’t, and then we disagree what that signal means.
00:04:52 If it’s real and it is an ambiguously phosphine, it is very exciting because we don’t know
00:04:58 how to explain it without life, but going from there to Venusians is still a huge jump.
00:05:05 And so…
00:05:06 Venusians.
00:05:07 So that would be the title for the civilization, if it is a living and thriving on Venus’s
00:05:12 Venusians.
00:05:14 Until we know what they call themselves and that’s the name, yes.
00:05:18 So this is the early analysis of data or analysis of early data.
00:05:25 It was nevertheless, you waited until the actual peer reviewed publication to know?
00:05:30 Of course.
00:05:31 And analysis of the two different instruments months apart.
00:05:33 So that’s ALMA and JCMT, the two telescopes.
00:05:35 I mean, it’s still, I mean, it’s really exciting.
00:05:39 What did it feel like sort of sitting on this data?
00:05:42 Like kind of anticipating the publication and wondering and still wondering, is it true?
00:05:50 Like how does it make you feel that a planet in our solar system might have phosphine in
00:05:55 the atmosphere?
00:05:56 It’s nuts.
00:05:57 It’s absolutely nuts.
00:06:01 I mean…
00:06:02 In the best possible way?
00:06:04 I’ve been working on phosphine for over a decade.
00:06:08 Before it was cool.
00:06:10 Way before it was cool.
00:06:12 Before anyone could spell it or heard of it.
00:06:15 And at the time people either didn’t know what phosphine was or only knew it for being
00:06:21 just possibly the most horrendous molecule that ever graced the earth.
00:06:26 And so no one was a fan.
00:06:30 And I had been considering looking for it because I did think it was an unusual and
00:06:34 disgusting but very promising sign of life.
00:06:37 I’ve been looking for it everywhere.
00:06:40 I really didn’t think to look in the solar system.
00:06:42 I thought it was all pretty rough around here for life.
00:06:49 And so I wasn’t even considering the solar system at all, never mind next door Venus.
00:06:53 It was only the lead author of the study, Jane Greaves, who thought to look in the clouds
00:06:58 of Venus and then reached out to me to say, I don’t know phosphine but I know it’s weird.
00:07:05 How weird is it?
00:07:06 And the answer is very weird.
00:07:09 And so the telescopes we’re looking at, this is visual data.
00:07:12 That’s what I mean by visual.
00:07:14 You wouldn’t see the phosphine.
00:07:15 Well, but I mean it’s a telescope.
00:07:18 It’s remote.
00:07:19 It’s remote.
00:07:20 You’re observing, you’re what zooming in on this particular planet and what does the sensor
00:07:27 actually look like?
00:07:28 How many pixels are there?
00:07:30 What does the data kind of look like?
00:07:32 It’d be nice to kind of build up intuition of how little data we have based on which,
00:07:39 I mean, if you look at like, I’ve just been reading a lot about gravitational waves and
00:07:44 it’s kind of incredible how from just very little, like probably the world’s most precise
00:07:50 instrument, we can derive some very foundational ideas about our early universe.
00:07:57 And in that same way, it’s kind of incredible how much data, how much information you can
00:08:01 get from just a few pixels.
00:08:03 So what are we talking about here in terms of based on which this paper saw possible
00:08:10 signs of phosphine in the atmosphere?
00:08:13 So phosphine, like every other molecule has a unique spectroscopic fingerprint, meaning
00:08:18 it rotates and it vibrates in special ways.
00:08:21 I calculated how many of those ways it can rotate and vibrate, 16.8 billion ways.
00:08:28 What this means is that if you look at the spectrum of light and that light has gone
00:08:33 through phosphine gas on the other end, there should be 16.8 billion tiny marks left, indentations
00:08:41 left in that spectrum.
00:08:43 We found one of those on Venus, one of those 16.8 billion.
00:08:49 So now the game is, can we find any of the other ones?
00:08:53 But they’re really hard to spot.
00:08:55 They’re all in terrible places in the electromagnetic spectrum.
00:08:59 And the instruments we use to find this one can’t really find any other one.
00:09:04 There’s another one of the 16.8 billion we could find, but it would take many, many days
00:09:08 of continuous observations and that’s not really in the cards right now.
00:09:14 There’s all kinds of noise, first of all.
00:09:16 There’s all kinds of other signal.
00:09:20 So how do you separate all of that out to pull out just this particular signature that’s
00:09:28 associated with phosphine?
00:09:31 So the data kind of looks somewhat like a wave and a lot of that is noise and it’s a
00:09:36 baseline.
00:09:37 And so if you can figure out the exact shape of the wave, you can cancel that shape out
00:09:42 and you should be left with a straight line and if there’s something there, an absorption,
00:09:46 so a signal.
00:09:47 So that’s what we did.
00:09:49 We tried to find out what was this baseline shape, cleaned it out and got the signal.
00:09:54 That’s part of the problem.
00:09:55 If you do this wrong, you can create a signal.
00:09:59 But that signal is at 8.904 wave numbers and we actually have more digits than that, but
00:10:07 I don’t remember by heart.
00:10:08 And ALMA in particular is a very, very good telescope, array of telescopes and it can
00:10:14 focus on exactly that frequency.
00:10:16 And in that frequency, there are only two known molecules that absorb it all.
00:10:22 So that’s how we do it.
00:10:23 We look at that exact spot where we know phosphine absorbs the other molecules SO2.
00:10:30 If there is extraterrestrial life, whether it’s on Venus or on exoplanets where you
00:10:36 looked before, how does that make you feel?
00:10:40 How should it make us feel?
00:10:42 Should we be scared?
00:10:43 Should we be excited?
00:10:46 Let’s say it’s not intelligent life.
00:10:48 Let’s say it’s microbial life.
00:10:51 Is it a threat to us?
00:10:53 Are we a threat to it?
00:10:55 Or is it only, not only, but mostly a possibility to understand something fundamental, something
00:11:00 beautiful about life in the universe?
00:11:04 Hard to know.
00:11:05 You would have to bring on a poet or a philosopher on the show.
00:11:11 I feel those things.
00:11:12 I just don’t know if those are the right things to feel.
00:11:14 I certainly don’t feel scared.
00:11:16 I think it’s rather silly to feel scared.
00:11:19 Definitely don’t touch them.
00:11:21 Sometimes in movies, don’t go near it.
00:11:24 Don’t interfere.
00:11:26 I think one of the things with Venus is because of phosphine, now there is a chance that Venus
00:11:33 is inhabited.
00:11:34 And in that case, we shouldn’t go there.
00:11:39 We should be very careful with messing with them, bringing our own stuff there that contaminates
00:11:46 it.
00:11:48 And Venus has suffered enough.
00:11:49 If there’s life there, it’s probably the remains of a living planet, the very last survivors
00:11:56 of what once was potentially a thriving world.
00:12:00 And so I don’t want our first interaction with alien life to be a massacre.
00:12:06 So I definitely wouldn’t want to go near out of a, let’s say, galactic responsibility,
00:12:12 galactic ethics.
00:12:14 And I often think of alien astronomers watching us and how disappointed they would be if we
00:12:19 messed this up.
00:12:20 So I really want to be very careful with anything that could be life.
00:12:25 But certainly I wouldn’t be scared.
00:12:28 Humans are plenty capable of killing one another.
00:12:30 We don’t need extraterrestrial help to destroy ourselves.
00:12:34 Scared mostly of other humans.
00:12:36 Exactly.
00:12:37 But these, this life, if there is life there, it does seem just like you said, it would
00:12:41 be pretty rugged.
00:12:43 It’s like the cockroaches or Chuck Norris, I don’t know.
00:12:47 It’s the, some kind of, it’s something that survived through some very difficult conditions.
00:12:53 That doesn’t mean it would handle us, you know, it could be like war of the worlds.
00:12:58 You come, just because you’re resilient in your own planet doesn’t mean you can survive
00:13:02 another.
00:13:03 The extremophiles, which are very impressive, we should all be very proud of our extremophiles.
00:13:08 They wouldn’t really make it in the Venusian clouds.
00:13:12 So I wouldn’t expect, because you’re tough, even Chuck Norris tough, that you would survive
00:13:18 on an alien planet.
00:13:20 And then from the scientific perspective, you don’t want to pollute the data gathering
00:13:25 process by showing up there.
00:13:27 The observer can affect the observed.
00:13:31 How heartbreaking would it be if we found life on another planet and then we’re like,
00:13:35 oh, we brought it with us.
00:13:37 It was my sandwich.
00:13:38 But that’s always the problem, right?
00:13:40 And it’s certainly a problem with Mars because we’ve visited the, if there is life on Mars
00:13:47 or like remains of life on Mars, it’s always going to be a question of like, well, maybe
00:13:52 we planted it there.
00:13:53 Let’s not do the same with Venus.
00:13:55 It’s harder because when we try to go to Venus, things melt very quickly.
00:13:59 So it’s a little harder to pollute Venus.
00:14:04 It’s very good at destroying foreigners.
00:14:06 Yeah.
00:14:07 Well, in terms of Elon Musk and terraforming planets, Mars is stop number one, then Venus
00:14:13 maybe after that.
00:14:15 So can we talk about phosphine a little bit?
00:14:19 So you mentioned it’s a pretty…
00:14:20 Love talking about phosphine.
00:14:21 Love phosphine.
00:14:22 What’s your Twitter handle?
00:14:23 It’s like Dr. Phosphine.
00:14:24 It’s Dr. Phosphine.
00:14:25 Yes.
00:14:26 You will be surprised here.
00:14:27 It wasn’t taken already.
00:14:28 I just grabbed it.
00:14:29 I didn’t have to buy it off anyone.
00:14:32 Yeah.
00:14:33 So what is it?
00:14:35 What’s phosphine?
00:14:36 You already mentioned it’s pretty toxic and troublesome and outside, troublesome, sorry.
00:14:43 No, I love it.
00:14:45 I’m going to stop calling it troublesome.
00:14:48 So maybe what are some things that make it interesting chemically and why is it a good
00:14:56 sign of life when it’s present in the atmosphere?
00:15:00 Like you’ve described in your paper, aptly titled the phosphine as a biosignature gas
00:15:06 in exoplanet atmospheres.
00:15:08 I suppose you wrote that paper before Venus.
00:15:10 I did.
00:15:11 Yes.
00:15:12 I did.
00:15:13 And no one cared.
00:15:14 In that paper, I said something like, if we find phosphine on any terrestrial planet can
00:15:19 only mean life.
00:15:20 And everyone’s like, yeah, that sounds about right.
00:15:21 Let’s go.
00:15:22 And then Venus shows up and I was like, are you sure?
00:15:24 I’m like, I was sure before I was sure.
00:15:27 Now that it’s right here, I’m less sure now that my claims are being tested.
00:15:35 So phosphine, phosphine is a fascinating molecule.
00:15:38 So it’s shaped like a pyramid with a phosphorus up top and then three hydrogens.
00:15:43 It’s actually quite a simple molecule in many ways and you know, it’s the most popular elements
00:15:49 in the universe, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur.
00:15:54 When you add hydrogen to them, it makes quite simple, quite famous molecules.
00:16:00 You do it to oxygen, you get water, you do it to carbon, you get methane, you do it to
00:16:04 nitrogen, you get ammonia.
00:16:06 These are all molecules people have heard of, but you do it to phosphorus, you get phosphine.
00:16:11 People haven’t heard of phosphine because it’s not really popular on earth.
00:16:16 You really shouldn’t find it anywhere on earth because it is extremely toxic to life.
00:16:22 It interacts with oxygen metabolism and everything you know and love uses oxygen metabolism and
00:16:30 it interacts fatally.
00:16:31 So it kills in several very imaginative and very macabre ways.
00:16:37 So it was used as a chemical warfare agent in the first world war and most recently by
00:16:43 ISIS.
00:16:44 So really bad.
00:16:46 Most life avoids it.
00:16:48 Even life that might not avoid it, so life that doesn’t use oxygen metabolism, anaerobic
00:16:51 life still has to put crazy amounts of effort into making it.
00:16:56 It’s a really difficult molecule to make, thermodynamically speaking.
00:16:59 It’s really difficult to make that phosphorus want to be together with that hydrogen.
00:17:04 So it’s horrible.
00:17:07 Everyone avoids it.
00:17:08 When they’re not avoiding it, it’s extremely difficult to make.
00:17:10 You would have to put energy in, sacrifice energy to make it.
00:17:14 And if you did go through all that trouble and made it, it gets reacted with the radicals
00:17:19 in the atmosphere and gets destroyed.
00:17:22 So we shouldn’t find it anywhere and yet we do.
00:17:24 This is kind of weird molecule that seems to be made by life and we don’t even know
00:17:30 why.
00:17:31 Life clearly finds a use for it.
00:17:33 It’s not the only molecule that life is willing to sacrifice energy to make, but we don’t
00:17:37 know how or why life is even making it.
00:17:39 So absolutely mysterious, absolutely deadly, smells horrifically.
00:17:46 When it’s made, it produces other kind of diphosphenes and it’s been reported as smelling
00:17:50 like garlicky, fishy death.
00:17:54 Once someone referred to it as smelling like the, let me see if I remember, the rancid
00:17:58 diapers of the spawn of Satan.
00:18:00 Oh, very nice.
00:18:01 Yeah, very vivid.
00:18:03 And so…
00:18:04 You’re a poet after all.
00:18:05 I didn’t call it that, someone else did.
00:18:08 And so it’s just this horrific molecule, but it is produced by life.
00:18:12 We don’t know why.
00:18:14 And when it is produced by life, it’s done with enormous sacrifice and the universe does
00:18:18 not sacrifice, life sacrifices.
00:18:22 And so it’s this strange, contradictory molecule that we should all be avoiding and yet seems
00:18:27 to be an almost an ambiguous sign of life on rocky planets.
00:18:31 Okay.
00:18:32 Can we dig into that a little bit?
00:18:34 So on rocky planets, is there biological mechanisms that can produce it?
00:18:43 You said that why is unclear, why life might produce it, but is there an understanding
00:18:50 of what kind of mechanisms might be able to produce it, this very difficult to produce
00:18:54 molecule?
00:18:55 We don’t know yet.
00:18:57 The enzymatic pathways of phosphine production by life are not yet known.
00:19:02 This is not actually as surprising as it might sound.
00:19:04 I think something like 80% of all the natural products that we know of, so we know biology
00:19:10 makes them.
00:19:11 We don’t know how.
00:19:12 It is much easier to know life produces something because you can put bacteria in a Petri dish
00:19:17 and then watch and then that gas is produced, you go, oh, life made it.
00:19:21 That actually happened with phosphine.
00:19:23 But that’s much easier to do of course, than figuring out what is the exact metabolic pathway
00:19:29 within that life form that created this molecule.
00:19:33 So we don’t know yet.
00:19:35 Phosphine is really understudied.
00:19:38 No one had really heard of it until nowish.
00:19:40 What you were presenting is the fact that life produces phosphine, not the process by
00:19:46 which it produces phosphine.
00:19:47 Is there an urgency now?
00:19:49 Like if you were to try to understand the mechanisms, the, what did you call them, enzymatic
00:19:55 pathways that produce phosphine, how difficult is that of a problem to crack?
00:20:00 It’s really difficult.
00:20:01 If I’m not mistaken, even the scent of truffles, obviously a billion dollar industry, huge
00:20:08 deal.
00:20:09 Until quite recently, it wasn’t known exactly how those scents, those molecules that create
00:20:14 this incredible smell were produced.
00:20:16 This is a billion dollar industry.
00:20:17 As you can imagine, there is no such pressure.
00:20:21 There’s no phosphine lobby or anything that would push for this research, but I hope someone
00:20:26 picks it up and does it.
00:20:29 And it isn’t crazy because we know that phosphine is really hard to make.
00:20:33 We know it’s really hard for it to happen accidentally.
00:20:36 Even lightning and volcanoes that can produce small amounts of phosphine, it’s extremely
00:20:41 difficult for even these extreme processes to make it.
00:20:44 So it’s not really surprising that only life can do it because life is willing to make
00:20:49 things at a cost.
00:20:52 So maybe on the topic of phosphine, what, again, you’ve gotten yourself into trouble.
00:20:58 I’m going to ask you all these high level poetic questions.
00:21:01 I apologize.
00:21:02 No, I would love it.
00:21:04 Okay.
00:21:05 When did you first fall in love with phosphine?
00:21:09 It wasn’t love at first sight.
00:21:11 It was somewhere between a long relationship and Stockholm syndrome.
00:21:20 When I first started my PhD, I knew I wanted to learn about molecular spectra and how to
00:21:25 simulate it.
00:21:26 I thought it was really outrageous that we as a species couldn’t detect molecules remotely.
00:21:32 We didn’t have this perfect catalog ready of the molecular fingerprint of every molecule
00:21:36 we may want to find in the universe.
00:21:39 And something as basic as phosphine, the fact that we didn’t really know how it interacted
00:21:43 with light and so we couldn’t detect it properly in the galaxy, I was so indignant.
00:21:50 And so initially I just started working on phosphine because people hadn’t before.
00:21:55 And I thought we should know what phosphine looks like and that was it.
00:22:01 And then I read every paper that’s ever been published about phosphine.
00:22:04 It was quite easy because there aren’t that many.
00:22:07 And that’s when I started learning about where we had already found it in the universe and
00:22:13 what it meant.
00:22:15 I started finding out quite how little we know about it and why.
00:22:20 And it was only when I joined MIT and I started talking to biochemists that it became clear
00:22:27 that phosphine wasn’t just weird and special and understudied and disgusting.
00:22:33 It was all these things for oxygen loving life.
00:22:37 And it was the anaerobic world that would welcome phosphine and that’s when the idea
00:22:42 of looking for it on other planets became crystallized.
00:22:46 Because oxygen is very powerful and very important on Earth but that’s not necessarily going
00:22:52 to be the case on other exoplanets.
00:22:54 Most planets are oxygen poor, overwhelmingly most planets are oxygen poor.
00:22:59 And so finding the sign of life that would be welcomed by everything that would live
00:23:06 without oxygen on Earth seemed so cool.
00:23:12 But ultimately the project at first was born out of the idea that you want to find that
00:23:16 molecular fingerprint of a molecule.
00:23:22 And this is just one example.
00:23:24 And that’s connected to then looking for that fingerprint elsewhere in a remote way.
00:23:33 And obviously that then at that time where exoplanets already, when you were doing your
00:23:37 PhD, and by the way you should say your PhD thesis was on phosphine.
00:23:41 It was all on phosphine, 100% on phosphine with a little bit of ammonia.
00:23:45 I have a chapter that I did where I talked about phosphine and ammonia.
00:23:51 But no, phosphine was very much my thesis.
00:23:55 But at that time when you’re writing it there’s already a sense that exoplanets are out there
00:24:01 and we might be able to be looking for biosignatures on those exoplanets?
00:24:08 Pretty much.
00:24:09 I did my PhD in 2015.
00:24:11 We found the first exoplanets in the kind of mid to late 90s.
00:24:15 So exoplanets were known.
00:24:17 It was known that some had atmospheres and from there it’s not a big jump to think, well,
00:24:22 if some have atmospheres, some of those might be habitable and some of those may be inhabited.
00:24:30 So how do you detect, you started to talk about it, but can we linger on it?
00:24:35 How do you detect phosphine on a faraway thing, rocky thing, rocky planet?
00:24:43 What is spectroscopy?
00:24:45 What is this molecular fingerprint?
00:24:47 What does it look like?
00:24:49 You’ve kind of mentioned the wave, but what are we supposed to think about?
00:24:52 What are the tools?
00:24:53 What are the uncertainties?
00:24:55 All those kinds of things.
00:24:57 So the path can go this way.
00:24:59 You’ve got light, kind of pure light.
00:25:03 You can crack that light open with a prism or a spectroscope or water and make a rainbow.
00:25:10 That rainbow is all the colors and all the invisible colors, the ultraviolet, the infrared.
00:25:17 And if that light was truly pure, you could consider that rainbow to just cover continuously
00:25:22 all of these colors.
00:25:24 But if that light goes through a gas, we may not see that gas.
00:25:28 We certainly cannot see the molecules within that gas, but those molecules will steal,
00:25:33 absorb some of that light, some, but not all.
00:25:38 Each molecule absorbs only very specific colors of that rainbow.
00:25:42 And so if you know, for example, that shade of green can only be absorbed by methane,
00:25:48 then you can watch.
00:25:49 As a planet passes in front of a star, the planet’s too far away, you can’t see it.
00:25:54 And it has an atmosphere.
00:25:55 That atmosphere is far too small, you definitely can’t see it.
00:25:58 But the sunlight will go through that atmosphere.
00:26:01 And if that atmosphere is methane, then on the other side, that shade of blue, I can’t
00:26:06 remember if I said blue or green, that color will be missing because methane took it.
00:26:11 And so with phosphine, it’s the same thing.
00:26:14 It has specific colors, 16.8 billion colors that it absorbs it and nothing else does.
00:26:22 And so if you can find them and notice them missing from the light of a star that went
00:26:28 through a planet’s atmosphere, then you’ll know that atmosphere contains the molecule.
00:26:33 How cool is that?
00:26:34 That’s incredible.
00:26:35 So you can have this fingerprint within the space of colors and there’s a lot of molecules.
00:26:40 And I mean, I wonder, that’s a question of like how much overlap there is.
00:26:45 How close can you get to the actual fingerprint?
00:26:48 Like can phosphine unlock the iPhone with its lights on?
00:26:52 You said 16.8 billion, so presumably this rainbow is discretized into little segments
00:27:00 somehow.
00:27:01 Exactly.
00:27:02 How many total are there?
00:27:03 How a lot is 16.8 billion?
00:27:06 It’s a lot.
00:27:07 We don’t have the instruments to break these, break any light into this many tiny segments.
00:27:14 And so with the instruments we do have, there’s huge amounts of overlap.
00:27:19 As an example, a lot of the ways it’s detectable is because the carbon and the hydrogens, they
00:27:27 vibrate with one another, they move, they interact.
00:27:30 But every other hydrocarbon, acetylene, isoprene has carbon and hydrogens also vibrating and
00:27:38 rotating.
00:27:39 And so it’s actually very hard to tell them apart at low resolutions and our instruments
00:27:44 can’t really cope with distinguishing between molecules particularly well.
00:27:50 But in an ideal world, if we had infinite resolution, then yes, every molecule’s spectral
00:27:55 features will be unique.
00:27:57 Yeah, like almost too unique, like it would be too trivial.
00:28:01 At the quantum level, they’re unique.
00:28:04 At our level, there’s huge overlap.
00:28:07 Yeah.
00:28:08 So you can start to then try to disambiguate the fact that certain colors are missing,
00:28:16 what does that mean?
00:28:18 And hopefully they’re missing in a certain kind of pattern where you can say with some
00:28:21 kind of probability, there’s this gas, not this gas.
00:28:24 So you’re solving that gaseous puzzle.
00:28:28 I got it.
00:28:29 Okay.
00:28:30 We can go back to Venus actually and show that.
00:28:31 So with this, I mentioned those two molecules that could be responsible for that signal,
00:28:36 the resolution that we have.
00:28:37 It was phosphine and SO2, sulfur dioxide.
00:28:43 And that resolution could really be one of the other, but in the same bandwidth, so in
00:28:47 the kind of the same observations, there was another region where phosphine does not absorb,
00:28:52 we know that, but SO2 does.
00:28:55 So we just went and checked and there was no signal.
00:28:58 So we thought, oh, then it must be phosphine.
00:29:01 And then we submitted the paper.
00:29:05 The rest is history.
00:29:06 I got it.
00:29:07 Well, yeah, that’s beautifully told.
00:29:13 Is there, so the telescopes we’re talking about are sitting on earth.
00:29:18 What can it help solving this fingerprint, molecular fingerprint problem if we do a flyby?
00:29:26 Does it help if you get closer and closer or are telescopes pretty damn good for this
00:29:31 kind of puzzle solving?
00:29:34 Telescopes are pretty good, but the earth’s atmosphere is a pain.
00:29:37 I mean, I’m very thankful for it, but it does interrupt a lot of measurements and a lot
00:29:43 of regions where phosphine would be active, they are not available.
00:29:47 The earth is not transparent in those wavelengths.
00:29:52 So being above the atmosphere would make a huge difference.
00:29:55 Then proximity matters a lot less, but just escaping the earth’s atmosphere would be wonderful.
00:30:00 But then it’s really hard to stay very stable and if there is phosphine on Venus, there’s
00:30:06 very little of it in the clouds.
00:30:08 And so the signal is very weak and the telescopes we can use on earth are much bigger and much
00:30:15 more stable.
00:30:16 So it’s a bit of a trade off.
00:30:18 So is it, are you comfortable with this kind of remote observation?
00:30:24 Is it at all helpful to strive for going over to Venus and like grabbing a scoop of the
00:30:32 atmosphere or is remote observation really a powerful tool for this kind of job?
00:30:39 Like the scoop is not necessary.
00:30:41 Well a lot of people want to scoop, I get it.
00:30:44 I get it completely.
00:30:45 That’s my natural inclination, yeah.
00:30:47 I don’t want to scoop specifically because if it is life, I want to know everything I
00:30:51 can remotely before I interfere.
00:30:55 So that’s my, I’ve got ethical reasons against the scoop more than engineering reasons against
00:30:59 the scoop.
00:31:00 But I have some engineering reasons against the scoop.
00:31:03 Scoop is not a technical term, but I feel like now it’s too late to take it back.
00:31:10 We don’t understand the clouds well enough to plan the scoop very well.
00:31:14 Because it’s not that saturated, like there’s not that much of it present.
00:31:18 No, and the place is nasty.
00:31:21 You know, it’s not going to be easy to build something that can do the task reliably and
00:31:28 can be trusted, the measurements can be trusted and then pass that message on.
00:31:33 So actually I’m for an orbiter.
00:31:35 I think we should have orbiters around every solar system body whose job is just to learn
00:31:40 about these places.
00:31:42 I’m disappointed we haven’t already got an orbiter around every single one of them.
00:31:47 A small, it can be a small satellite.
00:31:49 Getting data, figuring out, you know, how do the clouds move?
00:31:52 What’s in them?
00:31:53 How often is there lightning and volcanic activity?
00:31:56 Where’s the topography?
00:31:57 Is it changing?
00:31:58 Is there a biosphere actively doing things?
00:32:02 We should be monitoring this from afar.
00:32:05 And so I’m for over the atmosphere, hopefully around Venus, that would be, that would be
00:32:11 my choice.
00:32:12 Okay.
00:32:13 So now recently Venus is all exciting about a phosphine and everything.
00:32:19 Is there other stuff maybe before we were looking at Venus or now looking out into other
00:32:25 solar systems?
00:32:26 Is there other promising exoplanets or other planets within the solar system that might
00:32:32 have phosphine or might have other strong biosignatures that we should be looking for
00:32:40 like phosphine?
00:32:41 There’s a few, but outside the solar system, all are kind of promising candidates.
00:32:48 We know so little about them.
00:32:49 For most of them, we barely know their density.
00:32:53 Most of them, we don’t even know if they have an atmosphere, nevermind what that atmosphere
00:32:57 might contain.
00:32:59 So we’re still very much at the stage where we have detected promising planets, but they’re
00:33:03 promising in that they’re about the right size, about the right density.
00:33:08 They could have an atmosphere and they’re about the right distance from their host star.
00:33:13 But that’s really all we know.
00:33:15 Near future telescopes will tell us much more, but for now we’re just guessing.
00:33:20 So you said near future, so there’s hope that there’ll be telescopes that can see that far
00:33:25 enough to determine if there’s an atmosphere and perhaps even the contents of that atmosphere?
00:33:31 Absolutely.
00:33:32 JWST, launching later this year, will be able to get a very rough sense of the main atmospheric
00:33:39 constituents of planets that could potentially be habitable.
00:33:44 And that’s this year.
00:33:46 What’s the name?
00:33:47 JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope.
00:33:49 Okay.
00:33:50 And that’s going to be out in space, past the atmosphere.
00:33:53 Yes.
00:33:54 Is there something interesting to be said about the engineering aspect of the telescope?
00:33:57 I mean, it’s an incredible beast, but it’s a beast of many burdens.
00:34:02 So it’s going to do, it’s going to.
00:34:05 See, you are a poet.
00:34:07 You are, yeah.
00:34:08 I love it.
00:34:09 This is very eloquent.
00:34:10 You’re speaking to the audience, which I appreciate.
00:34:15 So yeah, so it’s a giant engineering project and is it orbiting something, do you know?
00:34:20 So it’s going to be above the atmosphere and it will be doing lots of different astrophysics.
00:34:26 And so some of its time will be dedicated to exoplanets, but there’s an entire astronomy
00:34:33 field fighting for time before the cryogenic lifetime of the instrument.
00:34:40 And so when I was looking for the possibility of finding phosphine on distant exoplanets,
00:34:45 I used JWST as a way of checking with this instrument that we will launch later this
00:34:52 year, could we detect phosphine on an oxygen poor planet?
00:34:56 And there I put very much a hard stop where some of my simulation said, yes, you can totally
00:35:02 do it, but it will take a little under the cryogenic lifetime of this machine.
00:35:07 So then I had to go, well, that’s not going to, no one’s going to dedicate all of JWST
00:35:11 to look for my molecule that no one cared about.
00:35:15 So we’re very much at that edge, but there’ll be many other telescopes in the coming decades
00:35:21 that will be able to tell us quite a lot about the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets.
00:35:26 So you mentioned simulation.
00:35:28 This is super interesting to me.
00:35:30 And this perhaps could be a super dumb question, but I think I haven’t been able to, I haven’t
00:35:36 been able to prove you wrong on that one.
00:35:38 You simulate molecules to understand how they look from a distance is what I understand.
00:35:43 Like what does that simulation look like?
00:35:46 So it’s talking about which colors that the rainbow will be missing.
00:35:52 Is that the goal of the simulation?
00:35:54 That’s the goal, but it’s really just a very, very nasty Schrodinger’s equation.
00:35:59 So it’s a quantum simulation.
00:36:01 Oh, so it’s simulating at the quantum level.
00:36:03 Yes.
00:36:04 So I’m a quantum astrochemist.
00:36:05 Hi, I’m Clara.
00:36:07 I’m a quantum astrochemist.
00:36:08 That’s how we should have started this conversation.
00:36:10 Can you describe the three components of that quantum astro and chemist and how they interplay
00:36:17 together?
00:36:18 So I study the quantum behavior of molecules, hence the quantum and the chemist specifically
00:36:26 so I can detect them in space, hence the astro.
00:36:31 So what I do is I figure out the probability of a molecule being in a particular state.
00:36:38 There’s no deterministic nature to the work I do, so it’s every transition is just a likelihood.
00:36:45 But if you get a population of that molecule, it will always happen.
00:36:50 And so this is all at the quantum level.
00:36:52 It’s a Schrodinger equation on, I think, 27 dimensions.
00:36:55 I don’t remember it by heart.
00:36:57 And what this means is I’m solving these giant quantum matrices.
00:37:03 And that’s why you need a lot of computer power, giant computers, to diagonalize these
00:37:09 enormous matrices, each of whom describes a single vibrational behavior of a molecule.
00:37:17 So I think phosphine has 17.5 million possible states it can exist in.
00:37:26 And transitions can occur between pairs of these states, and there’s a certain likelihood
00:37:31 that they’ll happen.
00:37:32 This is the quantum world.
00:37:33 Nothing is deterministic.
00:37:34 There’s just a likelihood that it will jump from one state to another.
00:37:38 And these jumps, they’re transitions, and there’s 16.8 billion of them.
00:37:44 When energy is absorbed, that corresponds to this transition, we see it in the spectrum.
00:37:48 This is more quantum chemistry than you had asked for.
00:37:50 I’m sorry.
00:37:51 No, no.
00:37:52 I’m sorry.
00:37:53 Brain’s broken.
00:37:54 So when the transitions happen between the different states, somehow the energy maps
00:37:59 the spectrum.
00:38:00 Exactly.
00:38:01 Energy corresponds to a frequency, and a frequency corresponds to a wavelength, which corresponds
00:38:06 to a color.
00:38:08 So there’s some probability assigned to each color then?
00:38:11 Exactly.
00:38:12 And that probability determines how intense that transition will be, how strong.
00:38:17 And so you run this kind of simulation for particular, so that’s 17.5 squared or something
00:38:23 like that.
00:38:24 So 15.5 million energies, each one of whom involves diagonalizing a giant matrix with
00:38:30 a supercomputer.
00:38:31 I wonder what the most efficient algorithm for diagonalization is, but there’s some kind
00:38:36 of…
00:38:37 There’s many.
00:38:38 Depends on kind of the shape of the matrix.
00:38:41 So they’re not random matrices.
00:38:43 So some are more diagonal than others, and so some need more treatment than others.
00:38:48 Most of the work ends up going in describing the system, this quantum system in different
00:38:52 ways until you have a matrix that is close to being diagonal, and then it’s much easier
00:38:57 to clean it up.
00:38:59 So how hard is this puzzle?
00:39:03 So you’re solving this puzzle for phosphine, right?
00:39:08 Is this…
00:39:09 Are we supposed to solve this puzzle for every single molecule?
00:39:12 Exactly.
00:39:13 Oh boy.
00:39:14 Yes, I calculated if I did the work I did for phosphine, again, for all the molecules
00:39:20 for which we don’t have spectra, for which we don’t have a fingerprint, it would take
00:39:25 me 62,000 years, a little over.
00:39:28 62,000 years.
00:39:30 What time flies when you’re having fun?
00:39:31 Okay.
00:39:32 But you write that there are about 16,000 molecules we care about when looking for a
00:39:38 new Earth or when we try to detect alien biosignatures.
00:39:43 If we want to detect any molecules from here, we need to know their spectra, and we currently
00:39:48 don’t.
00:39:49 So to solve this particular problem, that’s my job.
00:39:53 What was that?
00:39:54 I mean, that’s absolutely correct.
00:39:55 I could have not said it better myself.
00:39:57 Did you take that from my website?
00:39:59 Yeah, I think I stole it.
00:40:00 And your website is excellent, so it’s a worthy place to steal stuff from.
00:40:04 Thank you.
00:40:05 How do you solve this problem for the 16,000 molecules we care about, of which phosphine
00:40:12 is one?
00:40:13 Yes.
00:40:14 So, taking a step a little bit out of phosphine, is there…
00:40:21 Well, we were having so much fun.
00:40:23 We were having so much fun.
00:40:24 No, no, we’re not saying bye.
00:40:25 No, no, no.
00:40:26 It’s sticking around.
00:40:27 I’m just saying we’re joining, more friends coming to the party.
00:40:30 How do you choose other friends to come to the party that are interesting to study as
00:40:35 we solve one puzzle at a time through the space of 16,000?
00:40:40 So we’ve already started.
00:40:41 Out of those 16,000, we understand water quite well, methane quite well, ammonia quite well,
00:40:46 carbon dioxide.
00:40:47 I could keep going.
00:40:49 And then we understand molecules like acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, more or less.
00:40:55 And that takes us to about 4% of those 16,000.
00:40:59 We understand about 4% of them, more or less.
00:41:02 Phosphine is one of them.
00:41:04 But the other 96%, we just really have barely any idea at all of where in the spectrum of
00:41:11 light they would leave a mark.
00:41:14 I can’t spend the next 62,000 years doing this work.
00:41:19 And I don’t want to, even if somehow I was able, that wouldn’t feel good.
00:41:26 So one of the things that I try to do now is move away from how I did phosphine.
00:41:32 So I did phosphine really the best that I could, the best that could be done with the
00:41:37 computer power that we have, trying to get each one of those 16.8 billion transitions
00:41:42 mapped accurately, calculated.
00:41:46 And then I thought, what if I do a worse job?
00:41:50 What if I just do a much worse job?
00:41:53 Can I just make it much faster and then it’s still worth it?
00:41:57 How bad can I get before it’s worthless?
00:42:02 And then could I do this for all the other molecules?
00:42:05 So I created exactly this terrible, terrible system.
00:42:10 So how, what’s the answer to that question, that fundamental question I ask myself all
00:42:14 the time in other domains.
00:42:15 How crappy can I be before I’m useless?
00:42:17 Before somebody notices.
00:42:18 Turns out pretty crappy because no one has any idea what these molecules look like.
00:42:26 Anything is better than nothing.
00:42:28 And so I thought, how long will it take me to create better than nothing spectra for
00:42:33 all of these molecules?
00:42:34 And so I created RASCAL, Rapid Approximate Spectral Calculations for All.
00:42:42 And what I do is I use organic chemistry and quantum chemistry and kind of cheat them both.
00:42:48 I just try to figure out what is the fastest way I could run this.
00:42:53 And I simulate rough spectra for all of those 16,000.
00:42:57 So I’ve managed to get it to work.
00:42:59 It’s really shocking how well it works considering how bad it is.
00:43:03 Is there insights you could give to like the tricks involved in making it fast?
00:43:08 Like what are the maybe some insightful shortcuts taken that still result in some useful information
00:43:16 about the spectra?
00:43:18 The insights came from organic chemistry from decades ago.
00:43:22 When organic chemists wanted to know what a compound might be, they will look at a spectrum
00:43:26 and see a feature and they would go, I’ve seen that feature before.
00:43:31 That’s usually what happens when you have a carbon triple bonded to another carbon.
00:43:36 And they were mostly right.
00:43:37 Almost every molecule that has a carbon triple bonded to another one looks like that.
00:43:42 Has other features different that distinguish them from one another, but they have that
00:43:47 feature in common.
00:43:49 We call these functional groups.
00:43:51 And so most of that work ended up being abandoned because now we have mass spectrometry.
00:43:57 We got nuclear magnetic resin spectroscopy, so people don’t really need to do that anymore.
00:44:03 But these ancient textbooks still exist and I’ve collected them all as many as I could.
00:44:09 And there are hundreds of these descriptions where people have said, oh, whenever you have
00:44:13 a iodine atom connected to this one, there’s always a feature here and it’s usually quite
00:44:20 sharp and it’s quite strong.
00:44:22 And some people go, oh yeah, that’s really broad feature.
00:44:24 Every time that combination of atoms and bonds.
00:44:28 So I’ve collected them all and I’ve created this giant dictionary of all these kind of
00:44:32 puzzle pieces, these Lego parts of molecules.
00:44:37 And I’ve written a code that then puts them all together in some kind of like Frankenstein’s
00:44:41 monster of molecules.
00:44:43 So you asked me for any molecule and I go, well, it has these bonds and this atom dangling
00:44:48 off this atom and this cluster here, and I tell you what it should look like and it kind
00:44:55 of works.
00:44:57 So this creates a whole portfolio of just kind of signatures that we could look for.
00:45:03 Rough, very rough signatures.
00:45:05 But still useful enough to analyze the atmospheres, the telescope generated images of other planets?
00:45:14 Close.
00:45:15 Right now it is so complete.
00:45:18 So it has all of these molecules that it can tell you, say you look at an alien atmosphere
00:45:24 and there’s a feature there.
00:45:26 It can tell you, oh, that feature, that’s familiar.
00:45:29 It could be one of these 816 molecules, best of luck.
00:45:34 So I think the next step, which is what I’m working on is telling you something more useful
00:45:38 than it could be one of those 816 molecules.
00:45:41 That’s still true.
00:45:42 I wouldn’t say it’s useful.
00:45:43 So it can tell you, but only 12% of them also have a feature in this region.
00:45:48 So go look there.
00:45:49 And if there’s nothing there, it can’t be those and so on.
00:45:53 It can also tell you things like you will need this much accuracy to distinguish between
00:45:58 those 816.
00:46:00 So that’s what I’m working on.
00:46:03 But it’s a lot of work.
00:46:04 So this is really interesting, the role of computing in this whole picture.
00:46:09 You mentioned code.
00:46:10 So like you as a quantum astrochemist, there is some role for programming in your life,
00:46:18 in your past life, in your current life, in your group?
00:46:21 Oh yeah, almost entirely.
00:46:22 I’m a computational quantum astrochemist, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue very
00:46:25 easily.
00:46:26 So this is fundamentally computational.
00:46:28 Like if you want to be successful in the 21st century in doing quantum astrochemistry, you
00:46:32 want to be computational?
00:46:33 Absolutely.
00:46:34 All quantum chemistry is computational at this point.
00:46:36 Okay.
00:46:37 So does machine learning play a role at all?
00:46:40 Is there some extra shortcuts that could be discovered through, like you see all that
00:46:46 success with protein folding, right?
00:46:48 A problem that thought to be extremely difficult to apply machine learning to because it’s,
00:46:58 I mean mostly because there’s not a lot of already solved puzzles to train on.
00:47:04 I suppose the same exact thing is true with this particular problem, but is there hope
00:47:09 for machine learning to help out?
00:47:11 Absolutely.
00:47:12 Currently you’ve laid out exactly the problem.
00:47:14 The training set is awful and because there’s so, a lot of this data that I’m basing it
00:47:21 on is literally many decades old.
00:47:24 The people who worked on it and data that I get, often they’re dead and the files that
00:47:29 I’ve used, some of them were hand drawn by someone tired in the seventies.
00:47:34 Yes.
00:47:35 So I can of course have a program training on these, but I would just be perpetuating
00:47:40 these mistakes without hope of actually verifying them.
00:47:43 So my next step is to improve this training set by hand and then try to see if I can apply
00:47:51 machine learning on the full code of the full 16,000 molecules and improve them all.
00:47:57 But really I need to be able to test the outcomes with experimental data, which means convincing
00:48:01 someone in a lab to spend a lot of money putting very dangerous gases in chambers and measuring
00:48:08 them at outrageous temperatures.
00:48:11 So it’s a work in progress.
00:48:13 And so collecting huge amounts of data about the actual gases.
00:48:18 So you are up for doing that kind of thing too.
00:48:22 So actually like doing the full end to end thing, which is like having a gas, collecting
00:48:29 data about it, and then doing the kind of analysis that creates the fingerprint and
00:48:35 then also analyzing using that library, the data that comes from other planets.
00:48:40 So you do the full.
00:48:41 Full from birth to death.
00:48:43 Interesting.
00:48:44 Yes.
00:48:45 I worked in an industrial chemistry laboratory when I was much younger in Slovenia and there
00:48:50 I worked in the lab actually collecting spectrum and predicting spectrum.
00:48:56 What’s it like to work with a bunch of gases that are like not so human friendly?
00:49:00 It’s terrifying.
00:49:01 It’s horrific.
00:49:03 It’s so scary.
00:49:04 And I love my job.
00:49:06 I’m willing to clearly sacrifice a lot for it, you know, job, stability, money, sanity.
00:49:15 But I only worked there for a few months and it was really terrifying.
00:49:20 There’s just so many ways to die.
00:49:22 You know, usually you only have a handful of ways to die every day, you know.
00:49:26 And if you work in a lab, there’s so many more, orders of magnitude more.
00:49:30 And I was very bad at it.
00:49:32 I’m not a good hands on scientist.
00:49:35 I want a laptop connected to a remote super computer or a laptop connected to a telescope.
00:49:43 I don’t need to be there to believe it.
00:49:46 And I am not good in the lab.
00:49:48 Yeah.
00:49:49 When there’s a bunch of things that can poison you, a bunch of things that could explode
00:49:53 and they’re gaseous and they’re often, maybe they might not even have a smell or they might
00:49:57 not be visible.
00:49:59 It’s like…
00:50:00 So many of them give you cancer.
00:50:02 It’s just so cruel.
00:50:03 And some people love this work, but I’ve never enjoyed experimental work.
00:50:09 It’s so ungrateful.
00:50:11 So lonely.
00:50:12 Well, most, I mean, so much work is lonely if you find the joy in it, but you enjoy the
00:50:18 results of it.
00:50:19 Yes.
00:50:20 So I’m very thankful for all the experimentalists in my life, but I’ll do the theory.
00:50:26 They do the experiment and then we talk to one another and make sure it matches.
00:50:30 Okay.
00:50:31 Beautiful.
00:50:32 What are spectroscopic networks?
00:50:34 Those look super cool.
00:50:35 Are they related to what we were talking about?
00:50:37 The picture look pretty.
00:50:38 Oh, yes, slightly.
00:50:39 So remember when I mentioned the 17.5 million energy levels?
00:50:44 Yes.
00:50:45 There are rules for each molecule on which energy levels they can jump from and to and
00:50:51 how likely it is to make that jump.
00:50:53 And so if you plot all the routes it can take, you get this energy network, which is like
00:51:01 a ball.
00:51:02 So these are the constraints of the transitions that could be taken.
00:51:06 Exactly for each molecule.
00:51:07 Interesting.
00:51:08 And they’re not, so it’s not a fully connected, it’s like it’s sparse somehow.
00:51:13 Yes, you get islands sometimes.
00:51:15 You get a molecule can only jump from one set of states to another and it’s trapped
00:51:20 now in this network.
00:51:21 It can never go to another network that could have been available to other siblings.
00:51:27 Is there some insights to be drawn from these networks?
00:51:30 Like something cool that you can understand about a particular molecule because of it?
00:51:33 Yes.
00:51:34 Some molecules have what we call forbidden transitions, which aren’t really forbidden
00:51:38 because it’s quantum.
00:51:39 There are no rules.
00:51:40 No, I’m not joking.
00:51:41 One of the rules is just the rules are very often broken in the quantum world.
00:51:45 And so forbidden transitions doesn’t actually mean they’re forbidden.
00:51:49 Low probability.
00:51:50 Exactly.
00:51:51 They just become deeply unlikely.
00:51:52 Yeah.
00:51:53 Cool.
00:51:54 And so you could do all the same, like I’m coming from a computer science world, I love
00:51:58 graph theory.
00:51:59 So you can do all the same graph theoretic kind of analysis of clusters or something
00:52:05 like that.
00:52:06 Exactly.
00:52:07 All those kinds of things.
00:52:08 And draw insights from it.
00:52:09 Cool.
00:52:10 And they’re unique for each molecule.
00:52:11 And the networks that you mentioned, that’s actually not too difficult a layer of quantum
00:52:17 physics.
00:52:18 By then, all the energies are mapped.
00:52:19 So we’ve had high school children work on those networks.
00:52:23 And the trick is to not tell them they’re doing quantum physics until like three months
00:52:26 in when it’s too late for them to back out.
00:52:29 And then you’re like, you’re a quantum physicist now.
00:52:31 And it’s really nice.
00:52:32 Yeah.
00:52:33 Okay.
00:52:34 But like the promise of this, even though it’s 16,000, even just a subset of them, that’s
00:52:37 really exciting because then you can do as the telescope data get better and better,
00:52:41 especially for exoplanets, but also for Venus.
00:52:46 You can then start like getting your full, like, you know how you get like blood work
00:52:50 done or like you get your genetic testing to see what your ancestors are.
00:52:54 You can get the same kind of like high resolution information about interesting things going
00:52:59 on on a particular planet based on the atmosphere.
00:53:02 Right?
00:53:03 Exactly.
00:53:04 How cool would that be if we could, you know, scan an alien planet and go,
00:53:07 oh, this is what the clouds are made of.
00:53:09 This is what’s in the surface.
00:53:10 These are the molecules that are mixing.
00:53:12 Here are probably oceans because you can see these types of molecules above it.
00:53:16 And here are the Hadley cells.
00:53:19 Here are how the biosphere works.
00:53:22 We could map this whole thing.
00:53:24 Wouldn’t it be cool if the aliens like are aware of these techniques and like would spoof
00:53:28 like the wrong gases, just to like pretend that’s how they can be, it’s like an invisibility
00:53:33 cloak.
00:53:34 They can generate gases that would throw you off or like, or do the opposite.
00:53:39 They pretend they will artificially generate phosphine.
00:53:42 So like, like the dumb, the dumb apes on earth again, like go out, like flying in different
00:53:47 places because it’s just fun.
00:53:49 It’s like some teenager alien somewhere, just pranking.
00:53:53 Yeah.
00:53:54 I was asked that exact question this Saturday by, by a 70 year old boy in Canada, but it
00:54:04 was the first time I’d been asked that question, the second in a week.
00:54:10 We’re kindred spirits, him and I.
00:54:12 We can, they can prank us to some extent, but the, this work of interpreting an alien
00:54:19 atmosphere means you’re reading the atmosphere as a message and it’s very hard to hide signs
00:54:25 of life in an atmosphere because you can try to prank us, but you’re still going to fart
00:54:32 and breathe and somehow metabolize the environment around you and call that whatever you call
00:54:37 that and release molecules.
00:54:41 And so that’s really hard to hide.
00:54:42 You know, you can go very quiet.
00:54:44 You can throw out some weird molecule to confuse us further, but we can still see all your
00:54:50 other metabolites.
00:54:51 Yeah.
00:54:52 It’s hard to fake.
00:54:53 Is there, so you kind of mentioned like water that what, what other gases are there that
00:55:00 we know about that are like high likelihood as biosignatures in terms of life?
00:55:06 I mean, what are your other favorites in terms of, so, so we’ve got phosphine, but like what,
00:55:14 what else is a damn good signal to be a, that you think about that we should be looking
00:55:19 for if we look at another atmosphere, is there gases that come to mind or are there all sort
00:55:23 of possible biosignatures that we should love equally?
00:55:29 There’s many, so there’s water.
00:55:31 We know that’s important for life as we know it.
00:55:33 There’s molecular oxygen on earth.
00:55:35 That’s probably the most robust sign of life, particularly combined with small amounts of
00:55:39 methane.
00:55:40 And it’s true that the majority of the oxygen in our atmosphere is a product of life.
00:55:44 And so if I was an alien astronomer and I saw earth’s atmosphere, I’m, I would get a
00:55:50 Nobel I think on, you know,
00:55:52 What would you notice?
00:55:53 I mean, this is a really,
00:55:54 I would be very excited about this.
00:55:57 About the oxygen.
00:55:58 I’m not finding 20%, 21% of oxygen atmosphere.
00:56:02 That’s very unusual.
00:56:03 So would that be the most exciting thing to you from an alien perspective about earth
00:56:07 in terms of the tech, like analyzing the atmosphere, like what are the biosignatures of life on
00:56:12 earth?
00:56:13 Would you say in terms of the contents of the atmosphere is oxygen, high amount of oxygen,
00:56:18 pretty damn good sign.
00:56:19 I mean, it’s not as good as the TV signals we’ve been sending out.
00:56:23 Those are slightly more robust than oxygen.
00:56:27 Oxygen on its own has false positives for life.
00:56:30 So there’s still ways of making it, but it’s, it’s a pretty robust sign of life in the context
00:56:36 or atmosphere with the radiation that the sun produces, our position in relation to
00:56:41 the sun, the other components of our atmosphere, the volcanic activity we have, all of that
00:56:47 together makes the 20% of oxygen extremely robust sign of life.
00:56:53 But outside that context, you could still produce oxygen without life.
00:56:59 But phosphine, although better in the sense of it is much harder to make, it has lower
00:57:03 false positives, still has some.
00:57:06 So I’m actually against looking for specific molecules unless we’re looking for like CFCs.
00:57:12 If we find CFCs, that’s definitely aliens, I feel confident, chlorofluorocarbons.
00:57:16 And so, you know, if aliens had been watching us, they would have been going, oh no, CFCs.
00:57:22 I mean, they’re not going to last long.
00:57:25 Let’s, you know, everyone’s writing their thesis on the end of, the end of the earth.
00:57:30 And then we got together, we stopped using them.
00:57:33 I like to think they’re really proud of us.
00:57:35 You know, they literally saw our ozone hole shrinking.
00:57:38 They’ve been watching it and they saw it happen.
00:57:40 I think to be honest, they’re more paying attention to the whole nuclear thing.
00:57:43 I don’t think they care.
00:57:44 It’s not going to bother them.
00:57:45 Oh, I mean, worried about us.
00:57:46 Oh yes.
00:57:47 Oh no, worried about us.
00:57:48 They, I mean, this is why the aliens have been showing up recently.
00:57:53 It’s like, if you, if you look at, I mean, there is, I mean, it’s probably, there’s a
00:57:56 correlation with a lot of things, but what the ufologists quote unquote often talk about
00:58:02 is that there seems to be a much higher level of UFO sightings since like in the nuclear
00:58:08 age.
00:58:09 So like if aliens were indeed worried about us, like if you were aliens, you would start
00:58:14 showing up when the living organisms first discovered a way to destroy the entire, the
00:58:21 entire colony.
00:58:22 Can the increase in sightings not have to do with the fact that people now have more
00:58:28 cameras?
00:58:29 It’s an interesting thing about science, like with UFO sightings, it’s like either 99.9%
00:58:37 of them are false or 100% of them are false.
00:58:40 The interesting thing to me is that in that 0.01%, there’s a lot of things in science
00:58:46 that are like these weird outliers that are difficult to replicate.
00:58:52 You have like, there’s even physical phenomena, ball lightning.
00:58:55 There’s difficult things to artificially create in large amounts or observe in nature in large
00:59:00 amounts in such a way that you can do it to apply the scientific method that could be
00:59:05 just things that like what happened like a few times or once and you’re like, what the
00:59:11 hell is that?
00:59:13 And that’s very difficult for science to know what to do with.
00:59:16 I’m a huge proponent of just being open minded because when you’re open minded about aliens,
00:59:20 for example, it allows you to think outside of the box in other domains as well.
00:59:27 And somehow that will result, like if you’re open minded about aliens and you don’t laugh
00:59:33 it off immediately, what happens is somehow that’s going to lead to a solution to a P
00:59:37 equals NP or P not equals NP.
00:59:39 Like in ways that you can’t predict, the open mindedness has tertiary effects that will
00:59:45 result in progress, I believe, which is why I’m a huge fan of aliens because it’s like
00:59:51 because too many scientists roll their eyes at the idea of aliens, alien life.
00:59:57 And to me, it’s one of the most exciting possibilities in the biggest, most exciting questions before
01:00:06 all of human civilization.
01:00:07 So to roll your eyes is not the right answer.
01:00:12 To roll your eyes presumes that you know anything about this world as opposed to just knowing
01:00:16 point zero zero zero one percent of this world.
01:00:19 And so being humble in the face of that, being open to the possibility of aliens visiting
01:00:26 Earth is a good idea.
01:00:29 Not everything, though.
01:00:30 I’m not so open minded to the flat Earth hypothesis as there’s a growing number of people believing
01:00:36 in.
01:00:37 But even then.
01:00:38 Or the inner Earth, I’ve got shouted at in a public talk about it.
01:00:42 So like the Earth is hollow?
01:00:43 Yeah.
01:00:44 My understanding is that there’s this conspiracy theory that as far as I can tell has no grounding
01:00:51 in reality is that there’s a slightly smaller Earth inside this one, which is just too cute
01:00:56 as a concept.
01:00:57 That’s awesome.
01:00:58 And you can access it, I think, from Antarctica.
01:01:00 And that’s where we keep, and I quote, the mammoths and the Nazis.
01:01:05 Yeah, I mean, that one is ridiculous.
01:01:08 But like I do like.
01:01:09 Hey, I thought you were keeping an open mind.
01:01:12 I genuinely think that’s more likely than aliens visiting the Earth.
01:01:15 And I say this as someone who has dedicated her life to finding like alien life.
01:01:21 And so that’s how improbable, I think, the visitations are.
01:01:27 Because interstellar distances are so huge that it’s just not really worth it.
01:01:32 See, I have a different view on this whole thing.
01:01:34 I think the aliens that look like little green men are like extremely low probability event.
01:01:43 Like mammoths and Nazis under that level.
01:01:48 But other kind of ideas, like the sad thing to me, and I think in my view, if there’s
01:01:57 other alien civilizations out there and they visited Earth, neither them or perhaps just
01:02:04 us would be even able to detect them.
01:02:06 Like we wouldn’t be open minded enough to see it.
01:02:10 Like if, because our understanding of what is life, and I just talked to Sarah Walker,
01:02:19 who’s.
01:02:20 You know Sarah.
01:02:21 Yeah, we talked for three hours about the question of what is life.
01:02:25 Sarah’s a good person to talk to about what is life.
01:02:29 But like the whole point is we don’t really, we have a very narrow minded view of what
01:02:33 is life.
01:02:34 And when it shows up, and it might be already here, trees and dolphins and so on, or mountains
01:02:45 or I don’t know, or the molecules in the atmosphere, or like people make fun of me.
01:02:53 But I do think that ideas are kind of aliens themselves, or consciousness could be the
01:02:57 aliens, or it could be the method by which they communicate.
01:03:00 We don’t know shit about the way our human mind works.
01:03:03 And the fact that this thing is a quantum process, please don’t I understand this.
01:03:09 It’s not woo woo.
01:03:10 I’m not I, we could, but it very well could be there could be something at the at the
01:03:14 physics level, right?
01:03:16 It could be at the chemical or the biological level, things that are happening that we’re
01:03:19 just close to close minded, because our conception of life is at the level of like us, like at
01:03:27 the jungle level of mammals.
01:03:30 And on the time scale, that’s the human time scale, we may not be able to perceive what
01:03:34 alien life is actually like what the scale at which their intelligence realizes itself
01:03:42 when we’re not able to perceive.
01:03:45 And the other thing that’s really important about alien visitations, whether it happened
01:03:49 or not, is especially after COVID in 2020, I’m losing a little bit of faith of our government
01:03:56 being able to handle that that well, not our government, but us as a society, as a collective,
01:04:04 being able to deal with new things in an effective way that’s inspiring, that’s efficient, that
01:04:11 like, whether it’s if it’s a dangerous thing to deal with it to alleviate the danger, whether
01:04:19 it’s the possibility of new discoveries and something inspiring to ride that wave and
01:04:24 make it inspiring all those kinds of things.
01:04:27 I honestly think if aliens showed up, they would look around, everybody would ignore
01:04:31 them and the government might like hide it, try to like see to keep it from the Chinese
01:04:36 and the Russians if it’s the United States, call it a military secret in a very close
01:04:41 minded way.
01:04:42 And then the bureaucracy would drown it away to where through paperwork, the poor aliens
01:04:48 would just like waste away and sell somewhere like there’s a certain
01:04:51 That would not happen, that would never happen, part of the reason that I feel so confident
01:04:55 that aliens have not visited because they would have had to visit just to have a look
01:04:59 remotely, from Neptune or something, which makes no sense because interstellar travel
01:05:04 is so difficult that it would be quite a ridiculous proposition, but that’s the bit that I think
01:05:12 is technically possible.
01:05:13 If they did come here and they were visible by anyone, detectable by anyone, the thought
01:05:18 that any government, no matter, or any military could just contain them, these beings are
01:05:24 capable of traveling interstellar distances when we can barely go to the moon, like barely
01:05:30 go to the moon.
01:05:31 These things would be way, way, way, way out there.
01:05:32 Way.
01:05:33 And the fact that we think our puny military, even if all the military in the world got
01:05:38 together and the fact that they could somehow contain it, that’s the bit that’s laughable.
01:05:44 Ants trying to contain a human that visited them.
01:05:47 Exactly.
01:05:48 And scientists, you would have to bring scientists on board.
01:05:50 You’ve met a lot of scientists.
01:05:52 How good are they at keeping secrets?
01:05:53 Because in my experience, they’re absolutely appalling at keeping secrets.
01:05:58 Yeah, that’s terrible.
01:05:59 Even the Phosphine on Venus thing, which was a pretty well kept secret.
01:06:03 This is true.
01:06:04 You had a bunch of people that were.
01:06:05 I told my dad.
01:06:06 Yeah.
01:06:07 You know, my dad knew and hopefully didn’t tell anyone, but if it had been an alien visiting,
01:06:12 he probably would have told a mate, you know?
01:06:15 And so these secrets could not be kept by any scientist that I know and certainly not
01:06:20 collaborative scientists, which would be needed.
01:06:23 You would need all sorts of scientific teams.
01:06:26 So between the pathetic power of any world’s military compared to any civilization capable
01:06:34 of traveling and our absolute inability to keep secrets, absolutely not.
01:06:41 I will bet everything that we have not been visited because we are too pathetic to hold
01:06:46 that truth.
01:06:47 If we’re just making like a $10 bet, the possibility here that the main alien, say there exists
01:06:56 one alien civil, other intelligent alien civilization in the galaxy.
01:07:02 To me, if they visit Earth, what’s going to visit Earth is like the crappy, like the really
01:07:09 crappy, short straw, like, like this, this like really dumb thing that’s, I don’t know,
01:07:17 like the early game boys or something like, there’s a cartoon about this.
01:07:20 There’s an alien that gets sent to Earth, Commander Spiff or something, and it’s kind
01:07:26 of a punishment or something, but that’s not possible.
01:07:29 That’s the thing because interstellar distances are so hard to, to cross.
01:07:34 You have to do it on purpose.
01:07:35 You have to do on purpose.
01:07:36 It has to be a big, big deal, and we know this because yes, you’re right.
01:07:40 We don’t know enough about galactic biology.
01:07:43 We don’t know what the universal rules of biology or biochemistry are because we only
01:07:47 have the Earth, but we do know that the laws of physics are universal.
01:07:53 We can predict behavior in the universe and then see it happen based on these laws of
01:07:57 physics.
01:07:59 We know that the laws of chemistry are universal.
01:08:01 We know the periodic table is all they have to choose from.
01:08:05 So yes, they may be some sort of unimaginable intelligence, but they still have to use the
01:08:11 same periodic table that we have access to.
01:08:13 They still have a finite number of molecules they can do things with.
01:08:18 So they still have to use the resources around them, the stars around them, the universe
01:08:22 around them, and we know how much energy is in these places.
01:08:26 And so yes, they may be very capable, capable beyond our wildest dreams, but they’re still
01:08:32 in the same universe, and we know a lot of those rules.
01:08:35 We’re not completely blind.
01:08:37 But there’s a colleague of yours at Harvard, Kamran Vafa, he’s a theoretical physicist.
01:08:43 I don’t know if you know him.
01:08:45 I’ve only joined Harvard about six months ago.
01:08:48 Okay.
01:08:49 It’s time to meet all the theoretical physicists.
01:08:52 So he’s a string theorist, but his idea is that aliens that are sophisticated enough
01:09:01 to travel interstellar like those kinds of distances will figure out actually ways to
01:09:05 hack the fabric of the universe enough to have fun in other ways, like this universe
01:09:11 is too boring.
01:09:12 Like you would figure out ways to create other universes, like you go outside the physics
01:09:17 as we know it.
01:09:19 So the reason we don’t see aliens visiting us all over the place is they’re having fun
01:09:23 elsewhere.
01:09:24 This is like way too boring.
01:09:26 We humans think this is fun, but it’s actually mostly empty space that no fun is happening.
01:09:32 There’s no fun in visiting Earth for a super advanced civilization.
01:09:35 So he thinks like if alien civilizations are out there, they found outside of our current
01:09:42 standard models of physics ways of having fun that don’t involve us.
01:09:47 That’s probably true, but even the notion of visiting, that’s so literally pedestrian.
01:09:52 Of course we want to go there because going there is the only thing we know.
01:09:55 We see a thing we want, we want to go there and get it.
01:09:58 But that is probably something they’ve no longer gotten need for.
01:10:03 I specifically don’t particularly want to go to space.
01:10:08 Sounds awful.
01:10:09 None of the things I like are going to be there.
01:10:13 My whole work is my whole career is finding life and understanding the universe.
01:10:17 So I care a lot, but I care about knowing about it and I feel no need to go there to
01:10:23 learn about it.
01:10:25 And I think as we develop better tools, hopefully people will feel less and less a need to go
01:10:30 everywhere that we know about.
01:10:33 And I would expect any alien civilization worth the salt have developed observation
01:10:38 tools and tools that allow them to understand the universe around them and beyond without
01:10:44 having to go there.
01:10:46 This going is so wasteful.
01:10:48 Yeah.
01:10:49 So more focused on the knowledge and learning versus the colonization, like the conquering
01:10:53 and all those kinds of things.
01:10:55 That’s beneath them.
01:10:57 That’s beneath them.
01:10:58 I mean, that said, do you think there’s in your hopeful search for life through phosphine
01:11:04 and other gases, do you think there’s other alien civilizations out there?
01:11:11 First do you think there’s other life out there?
01:11:14 First do you think there’s life in the solar system?
01:11:17 Second do you think there’s life in the galaxy?
01:11:22 And a third, do you think there’s intelligent life in the solar system or the galaxy outside
01:11:26 of earth?
01:11:28 So intelligent life, I have no idea.
01:11:30 It seems deeply unlikely possible, but I’m not even sure if it’s plausible.
01:11:35 So that’s the special thing to you about earth is somehow intelligent life came to me.
01:11:38 Yes.
01:11:39 And it’s only, you know, very briefly, probably extremely briefly.
01:11:43 Oh, you mean like it’s always going to be like, we’re going to destroy ourselves.
01:11:48 Exactly.
01:11:49 Oh boy.
01:11:50 We’re going to continue on earth happily, probably more happily.
01:11:54 So the trees and the dolphins will be here, I’m telling you.
01:11:56 And the cockroaches and the incredible fungi, you know, they’ll be fine.
01:12:02 So life on earth will be fine, was fine before us and will be fine after us.
01:12:08 So I’m not that worried about intelligent life, but I think it is unlikely, even on
01:12:12 earth is unlikely out of, what is it, five billion species across the history of the
01:12:16 earth.
01:12:17 Yes.
01:12:18 For an intelligent one and for a blink of an eye, possibly not much longer than that.
01:12:24 So I wouldn’t bet on that at all, though I would love it, of course, you know, I wanted
01:12:31 to find aliens since I was a little girl.
01:12:34 And so of course I initially wanted to find ones that I could be friends with and I’ve
01:12:40 had to let go of that dream because it’s so deeply implausible.
01:12:44 But see the nice, and sorry to interrupt, but the nice thing about intelligent alien
01:12:47 civilizations, they may have more biosignatures than nonintelligent ones.
01:12:52 So they might be easier to detect, that would be the hope.
01:12:56 On earth that’s not the case, but it could be the case elsewhere.
01:12:58 Oh, it’s not the case on earth.
01:13:00 Most of the biosignatures we have on earth are created by quite simple life.
01:13:06 If you don’t count pollution, pollution is all, all us baby.
01:13:11 So you don’t see polluting gases as a possible, like.
01:13:17 I look for polluting gases.
01:13:18 I would love to find polluting gases.
01:13:20 Well, you know, I’d be worried for them, of course, the same way I, I think about my alien
01:13:26 colleagues all the time looking at us and I’m sure they worry about our pollutions,
01:13:30 but it would be a really good, robust, unambiguous sign of life if we found complex pollutants.
01:13:38 So I look for those too.
01:13:39 I just don’t have any hope of finding them.
01:13:41 I think intelligent life in the galaxy at the same time that we’re looking is deeply
01:13:47 implausible, but life I think is inevitable and if it is inevitable, it is common.
01:13:56 So I think there’ll be life everywhere in the galaxy.
01:14:00 Now how common that life is, I think will depend a lot on whether there’s life in the
01:14:04 solar system beyond earth.
01:14:07 So I’ll adjust my expectations very much based on there being life in the solar system.
01:14:13 If there’s life in the Venusian clouds, if there’s life in the, if there are biosignals
01:14:19 coming out of the plumes of Enceladus, if there’s life on Titan.
01:14:23 Yeah, that’s right.
01:14:24 Yeah, yeah.
01:14:25 Plumes of Enceladus.
01:14:26 That’s the, that’s the Saturn one.
01:14:27 It’s the moon that has the geysers that come out.
01:14:30 And so you can’t see the, under the subterranean oceans, but.
01:14:34 It’s supposed, so it would be in the atmosphere.
01:14:36 I was going to ask you about that one.
01:14:39 Have you looked at that?
01:14:40 Have you, is that a hope for you to use the tools you’re using with RASCAL and other ways
01:14:49 for detecting the 16,000 molecules that might be biosignatures to look at Enceladus?
01:14:56 Yes, that’s absolutely the plan.
01:14:59 What’s the limiting factor currently?
01:15:01 Is it the quality of the telescopes, what’s the quality of the data?
01:15:06 Yeah, the quality of the data, the observational data, and also the quality of RASCAL and other
01:15:12 associated things.
01:15:13 So we’re missing a lot of fundamental data to interpret the data that we get and we don’t
01:15:17 have good enough data.
01:15:19 But hopefully we will, in the coming decades, we’ll get some information on Titan.
01:15:24 We have Dragonfly going over.
01:15:27 We’ll get the plumes of Enceladus.
01:15:31 We will look at the clouds of Venus and there’s other places.
01:15:34 And so if we find any life or any sign of life ever, like on Mars, then I’ll adjust
01:15:41 my calculations and I’ll say life is not just inevitable and common, but extremely common.
01:15:48 Because all of these places we’ve mentioned, the subterranean oceans on Enceladus, the
01:15:52 methane oceans of Titan, the clouds of Venus, the acidic clouds of Venus, these are places
01:15:58 that are very different from the places where we find life on Earth.
01:16:02 Even the most extreme places.
01:16:04 And so if life can originate in all of these completely different habitats, then life is
01:16:10 even more resourceful than we thought, which means it’s everywhere.
01:16:14 That’s really exciting if it’s everywhere.
01:16:17 If there’s life on just one of the moons, if it’s on Mars.
01:16:21 Anywhere.
01:16:22 Anywhere in the solar system and I will bet everything I own that every solar system,
01:16:27 every planetary system has a potential for habitability.
01:16:31 Because even if they don’t have a habitable planet, they’ll have moons around other giant
01:16:35 planets and there’ll be so much life.
01:16:39 So for me, that’s the only thing to figure out now, whether life is inevitable and quite
01:16:44 common throughout the galaxy or everywhere, but it’s somewhere between those two.
01:16:51 In life, I make no bets and if I had to bet, I would be against.
01:16:58 To me, like two discoveries in the 21st century would change everything.
01:17:05 One is, and maybe I’m biased, but one is a discovery of life in the solar system.
01:17:12 I feel like that would change our whole conception of how unique we are in the universe.
01:17:18 I think I’m much more eager than you are to jump from basic life to intelligent life.
01:17:23 I feel like if there’s life everywhere, like the odds are, there has, like we cannot, like
01:17:31 you have, oh, I see.
01:17:34 You’re saying there could have been many intelligent civilizations out there, but they just keep
01:17:37 dying out.
01:17:38 It’s like little.
01:17:39 Yeah.
01:17:40 I was detecting them, you know, ships in the night.
01:17:41 Ships in the night.
01:17:42 No, that’s ultra sad.
01:17:45 Just like.
01:17:46 Is it sad?
01:17:47 The earth is not better for having us.
01:17:50 Is it, we, it doesn’t owe us anything.
01:17:53 Would you be sad to find alien giraffes?
01:17:56 Would you be disappointed if you found alien giraffes?
01:17:59 Because I would not.
01:18:00 No, well, giraffes, first of all, they look goofy with their necks and everything, but.
01:18:04 We do not shit on giraffes.
01:18:05 Okay.
01:18:06 Giraffes are wondrous animals, are deeply understudied.
01:18:09 We still know so little about them because no one does PhDs in giraffes.
01:18:12 I am disappointed I made a PhD in phosphine when people aren’t doing PhDs in giraffes.
01:18:17 We do not know enough about giraffes.
01:18:19 I think it was like Ricky Gervais that did a whole, like a long thing.
01:18:22 You can’t trust Ricky Gervais to talk about giraffes.
01:18:25 That is not his expertise.
01:18:26 Yeah.
01:18:27 But it’s a stupid necks, it doesn’t make any sense.
01:18:31 I mean, that’s fine.
01:18:32 Giraffes are very resourceful animals who do incredible things and can kick a lion in
01:18:36 the face.
01:18:37 Why don’t you climb the tree?
01:18:38 Why don’t you climb the tree?
01:18:39 You don’t need to grow through the lengthy evolutionary process.
01:18:42 You’re shitting on giraffes.
01:18:43 Okay.
01:18:44 Giraffes are wondrous animals.
01:18:45 Fine.
01:18:46 I would very appreciate it.
01:18:47 Take it back.
01:18:48 I take it back.
01:18:49 I apologize.
01:18:50 I trust your expertise on this.
01:18:54 The thing that makes humans really fascinating, and I think the earth, but I’m a human, is
01:19:01 we create things that are, yes, there’s all the ugliness in the world.
01:19:09 There’s all the, on the biological, on the chemical level, there’s the pollution, but
01:19:16 we create beauty.
01:19:18 If you even from a physics perspective, look at symmetry as somehow capturing beauty, the
01:19:23 breaking of symmetries, stuff grounded in all the different definitions of symmetry,
01:19:28 we’re good at creating things.
01:19:31 So are spiders.
01:19:35 But not giraffes.
01:19:36 Okay.
01:19:37 But yes, this is a…
01:19:38 Spiders.
01:19:39 Spiders that create little bubbles of air so they can breathe underwater, they can literally
01:19:43 scuba dive.
01:19:44 There are spiders that can create parachutes so they can glide.
01:19:48 And talk about symmetry, look what spiders can do.
01:19:51 And I just thought of spiders, but if I was an alien species coming to earth, there’ll
01:19:56 be plenty to wonder, and we would just be one of the things, clunky, naked monkey.
01:20:05 The ants might be even more fascinating.
01:20:07 The ants.
01:20:08 The ants can figure out exactly through some emergent consciousness what the maximum distance
01:20:14 between their trash, their babies, and their food is just from without any of them knowing
01:20:22 how to do this.
01:20:23 And collectively they’ve learned how to do this.
01:20:24 If I was an alien species, I’ll be looking at that.
01:20:27 Well, so that was the other thing I was going to mention.
01:20:29 The second thing is I tend to believe we can engineer consciousness, but at the basic level,
01:20:35 in the source of consciousness, because if consciousness is unique to humans, and if
01:20:42 we can engineer it, that gives me hope that it could be present elsewhere in the universe.
01:20:47 That’s the other thing that makes, it’s an open question, that makes humans perhaps special
01:20:53 is not maybe the presence of consciousness, but somehow a presence of elevated consciousness.
01:21:00 It does, again, maybe human centric, but it feels like we’re more conscious than giraffes,
01:21:04 for example, and spiders.
01:21:06 Yes, I won’t deny that.
01:21:08 There is something special about humans.
01:21:10 They’re my favorite species.
01:21:12 They are.
01:21:14 They are.
01:21:16 Some of my best friends are humans.
01:21:21 I think highly of humans.
01:21:24 It’s great.
01:21:25 I just don’t have great hope for our longevity, and specifically I don’t have great hope given
01:21:31 that we’re the only species that are five billion that did this cool consciousness trick.
01:21:35 I just, I don’t want to bet on finding a kinship elsewhere.
01:21:42 That’s quite interesting to think about.
01:21:44 I don’t think I’ve even considered that possibility that there would be life in the solar system,
01:21:51 so that indicates that very possibly life is literally everywhere.
01:21:57 Everywhere it can happen, it does.
01:21:59 And especially what we’re discovering with the exoplanets now, how numerous they are,
01:22:06 or earthlike habitable, quote unquote, planets, they’re everywhere.
01:22:12 The most common type of planet is rocky, it seems.
01:22:16 But I didn’t consider the possibility that life is literally everywhere, and yet intelligent
01:22:21 life is nowhere long enough to communicate with each other, to form little clusters of
01:22:30 civilizations that expand beyond the solar system and so on.
01:22:35 Man, maybe becoming a multi planetary species is a less likely pursuit than we imagine.
01:22:43 I agree.
01:22:44 But one of the things that makes humans beautiful is we hope.
01:22:49 What I hope for humanity, and one of the things I hope for is that we become less obsessed
01:22:56 with conquering, and we become less obsessed with spreading ourselves.
01:23:03 I hope that we transcend that, that we’re happy with the universe without having to
01:23:08 go and take it.
01:23:11 So you can hope for the species without hoping for a multi planetary existence.
01:23:18 That is only, I think, the drive of our most primitive instincts to go and take, to go
01:23:26 and plant a flag somewhere.
01:23:28 We love planting a flag somewhere.
01:23:31 And maybe we could overcome that minor drive.
01:23:35 And once we do, the AI systems we build will destroy us because we’re too peaceful, and
01:23:41 they will go and conquer and plant the flags.
01:23:43 Best of luck to them.
01:23:44 Rock roaches will be happy to keep to the business as they always have.
01:23:50 I tend to believe that robots can have the same elegance and consciousness and all the
01:23:58 qualities of kindness and love and hope and fear that humans have.
01:24:02 In principle, they could, yes.
01:24:05 I don’t really trust the people who make them.
01:24:10 This is about the giraffe comment, isn’t it?
01:24:13 I haven’t forgiven you for shitting on giraffes, whatever they’ve done to you.
01:24:18 Just as a small tangent, your master’s thesis is also fascinating.
01:24:22 Maybe we could talk about it for just a little bit.
01:24:25 It’s titled Influence of a Star’s Evolution on its Planetary System.
01:24:30 So this interplay between a star and a planet, is there something interesting you could say
01:24:35 about what you’ve learned about this journey that a star takes and the planets around it?
01:24:42 Well, when I was younger and I was told what would happen ultimately to the Earth as the
01:24:49 sun expands towards a red giant and mercury would just like fall in and then Venus fall
01:24:57 in and the sun doesn’t care.
01:24:59 And it just seemed so, I felt so small.
01:25:05 I felt like the Earth and everything on it, it’s just the universe doesn’t care.
01:25:10 Even our sun doesn’t care.
01:25:12 And I think I felt like our sun should feel some sort of responsibility for its planets.
01:25:17 And it just felt like such a violent and neglectful parent.
01:25:21 It’s like a parent eating its own children.
01:25:23 It’s horrible.
01:25:24 It’s just a horrible notion, but it made me think, what if there’s some sort of generation?
01:25:31 And so at the time when I was doing my master’s, there was a notion of the white dwarf cemetery,
01:25:36 which is this idea that when stars become white dwarfs, that death is so horrible that
01:25:41 planets, potentially habitable planets that could have been habitable before, they’re
01:25:45 now gone.
01:25:46 There’s no chance for life.
01:25:48 But then I thought, what if life returns?
01:25:52 Now it’s a white dwarf, it’s calmed down, it’s not going to go anywhere.
01:25:55 White dwarfs are very stable across like universal timescales.
01:25:59 And so could you have planets around the white dwarf that could themselves get life again?
01:26:05 No, life doesn’t care.
01:26:07 And so my work was basically killing dozens of planets, thousands of times.
01:26:14 I just ran thousands and thousands of end body simulations.
01:26:18 Oh, you simulated this?
01:26:19 Yeah.
01:26:20 So I simulated the star growing and just eating all these planets up and just absolute chaos.
01:26:26 The orbits of the planets would change as the star loses mass.
01:26:29 So you would have like Jupiter planets just crashing into the other planets, throwing
01:26:34 them into the sun early.
01:26:36 It was terrifying to watch these simulations.
01:26:40 It was absolute carnage.
01:26:44 But if you run thousands of these simulations, some systems find new balance ways of staying
01:26:50 alive.
01:26:52 Some systems post star death find stable orbits again for billions of years, more than enough
01:26:59 for life to originate again.
01:27:01 And so that was my idea during that time that Thesis was trying to explore this notion of
01:27:09 life coming back.
01:27:12 And this idea of the universe doesn’t care if you’re here or not, and it will go about
01:27:18 its business.
01:27:19 Andromeda will crash into us and doesn’t care.
01:27:23 No one cares if you’re alive in the universe.
01:27:25 And so letting go of that preciousness of life, I found very useful at that stage of
01:27:31 my career.
01:27:32 And instead, I just thought, if life is inevitable, it doesn’t matter that it came by four billion
01:27:38 years ago.
01:27:39 It can start again four billion years later.
01:27:41 And maybe that is nice.
01:27:44 Maybe that’s where hope lies, the Phoenix rising everywhere.
01:27:49 Planets being destroyed and created and we’re here now and others will be more or less hereish
01:27:56 billions of years later.
01:27:57 So accepting the cycle of death and life and yeah.
01:28:02 Not taking it personally.
01:28:03 Not taking it personally.
01:28:05 The sun doesn’t owe us anything.
01:28:06 It’s not a bad parent.
01:28:08 It’s not a parent at all.
01:28:10 Yeah.
01:28:11 I was looking at the work of Freeman Dyson and seeing how this universe eventually will
01:28:18 just be a bunch of supermassive black holes before they also evaporate.
01:28:22 A bunch of tiny black holes too.
01:28:24 Yeah.
01:28:25 Absolute quiet.
01:28:26 Everyone, all the black holes a little too far away from one another to even interact
01:28:30 until it’s just silence forever.
01:28:34 But until then, many, many cycles of death and destruction and rebirth.
01:28:40 And rebirth.
01:28:42 You kept bringing up sort of coding stuff up.
01:28:44 I wanted to ask two things.
01:28:47 First of all, what programming language do you like?
01:28:52 And also what, because you’re as a computational quantum astrochemist, no, yes, that’s right.
01:29:05 You’re kind of, you could say you’re actually understanding some exceptionally complicated
01:29:11 things with one of the things you’re using is the tools of computation of programming.
01:29:18 Is there a device you can give to people, because I know quite a few that have not practiced
01:29:24 that tool and have fallen in love with a particular science, whatever it’s biology and chemistry
01:29:28 and physics and so on.
01:29:30 And if they were interested in learning to program and learning to use computation as
01:29:37 a tool in their particular science, is there advice you can give on programming and also
01:29:41 just maybe a comment on your own journey and the use of programming in your own life?
01:29:48 Well, I’m a terrible programmer.
01:29:50 A lot of scientists, their programming is bad because we never learned formal programming.
01:29:55 We learned science, physics, chemistry.
01:29:58 And then we were told, oh, you can, you have to get these equations modeled and run through
01:30:03 a simulation.
01:30:04 And you’re like, oh, okay, so I’m going to learn how to code to do this.
01:30:07 And you learn just as much as you need to run these simulations and no more.
01:30:12 So they’re rarely optimized and they’re really clunky.
01:30:15 Six months later, you can’t read your own code.
01:30:17 My variable names are extremely embarrassing.
01:30:19 I still have error messages for different compilation errors that say things like, at
01:30:26 least your dad loves you, Clara.
01:30:29 You know, it doesn’t help me at all.
01:30:32 Just like you suck at coding, but there’s other things in your life.
01:30:36 So I’m a bad programmer.
01:30:37 And so, you know, if that will give hope to anyone else who’s a bad programmer, I can
01:30:41 still do pretty impressive science.
01:30:44 But I learned, I think I started learning MATLAB and Java when I was in college.
01:30:48 It did me no good at all.
01:30:50 It has not been particularly useful.
01:30:52 I learned some Fortran that was very useful, even though it’s really not a fun language
01:30:58 because so much of legacy code is in Fortran.
01:31:02 And so if you want to use other people’s code who have now retired, Fortran will be nice.
01:31:08 And then I used IDL to visualize.
01:31:10 So that simulation and body simulation, those all Fortran and IDL.
01:31:14 But thankfully, since I’ve left college, I’ve just learned Python like a normal person and
01:31:19 that has been much nicer.
01:31:21 So most of my code now is in Python.
01:31:24 I should also make a few quick comments as well.
01:31:26 So one is, you say you’re sort of bad at programming.
01:31:30 I’ve worked with a lot of excellent scientists that are quote unquote bad at programming.
01:31:36 They’re not.
01:31:37 It gets the job done.
01:31:38 In fact, there’s a downside to sort of, especially getting a software engineering education.
01:31:45 If I were to give advice, especially if you’re doing a computer science degree and you’re
01:31:50 doing software engineering, is not to get lost in the optimization of the correct, there’s
01:31:58 an obsession, you could see it in like Stack Overflow, of the correct way to do things.
01:32:04 And I think you can too easily get lost in constantly trying to optimize and do things
01:32:11 the correct way when you actually never get done.
01:32:13 The same thing happens, you have like communities of people obsessed with productivity and they
01:32:19 keep researching productivity hacks and then they spend like 90% plus of their time figuring
01:32:25 out how to do things productively and then never actually do anything.
01:32:29 So there’s a certain sense if you focus on the task that needs to be done, that’s what
01:32:34 programming is for.
01:32:35 So not over optimizing, not thinking about variable names in the following sense.
01:32:43 Sometimes you think, okay, I’m going to write code that’s going to last for decades.
01:32:47 In reality, your code, if it’s well written or poorly written, will be very likely obsolete
01:32:53 very quickly.
01:32:54 The point is to get the job done really well.
01:32:57 So there’s a trade off there that you have to make sure to strike.
01:33:02 I should also comment as a public service announcement or a request, if there’s any
01:33:08 world class Fortran or Cobalt programmers out there, I’m looking for them, I want to
01:33:13 talk to you.
01:33:14 That will not be me, I’m a terrible Fortran programmer.
01:33:18 But it’s fascinating because so much of the world in the past and still runs programming
01:33:23 languages and there’s no experts on it.
01:33:26 They’re all retiring.
01:33:28 I disagree slightly in that I think because I can get the job done, I’m a programmer.
01:33:33 But because no one else can look at my code and know how I got my job done, I’m a bad
01:33:37 programmer.
01:33:38 That’s how I’m defining it.
01:33:39 Including yourself.
01:33:40 Including myself six months later, I’m working with a new student right now and she sent
01:33:44 me some messages on Slack being like, what is this file that you’ve got with some functions
01:33:52 that run?
01:33:53 And I was like, this was from 2018, it wasn’t that long ago and I can no longer remember
01:33:59 what that code does.
01:34:00 I’m going to spend now two days reading through my own code and trying to improve it.
01:34:06 And I do think that’s frustrating.
01:34:08 And so I think my advice to any young people who want to get into astronomy or astrobiology
01:34:15 or quantum chemistry is that I certainly find it much easier to teach the science concepts
01:34:22 to a programmer than the programming to a scientist.
01:34:25 And so I would much, much faster hire someone who knows programming but barely knows where
01:34:33 space is than teach programming to an astronomer.
01:34:37 Oh, that’s fascinating.
01:34:39 Yeah.
01:34:40 Okay.
01:34:41 This is true.
01:34:42 I mean, yeah, there’s some basics.
01:34:43 I’m focusing too much on the silver lining because the people that write MATLAB code,
01:34:47 yeah, single variable, single letter variable names, those kinds of things.
01:34:52 And it’s accessibility, right?
01:34:53 It’s I want my code to be open source and it is, it’s on GitHub, anyone can download
01:34:59 it.
01:35:00 But is it really open source if it’s written so cryptically, so poorly that no one can
01:35:04 really use it to its full functionality?
01:35:06 Have I really published my work and that weighs on me?
01:35:11 I feel guilty for my own inadequacies as a programmer.
01:35:16 But you can only do so much.
01:35:18 I’ve already learned quantum chemistry and astrophysics.
01:35:20 So yeah, I mean, there’s all kinds of ways to contribute to the world.
01:35:28 One of them is publication, but publishing code is a fascinating way to contribute to
01:35:32 the world, even if it’s very small, very basic element, great code.
01:35:38 I guess I was also kind of criticizing the software engineering process versus like,
01:35:44 which is a good thing to do is code that’s readable, almost like without documentation,
01:35:50 it’s readable, it’s understandable.
01:35:52 The variable names, the structure, all those kinds of things.
01:35:55 That’s the dream.
01:35:56 That’s the dream.
01:35:57 This is a dumb question.
01:35:58 What do you, all right.
01:35:59 No, no, tell me a dumb question.
01:36:00 I want to hear it.
01:36:01 Okay.
01:36:02 I mean, okay, this is the question about beauty.
01:36:08 It’s way too general.
01:36:09 It’s very impossible.
01:36:10 It’s like asking, what’s your favorite band?
01:36:12 What’s your favorite music band?
01:36:13 Oh, I thought you meant wavelength band.
01:36:15 I was like, I definitely have favorite wavelength bands.
01:36:17 Absolutely.
01:36:18 Well, it’s hard to narrow it down, huh?
01:36:21 Okay.
01:36:22 What do you use the most beautiful idea in science?
01:36:25 It’s not a dumb question.
01:36:27 Do you want to try the question again proudly?
01:36:31 Okay.
01:36:32 I have a really good question to ask you.
01:36:35 Okay.
01:36:36 Don’t oversell it.
01:36:37 I’ve got an okay question to ask you, you know?
01:36:42 What do you use the most beautiful idea in science, something you just find inspiring
01:36:49 or just maybe the reason you got into science or the reason you think science is cool?
01:37:00 My favorite thing about science is kind of the connection between the scales.
01:37:05 So when I was little and I wanted to know about space, I really felt that it would make
01:37:11 me feel powerful to be able to predict the heavens.
01:37:15 Something so much larger than myself that felt really powerful.
01:37:19 It was almost a selfish desire and that’s what I wanted.
01:37:23 There was some control to being able to know exactly what the sky would do.
01:37:29 And then as I got older and I got more into astronomy and I didn’t just want to know how
01:37:34 the stars moved.
01:37:35 I wanted to know how the planets around them moved.
01:37:38 And then as I got deeper into that field, I really didn’t care that much about the planets.
01:37:41 I wanted to know about the atmospheres around the planets and then the molecules within
01:37:45 those atmospheres and what that might mean.
01:37:48 So I ended up shrinking my scale until it was literally the quantum scale.
01:37:53 And now all my work, the majority of my work is on this insane quantum scale.
01:37:59 And yet I’m using these literal tiny, tiny tools to try and answer the greatest questions
01:38:10 that we’ve ever been able to ask.
01:38:12 And this crossing of scales from the quantum to the astronomical, that’s so cool, isn’t
01:38:20 it?
01:38:21 Yeah.
01:38:22 It spans the entirety, the tiny and the huge.
01:38:24 That’s the cool thing about, I guess, being a quantum astrochemist is you’re using the
01:38:30 tools of the tiny to look at the heavenly bodies, the giant stuff.
01:38:35 And the potential life out there that this is the thing that connects us, that you can’t
01:38:41 escape the rules of the quantum world and how universal they themselves are despite
01:38:45 being probabilistic.
01:38:48 And that makes me feel really pleased to be in science, but in a really humbling way.
01:38:56 It’s no longer this thirst for power.
01:39:00 I feel less special the more work I do, less exceptional the more work I do.
01:39:05 I feel like humans and the earth and our place in the universe is less and less exceptional.
01:39:11 And yet I feel so much less lonely.
01:39:14 And so it’s been a really good trade off that I’ve lost power, but I’ve gained company.
01:39:19 Wow.
01:39:20 That’s a beautiful answer.
01:39:21 I don’t think there’s a better way to actually end it.
01:39:23 You’re right.
01:39:24 I asked a mediocre question and you came through.
01:39:27 You made the question good by a brilliant answer.
01:39:34 You’re the Michael Jordan and I’ll be the Dennis Rodman.
01:39:39 I don’t know enough about basketball.
01:39:40 I mean, literally you’ve reached the peak of my basketball knowledge because I know
01:39:44 that those people are basketball pros, I believe, but only because I watch Space Jam, I think.
01:39:50 Are there books or movies in your life?
01:39:53 Long ago or recently, do you have any time for books and movies had an impact on you?
01:39:59 What ideas did you take away?
01:40:02 I absolutely have time for books and movies.
01:40:04 I try as best I can to not work very hard.
01:40:08 I mostly fail.
01:40:09 I should point out.
01:40:11 But I think I’m a better scientist when I don’t work evenings and weekends.
01:40:18 If I get four good hours in a day, I often don’t.
01:40:21 I often get eight crappy hours, emails, meetings, bad code, data processing.
01:40:28 But if I can get four high quality scientific hours, I just stop working for the day because
01:40:33 I know it’s diminishing returns after that.
01:40:35 So I have a lot of time.
01:40:37 I try to make as much time as I can.
01:40:40 Can you kind of dig into what it takes to be, one, productive, two, to be happy as a
01:40:50 researcher?
01:40:51 Because I think it’s too easy in that world because you have so many hats, you have to
01:40:58 wear so many jobs, you have to be a mentor, a teacher, a head of a research group to research
01:41:05 yourself.
01:41:06 You have to do service, all the kinds of stuff you’re doing now with education and interviews.
01:41:15 So as a public science, like being a public communicator, that’s a job.
01:41:22 The whole thing.
01:41:23 Pays very poorly.
01:41:24 I’ll pay you in Bitcoin.
01:41:28 Okay.
01:41:29 I’ll take Bitcoin.
01:41:33 So is there some advice you can give to the process of being productive and happy as a
01:41:41 researcher?
01:41:42 I think, sadly, it’s very hard to feel happy as a scientist if you’re not productive.
01:41:47 It’s a bit of a trap, but I certainly find it very difficult to feel happy when I’m not
01:41:53 being productive.
01:41:54 It’s become slightly better.
01:41:56 If I know my students are being productive, I can be happy.
01:41:59 But I think a lot of senior scientists, once they get into that mindset, they start thinking
01:42:05 that their student science is theirs.
01:42:07 And I think this happens a lot with senior scientists.
01:42:10 They have so many hats, as you mentioned, they have to do so much service and so much
01:42:14 admin, that they have very little time for their own science.
01:42:18 And so they end up feeling ownership over the junior people in their labs and their
01:42:24 groups.
01:42:25 And that’s really heartbreaking.
01:42:26 I see it all the time.
01:42:28 And that, I think I’ve escaped that trap.
01:42:31 I feel so happy, even when I’m not productive, when my students are productive.
01:42:38 I think that sensation I was describing earlier of they only need to be half as productive
01:42:44 as me for me to feel like I’ve done my job for humanity.
01:42:50 So that has been the dynamic I’ve had to worry about.
01:42:55 But to be productive is not clear to me what you have to do.
01:42:58 You have to not be miserable otherwise.
01:42:59 I find it extremely hard when I’m having conflicts with collaborators, for example, kind of very
01:43:06 hard to enjoy the work we do.
01:43:08 Even if the work is this fantastical phosphine or things that I know I love, still very difficult.
01:43:16 So I think choosing your collaborators based on how well you get along with them is a really
01:43:22 sound scientific choice.
01:43:26 Being a miserable collaborator ruins your whole life.
01:43:29 It’s horrible.
01:43:30 It makes you not want to do the science.
01:43:32 It probably makes you do clumsy science because you don’t focus on it.
01:43:35 You don’t go over it several times.
01:43:37 You just want it to be over.
01:43:39 And so I think in general, just not being a douchebag can get so much good science done.
01:43:47 Just find the good people in your community and collaborate with them.
01:43:51 Even if they’re not as good scientists as others, you’ll get better science out.
01:43:55 Yeah, don’t be a douchebag yourself and surround yourself by other cool people.
01:43:59 Exactly.
01:44:00 And then you’ll get better science than if you would try to work with three geniuses
01:44:04 who are just hell to be around.
01:44:07 Yeah.
01:44:08 I mean, there’s parallel things like that.
01:44:12 I’m very fortunate now.
01:44:14 I was very fortunate at MIT to have friends and colleagues there that were incredible
01:44:18 to work with.
01:44:19 But I’m currently sort of, I’m doing a lot of fun stuff on the side, like this little
01:44:29 podcast thing and I mentioned to you, I think, robotics related stuff.
01:44:35 I was just at Boston Dynamics yesterday checking out their robots.
01:44:41 And I’m currently, I guess, hiring people to help me with a very fun little project
01:44:46 around those robots.
01:44:47 Want to put an ad in?
01:44:48 No.
01:44:49 I have more applications I can possibly deal with, there’s thousands.
01:44:53 So it’s not an ad, it’s the opposite.
01:44:57 We need to put an ad out for someone to help you go through the applications.
01:45:00 Well, that too is already there.
01:45:03 Over 10,000 people apply for that.
01:45:04 An infinite Master Yoshika doll of application management.
01:45:09 But the point is, it’s not exactly, the point is, like what I’m very distinctly aware of
01:45:16 is life is short and productivity is not the right goal to optimize for, at least for me.
01:45:26 The right goal to optimize for is how happy you are to wake up in the day and to work
01:45:32 with the people that you do.
01:45:34 Because the productivity will take care of itself.
01:45:36 Agreed.
01:45:37 And so like, it’s so important to select the people well.
01:45:42 And I think one of the challenges with academia, as opposed to sort of the thing I’m currently
01:45:46 doing is, like, saying goodbye is sometimes a little bit tougher.
01:45:51 Because your colleagues are there, I mean, their goodbye hurts.
01:45:58 And then if you have to spend the rest, you know, for many years to come, still surrounded
01:46:02 by them in the community, it’s tougher.
01:46:04 It kind of adds, puts extra pressure to stay in that relationship, in that collaboration.
01:46:13 And in some sense, that makes it much more difficult, but it’s still worth it.
01:46:17 It’s still worth it to break ties if you don’t, if you’re not happy, if there’s not that magic,
01:46:25 that dance.
01:46:26 I talked to this guy named Daniel Kahneman.
01:46:30 Oh, I know.
01:46:32 Danny Kahneman.
01:46:33 Danny, yeah.
01:46:34 Boy, did that guy make me realize, like, what a great collaborator is.
01:46:39 Well, he had Tversky, right?
01:46:41 Yeah.
01:46:42 So they had, obviously, they had a really deep collaboration there, but, like, I collaborated
01:46:48 with him on a conversation, like, just, like, talking about, I don’t know what we’re talking
01:46:53 about.
01:46:54 I think cars, autonomous vehicles, but the brainstorming session, I’m like a nobody.
01:46:59 And the fact that he would, with that childlike curiosity and that dance of thoughts and ideas
01:47:04 and the push and pull and the, like, and the lack of ego, but then enough ego to have a
01:47:09 little bit of a stubbornness over an idea and a little bit of humor and all those things,
01:47:13 it’s like, holy shit, that person, also the ability to truly listen to another human,
01:47:19 it’s like, okay, that’s what it takes to be a good collaborator.
01:47:23 It made me realize that I haven’t been, I’ve been very fortunate to have cool people in
01:47:27 my life, but there’s, like, levels even to the cool.
01:47:30 Yeah, I don’t think you can compete with Danny Kahneman on cool.
01:47:34 He’s just incredible.
01:47:36 Everybody was like, okay, I guess what I’m trying to say is that collaboration is an
01:47:41 art form, but perhaps it’s actually a skill, is allowing yourself to develop that skill
01:47:47 because that’s one of the fruitful skills.
01:47:50 And praise it in students, you know, and I think it is something you can really improve
01:47:56 on.
01:47:57 I’ve become a better collaborator as the years have gone on.
01:47:59 I don’t have some innate collaborative skills.
01:48:03 I think they’re skills I’ve developed, and I think in science there’s this really destructive
01:48:10 notion of the lone wolf, the scientist who sees things where others don’t, you know,
01:48:15 then that’s really appealing and people really like either fulfilling that or pretending
01:48:19 to be fulfilling that.
01:48:21 And first of all, it’s mostly a lie.
01:48:25 Any modern scientist, particularly in astronomy, which is so interdisciplinary, any modern scientist
01:48:30 that’s doing it on their own is doing a crappy job most likely because you need an independent
01:48:36 set of eyes to help you do things.
01:48:39 You need experts in the sub fields that you’re working on to check your work.
01:48:43 But most importantly, it’s just a bad idea.
01:48:49 It doesn’t lead to good science and it leaves you miserable.
01:48:54 I was recently, I had some work that I was avoiding and I thought maybe I should pursue
01:48:58 the scientific project because I don’t care enough about the outcome and it’s going to
01:49:03 be a lot of hard work.
01:49:04 And I was trying to balance these two things to be really difficult.
01:49:07 And the outcome is that maybe 10 people will cite me in the next decade because it’s not,
01:49:12 no one’s asking for this question to be answered.
01:49:16 And then I found myself working with this collaborator, Jason Dittman.
01:49:21 And I spent a whole afternoon hours with him working on this and time flew by and I just
01:49:27 felt taller and like I could breathe better.
01:49:31 I was happier, I was a better person when it was done.
01:49:35 And that’s because he’s a great collaborator.
01:49:38 He’s just a wonderful person that brings out joy out of science that you’re doing with
01:49:43 him.
01:49:45 And that’s really the trick.
01:49:46 You find the people that make you feel that way about the science you’re doing and you
01:49:52 stop worrying about being the lone wolf.
01:49:55 That’s just a terrible dream that will leave you miserable and your science will be shit.
01:50:01 And since I’m Russian, just murder anybody who doesn’t fall into that beautiful collaborative
01:50:08 relationship.
01:50:10 We were talking about books.
01:50:11 Books, yes.
01:50:13 Is there books, movies?
01:50:14 Why was I talking about my productivity?
01:50:16 Oh, you said you maybe don’t have time for books and movies.
01:50:18 And you said you must make time for books and movies.
01:50:22 Make time to not work.
01:50:24 Make time to not work whatever that looks like to you.
01:50:28 But there’s plenty.
01:50:31 When I was younger, I found a lot of my scientific fulfillment in books and movies.
01:50:36 Now as I got older, I have plenty of that in my work and I try to read outside my field.
01:50:43 I read about Danny Kahneman’s work instead.
01:50:47 But when I was little, it was Contact, the Carl Sagan book.
01:50:52 I really thought I was just like Ellie and I was going to become Ellie.
01:50:59 I really resonated with me, that character and the notions of life and space and the
01:51:06 universe.
01:51:07 Even the idea of then the movie came out and I got to put Jodie Foster in that, which helped.
01:51:17 But even the notion of if it is just us, what an awful waste of space, I find extremely
01:51:23 useful as a concept to think maybe we are special, but that would suck is a really nice
01:51:30 way of thinking of the search for life, that it’s much better to not be special and have
01:51:35 company.
01:51:36 I got that from Carl Sagan.
01:51:39 So that’s where I always recommend.
01:51:42 Let me ask one other ridiculous question.
01:51:45 We talked about the death and life cycle that is ever present in the universe until it’s
01:51:53 not, until it’s supermassive and little black holes too at the end of the universe.
01:51:58 What do you think is the why, the meaning of it all?
01:52:02 What do you think is the meaning of life here on Earth and the meaning of that life that
01:52:09 you look for, whether it’s on Venus or other exoplanets?
01:52:14 I think there’s none.
01:52:16 I find enormous relief in the absence of meaning.
01:52:19 I think chasing for meaning is a human desire that the universe doesn’t give two shits about.
01:52:29 But you still enjoy…
01:52:30 I enjoy finding meaning in my life.
01:52:33 I enjoy finding where the morality lies.
01:52:38 I enjoy the complication of that desire and I feel that is deeply human, but I don’t feel
01:52:47 that it’s universal.
01:52:49 It’s somehow absolute.
01:52:50 Like we conjure it up.
01:52:54 We bring it to life through our own minds, but it’s not any kind of fundamental way real.
01:52:59 No.
01:53:01 And the same way the sun is not to be blamed for destroying its own planets.
01:53:07 The universe doesn’t care because it has no meaning.
01:53:12 It owes us nothing.
01:53:14 And looking for meaning in the universe is demanding answers.
01:53:18 Who are we?
01:53:19 We’re nothing.
01:53:20 We don’t get to demand anything and that includes meaning.
01:53:23 And I find it very reassuring because once there is no meaning, I don’t have to find
01:53:28 it.
01:53:30 Yeah.
01:53:34 Once there’s no meaning, it’s a kind of freedom in a way.
01:53:38 You sound a bit like…
01:53:41 I’m happy about it.
01:53:42 This isn’t a depressing outlook as far as I’m concerned.
01:53:44 It’s happiness.
01:53:45 Yeah.
01:53:46 Yeah.
01:53:47 So, I mean, there’s a…
01:53:48 I don’t know if you know who Sam Harris is, but he, despite the pushbacks from the entirety
01:53:53 of the world, really argues hard that free will is an illusion, that the deterministic
01:54:01 universe and it’s all already been predetermined and he’s okay with it.
01:54:06 And he’s happy with it, that he’s distinctly aware of it.
01:54:11 And that’s okay.
01:54:12 The quantum world will disagree with him on the deterministic nature of nature.
01:54:16 Well, he’s not saying it’s deterministic, but he’s saying that the randomness doesn’t
01:54:22 help either.
01:54:24 Randomness does not help in the experience of feeling like you’re the decider of your
01:54:31 own actions.
01:54:33 That he kind of is okay with being a leaf flowing on the river, or being the river,
01:54:40 as opposed to having or being like a fish or something that can decide its swimming
01:54:45 direction.
01:54:46 He’s okay just embracing the flow of life.
01:54:48 I mean, in that same way, it kind of sounds like your conception of meaning.
01:54:53 I mean, it just is.
01:54:56 The universe doesn’t care.
01:54:58 It just is what it is and we experience certain things and some feel good and some don’t.
01:55:04 And that’s life.
01:55:08 But I don’t feel like that about life.
01:55:10 I think life does have meaning and it’s laudable to look for that meaning in life.
01:55:16 I just don’t think you can apply that beyond life and certainly not beyond earth.
01:55:22 That this notion of meaning is a human construct and so it only applies within us and the other
01:55:31 life forms and planet types that suffer from our intrusions or rejoice from our interactions.
01:55:40 But this meaning is ours to do as we please.
01:55:44 We created it, we’ve created a need for it, and so that’s our problem to solve.
01:55:49 I don’t apply it beyond us.
01:55:51 I think we as humans have a lot of responsibilities, but they’re moral responsibilities.
01:55:55 And a lot of those responsibilities are much more easily fulfilled if you find meaning
01:55:59 in them.
01:56:00 So I think there’s value to meaning, whether it’s real or not.
01:56:04 I just think we gain nothing from trying to anthropomorphize the entire universe.
01:56:11 And also that’s the height of hubris.
01:56:13 That’s not for us to do.
01:56:15 Yeah.
01:56:16 It also could be just like duality and quantum mechanics.
01:56:19 It could be both that there is meaning and that there isn’t.
01:56:25 And we’re somehow depending on the observer, depending on the perspective you take on the
01:56:32 thing.
01:56:33 I mean, even on earth that’s true, but whether things have meaning or not depends a lot on
01:56:38 who’s looking.
01:56:41 Whether it’s us humans, the aliens or the giraffes.
01:56:45 Clara, this was an incredible conversation.
01:56:49 I mean, I learned so much, but I also am just inspired by the passion you have in not finding
01:56:57 meaning in the universe.
01:57:00 I’m very passionate about not finding meaning in the universe.
01:57:04 You’re the most inspiring nihilist I’ve ever met.
01:57:06 I’m just kidding.
01:57:08 You are truly an inspiring communicator of everything from phosphine to life to quantum
01:57:17 astrochemistry.
01:57:18 I can’t wait to see what other cool things you do in your career, in your scientific
01:57:24 life.
01:57:25 Thank you so much for wasting your valuable time with me today.
01:57:28 I really appreciate it.
01:57:30 It was my pleasure.
01:57:31 I’d already got my four hours of productivity before I got here.
01:57:33 And so it’s not a waste.
01:57:35 It’s all downhill from there.
01:57:37 Thank you.
01:57:38 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Clara Sousa Silva.
01:57:41 And thank you to Onnit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed.
01:57:46 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
01:57:50 And now let me leave you with some words from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
01:57:54 The earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.
01:58:00 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.