Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Konstantin Batygin, planetary astrophysicist at Caltech,
00:00:06 interested in, among other things, the search for the distant, the mysterious, Planet Nine,
00:00:13 in the outer regions of our solar system.
00:00:16 Quick mention of our sponsors, Squarespace, Literati, Onnit, and Ni.
00:00:21 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
00:00:25 As a side note, let me say that our little sun is orbited by not just a few planets in
00:00:30 the planetary region, but trillions of objects in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud that
00:00:36 extends over three light years out.
00:00:39 This to me is amazing, since Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, is only 4.2 light
00:00:45 years away, and all of it is mostly covered in darkness.
00:00:50 When I get a chance to go out swimming in the ocean far from the shore, I’m sometimes
00:00:54 overcome by the terrifying and the exciting feeling of not knowing what’s there in the
00:00:59 deep darkness.
00:01:00 That’s how I feel about the edge of our solar system.
00:01:04 One day, I hope humans will travel there, or at the very least, AI systems that carry
00:01:09 the flame of human consciousness.
00:01:12 This is the Lux Friedman Podcast, and here’s my conversation with Konstantin Batygin.
00:01:19 What is Planet Nine?
00:01:21 Planet Nine is an object that we believe lives in the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune.
00:01:28 It orbits the sun with a period of about 10,000 years, and is about five Earth masses.
00:01:36 So that’s a hypothesized object.
00:01:38 There’s some evidence for this kind of object.
00:01:41 There’s a bunch of different explanations.
00:01:44 Can you give like an overview of the planets in our solar system?
00:01:48 How many are there?
00:01:50 What do we know and not know about them at a high level?
00:01:53 All right.
00:01:54 That sounds like a good plan.
00:01:55 So look, the solar system basically is comprised of two parts, the inner and the outer solar
00:02:01 system.
00:02:02 The inner solar system has the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
00:02:07 Now Mercury is about 40% of the orbital separation of where the Earth is.
00:02:14 It’s closer to the sun, Venus is about 70%, then Mars is about 160% further away from
00:02:25 the sun than is the Earth.
00:02:27 These planets that we, one of them we occupy, right, are pretty small, okay?
00:02:33 They’re two leading order sort of heavily overgrown asteroids, if you will.
00:02:40 And this becomes evident when you move out further in the solar system and encounter
00:02:46 Jupiter, which is 316 Earth masses, right, 10 times the size.
00:02:53 You know, and Saturn is another huge one, 90 Earth masses at about 10 times the separation
00:03:00 from the sun as is the Earth, and then you have Uranus and Neptune at 20 and 30 respectively.
00:03:07 For a long time, that is where the kind of massive part of the solar system ended.
00:03:15 But what we’ve learned in the last 30 years is that beyond Neptune, there’s this expansive
00:03:22 field of icy debris, a second icy asteroid belt in the solar system.
00:03:27 A lot of people have heard of the asteroid belt, which lives between Mars and Jupiter,
00:03:33 right?
00:03:34 That’s a pretty common thing that people like to imagine and draw on lunch boxes and stuff.
00:03:40 But beyond Neptune, there’s a much more massive and much more radially expansive field of
00:03:47 debris.
00:03:48 Pluto, by the way, it belongs to that second, you know, icy asteroid belt, which we call
00:03:54 the Kuiper belt.
00:03:55 It’s just a big object within that population of bodies.
00:03:59 Wow, Pluto the planet.
00:04:01 Pluto the dwarf planet, the former planet, you know.
00:04:05 Why is Pluto not a planet anymore?
00:04:07 I mean, it’s tiny.
00:04:09 We used to…
00:04:10 So size matters when it comes to planets.
00:04:12 Oh, 100%, 100%.
00:04:13 It’s actually a fascinating story.
00:04:15 When Pluto was discovered in 1930, the reason it was discovered in the first place is because
00:04:22 astronomers at the time were looking for a seven Earth mass planet somewhere beyond Neptune.
00:04:29 It was hypothesized that such an object exists.
00:04:32 When they found something, they interpreted that as a seven Earth mass planet and immediately
00:04:38 revised its mass downward because they couldn’t resolve the object with the telescope.
00:04:42 So it looked like just a point mass, you know, star rather than a physical disk.
00:04:47 They said, well, maybe it’s not seven, maybe it’s one, right?
00:04:50 And then, so over the next, you know, I guess 40 years, Pluto’s mass kept getting revised
00:04:56 downwards, downwards, downwards until it was realized that it’s like 500 times less massive
00:05:04 than the Earth.
00:05:05 I mean, like Pluto’s surface area is almost perfectly equal to the surface area of Russia
00:05:12 actually.
00:05:13 And you know, Russia is big, but it’s not a planet.
00:05:17 Well, I mean, actually we can touch more on that.
00:05:20 That’s another discussion.
00:05:22 So in some sense, earlier in the century, Pluto represented kind of our ignorance about
00:05:29 the edges of the solar system.
00:05:31 And perhaps planet nine is the thing that represents our ignorance about now the modern
00:05:37 set of ignorances about the edges of our solar system.
00:05:41 That’s a good way to put it.
00:05:42 By the way, just imagining this belt of astral debris at the edge of our solar system is
00:05:48 incredible.
00:05:49 Can you talk about it a little bit?
00:05:51 What is the Kuiper belt and what is the Oort cloud?
00:05:56 Yeah.
00:05:57 Okay.
00:05:58 So look, the simple way to think about it is that if you imagine, you know, Neptune’s
00:06:02 orbit like a circle, right?
00:06:05 Kind of maybe a factor of one and a half, 1.3 times bigger on a radius of 1.3 times
00:06:14 bigger, you’ve got a whole collection of icy objects.
00:06:18 Most of these objects are sort of the size of Austin, you know, maybe a little bit smaller.
00:06:26 If you then zoom out and explore the orbits of the most long period Kuiper belt object,
00:06:36 these are the things that have the biggest orbits and take the longest time to go around
00:06:42 in, then what you find is that beyond a critical orbit size, beyond a critical orbit period,
00:06:49 which is about 4,000 years, you start to see weird structure, like all the orbits sort
00:06:56 of point into one direction.
00:06:58 And all the orbits are kind of tilted in the same way by about 20 degrees with respect
00:07:04 to Sun.
00:07:05 This is particularly pronounced in orbits that are not heavily affected by Neptune.
00:07:11 So there you start to see this weird dichotomy where they’re objects which are stable, which
00:07:17 Neptune does not mess with gravitationally, and unstable objects.
00:07:22 The unstable objects are basically all over the place because they’re being kicked around
00:07:27 by Neptune.
00:07:28 The stable orbits show this remarkable pattern of clustering.
00:07:33 We back, I guess, five years ago interpreted this pattern of clustering as a gravitational
00:07:39 one way sign, the existence of a planet in a distant planet, right?
00:07:45 Something that is shepherding and confining these orbits together.
00:07:50 Of course, right, you have to have some skepticism when you’re talking about these things.
00:07:57 You have to ask the question of, okay, how statistically significant is this clustering?
00:08:01 And there are many authors that have indeed called that into question.
00:08:06 We have done our own analyses and basically, just like with all statistics where there’s
00:08:11 kind of multiple ways to do the exercise, you can either ask the question of if I have
00:08:21 a telescope that has surveyed this part of the sky, what are the chances that I would
00:08:27 discover this clustering?
00:08:30 That basically tells you that you have zero confidence, right?
00:08:36 That does not give you a confident answer one way or another.
00:08:40 Another way to do the statistics, which is what we prefer to do, is to say we have a
00:08:45 whole night sky of discoveries in the Kuiper Belt, right?
00:08:50 And if we have some object over there, which has right ascension and declination, which
00:08:56 is a way to say it’s there on the sky, and it has some brightness, that means somebody
00:09:01 looked over there and discovered an object, was able to discover an object of that brightness
00:09:07 or brighter.
00:09:09 Through that analysis, you can construct a whole map on the sky of kind of where all
00:09:14 of the surveys that have ever been done have collectively looked.
00:09:18 So if you do the exercise this way, the false alarm probability of the clustering on which
00:09:25 the Planet Nine hypothesis is built is about 0.4%.
00:09:28 Wow, okay, so there’s a million questions here.
00:09:32 One, when you say bright objects, why are they bright?
00:09:35 Are we talking about actual objects within the Kuiper Belt or the stuff we see through
00:09:38 the Kuiper Belt?
00:09:39 This is the actual stuff we see in the Kuiper Belt.
00:09:42 The way you go about discovering Kuiper Belt objects is pretty easy.
00:09:46 I mean, it’s easy in theory, right?
00:09:49 Hard in practice.
00:09:50 All you do is you take snapshots of the sky, right?
00:09:54 Use that direction, say, and take a high exposure snapshot.
00:09:59 Then you wait a night and you do it again, and then you wait another night and you do
00:10:03 it again.
00:10:05 Objects that are just random stars in the galaxy don’t move on the sky, whereas objects
00:10:09 in the solar system will slowly move.
00:10:11 This is no different than if you’re driving down the freeway, it looks like trees are
00:10:17 going by you faster than the clouds, right?
00:10:19 This is parallax.
00:10:21 That’s it.
00:10:22 It’s they’re reflecting light off of the sun and it’s going back and hitting this.
00:10:27 There’s a little bit of a glimmer from the different objects that you can see based on
00:10:31 the reflection from the sun.
00:10:32 So like there’s actual light, it’s not darkness.
00:10:36 That’s right.
00:10:37 These are just big icicles basically that are just reflecting sunlight back at you.
00:10:41 It’s then easy to understand why it’s so hard to discover them because light has to travel
00:10:47 to something like 40 times the distance between the earth and the sun and then get reflected
00:10:54 back.
00:10:55 Was that like an hour travel?
00:10:57 Yeah, that’s right.
00:10:58 That’s something like that because the earth to the sun is eight minutes, I believe.
00:11:04 Something in that order of magnitude.
00:11:07 So that’s interesting.
00:11:09 So you have to account for all of that.
00:11:12 And then there’s a huge amount of data, pixels that are coming from the pictures and you
00:11:18 have to integrate all of that together to paint a sort of like a high estimate of the
00:11:24 different objects.
00:11:25 Can you track them?
00:11:26 Can you be like, that’s Bob?
00:11:27 Like, can you like?
00:11:29 Yes, exactly.
00:11:30 In fact, one of them is named Joe Biden.
00:11:33 I mean, I’m not like, this is not even a joke, right?
00:11:36 Is there a Trump one or no?
00:11:38 No, no.
00:11:39 Not yet.
00:11:40 I don’t know.
00:11:41 I don’t know for that.
00:11:43 But like the way it works is if you discover one, you right away get a license plate for
00:11:49 it.
00:11:51 So like the first four numbers is the first year that this object has appeared on, you
00:11:56 know, in the data set, if you will.
00:12:00 And then there’s like this code that follows it, which basically tells you where in the
00:12:06 sky it is, right?
00:12:08 So one of the really interesting Kuiper Belt objects, which is very much part of the Planet
00:12:13 Nine story is called VP113, because Joe Biden was vice president at the time, you know,
00:12:20 got nicknamed Biden.
00:12:22 VP113?
00:12:23 Yeah.
00:12:24 He got nicknamed Biden.
00:12:27 Beautiful.
00:12:28 What’s the fingerprint for any particular object?
00:12:32 Like how do you know it’s the same one?
00:12:34 Or you just kind of like, yeah, from night to night, you take a picture, how do you know
00:12:38 it’s the same object?
00:12:39 Yeah.
00:12:40 So the way you know is it appears in almost exactly the same part of the sky except for
00:12:45 move, but it moves.
00:12:46 But this is why actually you need at least three nights because oftentimes asteroids,
00:12:53 which are much closer to the earth, like will appear to move only slightly, but then on
00:13:02 the third night will move away.
00:13:03 So that third night is really there to detect acceleration.
00:13:07 Now the thing that I didn’t really realize until, you know, I started observing together
00:13:15 with my partner in crime in all this, Mike Brown, is just the fact that for the first
00:13:20 year when you make these detections, the only thing you really know with confidence is where
00:13:26 it is on the night sky and how far away it is, okay?
00:13:30 That’s it.
00:13:31 It’s all about the orbit because over three days the object just moves so little, right?
00:13:38 That whole motion on the sky is entirely coming from motion of the earth, right?
00:13:43 So the earth is kind of the car, the object is the tree and you see it move.
00:13:47 So then to get some confident information about what its orbit looks like, you have
00:13:52 to come back a year later and then measure it again.
00:13:56 Oh, interesting.
00:13:57 So three nights then come back a year later and do another three nights so you get the
00:14:01 velocity of the acceleration from the three nights and then you have the maybe the additional
00:14:07 information.
00:14:08 Because an orbit is basically described by six parameters.
00:14:11 So you at least need six independent points, but in reality you need many more observations
00:14:17 to really pin down the orbit well.
00:14:20 And from that you’re able to construct for that one particular object and orbit and then
00:14:24 there’s of course, like how many objects are there?
00:14:27 There’s like four ish thousand now.
00:14:31 But like the, in the future that could be like millions.
00:14:36 Oh sure, oh sure.
00:14:39 So in fact these things are hard to predict, but there’s a new observatory called the Vera
00:14:43 Rubin Observatory, which is coming online maybe next year.
00:14:48 I mean with COVID these things are a little bit more uncertain, but they’ve actually been
00:14:53 making great progress with construction.
00:14:56 And so that telescope is just going to sort of scan the night sky every day automatically
00:15:04 and just, it’s such an efficient survey that it might increase the census of the distant
00:15:11 Kuiper Belt, the things that I’m interested in by a factor of a hundred.
00:15:15 I mean that would be, that would be really cool.
00:15:18 And yeah, that’s a, that’s an incredible…
00:15:22 I mean they might just find planet nine.
00:15:26 I mean that’s…
00:15:27 Like almost like literally pictures, like visually.
00:15:29 I mean, sure.
00:15:30 Yeah.
00:15:31 Like the first detection you make, all you know is where it is in the sky and how far
00:15:34 away it is.
00:15:35 If something is, you know, 500 times away from the sun, as far away from the sun as
00:15:39 is the earth, you know that’s planet nine.
00:15:42 That’s when the story concludes and then you can study it.
00:15:45 Now you can study it.
00:15:46 Yeah.
00:15:47 By the way, I’m going to use that as like, I don’t know, a pickup line or a dating strategy,
00:15:51 like see the person for three days and then don’t see them at all and then see them again
00:15:56 in a year to determine the orbit.
00:15:59 And over time you figure out if sort of from a cosmic perspective, this, this whole thing
00:16:06 works.
00:16:07 Yeah.
00:16:08 I have no dating advice to give.
00:16:09 I was going to use this as a metaphor to somehow map it onto the human condition.
00:16:16 Okay.
00:16:17 You mentioned the Kuiper Belt.
00:16:18 What’s the Oort cloud?
00:16:19 If you look at the Neptune orbit as a one, then the Kuiper Belt is like 1.3 out there
00:16:25 and then we get farther and farther into the darkness.
00:16:28 What’s the Oort cloud?
00:16:29 So okay, you’ve got the kind of main Kuiper Belt, which is about say 1.3, 1.5.
00:16:36 Then you have something called the scattered disc, which is kind of an extension of the
00:16:40 Kuiper Belt.
00:16:41 It’s a bunch of these long, very elliptical orbits that hug the orbit of Neptune, but
00:16:48 come out very far.
00:16:50 So that, the scattered disc with the current senses, like the, some of the longest orbits
00:16:58 we know of have a semi major axis.
00:17:04 So half the orbit length, roughly speaking of about a thousand, thousand times the distance
00:17:10 between the earth and the sun.
00:17:12 Now if you keep moving out, okay, eventually once you’re at sort of 10,000 to 100,000 roughly,
00:17:21 that’s where the Oort cloud is.
00:17:23 Now the Oort cloud is a distinct population of icy bodies and is distinct from the Kuiper
00:17:30 Belt.
00:17:31 In fact, it’s so expansive that it ends roughly halfway between us and the next star.
00:17:39 It’s edge is just dictated by to what extent does the solar gravity reach.
00:17:45 Solar gravity reaches that far?
00:17:47 So it has to, wow, imagining this is a little bit overwhelming.
00:17:55 So there’s like a giant, like vast icy rock thingy.
00:18:03 It’s like a sphere.
00:18:04 It’s like, it’s an almost spherical structure that engulfs, that encircles the sun and all
00:18:12 the long period comets come from the Oort cloud.
00:18:16 They come, the way that they appear, I mean, for already, I don’t know, hundreds of years
00:18:21 we’ve been detecting and occasionally like a comet will come in and it seemingly comes
00:18:28 out of nowhere.
00:18:29 The reason these long period comets appear on very, very long timescales, right?
00:18:36 These Oort cloud objects that are sitting 30,000 times as far away from the sun as is
00:18:42 the earth actually interact with the gravity of the galaxy, the tide, effectively the tide
00:18:48 that the galaxy exerts upon them and their orbits slowly change and they elongate to
00:18:53 the point where once they, their closest approach to the sun starts to reach a critical distance
00:19:01 where ice starts to sublimate, then we discover them as comets because then the ice comes
00:19:07 off of them.
00:19:08 They look beautiful in the night sky, et cetera, but they’re all coming from really, really
00:19:13 far away.
00:19:14 So is there, are any of them coming our way from collisions?
00:19:19 Like how many collisions are there or is there a bunch of space for them to move around?
00:19:22 Yeah, there’s zero.
00:19:24 It’s completely collisionless out there.
00:19:27 The physical radii of objects are so small compared to the distance between them, right?
00:19:33 It’s just, it is truly a collisionless environment.
00:19:38 I don’t know.
00:19:39 I think that probably in the age of the solar system have literally been zero collisions
00:19:46 in the Oort cloud.
00:19:48 Wow.
00:19:49 So if you like draw a picture of the solar system, everything’s really close together.
00:19:53 So everything I guess here is spaced far apart.
00:19:57 Do rogue planets like fly in every once in a while and join?
00:20:01 Not rogue planets, but rogue objects from out there.
00:20:04 Oh sure.
00:20:05 Oh sure.
00:20:06 Yeah.
00:20:07 Join the party?
00:20:08 Yeah, absolutely.
00:20:09 We’ve seen a couple of them in the last three or so years, maybe four years now.
00:20:15 The first one was the one called Uamuamua and it’s been all over the news.
00:20:22 The second one was Comet Borisov discovered by a guy named Borisov.
00:20:28 Yeah, so the way you know they’re coming from elsewhere is unlike solar system objects which
00:20:35 travel on elliptical paths around the sun, these guys travel on hyperbolic paths.
00:20:42 So they come in, say hello and then they’re gone.
00:20:45 And the fact that they exist is totally like not surprising, right?
00:20:52 The Neptune is constantly ejecting Kuiper belt objects into interstellar space.
00:20:59 Our solar system itself is sort of leaking icy debris and ejecting it.
00:21:05 So presumably every planetary systems around other stars do exactly the same thing.
00:21:11 Let me ask you about the millions of objects that are part of the Kuiper belt and part
00:21:17 of the Oort cloud.
00:21:18 Do you think some of them have primitive life?
00:21:20 It kind of makes you sad if there’s like primitive life there and they’re just kind of like lonely
00:21:25 out there in space.
00:21:26 Yeah.
00:21:27 Like how many of them do you think have life, like bacterial life?
00:21:30 Probably a negligible amount.
00:21:32 Zero with like a plus on top.
00:21:35 Right.
00:21:36 Zero plus plus.
00:21:37 Yeah.
00:21:38 So, you know, if you and I took a little trip to the interstellar medium, I think we would
00:21:46 develop cancer and die real fast, right?
00:21:49 That’s rough.
00:21:50 Yeah.
00:21:51 It’s a pretty hostile radiation environment.
00:21:54 You don’t actually have to go to the interstellar medium.
00:21:56 You just have to leave the earth’s magnetic field too.
00:22:00 And then you’re not doing so well suddenly.
00:22:03 So you know, this idea of, you know, life kind of traveling between places, it’s not
00:22:12 entirely implausible, but you really have to twist, I think, a lot of parameters.
00:22:18 One of the problems we have is we don’t actually know how life originates, right?
00:22:22 So it’s kind of a second order question of survival in the interstellar medium and how
00:22:29 resilient it is because we think you require water, but, and that’s certainly the case
00:22:37 for the earth, but you know, we really don’t know for sure.
00:22:43 That said, I will argue that the question of like, are there aliens out there is a very
00:22:49 boring question because the answer is, of course there are.
00:22:53 I mean, like we know that there are planets around almost every star.
00:23:02 Of course there are other life forms.
00:23:05 Life is not some specific thing that happened on the earth and that’s it, right?
00:23:11 That’s a statistical impossibility.
00:23:12 Yeah.
00:23:13 Yeah, but the difficult question is before even the fact that we don’t know how life
00:23:19 originates, I don’t think we even know what life is like definitionally, like formalizing
00:23:25 a kind of picture of, in terms of the mechanism we would use to search for life out there
00:23:32 or even when we’re on a planet to say, is this life?
00:23:36 Is this rock that just moved from where it was yesterday life or maybe not even a rock,
00:23:42 something else?
00:23:43 I got to tell you, I want to know what life is, okay?
00:23:46 And I want you to show me.
00:23:51 I think there’s a song to basically accompany every single thing we talk about today and
00:23:57 probably half of them are love songs and somehow we’ll integrate George Michael into the whole
00:24:02 thing.
00:24:03 Okay.
00:24:04 So your intuition is there’s life everywhere in our universe.
00:24:08 Do you think there’s intelligent life out there?
00:24:10 I think it’s entirely plausible.
00:24:11 I mean, it’s entirely plausible.
00:24:17 I think there’s intelligent life on earth and so yeah, taking that, like say whatever
00:24:23 this thing we got on earth, whether it’s dolphins or humans, say that’s intelligent.
00:24:29 Definitely dolphins.
00:24:30 I mean, have you seen the dolphins?
00:24:34 Well, they do some cruel stuff to each other.
00:24:37 So if cruelty is a definition of intelligence, they’re pretty good and then humans are pretty
00:24:43 good in that regard.
00:24:44 And then there’s like pigs are very intelligent.
00:24:48 I got actually a chance to hang out with pigs recently and they’re, aside from the fact
00:24:54 they were trying to eat me, they love food, they love food, but there’s an intelligence
00:25:01 to their eyes that was kind of like haunts me because I also love to eat meat and then
00:25:09 to meet the thing I later ate and that was very intelligent and almost charismatic with
00:25:15 the way he was expressing himself, herself, itself was quite incredible.
00:25:21 So all that to say is if we have intelligent life here on earth, if you take dolphins,
00:25:28 pigs, humans, from the perspective of like planetary science, how unique is earth?
00:25:33 Okay.
00:25:34 So earth is not a common outcome of the planet formation process.
00:25:41 It’s probably a something on the order of maybe a 1% effect.
00:25:48 And by earth, I mean not just an earth mass planet, okay?
00:25:53 I mean the architecture of the solar system that allows the earth to exist in its kind
00:26:00 of very temperate way.
00:26:06 One thing to understand and this is pretty crucial, right, is that the earth itself formed
00:26:13 well after the gas disk that formed the giant planets had already dissipated.
00:26:23 You see stars start out with, you know, the star and then a disk of gas and dust that
00:26:28 encircles it, okay?
00:26:30 From this disk of gas and dust, big planets can emerge.
00:26:36 And we have over the last two, three decades discovered thousands of extra solar planets
00:26:43 as an orbit or other stars.
00:26:45 What we see is that many of them have these expansive hydrogen helium atmospheres.
00:26:53 The fact that the earth doesn’t is deeply connected to the fact that earth took about
00:26:59 100 million years to form.
00:27:01 So we missed that, you know, train, so to speak, to get that hydrogen helium atmosphere.
00:27:08 That’s why actually we can see the sky, right?
00:27:10 That’s why the sky is, well, at least in most places, that’s why the atmosphere is not completely
00:27:17 opaque.
00:27:20 With that, you know, kind of thinking in mind, I would argue that we’re getting the kind
00:27:26 of emergent pictures that the earth is not, you know, everywhere, right?
00:27:33 There’s sort of the sci fi view of things where we go to some other star and we just
00:27:37 land on random planets and they’re all earth like.
00:27:40 That’s totally not true.
00:27:42 But even a low probability event, even if you imagine that earth is a one in a million
00:27:49 or one in 10 million occurrence, there are 10 to the 12 stars in the galaxy, right?
00:27:58 So you just, you always win by, that’s right, by supply.
00:28:03 They save you.
00:28:04 Well, you’ve hypothesized that our solar system once possessed a population of short period
00:28:10 planets that were destroyed by the evil Jupiter migrating through the solar nebula.
00:28:17 Can you explain?
00:28:18 Well, if I was to say what was the kind of the key outcome of searches for extra solar
00:28:22 planets, it is that most stars are encircled by short period planets that are, you know,
00:28:30 a few earth masses, right?
00:28:33 So a few times bigger than the earth and have orbital periods that kind of range from days
00:28:39 to weeks.
00:28:42 Now if you go and ask the solar system what’s in our region, right, in that region, it’s
00:28:48 completely empty, right?
00:28:50 It’s just, it’s astonishingly hollow.
00:28:53 And think, you know, from the sun is not some, you know, special star that decided that it
00:29:00 was going to form the solar system.
00:29:03 So I think, you know, the natural thing to assume is that the same processes of planet
00:29:09 formation that occurred everywhere else also occurred in the solar system.
00:29:15 Following this logic, it’s not implausible to imagine that the solar system once possessed
00:29:20 a system of intra Mercurian, like, you know, compact system of planets.
00:29:28 So then we asked ourselves, would such a system survive to this day?
00:29:33 And the answer is no, at least our calculations suggested it’s highly unlikely because of
00:29:40 the formation of Jupiter.
00:29:41 And Jupiter’s primordial kind of wandering through the solar system would have sent this
00:29:46 collisional field of debris that would have pushed that system of planets onto the sun.
00:29:51 So was Jupiter, this primordial wandering, what did Jupiter look like?
00:29:56 Like, why was it wandering?
00:29:58 It didn’t have the orbit it has today?
00:30:00 We’re pretty certain that giant planets like Jupiter, when they form, they migrate.
00:30:05 The reason they migrate is, you know, on a detailed level, perhaps difficult to explain,
00:30:11 but just in a qualitative sense, they form in this fluid disk of gas and dust.
00:30:19 So it’s kind of like, okay, if I plop down a raft somewhere in the ocean, will it stay
00:30:27 where you plop it down or will it kind of get carried around?
00:30:30 It’s not really a good analogy because it’s not like Jupiter is being advected by the
00:30:34 currents of gas and dust, but the way it migrates is it carves out a hole in the disk and then
00:30:44 by interacting with the disk gravitationally, it can change its orbit.
00:30:50 The fact that the solar system has both Jupiter and Saturn here complicates things a lot because
00:30:56 you have to solve the problem of the evolution of the gas disk, the evolution of Jupiter’s
00:31:02 orbit in the gas disk, plus evolution of Saturn’s and their mutual interaction.
00:31:08 The common outcome of solving that problem, though, is pretty easy to explain.
00:31:15 Jupiter forms, its orbit shrinks, and then once Saturn forms, its orbit catches up basically
00:31:22 to the orbit of Jupiter and then both come out.
00:31:24 So there’s this inward outward pattern of Jupiter’s early motion that happens sort of
00:31:30 within the last million years of the lifetime of the solar system’s primordial disk.
00:31:36 So while this is happening, if our calculations are correct, which I think they are, you can
00:31:44 destroy this inner system of, you know, few Earth mass planets.
00:31:51 And then in the aftermath of all this violence, you form the terrestrial planets.
00:31:58 Where would they come from in that case?
00:32:00 So Jupiter clears out the space, and then there’s a few terrestrial planets that come
00:32:05 in and those come in from the disk somewhere, like one of the larger objects?
00:32:12 What actually happens in these calculations, you leave behind a rather mass depleted, like
00:32:18 remnant disk, only a couple Earth masses.
00:32:23 So then from that remnant population, annulus of material, over a hundred million years,
00:32:33 by just collisions, you grow the Earth and the Moon and everything else.
00:32:37 You said annulus?
00:32:38 Annulus.
00:32:39 Annulus.
00:32:40 Annulus, yeah.
00:32:41 That’s a beautiful word.
00:32:42 What does that mean?
00:32:43 Well, it’s like a disk that’s kind of thin.
00:32:45 It’s like a, yeah, it’s something that is, you know, a disk that’s so thin it’s almost
00:32:50 flirting with being a ring.
00:32:53 Like I was going to say, this reminds me of Lord of the Rings, so like this, the word
00:32:57 just feels like it belongs in a token though.
00:33:00 Yeah.
00:33:01 Okay.
00:33:02 So that’s incredible.
00:33:03 And so that, in your senses, you said like 1%, that’s a rare, the way Jupiter and Saturn
00:33:09 danced and cleared out the short period debris and then changed the gravitational landscape.
00:33:18 That’s a pretty rare thing too.
00:33:20 It’s rare.
00:33:21 And moreover, like you don’t even have to go to our calculations.
00:33:24 You can just ask the night sky, how many stars have Jupiter and Saturn analogs?
00:33:31 The answer is Jupiter and Saturn analogs are found around only 10% of Sun like stars.
00:33:36 They themselves, like you kind of have to score an A minus or better on the planet formation
00:33:43 test to become a solar system analog, even in that basic sense.
00:33:48 And moreover, you know, lower mass stars, which are very numerous in the galaxy, so
00:33:56 called M dwarfs, think like 0% of them, well, maybe like a negligible fraction of them have
00:34:03 giant planets.
00:34:05 Giant planets are a rare, you know, outcome of planet formation.
00:34:11 One of the really big problems that remain unanswered is why.
00:34:15 We don’t actually understand why they’re so rare.
00:34:18 How hard is it to simulate all of the things that we’ve been talking about, each of the
00:34:22 things we’ve been talking about, and maybe one day, all of the things we’ve been talking
00:34:27 about and beyond.
00:34:28 I mean, like from the initial primordial solar system, you know, a bunch of disks with, I
00:34:36 don’t know, billions, trillions of objects in them, like simulate that such that you
00:34:42 eventually get a Jupiter and a Saturn, and then eventually you get the Jupiter and the
00:34:47 Saturn that clear out a disk, change the gravitational landscape, then Earth pops up, like that whole
00:34:51 thing, and then be able to do that for every other system in the, every other star in the
00:34:59 galaxy, and then be able to do that for other galaxies as well.
00:35:04 Yeah, so, look.
00:35:07 Maybe start from the smallest simulation, like what is actually being done today.
00:35:11 I mean, even the smallest simulation is probably super, super difficult.
00:35:14 Even just like one object in the Kuiper belt is probably super difficult to simulate.
00:35:18 I mean, I think it’s super easy.
00:35:20 I mean, like, it’s just not that hard.
00:35:23 But you know, let’s ask the most kind of basic problem, okay?
00:35:29 So the problem of having a star and something in orbit of it, that you don’t need a simulation
00:35:36 for, like you can just write that down on a piece of paper.
00:35:39 There’s gravity, like yeah, I guess it’s important to try to, you know, one way to simulate objects
00:35:47 in our solar system is to build the universe from scratch.
00:35:50 Okay, we’ll get to building the universe from scratch in a sec.
00:35:54 But let me just kind of go through the hierarchy of what, you know, what we do.
00:35:58 Two objects.
00:35:59 Two objects, analytically solvable, like we can figure it out very easily if you just,
00:36:05 I don’t think you, yeah, you don’t need to know calculus.
00:36:08 It helps to know calculus, but you don’t necessarily need to know calculus.
00:36:13 Three objects that are gravitationally interacting, the solution is chaotic.
00:36:18 Doesn’t matter how many simulations you do, the answer loses meaning after some time.
00:36:25 I feel like that is a metaphor for dating as well, but go on.
00:36:30 Now look, yeah, so the fact that you go from analytically solvable to unpredictable, you
00:36:39 know, when your simulation goes from two bodies to three bodies should immediately tell you
00:36:46 that the exercise of trying to engineer a calculation where you form the entire solar
00:36:53 system from scratch and hope to have some predictive answer is a futile one, right?
00:37:00 We will never succeed at such a simulation.
00:37:03 I feel like, just to clarify, you mean like explicitly having a clear equation that generalizes
00:37:09 the whole process enough to be able to make a prediction, or do you mean actually like
00:37:13 literally simulating the objects is a hopeless pursuit once it goes beyond three?
00:37:18 The simulating them is not a hopeless pursuit, but the outcome becomes a statistical one.
00:37:26 What’s actually quite interesting is I think we have all the equations figured out, right?
00:37:34 You know, in order to really understand this, the formation of the solar system, it suffices
00:37:39 to know gravity and magnetohydrodynamics, I mean, like a combination of Maxwell’s equations
00:37:47 and Navier Stokes equations for the fluids.
00:37:50 You need to know quantum mechanics to understand the capacities and so on.
00:37:54 But we have those equations in hand.
00:37:59 It’s not that we don’t have that understanding, it’s that putting it all together is A, very,
00:38:05 very difficult, and B, if you were to run the same evolution twice, changing, you know,
00:38:13 the initial conditions by some infinitesimal amount, some, you know, minor change in your
00:38:19 calculation to start with, you would get a different answer.
00:38:23 This is one, this is part of the reason why planetary systems are so diverse.
00:38:29 You don’t have like a, you know, very predictive path for you start with a disk of this mass
00:38:36 and it’s around this star, therefore you’re going to form the solar system, right?
00:38:42 You start with this and therefore you will conform this huge outcome, huge set of outcomes,
00:38:47 and some percentage of it will resemble the solar system.
00:38:50 You mentioned quantum mechanics and we’re talking about cosmic scale objects.
00:38:57 You’ve talked about that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with Schrodinger’s
00:39:02 equation.
00:39:03 I sure did.
00:39:04 Why?
00:39:05 Like, how does quantum mechanics become relevant when you consider the evolution of objects
00:39:14 in the solar system?
00:39:15 Yeah.
00:39:16 Well, let me take a step back and just say, like, I remember being, you know, utterly
00:39:22 confused by quantum mechanics when I first learned it.
00:39:26 And the Schrodinger equation, which is kind of the parent equation of that whole field,
00:39:32 you know, seems to come out of nowhere, right?
00:39:35 The way that I was sort of explaining it, I remember asking, you know, my professor
00:39:40 is like, but where does it come from?
00:39:42 And I’m like, well, it’s just like, don’t worry about it and just like calculate the
00:39:47 hydrogen, you know, energy levels, right?
00:39:50 So it’s like I could do all the problems.
00:39:52 I just did not have any intuition for where this parent, you know, super important equation
00:39:58 came from.
00:39:59 Now, down the line, I was, remember, I was preparing for my own lecture and I was trying
00:40:04 to understand how waves travel in self gravitating disks.
00:40:09 So you know, again, there’s a very broad theory that’s already developed, but I was looking
00:40:17 for some simpler way to explain it really for the purposes of teaching class.
00:40:22 And so I thought, okay, what if I just imagine a disk as an infinite number of concentric
00:40:30 circles, right?
00:40:31 That interact with each other gravitationally.
00:40:36 That’s a problem in some sense that I can solve using methods from like the late 1700s.
00:40:44 I can write down Hamiltonian, well, I can write down the energy function basically of
00:40:49 their interactions.
00:40:51 And what I found is that when you take the continuum limit, when you go from discrete
00:40:59 circles that are talking to each other gravitationally to a continuum disk, suddenly this gravitational
00:41:07 interaction among them, right?
00:41:10 The governing equation becomes the Schrodinger equation.
00:41:14 I had to think about that for a little bit.
00:41:15 Did you just unify quantum mechanics and gravity?
00:41:19 No, this is not the same thing as like, you know, fusing relativity and quantum mechanics.
00:41:25 But it did get me thinking a little bit.
00:41:29 So the fact that waves in astrophysical disks behave just like wave functions of particles
00:41:37 is kind of like an interesting analogy because for me it’s easier to imagine waves traveling
00:41:43 through, you know, astrophysical disks or really just sheets of paper.
00:41:48 And the reason this is, that analogy exists is because there’s actually nothing quantum
00:41:55 about the Schrodinger equation.
00:41:57 The Schrodinger equation is just a wave equation and all of the interpretation that comes from
00:42:04 it is quantum, but the equation itself is not a quantum being.
00:42:11 So you can use it to model waves.
00:42:14 It’s not turtles.
00:42:15 It’s waves all the way down.
00:42:16 You can pick which level you pick the wave at.
00:42:19 So it could be at the solar system level that you can use it.
00:42:22 And also it actually provides a pretty neat calculational tool because it’s difficult.
00:42:28 So we just talked about simulations, but it’s difficult to simulate the behavior of astrophysical
00:42:34 disks on timescales that are in between a few orbits and their entire evolution.
00:42:42 So it’s over a timescale of a few orbits, you have, you do a hydrodynamic, you know,
00:42:48 simulation, right?
00:42:49 You do that, basically that’s something that you can do on a modern computer on a timescale
00:42:55 of say a week.
00:42:56 When it comes to their evolution over their entire lifetime, you don’t hope to resolve
00:43:01 the orbits.
00:43:02 You just kind of hope to understand how the system behaves in between, right?
00:43:07 To get access to that, as it turns out, it’s pretty, it’s pretty cute.
00:43:11 You can use, you can use the Schrodinger equation to get the answer rapidly, so it’s a calculational
00:43:16 tool.
00:43:17 That’s fascinating.
00:43:18 So astrophysical disks, how, what are they?
00:43:22 How broad is this definition?
00:43:23 Okay.
00:43:24 So astrophysical disks span a huge, huge amount of ranges.
00:43:31 They start maybe at the smallest scale.
00:43:33 They start with actually Kuiper belt objects.
00:43:35 Some Kuiper belt objects have rings.
00:43:38 So that’s maybe the smallest example of an astrophysical disk.
00:43:42 You’ve got this little potato shaped asteroid, you know, which is, you know, sort of the
00:43:47 size of LA or something, and around it are some rings of icy matter.
00:43:53 That object is a small astrophysical disk.
00:43:57 Then you have Saturn, the rings of Saturn.
00:43:59 You have the next set of scale, you have the solar system itself when it was forming, you
00:44:03 have a disk.
00:44:04 Then you have black hole disks.
00:44:07 You have galaxies.
00:44:09 Disks are super common in the universe.
00:44:12 The reason is that stuff rotates, right?
00:44:15 I mean, that’s…
00:44:16 Yeah.
00:44:17 So, and those rings could be the material that composes those rings could be, it could
00:44:24 be gas, it could be solid, it could be anything.
00:44:27 That’s right.
00:44:28 So, the disk that made from which the planets emerged was predominantly hydrogen, helium,
00:44:35 gas.
00:44:36 On the other hand, the rings of Saturn are made up of, you know, icicle, ice, little
00:44:41 like ice cubes this big, about a centimeter across.
00:44:47 Sounds refreshing.
00:44:48 So, that’s incredible.
00:44:49 Hydrogen, helium, gas.
00:44:50 So, in the beginning, it was just hydrogen and helium around the sun.
00:44:55 How does that lead to the first formations of solid objects in terms of simulation?
00:45:01 Okay.
00:45:02 Here’s the story.
00:45:03 So, you’re like, have you ever been to the desert?
00:45:06 Yes.
00:45:07 I’ve been to the Death Valley and actually it was terrifying, just a total tangent, I’m
00:45:12 distracting you.
00:45:13 No.
00:45:14 But I was driving through it and I was really surprised because it was, at first, hot.
00:45:19 And then as it was getting into the evening, there’s this huge thunderstorm, like it was
00:45:23 raining and it got freezing cold.
00:45:25 I’m like, what the hell?
00:45:26 It was the apocalypse.
00:45:27 Yes.
00:45:28 I had to like just sit there listening to Bruce Springsteen, I remember, and just thinking,
00:45:33 I’m probably going to die and I was okay with it because Bruce Springsteen was on the radio.
00:45:37 But look, when you’ve got the boss, you’re ready to meet the boss.
00:45:42 Yeah.
00:45:43 So, look, I mean.
00:45:44 That’s a good line.
00:45:45 Anyway, sorry.
00:45:46 That does, yes.
00:45:47 It’s true.
00:45:48 Yeah.
00:45:49 By the way, to continue on this tangent, I absolutely love the Southwest for this reason.
00:45:57 During the pandemic, I drove from LA to New Mexico a bunch of times.
00:46:02 The madness of weather?
00:46:03 Yeah.
00:46:04 The chaos.
00:46:05 The madness of weather, the fact that it will be blazing hot one minute and then it’s just
00:46:09 like, we’ll decide to have a little thunderstorm, maybe we’ll decide to go back momentarily
00:46:15 to like a thousand degrees and then go back to the thunderstorm.
00:46:19 It’s amazing.
00:46:20 It’s that, by the way, is chaos theory in action.
00:46:23 Right.
00:46:24 But let’s get back to talking about the desert.
00:46:26 So, in the desert, tumbleweeds have a tendency to roll because the wind rolls them.
00:46:33 And if you’re careful, you’ll occasionally see this family of tumbleweeds where there’s
00:46:38 like a big one and then a bunch of little ones that kind of hide in its wake and are
00:46:44 all rolling together and almost looks like a family of ducks crossing the street or something.
00:46:51 Or for example, if you watch Tour de France, you’ve got a whole bunch of cyclists and they’re
00:46:58 like cycling within 10 centimeters of each other.
00:47:01 They’re not BFFs, right?
00:47:03 They’re not trying to be, trying to ride together.
00:47:07 They are riding together to minimize the collective air resistance, if you will, that they experience.
00:47:16 Turns out solids in the protoplanetary disk do just this.
00:47:21 There’s an instability wherein solid particles, things that are a centimeter across will start
00:47:30 to hide behind one another and form these clouds.
00:47:33 Why?
00:47:34 Because cumulatively, that minimizes the solid component of this aerodynamic interaction
00:47:42 with the gas.
00:47:43 Now, these clouds, because they’re kind of a favorable energetic condition for the dust
00:47:49 to live in, they grow, grow, grow, grow, grow until they become so massive that they collapse
00:47:54 under their own weight.
00:47:56 That’s how the first building blocks of planets form.
00:47:59 That’s how the big asteroids got there.
00:48:02 That’s incredible.
00:48:03 Yeah.
00:48:04 So that, is that simulatable or is it not useful to simulate?
00:48:06 No, no, that’s simulatable.
00:48:09 And people do these types of calculations.
00:48:12 It’s really cool.
00:48:13 That’s actually, that’s one of the many fields of planet formation theory that is really,
00:48:18 really active right now.
00:48:20 People are trying to understand all kinds of aspects of that process because of course
00:48:24 I’ve explained it, you know, like as if there’s one thing that happens.
00:48:29 Turns out it’s a beautifully rich dynamic, but qualitatively, formation of the first
00:48:37 building blocks actually follows the same sequence as formation of stars, right?
00:48:42 Stars are just clouds of gas, hydrogen, helium, gas that sit in space and slowly cool.
00:48:50 And at some point they, you know, contract to a point where their gravity overtakes the
00:48:57 thermal pressure support, if you will.
00:49:00 And they collapse under their own weight and you get a little baby solar system.
00:49:03 That’s amazing.
00:49:04 So do you think one day it will be possible to simulate the full history that took our
00:49:11 solar system to what it is today?
00:49:14 Yes.
00:49:15 And it will be useless.
00:49:16 Okay.
00:49:17 So you don’t think your story, many of the ideas that you have about Jupiter clear in
00:49:22 the space, like retelling that story in high resolution is not that important.
00:49:26 I actually think it’s important, but at every stage you have to design your experiments,
00:49:36 your numerical computer experiments so that they test some specific aspect of that evolution.
00:49:44 I am not a proponent of doing huge simulations because even if we forget the information
00:49:53 theory aspect of not being able to simulate in full detail the universe, because if you
00:50:00 do, then you have made an actual universe.
00:50:05 It’s not the simulation, right?
00:50:07 Simulation is in some sense a compression of information.
00:50:10 So therefore you must lose detail.
00:50:13 But that point aside, if we are able to simulate the entire history of the solar system in
00:50:22 excruciating detail, I mean, it’ll be cool, but it’s not going to be any different from
00:50:28 observing it, right?
00:50:31 Because theoretical understanding, which is what ultimately I’m interested in, comes from
00:50:38 taking complex things and reducing them down to something that, you know, some mechanism
00:50:45 that you can actually quantify.
00:50:49 That’s the fun part of astrophysics, just kind of simulating things in extreme detail
00:50:54 is we’ll make cool visualizations, but that doesn’t get you to any better understanding
00:51:02 than you had before you did the simulation.
00:51:04 So if you ask very specific questions, then you’ll be able to create like very highly
00:51:10 compressed, nice, beautiful theories about how things evolved, and then you can use those
00:51:15 to then generalize to other solar systems, to other stars and other galaxies, and then
00:51:21 say something generalizable about the entire universe.
00:51:24 How difficult would it be to simulate our solar system such that we would not know the
00:51:31 difference?
00:51:32 Meaning, if we are living in a simulation, is there a nice, think of it as a video game,
00:51:38 is there a nice compressible way of doing that, or just kind of like you intuited with
00:51:43 a three body situation is just a giant mess that you cannot create a video game that will
00:51:51 seem realistic without actually building your solar system from scratch?
00:51:56 I’m speculating, but one of the, yeah, I know you have a deep understanding of this, but
00:52:04 for me, I’m just going to speculate that for at least in the types of simulations that
00:52:11 we can do today, inevitably, you run into the problem of resolution, right?
00:52:19 Doesn’t matter what you’re doing, it is discrete.
00:52:22 Now, the way you would go about asking, you know, what we’re observing, is that a simulation
00:52:28 or is that, you know, some real continuous thing, is you zoom in, right?
00:52:35 You zoom in and try and find the, you know, the grid scale, if you will.
00:52:42 Yeah, I mean, it’s a really interesting question, and because the solar system itself and really,
00:52:55 you know, the double pendulum is chaotic, right?
00:52:59 From sitting on another pendulum, it moves unpredictably once you let them go.
00:53:06 You really don’t need to, like, inject any randomness into a simulation for it to give
00:53:12 you stochastic and unpredictable answers.
00:53:16 Weather is a great example of this.
00:53:18 Weather has a lapen of time of, you know, typical weather systems have a lapen of time
00:53:23 of a few days.
00:53:25 And there’s a fundamental reason why the force forecast always sucks, you know, two weeks
00:53:30 in advance.
00:53:32 It’s not that we don’t know the equations that govern the atmosphere, we know them well.
00:53:39 Their solutions are meaningless, though, after a few days.
00:53:42 The zooming in thing is very interesting.
00:53:45 I think about this a lot, whether there’ll be a time soon where we would want to stay
00:53:51 in video game worlds, whether it’s virtual reality or just playing video games.
00:53:55 I mean, I think that time, like, came in, like, the 90s, and it’s been that time.
00:54:01 Well, it’s not just came, I mean, it’s accelerated.
00:54:05 I just recently saw that WoW and Fortnite were played 140 billion hours, and those are
00:54:12 just video games.
00:54:13 And that’s, like, increasing very, very quickly, especially with the people coming up now,
00:54:17 being born now and become, you know, becoming teenagers and so on.
00:54:21 Let’s have a thought experiment where it’s just you and a video game character inside
00:54:25 a room, where you remove the simulation, they need to simulate sort of a lot of objects.
00:54:33 If it’s just you and that character, how far do you need to simulate in terms of zooming
00:54:39 in for it to be very real to you, as real as reality?
00:54:43 So like, first of all, you kind of mentioned zooming in, which is fascinating, because
00:54:48 we have these tools of science that allow us to zoom in, quote unquote, in all kinds
00:54:53 of ways in the world around us.
00:54:57 But our cognitive abilities, like our perception system as humans, is very limited in terms
00:55:01 of zooming in.
00:55:02 So we might be very easily fooled.
00:55:04 Some of the video games, like, on the PS4, like, look pretty real to me, right?
00:55:11 I think, you know, you would really have to interrogate, I mean, I think even with what
00:55:16 we have today, like, I don’t know, Ace Combat 7 is a great example, right?
00:55:22 Like, I mean, the way that the clouds are rendered, it’s, I mean, it looks just like
00:55:29 when you’re flying, you know, on a real airplane, the kind of transparency.
00:55:34 I think that the, you know, our perception is limited enough already to not be able to
00:55:41 tell some of the, you know, some of the differences.
00:55:46 There’s a game called Skyrim.
00:55:48 It’s an Elder Scrolls role playing game.
00:55:51 And I just, I played it for quite a bit.
00:55:55 And I think I played it very different than others.
00:55:58 Like, there’ll be long stretches of time where I would just walk around and look at nature
00:56:03 in the game.
00:56:04 It’s incredible.
00:56:05 Oh, sure.
00:56:06 It’s just like the graphics is like, wow, I want to stay there.
00:56:10 It was better.
00:56:11 I went hiking recently.
00:56:12 It was like as good as hiking.
00:56:14 So look, I know what you mean.
00:56:16 Not to go on a huge video game, you know, tangent, but like the third, like, Witcher
00:56:21 game was astonishingly beautiful, right?
00:56:25 Especially like playing on a good hardware machine, it’s like, this is pretty, this is
00:56:31 pretty legit.
00:56:32 That said, um, you know, I, I don’t resonate with the, I want to stay here, you know, like
00:56:40 one of the things that I love to do is to go to my like boxing gym and, and box with
00:56:47 a guy.
00:56:48 Right.
00:56:49 Like that’s, there’s, there’s nothing quite like that physical, you know, experience.
00:56:54 Like
00:56:55 that’s fascinating.
00:56:56 That might be simply an artifact of the year you were born maybe because if you’re born
00:57:00 today, it almost seems like stupid to go to a gym, like you’re going to a gym to box with
00:57:07 a guy.
00:57:08 Why not box with Mike Tyson when you yourself is like in his prime, when you yourself are
00:57:13 also an incredible boxer in the video game world.
00:57:16 For me, there, there’s a multitude of reasons why I don’t want to box with Mike Tyson.
00:57:21 Right.
00:57:22 No, no, no, no.
00:57:23 I enjoy teeth, you know, and I want to have an ear.
00:57:26 No, but your, your skills in this meat space, in this physical realm is very limited and
00:57:31 takes a lot of work and you’re, you’re a musician, you’re an incredible scientist.
00:57:37 You only have so much time in the, in the day, but in the video game world, you can
00:57:42 expand your capabilities and all kinds of dimensions that you can never have possibly
00:57:47 have time in the physical world.
00:57:48 And so that, it doesn’t make sense like to, to be existing, to be working your ass off
00:57:54 in the physical world when you can just be super successful in the video game world.
00:58:01 But I still, you enjoy sucking and stuff.
00:58:04 Yeah, I really struggling to get better.
00:58:06 I sure do.
00:58:07 I mean, I think like these days with music, music is a great example, right?
00:58:12 We just started, you know, practicing live with my band again, you know, after not playing
00:58:18 for a year and you know, it’s just, it was terrible.
00:58:22 Like it was just kind of a lot of the nuance, you know, a lot of the detail is just that
00:58:28 detail that takes, you know, years of collective practice to develop.
00:58:33 It’s just lost, but it was just an incredible amount of fun, way more fun than all the like
00:58:39 studio, you know, sitting around and playing that I did, you know, throughout the entire
00:58:44 year.
00:58:45 So I think there’s something, there’s something intangible or maybe, maybe tangible about
00:58:50 being, being in person.
00:58:54 I sure hope you’re wrong and that, you know, we, that’s not something that will get lost
00:58:59 because I think there’s like such a large part of the human condition is to hang out.
00:59:06 If we were doing this interview on zoom, right?
00:59:11 I mean, I’d already be, I’d already be bored out of my mind.
00:59:15 Exactly.
00:59:16 I mean, there’s something to that.
00:59:18 I mean, I’m almost playing devil’s advocate, but at the same time, you know, I’m sure people
00:59:22 talk about the same way at the beginning of the 20th century about horses, where they’re,
00:59:28 they are much more efficient, they’re much easier to maintain than cars.
00:59:34 It doesn’t make sense to have, you know, all the ways that cars break down and there’s
00:59:37 not enough infrastructure in terms of roads for cars.
00:59:40 It doesn’t make any sense.
00:59:41 Like horses and like nature, you could do the nature, like where, you know, you should
00:59:45 be living more natural life.
00:59:47 Horses are real.
00:59:48 You don’t want machines in your life that are going to pollute your mind and the minds
00:59:51 of young people, but then eventually just cars took over.
00:59:54 So in that same way, it just seems, going back to horses, I’m just, you know, well,
01:00:00 you can be, you can play, what is it?
01:00:04 Red dead, red dead redemption, redemption, and that you can ride horses in the video
01:00:08 game world.
01:00:09 That’s true.
01:00:10 So let me return us back to planet nine.
01:00:14 Always a good place to come back to.
01:00:15 So now that we did a big historical overview of our solar system, what is planet nine?
01:00:21 Okay.
01:00:22 Planet nine is a hypothetical object that orbits the solar system, right?
01:00:28 On orbital period of about 10,000 years and an orbit, which is slightly tilted with respect
01:00:36 to the plane of the solar system, slightly eccentric and the object itself we think is
01:00:42 five times more massive than the earth.
01:00:46 We have never seen planet nine in a telescope, but we have gravitational evidence for it.
01:00:53 And so this is where all the stuff we’ve been talking about, this clustering ideas, maybe
01:00:58 you can speak to the approximate location that we suspect.
01:01:02 And also the question I wanted to ask is what are we supposed to be imagining here?
01:01:07 Because you said there are certain objects in the Kuiper Belt that are kind of have a
01:01:11 direction to them that they’re all like flocking in some kind of way.
01:01:16 So that’s the sense that there’s some kind of gravitational object, not changing their
01:01:20 orbit, but kind of confining them, like grouping their orbits together.
01:01:25 See, what would happen if planet nine were not there is these orbits that roughly share
01:01:31 a common orientation, they would just disperse, right?
01:01:35 They would just become as a mutually symmetric point everywhere.
01:01:39 Planet nine’s gravity makes it such that these objects stay in a state that’s basically anti
01:01:47 aligned with respect to the orbit of planet nine and sort of hang out there and kind of
01:01:55 oscillate on a timescale of about a billion years.
01:01:58 That’s one of the lines of evidence for the existence of planet nine.
01:02:03 There are others.
01:02:04 That’s the one that’s easiest to maybe visualize just because it’s fun to think about orbits
01:02:08 that all point into the same direction, but I should, you know, emphasize that, for example,
01:02:15 the existence of objects, again, Kuiper Belt objects that are heavily out of the plane
01:02:20 of the solar system, things that are tilted by say 90 degrees, that’s not, we don’t expect
01:02:26 that as an outcome of planet formation.
01:02:29 Indeed, planet formation simulations have never produced such objects without some extrinsic
01:02:37 gravitational force.
01:02:38 Planet nine, on the other hand, generates them very readily, so that provides kind of
01:02:43 an alternative, you know, population of small bodies in the solar system that also get produced
01:02:50 by planet nine through an independent kind of gravitational effect.
01:02:54 So they’re kind of, there’s basically five different things that planet nine does individually
01:03:02 that are like kind of maybe a one sigma effect where you’d say, yeah, okay, if that’s all
01:03:08 it was, maybe it’s not, no reason to jump up and down, but because it’s a multitude
01:03:14 of these puzzles that all are explained by one hypothesis, that’s really the magnetism,
01:03:22 the attraction of the planet nine model.
01:03:25 So can you just clarify, so most orbit, most planets in the solar system orbit at approximately
01:03:34 the same, so it’s flat.
01:03:35 Yeah, it’s like one degree.
01:03:38 The difference between them is about one degree.
01:03:41 But nevertheless, if we looked at our solar system, it would look, and I could see every
01:03:46 single object, it would look like a sphere.
01:03:49 The inner part where the planets are would look like, you know, flat, right?
01:03:54 The Kuiper belt and the asteroid belt have a larger, it gets fatter and fatter and fatter
01:04:02 and becomes a sphere.
01:04:03 That’s right.
01:04:04 And if you look at the very outside, it’s polluted by this quasi spheroidal thing.
01:04:11 Nobody’s of course ever seen the Oort cloud, right?
01:04:14 We’ve only seen comments that come from the Oort cloud so that the Oort cloud, which is
01:04:20 this, right, population of distant debris, its existence is also inferred.
01:04:26 You could say alternatively, there is, you know, there’s a big cosmic creature that occasionally,
01:04:32 you know, sitting at 20,000 AU and occasionally throws an icy rock towards the sun like that.
01:04:38 Spaghetti monster, I think it’s called.
01:04:40 Okay.
01:04:41 I mean, so it’s a mystery in many ways, but you can kind of infer a bunch of things about
01:04:46 it.
01:04:47 And by the way, both terrifying and exciting that there’s this vast darkness all around
01:04:51 us that’s full of objects that they’re just throwing.
01:04:54 Just there.
01:04:55 Yeah.
01:04:56 It’s actually kind of astonishing, right, that we have only explored a small fraction
01:05:02 of the solar system, right?
01:05:04 That really kind of baffles me because I remember as a student, you know, studying physics,
01:05:11 you know, you do the problem where you put the earth around the sun, you solve that and
01:05:16 like, it’s one line of math and you say, okay, well, that surely was figured out by Newton.
01:05:22 So like all the interesting stuff is not in the solar system, but that it’s just plainly
01:05:29 not true.
01:05:30 There are mysteries in the solar system that are remarkable that we are only now starting
01:05:37 to just kind of scratch the surface of.
01:05:40 And some of those objects probably have some information about the history of our solar
01:05:44 system.
01:05:45 Absolutely.
01:05:46 Like a great example is, you know, small meteorites, right?
01:05:50 Small meteorites are melted, right?
01:05:53 They have, they’re differentiated, meaning some of the iron sinks, you say, well, how
01:05:59 can that be?
01:06:00 Because they’re so small that they wouldn’t have melted just from the heat of their accretion.
01:06:04 Turns out the fact that the solar nebula, the disk that made the planets was polluted
01:06:10 by aluminum 26 is in itself a remarkable thing.
01:06:13 It means the solar system did not form in isolation.
01:06:17 It formed in a giant cloud of thousands of other stars that were also forming, some of
01:06:23 which were undergoing, you know, going through supernova explosions, some of, and releasing
01:06:30 these unstable isotopes that, of which we now see kind of the traces of.
01:06:37 It’s so cool.
01:06:38 Do you think it’s possible that life from other solar systems was injected and that
01:06:43 was what was the origin of life on Earth?
01:06:47 Yeah, the Panspermia idea.
01:06:51 That’s seen as a low probability event by people who studied the origin of life, but
01:06:54 that’s because then they would be out of a job.
01:06:58 Well, I don’t think they’d be out of the job because you just then say, you have to figure
01:07:02 out how life started there.
01:07:04 But then you have to go there.
01:07:05 We can study life on Earth much easier.
01:07:07 We could study it in the lab much easier because we can replicate conditions there from an
01:07:13 early Earth much easier from a chemistry perspective, from a biology perspective.
01:07:19 You can intuit a bunch of stuff.
01:07:21 You can look at different parts of Earth and just.
01:07:23 To an extent, I mean, the early Earth was completely unlike the current Earth, right?
01:07:28 There was no oxygen.
01:07:30 So one of my colleagues at Caltech, Joe Kirshnik, is certain, something like 100% certainty
01:07:41 that life started on Mars and came to Earth on Martian meteorites.
01:07:48 This is not a problem that I like to kind of think about too much, like the origin of
01:07:55 life.
01:07:56 It’s a fascinating problem, but you know, it’s not physics and I just like, I just don’t
01:08:02 love it.
01:08:03 It’s the same reason you don’t love, I thought you’re a musician, so music is not physics
01:08:08 either.
01:08:09 So why are you so into it?
01:08:10 It’s 100% physics.
01:08:11 No, no, look, in all seriousness though, there are a few things that I really, really enjoy.
01:08:20 I genuinely enjoy physics.
01:08:23 I genuinely enjoy music.
01:08:24 I genuinely, you know, enjoy martial arts and I genuinely enjoy my family.
01:08:31 I should have said that all in a reverse order or something, but I like to focus on these
01:08:35 things and not worry too much about everything else.
01:08:39 You know what I mean?
01:08:40 Yes.
01:08:41 Just because there is a, like you said earlier, there’s a time constraint.
01:08:44 You can’t do it all.
01:08:47 There’s many mysteries all around us.
01:08:50 And they’re all beautiful in different ways.
01:08:53 To me, that thing I love is artificial intelligence that perhaps I love it because eventually
01:08:59 I’m trying to suck up to our future overlords.
01:09:03 The question of, you said there’s a lot of kind of little pieces of evidence for this
01:09:09 thing that’s Planet Nine.
01:09:11 If we were to try to collect more evidence or be certain, like a paper that says, like
01:09:18 you drop it, clear, we’re done.
01:09:22 What does that require?
01:09:23 Are sending probes out or do you think we can do it from telescopes here on earth?
01:09:28 What are the different ideas for conclusive evidence for Planet Nine?
01:09:32 The moment Planet Nine gets imaged from a telescope on earth, it’s done.
01:09:36 I mean, it’s just there.
01:09:37 Can you clarify it?
01:09:38 Cause you mentioned that before from an image, would you be able to tell?
01:09:42 Yes.
01:09:43 So from an image, the moment you see something, something that is reflecting sunlight back
01:09:51 at you and you know that it’s hundreds of times as far away from the sun as the earth,
01:10:01 you’re done.
01:10:02 So you’re thinking, so basically if you have a really far away thing that’s big, five times
01:10:08 the size of earth, that means that is Planet Nine.
01:10:13 Could there be multiple objects like that?
01:10:15 I guess.
01:10:16 In principle, yeah.
01:10:17 I mean, there’s no law of physics that doesn’t allow you to have multiple, there’s also no
01:10:22 evidence at present for there being multiple.
01:10:25 I wonder if it’s possible, just like we’re finding exoplanets, whether given the size
01:10:31 of the Oort Cloud, there’s basically, it’s rarer and rarer, but there are sprinkled Planet
01:10:36 Nine, 10, 11, 12, like these, some.
01:10:41 Got 13.
01:10:42 It goes after that.
01:10:43 I can just keep counting.
01:10:45 So just something about the dynamic system, it becomes lower and lower probability event,
01:10:50 but they gather up, they become larger and larger maybe, something like that.
01:10:57 I wonder if discovering Planet Nine will just be almost like a springboard, it’s like, well,
01:11:04 what’s beyond that?
01:11:05 It’s entirely plausible.
01:11:06 The Oort Cloud itself probably holds about five earth masses or seven earth masses of
01:11:12 material.
01:11:13 Right, so it’s not nothing.
01:11:16 And it all ultimately comes down to at what point will the observational surveys sample
01:11:27 enough of the solar system to kind of reveal interesting things.
01:11:33 There’s a great analogy here with Neptune and the story of how Neptune was discovered.
01:11:38 Neptune was not discovered by looking at the sky, right?
01:11:42 It was discovered mathematically, right?
01:11:45 So yeah, the orbit of Uranus, when Uranus was found, this was 1781, both the tracking
01:11:58 of the orbit of Uranus as well as the reconstruction of the orbit of Uranus immediately revealed
01:12:05 that it was not following the orbit that it was supposed to, right?
01:12:10 The predicted orbit deviated away from where it actually was.
01:12:13 So in the mid 1800s, right, a French mathematician by the name of Orban Le Verrier did a beautifully
01:12:24 sophisticated calculation which said if this is due to gravity of a more distant planet,
01:12:31 then that planet is there, okay?
01:12:34 And then they found it.
01:12:35 But the point is the understanding of where to look for Neptune came entirely out of celestial
01:12:42 mechanics.
01:12:43 The case with Planet Nine is a little bit different because what we can do I think relatively
01:12:49 well is predict the orbit and mass of Planet Nine.
01:12:52 We cannot tell you where it is on its orbit.
01:12:54 The reason is we haven’t seen the Kuiper Belt objects complete an orbit, their own orbit,
01:13:02 even once because it takes 4,000 years.
01:13:04 But I plan to live on as an AI being, and I’ll be tracking those orbits as, you know,
01:13:13 for…
01:13:14 So it takes 4,000 or 5,000 years.
01:13:15 I mean, it doesn’t have to be AI.
01:13:16 It could be longevity.
01:13:17 There’s a lot of really exciting genetic engineering research.
01:13:19 So you’ll just be a brain waiting for the, your brain waiting for the orbit to complete
01:13:25 for the basic Kuiper Belt objects.
01:13:27 That’s right.
01:13:28 That’s like kind of the worst reason to want to live a long time, right, just like can
01:13:34 the brain like smoke a cigarette?
01:13:36 I know, right?
01:13:37 Can you just like light one up while you’re waiting or?
01:13:44 But you’re making me actually realize that the one way to explore the galaxy is by just
01:13:52 sitting here on Earth and waiting.
01:13:54 So if we can just get really good at waiting, it’s like a mua mua or these interstellar
01:13:59 objects that fly in, you can just wait for them to come to you.
01:14:02 Same with the aliens.
01:14:03 You can wait for them to come to you.
01:14:05 If you get really good at waiting, then that’s one way to do the exploration because eventually
01:14:11 the thing will come to you.
01:14:12 Maybe that’s the, maybe the intelligent alien civilizations get much better at waiting,
01:14:18 and so they all decide, so game theoretically, to start waiting, and it’s just a bunch of
01:14:23 like ancient intelligent civilizations of aliens all throughout the universe, they’re
01:14:27 just sitting there waiting for each other.
01:14:29 Look, you can’t just be good at waiting.
01:14:31 You gotta know how to chill, okay?
01:14:33 Like you can’t just like sit around and do nothing.
01:14:36 You gotta be, you gotta know how to chill.
01:14:38 I honestly think that as we progress, if the aliens are anything like us, we enjoy loving
01:14:45 things we do, and it’s very possible that we just figure out mechanisms here on Earth
01:14:52 to enjoy our life, and we just stay here on Earth forever, that exploration becomes less
01:14:58 and less of an interesting thing to do, and so you basically, yes, wait and chill.
01:15:03 You get really optimally good at chilling, and thereby exploring is not that interesting,
01:15:09 so in terms of 4,000 years, it would be nothing for scientists.
01:15:13 We’ll be chilling and just all kinds of scientific explorations will become possible because
01:15:18 we’ll just be here on Earth.
01:15:20 So chill.
01:15:21 So chill.
01:15:22 You have a paper out recently, because you already mentioned some of these ideas, but
01:15:26 I’d love it if you could dig into it a little bit.
01:15:28 Yeah, of course.
01:15:29 The injection of inner Oort Cloud objects into the distant Kuiper Belt by Planet Nine.
01:15:35 What is this idea of Planet Nine injecting objects into the Kuiper Belt?
01:15:40 Okay, let me take a brief step back, and when we do calculations of Planet Nine, when we
01:15:47 do the simulations, as far as our simulations are concerned, sort of the Neptune, like kind
01:15:57 of the transneptunian solar system is entirely sourced from the inside, namely the Kuiper
01:16:05 Belt gets scattered by Neptune, and then Planet Nine does things to it and aligns the orbits
01:16:10 and so on, and then we calculate what happens on the lifetime of the solar system, yada,
01:16:17 yada, yada.
01:16:18 During the pandemic, one of the kind of questions we asked ourselves, and this is indeed something
01:16:23 we, Mike and I, Mike Brown, who’s a partner in crime on this, and I do regularly, is we
01:16:31 say how can we A, disprove ourselves, and B, how can we improve our simulations?
01:16:39 Like what’s missing?
01:16:40 One idea that maybe should have been obvious in retrospect is that all of our simulations
01:16:46 treated the solar system as some isolated creature, right?
01:16:50 But the solar system did not form in isolation, right?
01:16:53 It formed in this cluster of stars, and during that phase of forming together with thousands
01:16:59 of other stars, we believe the solar system formed this almost spherical population of
01:17:06 icy debris that sits maybe at a few thousand times the separation between the Earth and
01:17:16 the Sun, maybe even a little bit closer.
01:17:20 If Planet Nine’s not there, that population is completely dormant, and these objects just
01:17:25 slowly orbit the Sun.
01:17:29 Nothing interesting happens to them ever, but when we realize that if Planet Nine is
01:17:34 there, Planet Nine can actually grab some of those objects and gravitationally reinject
01:17:39 them into the distant solar system.
01:17:42 So we thought, okay, let’s look into this with numerical experiments.
01:17:46 Do our simulations, does this process work, and if it works, what are its consequences?
01:17:53 So it turns out, indeed, not only does Planet Nine inject these distant inner Oort cloud
01:18:01 objects into the Kuiper Belt, they follow roughly the same pathway as the objects that
01:18:09 are being scattered out.
01:18:10 So there’s this kind of river, two way river of material.
01:18:15 Some of it is coming out by Neptune scattering, some of it is moving in.
01:18:20 And if you work through the numbers, you kind of, at the end of the day, it has an effect
01:18:27 on the best fit orbit for Planet Nine itself.
01:18:30 So if you realize that the data set that we’re observing is not entirely composed of things
01:18:35 that came out of the solar system, but also things that got reinjected back in, then turns
01:18:41 out the best fit Planet Nine is slightly more eccentric.
01:18:44 That’s kind of getting into the weeds.
01:18:46 The point here is that the existence of Planet Nine itself provides this natural bridge that
01:18:53 connects an otherwise dormant population of icy debris of the solar system with things
01:18:58 that we’re starting to directly observe.
01:19:00 So it can flow back, so it’s not just a river flowing one way, it’s maybe a smaller stream
01:19:04 going back.
01:19:05 Backwash.
01:19:06 You want a backwash, you want to incorporate that into the simulations, into your understanding
01:19:10 of those distant objects when you’re trying to make sense of the various observations
01:19:15 and so on.
01:19:16 Exactly.
01:19:17 That’s fascinating.
01:19:18 I gotta ask you, some people think that many of the observations that you’re describing
01:19:24 could be described by a primordial black hole.
01:19:28 First, what is a primordial black hole and what do you think about this idea?
01:19:33 So primordial black hole is a black hole which is made not through the usual pathway of making
01:19:39 a black hole, which is that you have a star, which is more massive than 1.4 or so solar
01:19:48 masses and basically when it runs out of fuel, runs out of its nuclear fusion fuel, it can’t
01:19:56 hold itself up anymore and just the whole thing collapses on itself, right?
01:20:01 You create a, I mean one, I guess, simple way to think about it is you create an object
01:20:09 with zero radius, that has mass but zero radius, that singularity.
01:20:16 Now such black holes exist all over the place.
01:20:20 In the galaxy, there’s in fact a really big one at the center of the galaxy that’s like,
01:20:25 that one’s always looking at you when you’re not looking, okay, and it’s always talking
01:20:31 about you.
01:20:32 And when you turn off the lights, it wakes up.
01:20:34 That’s right.
01:20:37 So such black holes are all over the place.
01:20:40 When they merge, we get to see incredible gravitational waves that they emit, etc, etc.
01:20:45 One kind of plausible scenario, however, is that when the universe was forming, basically
01:20:50 during the Big Bang, you created a whole spectrum of black holes, some with masses of five Earth
01:20:59 masses, some with masses of 10 Earth masses, like the entire, you know, mass spectrum size,
01:21:05 some the massive asteroids.
01:21:08 Now on the smaller end, over the lifetime of the universe, the smaller ones kind of
01:21:14 evaporate and they’re not there anymore.
01:21:16 At least this is what we, what the calculations tell us.
01:21:21 But five Earth masses is big enough to not have evaporated.
01:21:25 So one idea is that Planet Nine is not a planet and instead it is a five Earth mass black
01:21:33 hole.
01:21:34 And that’s why it’s hard to find.
01:21:37 Now can we right away from our calculations say that’s definitely true or that’s not true?
01:21:45 Absolutely not.
01:21:46 We can’t, in fact, our calculations tell you nothing other than the orbit and the mass.
01:21:53 And that means the black hole, I mean, it could be a five Earth mass, you know, cup.
01:21:59 It could be a five Earth mass hedgehog or a black hole or really anything that’s five
01:22:04 Earth masses will do because the gravity of a black hole is no different than the gravity
01:22:10 of a planet, right?
01:22:11 If the sun became a black hole tomorrow, it would be dark, but the Earth would keep orbiting
01:22:17 it.
01:22:18 And like this notion that, oh, black holes suck everything in, it’s not, that’s like
01:22:23 a sci fi notion.
01:22:24 All right.
01:22:25 It’s just mass.
01:22:26 What would be the difference between a black hole and a planet in terms of observationally?
01:22:32 Probably the difference would be that you will never find the black hole, right?
01:22:37 The truth is they’re kind of, I’m actually not, you know, I never looked into this very
01:22:43 carefully, but there are some constraints that you can get just statistically and say,
01:22:49 okay, if the sun has a binary companion, which is a five Earth mass black hole, then that
01:22:56 means such black holes would be extremely common and, you know, you can sort of look
01:23:01 for lensing events and then you say, okay, maybe that’s not so likely.
01:23:05 But you know, that said, I want to emphasize that there’s a limit to what our calculations
01:23:12 can tell you.
01:23:13 That’s the orbit and the mass.
01:23:14 So I think there’s a bunch, like Ed Witten, I think wishes it’s a black hole because I
01:23:20 think one exciting things about black holes in our solar system is that we could go there
01:23:26 and we can maybe study the singularity somehow because that allows us to understand some
01:23:31 fundamental things about physics.
01:23:33 If it’s a planet, so planet nine, we may not, you know, and we go there, we may not discover
01:23:39 anything profoundly new.
01:23:43 The interesting thing, perhaps you can correct me about planet nine is like the big picture
01:23:47 of it.
01:23:48 The whole big story of the Kuiper belt and all those kinds of things.
01:23:52 It’s not that planet nine would be somehow fundamentally different from, I don’t know,
01:23:58 Neptune in terms of, in terms of the kind of things we could learn from it.
01:24:03 So I think that there’s kind of a hope that it’s a black hole because it’s an entirely
01:24:07 new kind of object.
01:24:09 Maybe you can correct me on that.
01:24:11 Yeah.
01:24:12 I mean, of course here, my own biases creep in because I’m interested, you know, in planets
01:24:18 around other stars.
01:24:19 And I would say, I would disagree that, you know, we wouldn’t find things that would be
01:24:26 truly, you know, fundamentally new because as it turns out, the galaxy is really good
01:24:33 at making five or three earth mass objects, right?
01:24:38 The most common type of planet that we see, that we, you know, discover orbiting around
01:24:45 other stars is a few earth masses.
01:24:47 In the solar system, there’s no analog for that, right?
01:24:50 We go from one earth mass object, which is this one and to skipping to Neptune and Uranus,
01:24:56 which themselves are actually relatively poorly understood, especially Uranus from the interior
01:25:01 structure point of view.
01:25:03 If planet nine is a planet, going there will give us the closest window into understanding
01:25:09 what other planets look like.
01:25:12 And I will, you know, I’ll say this, that, you know, planets kind of in terms of their
01:25:18 complexity on some logarithmic scale fall somewhere between a star and an insect, right?
01:25:26 An insect is way more complicated than a star, right?
01:25:30 Just all kinds of physical processes and really biochemical processes that occur inside of
01:25:37 an insect that just make a star look like, you know, somebody is like playing with a
01:25:43 spring or something, right?
01:25:45 So the, I think, you know, it would be, you know, arguably, you know, more interesting
01:25:53 to go to, you know, to go to planet nine if it’s a planet, because black holes are simple.
01:25:59 They’re just kind of, they’re basically macroscopic like particles, right?
01:26:04 Yeah.
01:26:05 And so just like a star that you mentioned in terms of complexity.
01:26:08 So it’s possible that planet nine is supposed to being like homogeneous is like super like
01:26:14 heterogeneous is a bunch of cool stuff going on that could give us an intuition.
01:26:18 I never thought about that, that it’s basically Earth number two in terms of size and gives
01:26:24 us, starts giving us intuition that could be generalizable to Earth like planets elsewhere
01:26:30 in the galaxy.
01:26:31 I mean, yeah, Pluto is also in the sense like, you know, Pluto is a tiny, tiny thing, right?
01:26:37 Just like you would imagine that it’s just a tiny ball of ice, like who cares, but the
01:26:41 New Horizons images of Pluto reveal so much remarkable structure, right?
01:26:47 They reveal glaciers flowing and these are glaciers not made out of water ice, but you
01:26:51 know, CO ice, it turns out at those temperatures, right, of like 40 or so Kelvin, water ice
01:27:00 looks like metal, right?
01:27:01 It just doesn’t flow at all, but then ice made up of carbon monoxide starts to flow.
01:27:07 I mean, there’s just like all kinds of really cool phenomena that you otherwise just wouldn’t
01:27:14 really even imagine that occur.
01:27:17 So yeah, I mean, there’s a reason why I like planets.
01:27:20 Well, let me ask you, I find as I read the idea that Ed Witten was thinking about this
01:27:28 kind of stuff fascinating.
01:27:30 So he’s a mathematical physicist who’s very interested in string theory, won the Fields
01:27:37 Medal for his work in mathematics.
01:27:41 So I read that he proposed a fleet of probes accelerated by radiation pressure that could
01:27:47 discover a Planet Nine primordial black holes location.
01:27:50 What do you think about this idea of sending a bunch of probes out there?
01:27:55 Yeah, look, the way the idea is a cool one, right?
01:28:00 You go and you say, you know, launch them basically, isotropically, you track where
01:28:06 they go.
01:28:07 And if I understand the idea correctly, basically measure the deflection and you say, okay,
01:28:15 that must be something there since the probe trajectories are being altered.
01:28:21 Oh, so the measurement, the basic sensory mechanism is the, it’s not like you have senses
01:28:26 on the probes.
01:28:27 It’s more like you’re, because you’re very precisely able to capture, to measure the
01:28:32 trajectory of the probes, you can then infer the gravitational fields.
01:28:35 I think that’s the basic idea.
01:28:39 You know, back a few years ago, we had conversations like these with, you know, engineers from
01:28:46 JPL.
01:28:47 They more or less convinced me that this is more, much more difficult than it seems because
01:28:55 you don’t, at that level of precision, right?
01:28:58 Things like solar flares matter, right?
01:29:00 Solar flares, right, are completely chaotic.
01:29:03 You can’t predict which, where a solar flare will happen.
01:29:07 That will drive radiation pressure gradients.
01:29:10 You don’t know where every single asteroid is.
01:29:12 So like actually doing that problem, I think it’s possible, but it’s not a trivial matter,
01:29:20 right?
01:29:21 Well, I wonder, not just about Planet 9, I wonder if that’s kind of the future of doing
01:29:28 science in our solar system is to just launch a huge number of probes.
01:29:33 So like a whole order of magnitude, many orders of magnitude, larger numbers of probes, and
01:29:39 then starting for a bunch of different stuff, not just gravity, but everything else.
01:29:44 So in this regard, I actually think there is a huge revolution that’s to some extent
01:29:50 already started, right?
01:29:52 The standard kind of like timescale for a NASA mission is that you like propose it and
01:29:57 it launches, I don’t know, like 150 years after your proposal.
01:30:01 I’m over exaggerating, but you know, it’s just like some huge development cycle and
01:30:08 it gets delayed 55 times, like that is not going away, right?
01:30:15 The really cutting edge things, you have to do it this way because you don’t know what
01:30:20 you’re building, so to speak.
01:30:22 But the CubeSat kind of world is starting to provide an avenue for like launching something
01:30:32 that costs a few million dollars and has a turnaround timescale of like a couple of years.
01:30:37 You can imagine doing PhD theses where you design the mission, the mission goes to where
01:30:44 you’re going, and you do the science all within a time span of five, six years.
01:30:49 That has not been fully executed on yet, but I absolutely think that’s on the horizon and
01:30:56 we’re not talking a decade, I think we’re talking like this decade.
01:30:59 Yeah, and the company is accelerating all this with Blue Origin and SpaceX, and there’s
01:31:07 a bunch of more CubeSat oriented companies that are pushing this forward.
01:31:12 Well let me ask you on that topic, what do you think about either one?
01:31:17 Elon Musk with SpaceX going to Mars, I think he wants SpaceX to be the first to put a first
01:31:24 human on Mars, and then Jeff Bezos, gotta give him props, wants to be the first to fly
01:31:33 his own rocket out into space.
01:31:38 Wasn’t there a guy who like built his rocket out of garbage?
01:31:43 This was like a couple years ago, and somewhere in the desert he launched himself.
01:31:47 I’m not tracking this closely, but I think I am familiar with folks who built their own
01:31:52 rocket to try to prove the earth is flat.
01:31:54 Yes, that’s the guy I’m talking about, he also jumped some limousine.
01:32:00 Truly revolutionary mind, you have to have greater men than either you or I.
01:32:09 It’s been astonishing to watch how really over the last decade the commercial sector
01:32:17 took over this industry that traditionally has really been a government thing to do.
01:32:27 Motivated primarily by the competition between nations, like the Cold War, and now it’s motivated
01:32:34 more and more by the natural forces of capitalism.
01:32:39 That’s right, so here I have many ideas about it.
01:32:43 I think on the one hand, like what SpaceX has been able to do, for example, phenomenal.
01:32:51 If that brings down the price of space exploration, that turnaround time scale for space exploration,
01:32:57 which I think it inevitably will, that’s a huge boost to the human condition.
01:33:06 The same time, if we’re talking astronomy, it comes at a huge cost, and the Starlink
01:33:14 satellites is a great example of that cost.
01:33:16 In fact, I was just camping in the Mojave with a friend of mine, and they saw this string
01:33:26 of satellites just kind of appear and then disappear into nowhere.
01:33:32 That is beginning to interfere with Earth based observations, so I think there’s tremendous
01:33:39 potential there, it’s also important to be responsible about how it’s executed.
01:33:45 Now with Mars and the whole idea of exploring Mars, I don’t have strong opinions on whether
01:33:53 a manned mission is required or not required, but I do think the thing to keep in mind is
01:34:05 that I’m not signed on, if you will, to the idea that Mars is some kind of a safe haven
01:34:13 that we can escape to.
01:34:17 Mars sucks.
01:34:19 Living on Mars, if you want to live on Mars, you can have that experience by going to the
01:34:26 Mojave Desert and camping, and it’s just not a great experience.
01:34:31 Well it’s interesting, but there’s something captivating about that kind of mission of
01:34:35 us striving out into space, and by making Mars in some ways habitable for at least like
01:34:43 months at a time, I think would lead to engineering breakthroughs that would make life in many
01:34:51 ways much better on Earth.
01:34:52 It will come up with ideas we totally don’t expect yet, both on the robotics side, on
01:34:58 the food engineering side, on the, maybe we’ll switch from, there’ll be huge breakthroughs
01:35:06 in insect farming, as exciting as I find that idea to be, in the ways we consume protein.
01:35:14 Maybe it’ll revolutionize, we do factory farming, which is full of cruelty and torture of animals,
01:35:22 we’ll revolutionize that completely because of our, we shouldn’t need to go to Mars to
01:35:27 revolutionize life here on Earth, but at the same time, I shouldn’t need a deadline to
01:35:32 get shit done, but I do need it.
01:35:35 And then in the same way, I think we need Mars.
01:35:37 There’s something about the human spirit that loves that longing for exploration.
01:35:41 I agree with that thesis, the going to the moon, right, and that whole endeavor has captivated
01:35:51 the imagination of so many, and it has led to incredible ideas, really, and probably
01:35:59 in nonlinear ways, not like, okay, we went to the moon, therefore some person here has
01:36:05 thought of this.
01:36:07 In that similar sense, I think space exploration is, there’s some real magnetism about it,
01:36:15 and it’s on a genetic level.
01:36:17 We have this need to keep exploring when we’re done with a certain frontier, we move on to
01:36:25 the next frontier.
01:36:26 All that I’m saying is that I’m not moving to Mars to live there permanently ever, and
01:36:32 I think that, I’m glad you noted the kind of degradation of the Earth.
01:36:39 I think that is a true kind of the leading order challenge of our time.
01:36:44 That’s a great engineering, that’s a bunch of engineering problems.
01:36:48 I’m most interested in space, because as I’ve read extensively, it’s apparently very difficult
01:36:53 to have sex in space, and so I just want that problem to be solved, because I think once
01:36:59 we solve the sex in space problem, we’ll revolutionize sex here on Earth, thereby increasing the
01:37:04 fun on Earth, and the consequences of that can only be good.
01:37:08 I mean, you can, you’ve got a clear plan, right, and it sounds like, you know.
01:37:14 I’m submitting proposals to NASA as we speak.
01:37:16 That’s right.
01:37:17 I keep getting rejected, I don’t know why.
01:37:21 Okay.
01:37:22 You need better diagrams.
01:37:24 Better pictures.
01:37:25 I should have thought of that.
01:37:26 You a while ago mentioned that, you know, there’s certain aspects in the history of
01:37:30 the solar system and Earth that resulted, it could have resulted in an opaque atmosphere,
01:37:38 but it didn’t, we couldn’t see the stars.
01:37:43 And somebody mentioned to me a little bit ago, and it’s almost like a philosophical
01:37:47 question for you.
01:37:49 Do you think humans, like human society would develop as it did, or at all, if we couldn’t
01:37:58 see the stars?
01:37:59 It would be drastically different.
01:38:03 Just if it ever did develop.
01:38:05 So I think some of the early developments, right, of like, you know, fire, you know.
01:38:12 First of all, that atmosphere would be so hot, because, you know, if you have an opaque
01:38:16 atmosphere, the temperature at the bottom is huge.
01:38:22 So we would be very different beings to start with.
01:38:25 We’d have very different.
01:38:26 It could be cloudy in certain kinds of ways that you could still get.
01:38:29 Okay.
01:38:30 Think about like a greenhouse, right?
01:38:32 A greenhouse is cloudy, effectively, but it’s super hot.
01:38:37 Yeah.
01:38:38 It’s hard to avoid having an atmosphere.
01:38:41 If you have an opaque atmosphere, it’s hard to, right.
01:38:44 Venus is a great example, right?
01:38:46 Venus is, I don’t remember exactly how many degrees, but it’s hundreds in Celsius, right?
01:38:52 It’s not a hundred, it’s hundreds.
01:38:55 Even though it’s only a little bit closer to the sun, that temperature is entirely coming
01:38:59 from the fact that the atmosphere is thick.
01:39:01 So it’s just a sauna of sorts.
01:39:03 Yeah.
01:39:04 Yeah.
01:39:05 You go there, you know, you feel refreshed after you come back, you know.
01:39:08 But if you stay there, I mean, so, okay, take that as an assumption.
01:39:13 This is a philosophical question, not a biological one.
01:39:15 So you have a life that develops under these extremely hot conditions.
01:39:18 Yeah.
01:39:19 So let’s see.
01:39:20 So much of the early evolution of mankind was driven by exploration, right?
01:39:28 And the kind of interest in stars originated in part as a tool to guide that exploration,
01:39:37 right?
01:39:38 I mean, that in itself, I think would be a huge, you know, a huge differential in the
01:39:44 way that we, you know, our evolution on this planet.
01:39:48 Yeah.
01:39:49 I mean, stars, that’s brilliant.
01:39:51 So even in that aspect, but even in further aspects, astronomy just shows up in basically
01:39:59 every single development in the history of science up until the 20th century, it shows
01:40:04 up.
01:40:05 So I wonder without that, if we would have, if we would even get like calculus.
01:40:10 Yeah, look, that’s a great, I mean, that’s a great point.
01:40:14 Newton in part developed calculus because he was interested in understanding, explaining
01:40:20 Kepler’s laws, right?
01:40:22 In general, that whole mechanistic understanding of the night sky, right, replacing a religious
01:40:29 understanding where you interpret, you know, this is, you know, this whatever fire god
01:40:34 riding his, you know, a little chariot across the sky, as opposed to, you know, this is
01:40:41 some mechanistic set of laws that transformed humanity and arguably put us on the course
01:40:48 that we’re on today, right?
01:40:50 The entirety of the last 400 years and the development of kind of our technological world
01:40:57 that we live in today was sparked by that, right?
01:41:03 Understanding an effectively, you know, a non secular view of the natural world and
01:41:08 kind of saying, okay, this can be understood and if it can be understood, it can be utilized,
01:41:15 we can create our own variants of this.
01:41:19 Absolutely, we would be a very, very different species without astronomy.
01:41:24 This I think extends beyond just astronomy, right?
01:41:29 There are questions like why do we need to spend money on X, right?
01:41:35 Where X can be anything like paleontology, like, right?
01:41:39 The mating patterns of penguins.
01:41:42 Yeah, that’s like, that’s right.
01:41:46 I think, you know, there’s a tremendous under appreciation for the usefulness of useless
01:41:53 knowledge, right?
01:41:54 I mean, that’s brilliant.
01:41:57 I didn’t come up with this, this is a little book by the guy who started the Institute
01:42:02 for Advanced Studies, but, you know, it’s so true, so much of the electronics that are
01:42:10 on this table, right, work on Maxwell’s equations.
01:42:13 Maxwell wasn’t sitting around in the 1800s saying, you know, I hope one day, you know,
01:42:21 we’ll make, you know, a couple mics so, you know, a couple, you know, a couple guys can
01:42:27 have this conversation, right?
01:42:30 That wasn’t at no point was that the motivation, and yet, you know, it gave us the world that
01:42:38 we have today.
01:42:39 The answer is if you are a purely pragmatic person, if you don’t care at all about kind
01:42:45 of the human condition, none of this, the answer is, you can tax it, right, like, useless
01:42:53 things have created way more capital than useful things.
01:43:00 And the sad thing, first of all, it’s really important to think about, and it’s brilliant
01:43:08 in the following context, like Neil deGrasse Tyson has this book about the role of military
01:43:13 based funding in the development of science, and then so much of technological breakthroughs
01:43:21 in the 20th century had to do with humans working on different military things.
01:43:28 And then the outcome of that had nothing to do with military, it had some military application,
01:43:32 but their impact was much, much bigger than military.
01:43:36 The splitting of the atom is a kind of a canonical example of this.
01:43:41 We all know the tragedy that, you know, arises from splitting of the atom, and yet, you know,
01:43:47 so much, I mean, the atom itself does not care for what purpose it is being split.
01:43:55 So I wonder if we took the same amount of funding as we used for war and poured it into
01:44:02 like totally seemingly useless things, like the mating patterns of penguins, we would
01:44:06 get the internet anyway.
01:44:08 I think so, I think so, and, you know, perhaps more of the internet would have penguins,
01:44:16 you know.
01:44:17 So we’re both joking, but in some sense, like, I wonder, it’s not the penguins, because penguins
01:44:23 is more about sort of biology, but all useless kind of tinkering and all kinds of avenues,
01:44:32 and also because military applications are often burdened by the secrecy required.
01:44:40 So it’s often like so much, the openness is lacking, and if we’ve learned anything for
01:44:46 the last few decades is that when there’s openness in science, that accelerates the
01:44:52 development of science.
01:44:53 That’s right.
01:44:54 That’s true.
01:44:55 That openness of science truly, you know, it benefits everybody, the notion that if,
01:45:02 you know, I share my science with you, then you’re going to catch up and like know the
01:45:07 same thing.
01:45:08 That is a short sighted viewpoint, because if you catch up and you open, you know, you
01:45:16 discover something that puts me in a position to do the next step, right?
01:45:21 So I absolutely agree with all of this.
01:45:25 I mean, the kind of question of like military funding versus non military funding is obviously
01:45:32 a complicated one, but at the end of the day, I think we have to get over the notion as
01:45:39 a society that we are going to, you know, pay for this, and then we will get that, right?
01:45:47 That’s true if you’re buying like, I don’t know, toilet paper or something, right?
01:45:53 It’s just not true in the intellectual pursuit.
01:45:55 That’s not how it works, and sometimes it’ll fail, right?
01:46:00 Like sometimes, like a huge fraction of what I do, right?
01:46:04 I come up with an idea, I think, oh, it’s great, and then I work it out, it’s totally
01:46:07 not great, right?
01:46:08 It fails immediately.
01:46:10 Failure is not a sign that the initial pursuit was worthless, so failure is just part of
01:46:16 this kind of this whole exploration thing, and we should fund more and more of this exploration,
01:46:21 the variety of the exploration.
01:46:22 That’s right.
01:46:23 I think it was Linus Pauling or somebody from, you know, that generation of scientists, you
01:46:28 know, a good way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.
01:46:33 Yeah.
01:46:34 So I think that’s true.
01:46:37 If you are conservative in your thinking, if you worry about proposing something that’s
01:46:42 going to fail and, oh, what if, you know, like, there’s no science police that’s going
01:46:48 to come and arrest you for proposing the wrong thing, and, you know, it’s also just like,
01:46:54 why would you do science if you’re afraid of, you know, taking that step?
01:47:01 It’d be so much better to propose things that are plausible, that are interesting, and then
01:47:07 for a fraction of them to be wrong than to just kind of, you know, make incremental progress
01:47:11 all your life, right?
01:47:13 Speaking of wild ideas, let me ask you about the thing we mentioned previously, which is
01:47:19 this interstellar object Amuamua.
01:47:22 Could it be space junk from a distant alien civilization?
01:47:27 You can’t immediately discount that by saying absolutely it cannot.
01:47:33 Anything can be space junk.
01:47:34 I mean, from that point of view, can any of the Kuiper Belt objects we see be space junk?
01:47:41 Everything on the night sky can, in principle, be space junk.
01:47:44 And Kuiper Belt would catch interstellar objects potentially and, like, force them into an
01:47:49 orbit if they’re, like, small enough?
01:47:52 Not the Kuiper Belt itself, but you can imagine, like, Jupiter family comets being captured,
01:47:57 you know.
01:47:58 So you can actually capture things.
01:48:00 It’s even easier to do this very early in the solar system, like, early in the solar
01:48:05 system’s life while it’s still in a cluster of stars.
01:48:09 It’s unavoidable that you capture debris, whether it be natural debris or unnatural
01:48:15 debris, or just debris of some kind from other stars.
01:48:20 It’s like a daycare center, right?
01:48:22 Like, everybody passes their infections on to other kids.
01:48:25 Yeah.
01:48:26 You know, Amuamua, there’s been a lot of discussion about it, and there’s been a lot of interest
01:48:31 in this over, like, is it aliens or is it not?
01:48:35 It’s, like, if you just kind of look at the facts, like, what we know about it is it’s
01:48:39 kind of, like, a weird shape, and it also accelerated, you know?
01:48:44 Right?
01:48:45 Like, that’s the two, those are the two interesting things about it.
01:48:50 There are puzzles about it, and perhaps the most daring resolution to this puzzle is that
01:49:02 it’s not, you know, aliens or it’s not, like, a rock, it’s actually a piece of hydrogen
01:49:07 ice.
01:49:08 Right?
01:49:09 So, this is a friend of mine, you know, Daryl Seligman, Greg Laughlin, came up with this
01:49:15 idea that in giant molecular clouds that are just clouds of hydrogen, helium, gas that
01:49:22 live throughout the galaxy, at their cores, you can condense ice to become these hydrogen,
01:49:31 you know, icebergs, if you will.
01:49:33 And then that explains many of the aspects of, in fact, I think that explains all of
01:49:41 the Oumuamua mystery, how it becomes elongated, because basically the hydrogen ice sublimates
01:49:48 and kind of like a bar of soap that, you know, slowly kind of elongates as you strip away
01:49:55 the surface layers, how it was able to accelerate because of a jet that is produced from, you
01:50:03 know, the hydrogen coming off of it, but you can’t see it because it’s hydrogen gas, like,
01:50:06 all of this stuff kind of falls together nicely.
01:50:12 I’m intrigued by that idea, truly, because it’s like, if that’s true, that’s a new type
01:50:18 of astrophysical object.
01:50:21 And it would be produced by, what’s the monster that produced it initially, that kind of object?
01:50:27 So these giant molecular clouds, they’re everywhere.
01:50:30 I mean, the fact that they exist is not…
01:50:34 Are they rogue clouds or are they part of like an Oort cloud?
01:50:37 No, no, they’re rogue clouds.
01:50:38 They’re just floating about?
01:50:39 Yeah, so if you go, like, a lot of people imagine the galaxy as being a, you know, a
01:50:47 bunch of stars, right, and they’re just orbiting, right?
01:50:50 But the truth is, if you fly between stars, you run into clouds.
01:50:55 They don’t have any large object that creates orbits, so they’re just floating about?
01:50:59 Just floating.
01:51:00 But why are they floating together?
01:51:01 Or they just float together for a time and not…
01:51:04 Well, so these eventually become the nurseries of stars.
01:51:08 So as they cool, they contract and, you know, then collapse into stars or into groups of
01:51:15 stars.
01:51:16 And some of them, the starless molecular clouds, according to the calculations that Daryl
01:51:24 and Greg did, can create these, like, icicles of hydrogen ice.
01:51:31 I wonder why they would be flying so fast, because they seem to be moving pretty fast
01:51:35 at a quick pace.
01:51:36 You mean Oumuamua?
01:51:37 Oumuamua, yeah.
01:51:38 Oh, that’s just because of the acceleration due to the sun.
01:51:41 If you stop, it’s like, take something really far away, let it go, and the sun is here.
01:51:48 By the time it comes close to the sun, right, it’s moving pretty fast.
01:51:52 So that’s an attractive explanation, I think, not so much because it’s cool, but it makes
01:51:59 a clear prediction, right, of when Vera Rubin Observatory comes online next year or so.
01:52:06 We will discover many, many more of these objects, right?
01:52:11 And they have, so I like theories that are falsifiable.
01:52:17 Not just testable, but falsifiable.
01:52:19 It’s good to have a falsifiable theory where you can say, that’s not true.
01:52:24 Aliens is one that’s fundamentally difficult to say, no, that’s not aliens.
01:52:29 Well, the interesting thing to me, if you look at one alien civilization, and then we
01:52:35 look at the things it produces, in terms of if we were to try to detect the alien civilization,
01:52:43 there is like, say there’s 10 billion aliens, there would probably be trillions of dumb
01:52:55 drone type things produced by the aliens, and then be many, many, many more orders of
01:53:01 magnitude of junk.
01:53:04 So if you were to look for an alien civilization, in my mind, you would be looking for the junk.
01:53:09 That’s the more efficient thing to look for.
01:53:12 So I’m not saying Oumuamua has any characteristics of space junk, but it kind of opened my eyes
01:53:19 to the idea that we shouldn’t necessarily be looking to the queen of the ant colony.
01:53:25 We should be looking at, I don’t know, I don’t know, traces of alien life that doesn’t look
01:53:32 intelligent in any way, may not even look like life.
01:53:35 It could be just garbage.
01:53:36 We should be looking for garbage.
01:53:39 Just generically.
01:53:40 Well, garbage that’s producible by unnatural forces.
01:53:47 For me at least, that was kind of interesting, because if you have a successful alien civilization,
01:53:53 that we will be producing many more orders of magnitude of junk, and that would be easier
01:53:57 potentially to detect.
01:53:58 Well, so you have to produce the junk, but you have to also launch it.
01:54:02 So this is the, this is where, I mean, let’s, let’s imagine.
01:54:05 Garbage disposal.
01:54:06 Yeah.
01:54:07 But let’s imagine we are a successful civilization that, you know, has made it to space.
01:54:13 We clearly have, right?
01:54:15 And yes, we’re in the infancy of that pursuit, but, you know, we’ve launched, I don’t know
01:54:20 how many satellites.
01:54:24 If you count GPS satellites, it must be at least thousands.
01:54:29 It’s certainly thousands.
01:54:30 I don’t know if it’s over 10,000, but it’s on that order.
01:54:32 But it’s on that, like a large order of magnitude.
01:54:35 How many of the things that we’ve launched will ever leave the solar system?
01:54:39 I think two.
01:54:40 Two so far.
01:54:41 Well, maybe the Voyager, the Voyager 1, Voyager 2, I don’t know if the Pioneer.
01:54:46 So maybe three.
01:54:47 Oh, there’s also a Tesla Roadster out there.
01:54:52 That one, it will never leave the solar system.
01:54:54 It’ll just, I think that one will eventually collide with Mars.
01:54:57 That can be SpaceX’s first Mars destination.
01:55:02 But look, so there’s an energetic cost to interstellar travel, which is really hard
01:55:08 to overcome.
01:55:09 And when we think about, you know, generically, what do we look for in an alien civilization,
01:55:15 oftentimes we tend to imagine that the thing you look for is the thing that we’re doing
01:55:20 right now.
01:55:21 Yeah.
01:55:22 Right?
01:55:23 So I think that, you know, if I look at the future, right, and for a while, like, okay,
01:55:28 if aliens are out there, they must be broadcasting in radio, right?
01:55:33 That radio, you know, the amount that we broadcast in radio has diminished tremendously in the
01:55:41 last 50 years.
01:55:43 But we’re doing a lot more computation, right?
01:55:46 What are the signs of computation?
01:55:49 Like that’s a good, that’s an interesting question to ask, right?
01:55:53 Where I don’t know, I think something on the order of a few percent of the entire electrical
01:55:58 grid last year went to mining Bitcoin, right?
01:56:03 You know,
01:56:04 Yeah, there could be a lot of in the future, different consequences of the computation,
01:56:09 which I mean, I’m biased, but it could be robotics, it could be artificial intelligence.
01:56:14 So we may be looking for intelligent looking objects, like that’s what I meant by probes,
01:56:22 like things that move in kind of artificial ways.
01:56:25 But the emergence of AI is not an if, right?
01:56:29 It’s happening right in front of our eyes.
01:56:33 And the energetic costs associated with that are becoming, you know, a tangible problem.
01:56:39 So I think, you know, if you imagine kind of extrapolating that into the future, right?
01:56:45 What are the, you know, what becomes the bottleneck, right?
01:56:50 The bottleneck might be powering, you know, powering the AI, broadly speaking, not one
01:56:57 AI, but powering that entire AI ecosystem, right?
01:57:01 So I don’t know, I think, you know, space junk is an is kind of, it’s an interesting
01:57:08 idea, but it’s heavily influenced by like sci fi of 1950s, where by 2020, we’re all
01:57:14 like, flying to the moon.
01:57:17 And so we produce a lot of space junk, I’m not sure if that’s the pathway that alien
01:57:23 civilizations take, I’ve also never seen an alien civilization.
01:57:28 That’s true.
01:57:29 But if your theory of chill turns out to be true, and then we don’t, you know, we don’t
01:57:36 necessarily explore, we seize the exploration phase of a, like alien civilizations quickly
01:57:41 seize the exploration phase of their, of their efforts, then, then perhaps they’ll just be
01:57:49 chilling in a particular space, expanding slowly, but then using up a lot of resources
01:57:56 and then have to have a lot of garbage disposal that sends stuff out.
01:58:00 And the other, you know, the other idea was that it could be a relay that you’ll almost
01:58:06 have like these GPS like markers, these sent throughout, which I think is kind of interesting.
01:58:12 It’s similar to this probe idea of sending a large number of probes out to measure gravitational
01:58:23 to measure basically, yeah, the gravitational field, essentially, I mean, a lot of people
01:58:29 at Caltech or at MIT are trying to measure gravitational fields.
01:58:33 And there’s, there’s a lot of ideas of sending stuff out there that accurately measures those
01:58:41 gravitational fields to have a greater understanding of the early universe.
01:58:47 But then you might realize that communication through gravitation, through gravity is actually
01:58:52 much more effective than, than radio waves, for example, something like that.
01:58:56 And then you send out, I mean, okay, if you’re an alien civilization that’s able to have
01:59:03 gigantic masses, like basically, we’re getting there as a, as a civilization, no, we’re not
01:59:09 not even close.
01:59:10 Well, I mean, I mean, like be able to sort of play with black holes, that kind of thing.
01:59:18 So we’re talking about a whole nother order of magnitude of masses, then it may be very
01:59:23 effective to send signals via gravitational waves.
01:59:27 I actually my sense is that all of these things are genuinely difficult to predict, you know,
01:59:33 and I don’t mean like, to kind of shy away, I just I really mean, if you think if you
01:59:38 take imagination of what the future will look like from, you know, 500 years ago, right?
01:59:46 It’s just, it is so hard to conceive of the impossible, right?
01:59:51 So it’s, it’s almost like, you know, it’s almost limiting to try and imagine things
01:59:58 that are an order of magnitude, you know, or two orders of magnitude ahead in terms
02:00:03 of progress, just because, you know, you mentioned cars before, you know, if you were to ask
02:00:10 people what they wanted in 1870, it’s faster buggies, right?
02:00:15 So so I think the whole like, kind of, you know, alien conversation inevitably gets gets
02:00:23 limited by by our entire kind of collective astrophysical lack of imagination.
02:00:31 So to push back a little bit, I find that it’s really interesting to talk about these
02:00:38 wild ideas about the future, whether it’s aliens, whether it’s AI, with brilliant people
02:00:43 like yourself, who are focused on very particular tools of science, we have today, to solve
02:00:49 very particular, like rigorous scientific questions.
02:00:52 And it’s almost like putting on this wild dreamy hat, like some percent of the time
02:00:56 and say, like, what are like, what would alien civilizations look like?
02:01:00 What would alien trash look like?
02:01:03 Well, what would our own civilization that sends out trillions of AI systems out there,
02:01:09 like how 9000, but 10,000 out there, what would that look like?
02:01:13 And you’re right, any one prediction is probably going to be horrendously wrong.
02:01:18 But there’s something about creating these kind of wild predictions that kind of opens
02:01:22 up.
02:01:23 No, there’s a huge magnetism to it, right?
02:01:26 And some of some of it, you know, I mean, some of the Jules Verne novels did a phenomenal
02:01:35 job predicting the future, right?
02:01:38 That actually was a great example of what you’re talking about, like allowing your imagination
02:01:42 to run free.
02:01:44 I mean, I just hope, I just hope there’s dragons.
02:01:49 That’s like, I love dragons are the best.
02:01:54 But see, the cool thing about science fiction and these kinds of conversations, it doesn’t
02:01:59 just predict the future, I think.
02:02:01 Some of these things will create the future.
02:02:05 Taking the idea, the humans are amazing, like fake it till you make it.
02:02:12 Humans are really good at taking an idea that seems impossible at the time.
02:02:18 And for any one individual human, that idea is like, it’s like planting a seed that eventually
02:02:25 materializes itself.
02:02:26 It’s weird.
02:02:27 It’s weird how science fiction can create science fiction, it drives the science.
02:02:32 I agree with you, and I think in this regard, you know, I’m like a sucker for sci fi.
02:02:43 It’s all I listen to like now when I run and some of it is completely implausible, right?
02:02:50 And it’s just like, I don’t care.
02:02:54 It’s both entertaining and, you know, it’s just like, it’s imagination.
02:03:01 You know about the black clouds book, I think this is by Fred Hoyle.
02:03:05 This is like, this has great connections with sort of a lot of the advancements that are
02:03:09 happening in NLP right now, right, with transformer models and so on.
02:03:16 But you know, it’s this black cloud shows up in the solar system and then, you know,
02:03:21 people try to send radio and then it learns to talk back at you, you know.
02:03:26 So anyway, we don’t have to talk at all about it, but it’s just, it’s something worth checking
02:03:30 out.
02:03:31 With that, on the alien front, with the black cloud, to me, exactly, on the NLP front, and
02:03:36 also just explainability of AI, it’s fascinating.
02:03:39 Just the very question, Stephen Wolfram looked at this with the movie Arrival, it’s like,
02:03:44 what would be the common language that we would discover?
02:03:47 The reason that’s really interesting to me is we have aliens here on earth now.
02:03:51 Japanese.
02:03:52 Japanese, oh yeah.
02:03:53 Japanese is the obvious answer.
02:03:54 Japanese, yeah, that would be the common, maybe it would be music, actually.
02:03:59 That’s more likely.
02:04:00 It wouldn’t be a language.
02:04:01 It would be art that they would communicate.
02:04:04 But you know, I do believe that we have, I’m with Stephen Wolfram on this a little bit,
02:04:09 that to me, computation, like programs we write, that, you know, that they’re kind of
02:04:16 intelligent creatures and I feel like we haven’t found the common language to talk with them.
02:04:21 Like our little creations that are artificial are not born with whatever that innate thing
02:04:28 that produces language with us and like, coming up with mechanisms for communicating with
02:04:34 them is an effort that feels like it will produce some incredible discoveries.
02:04:42 You can even think of, if you think that math has discovered, mathematics in itself is a
02:04:47 kind of…
02:04:48 Oh yeah, it’s an innate construction of the world we live in.
02:04:54 I think we are, you know, part of the way there because pre 1950, right, computers were
02:05:05 human beings that would carry out arithmetic, right?
02:05:09 And I think it was Ulam who worked in Los Alamos at the time, like towards the end of
02:05:17 the second world war, wrote something about how, you know, in the future, right, computers
02:05:23 will not be just arithmetic tool, but will be truly an interactive, you know, thing with
02:05:31 which you could do experiments, right?
02:05:34 At the time, the notion of doing an experiment, not like in the lab with some beakers, but
02:05:40 an experiment on a computer, designing an experiment, a numerical experiment was a new
02:05:47 one.
02:05:48 Like, you know, 70% of what I do is I design, you know, I write code, terrible code to be
02:05:55 clear, like, but, you know, I write code that creates an experiment, which is a simulation.
02:06:04 So in that sense, I think we’re beginning to interact with the computer in a way that
02:06:08 you’re saying, not as just a, you know, fancy calculator, not as just a, you know, call
02:06:14 and request type of thing, but, you know, something that can generate insights that
02:06:23 are otherwise completely unattainable, right there, unattainable by doing analytical mathematics.
02:06:29 Yeah.
02:06:30 And there’s, with AlphaFold 2, we’re now starting to crack open biology, so being able to simulate
02:06:38 at first trivial biological systems and hopefully down the line, complex biological systems.
02:06:43 My hope is to be able to simulate psychological, like sociological systems, like humans.
02:06:49 I’ve, you know, a large part of my work at MIT was on autonomous vehicles, and the fascinating
02:06:57 thing to me was about pedestrians, human pedestrians interacting with autonomous vehicles and simulating
02:07:03 those systems without murdering humans would be very useful, but nevertheless is exceptionally
02:07:07 difficult.
02:07:08 Yeah, I would say so.
02:07:09 When is my Mustang gonna drive itself?
02:07:11 Right.
02:07:12 I’m not even joking, it’s like, yeah.
02:07:16 It turns out it’s much more difficult than we imagined, and I suppose that’s the kind
02:07:23 of, the progress of science is just like, you know, going to Mars, it’s probably going
02:07:32 to turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined.
02:07:35 Sending out probes to investigate Planet 9 at the edge of our solar system might turn
02:07:39 out to be way more difficult than we imagined, but we do it anyway, and we figure it out
02:07:43 in the end.
02:07:44 It’s actually, Mars is a great, I mean, going, sending humans to Mars is way more complicated
02:07:49 than sending humans to the moon.
02:07:51 You’d think, just like naively, both are in space, who cares, like, if you go there, why
02:07:57 don’t you go there, you know, just life support is an extremely expensive thing, yeah.
02:08:05 There’s a bunch of extra challenges, but I disagree with you, I would be one of the early
02:08:09 people to go.
02:08:10 I used to think not, I used to think I’d be one of the first maybe million to go once
02:08:14 you have a little bit of a society, I think I’m upgrading myself to the first like 10,000.
02:08:18 Yeah, that’s right, front of the cabin.
02:08:22 Not completely front, but like, it would be interesting to die, I’m okay with, death sucks,
02:08:30 but I kind of like the idea of dying on Mars.
02:08:34 Of all the places to die, I gotta say, in this regard, like, I don’t wanna die on Mars.
02:08:39 You don’t?
02:08:40 No, no, I would much rather die on Earth.
02:08:45 I mean, death is fundamentally boring, right, like, death is a very boring experience, but
02:08:50 I mean, I’ve never died before, so I don’t know from first hand experience.
02:08:54 As far as you know.
02:08:55 Yeah.
02:08:56 It could be reincarnation, all those kinds of things.
02:08:57 So you mean, where would you die?
02:09:01 If you had to choose?
02:09:04 Oh, man, okay, so I would definitely, there’s a question of who I’d wanna die with, I prefer
02:09:13 not to die alone, but like, surrounded by family would be preferable, where I think
02:09:22 Northern New Mexico, and I’m not even joking, like, this is not a random place, it’s just
02:09:27 like.
02:09:28 Would that be your favorite place on Earth?
02:09:31 Not necessarily, like, favorite place on Earth to reside, you know, indefinitely, but it
02:09:38 is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been to.
02:09:43 So you know, there’s something, I don’t know, there’s something attractive about going,
02:09:49 you know.
02:09:50 Returning to nature in a beautiful place.
02:09:54 Let me ask you about another aspect of your life that is full of beauty, music.
02:09:59 Okay.
02:10:00 You’re a musician.
02:10:02 The absurd question I have to ask, what is the greatest song of all time, objectively
02:10:08 speaking?
02:10:09 The greatest song of all time.
02:10:10 I suppose that could change moment to moment, day to day, but if you were forced to answer
02:10:16 for this particular moment in your life, that’s something that pops to mind, this could be
02:10:20 both philosophically, this could be technically as a musician, like what you enjoy, maybe
02:10:25 lyrics.
02:10:26 Lyrics is very important, so I would probably, it would be, my choice would be lyrics based.
02:10:32 I don’t want to answer in terms of just technical, you know, technical prowess.
02:10:37 I think technical prowess is impressive, right?
02:10:41 It’s just like, it’s impressive what can be done.
02:10:44 I wouldn’t place that into the category of the greatest music ever written.
02:10:49 Some classical music that’s written is undeniably beautiful, but I don’t want to consider that
02:10:57 category of music either, just because, you know, so if I have to limit the scope of this
02:11:06 philosophical discussion to, you know, the kind of music that I listen to, you know,
02:11:13 probably What’s My Age Again by Blink 182, it’s just, you know, it’s a solid one.
02:11:18 It’s got, you know.
02:11:21 Said nobody ever.
02:11:22 That’s a good song.
02:11:23 I don’t know if you’re joking.
02:11:24 No, no.
02:11:25 I am joking.
02:11:26 It’s a good one, but it’s, yeah, I mean.
02:11:29 I was going to come back as a close second.
02:11:32 What’s My Age Again, oh, yeah.
02:11:37 No, I mean, it would probably, you know, songwriting wise, I think The Beatles came pretty close
02:11:44 to.
02:11:45 Were they influential to you?
02:11:46 Absolutely.
02:11:47 Yeah.
02:11:48 Yeah.
02:11:49 Love The Beatles.
02:11:50 I love The Beatles.
02:11:51 Let it be yesterday.
02:11:52 Yeah.
02:11:53 Like, I think Strawberry Fields Forever is one.
02:11:57 You know what one of my favorite Beatles songs is?
02:12:00 It’s, you know, In My Life, right?
02:12:04 It’s hard to imagine how, whatever, a 24 year old wrote that.
02:12:09 It is one of the most introspective pieces of music ever.
02:12:14 You know, I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan, and so I think, you know, if you were to, you can
02:12:20 sort of look at the entire Dark Side of the Moon album as, you know, getting pretty close
02:12:27 up there to the pinnacle of what, you know, can be created, so, you know, Time is a great
02:12:32 song.
02:12:33 Yeah.
02:12:34 It’s a great song.
02:12:35 Just the entirety of just the instruments, the lyrics, the feeling created by a song,
02:12:42 like Pink Floyd can create feelings.
02:12:46 The entire experience, I mean, you have that with The Wall of just transporting you into
02:12:52 another place.
02:12:54 Songs don’t, not many songs could do that as well.
02:12:58 Not many artists can do that as well as Pink Floyd did.
02:13:00 There are a lot of bands that you can kind of say, oh yeah, like if you take Blink 182,
02:13:06 right?
02:13:07 You have no idea, like if you are listening to sort of that type of pop punk for the first
02:13:13 time, it’s difficult to differentiate between Blink 182 and like Sum 41 and the thousand
02:13:20 of other like lesser known bands that all sounded, they all had that sparkling production
02:13:25 feel, they all kind of sounded the same, right?
02:13:32 With Pink Floyd, it’s hard to find another band that you’re like, well, is this one Pink
02:13:38 Floyd?
02:13:39 Like you know when you’re listening to Pink Floyd what you’re listening to.
02:13:43 The uniqueness, that’s fascinating.
02:13:45 You know, in the calculation of the greatest song in the greatest band of all time, you
02:13:51 could probably, you could probably actually quantify this like scientifically, is like
02:13:56 how unique, if you play different songs, how well are people able to recognize whether
02:14:01 it’s this band or not?
02:14:03 And that, you know, that’s probably a huge component to greatness.
02:14:07 Like if the world would miss it if it was gone.
02:14:10 Yes.
02:14:11 Yes.
02:14:12 So.
02:14:13 But there’s also the human story things, like I would say I would put Johnny Cash’s cover
02:14:17 of Hurt as one of the greatest songs of all time.
02:14:22 And that has less to do with the song.
02:14:24 But your interaction with it.
02:14:26 Interaction with it, but also the human, the full story of the human.
02:14:29 You’re like, it’s not just, if I just heard the song, I’d be like, okay.
02:14:34 But if it’s the full story of it, also the video component for that particular song.
02:14:40 So like that, you can’t discount the full experience of it.
02:14:43 Absolutely.
02:14:44 You know, I have no confusion about not, about being, you know, anywhere, you know, in that
02:14:52 league, but I just like sometimes think about, you know, music that is being produced today
02:15:01 feels oftentimes, it feels like kind of clothes, like clothes that you buy at like H&M and
02:15:08 you wear it three times before they rip and you throw away.
02:15:12 So like so much of it is, it’s not bad, it’s just kind of forgettable, right?
02:15:18 Like the fact that we’re talking about Pink Floyd in 2021 is in itself an interesting
02:15:24 question.
02:15:26 Why are we talking about Pink Floyd?
02:15:28 And there’s something unforgettable about them and unforgettable about the art that
02:15:33 they created.
02:15:34 That could be the markets that like, so Spotify has created this kind of market where the
02:15:41 incentives for creating music that lasts is much lower because there’s so much more music.
02:15:46 You just want something that shines bright for a short amount of time, makes a lot of
02:15:50 money and moves on.
02:15:51 And I mean, the same thing you see with the news and all those kinds of things, we’re
02:15:54 just living in a shorter and shorter, shorter like a time scale in terms of our attention
02:16:00 spans.
02:16:01 And that, nevertheless, when we look at the long arc of history of music, perhaps there
02:16:07 will be some songs from today that will last as much as Pink Floyd, we’re just unable to
02:16:12 see it.
02:16:13 Yeah.
02:16:14 Just the collected works of Nickelback.
02:16:15 Exactly.
02:16:16 You never know.
02:16:17 You never know.
02:16:18 Justin Bieber.
02:16:19 It could be a contender.
02:16:20 I’ve recently started listening to Justin Bieber just to understand what people are
02:16:24 talking about.
02:16:25 And I’ll just keep my comments to myself on that one.
02:16:28 It’s too good to explain in words.
02:16:29 The words cannot capture the greatness that is the Biebs.
02:16:35 You as a musician, so you write your own music, you play guitar, you sing.
02:16:44 Maybe can you give an overview of the role music has played in your life?
02:16:49 You’re one of the, you’re a world class scientist.
02:16:52 And so it’s kind of fascinating to see somebody in your position who is also a great musician
02:17:01 and still loves playing music.
02:17:04 Yeah.
02:17:05 Well, I wouldn’t call myself a great musician.
02:17:06 I’m like, you know.
02:17:07 One of the best of all time.
02:17:08 Yeah.
02:17:09 That’s right.
02:17:10 Like we were saying offline, confidence is like the most essential thing about being
02:17:15 a rock star.
02:17:16 That’s right.
02:17:17 Exactly.
02:17:18 It’s the confidence and kind of like moodiness, right?
02:17:20 Yeah.
02:17:21 Yeah.
02:17:22 Look, I mean, music plays an absolutely essential role in everything I do because I lose, if
02:17:31 I stop playing for one reason or another, say I’m traveling, I notably lose creativity
02:17:38 in every other aspect of my life, right?
02:17:41 There’s something, I don’t view, you know, playing music as a separate endeavor from
02:17:48 doing science or doing whatever.
02:17:50 It’s all part of that same creative thing, which is distinct from, I don’t know, pressing
02:18:01 a button or like, you know.
02:18:02 So it’s not a break from science, it’s a part of your science.
02:18:06 Absolutely, it’s a part of, I would say, you know, it’s a thing that enables the science,
02:18:12 right?
02:18:13 The science would, you know, suck even more than it does already without the music.
02:18:19 And that means like the creating of the writing of the music or is it just even playing other
02:18:23 people’s stuff?
02:18:24 Is it the whole of it?
02:18:26 Yeah.
02:18:27 It’s definitely both.
02:18:28 Yeah.
02:18:29 And also just, you know, I love to play guitar, I love to sing, you know.
02:18:36 My wife tolerates my screeching singing, you know, and even kind of likes it.
02:18:44 Yeah, so people should check out your stuff.
02:18:46 You have a great voice, so I love your stuff.
02:18:49 Is there something, you’re super busy, is there something you can say about practicing
02:18:57 for musicians, for guitar, you’re also in a band, so like that whole, how you can manage
02:19:03 that?
02:19:04 Is there some tricks, is there some hacks to being a lifelong musician while being like
02:19:09 super busy?
02:19:11 So I would say, you know, the way that I optimize my life is I try to do, you know, the thing
02:19:19 that I’m passionate about in a moment and put that at the top of the priority list.
02:19:26 There are moments when, you know, you just, you feel inspired to play music and if you’re
02:19:30 in the middle of something, if you can avoid, if that can be put on hold, just do it, right?
02:19:35 There are times when you get inspired about something scientific, you know, I do my best
02:19:43 to drop everything, go into that, you know, mode of, that isolated mode and execute upon
02:19:51 that.
02:19:52 It’s a chaotic, you know, I think I have a pretty chaotic lifestyle where I’m always
02:19:57 doing kind of multiple things and jumping between what I’m doing.
02:20:03 But at the end of the day, it’s not like, you know, those moments of inspiration are
02:20:13 actually kind of rare, right?
02:20:14 Like most of the time, all of us are just doing kind of, doing the stuff that needs
02:20:21 to get done.
02:20:23 If you do the disservice to yourself of saying, oh, I’m inspired to, you know, do this calculation,
02:20:29 figure this out, but I’ve got to answer email or just like do something silly, you know,
02:20:37 that is nothing more than disservice.
02:20:40 And also, like I have some social media presence, but I mostly stay off of, you know, social
02:20:48 media to, you know, just frankly, cause like, I don’t kind of, I don’t enjoy the mental
02:20:55 cycles that it, that it takes over.
02:20:57 Yeah, it robs you of that, the, yeah, those precious moments that could be filled with
02:21:03 inspiration in your, in your other pursuits.
02:21:08 But there’s something to, maybe you and I are different in this, like I tried to play
02:21:12 at least 10 minutes of guitar every day, like almost on the technical side, like keeping
02:21:20 that base of basic competence going.
02:21:27 And I mean, the same way like writers will get in front of a paper no matter what, that
02:21:31 kind of thing, it just feels like that for my life has been essential to the daily ritual
02:21:38 of it.
02:21:39 Why does days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and you haven’t played guitar
02:21:44 for months?
02:21:45 No, no, I, I, I understand.
02:21:47 For me, I think it’s, it’s been like, if we have a gig coming up, we’ll definitely
02:21:53 You need deadlines.
02:21:54 Yeah, yeah, that’s right.
02:21:55 No, like we, we will, we will sharpen up definitely, you know, especially coming up to a gig.
02:22:03 It’s like, you know, we’re not trying to make money with this.
02:22:06 This is like, just for the, for that satisfaction of doing something and doing something well,
02:22:13 right?
02:22:15 But overall, I would say most, I play guitar most days, most days.
02:22:22 And you know, when I put kids to sleep, I play guitar, you know, with them and we like,
02:22:29 just make up random songs about, you know, about our cat or something, you know, like
02:22:35 we just do kind of random stuff.
02:22:39 But you know, music is always involved in that process.
02:22:41 Yeah, keeping it fun.
02:22:43 You have Russian roots?
02:22:44 I sure do.
02:22:45 Were you born in Russia?
02:22:46 I was.
02:22:47 Yeah.
02:22:48 When did you come here?
02:22:49 So, I came to the US in very, the very end of 99.
02:22:55 But so I was like, almost 14 years old.
02:22:59 But along the way, we spent six years in Japan.
02:23:03 So like, we moved from Russia to Japan in 94, and then to the US in 99.
02:23:10 So did like elementary school, middle school in Japan.
02:23:14 So elementary school in Japan.
02:23:16 Yeah.
02:23:17 So, that’s interesting, dad.
02:23:19 Do you still speak Russian?
02:23:20 Sure.
02:23:21 Okay.
02:23:22 Ты по русски говоришь?
02:23:23 Да, конечно.
02:23:24 Okay, maybe I’ll, let me ask you, in Russian, что ты помнишь о России?
02:23:31 It’d be interesting to hear you speak Russian.
02:23:33 В общем, в целом, я помню, то есть мне было восемь, когда
02:23:38 мы уехали, и, конечно, как сказать, помню в первом
02:23:47 приближении всё, включая вот переход, там, 91, 92 год,
02:23:52 вот этот вот, вот этот турбулентный период, и ещё, естественно,
02:23:56 93.
02:23:57 То есть ещё я очень хорошо помню, как в какой то момент
02:24:03 сначала появилась пепси кола, а потом появилась
02:24:07 кока кола.
02:24:08 Я потом, я помню, я был лет, не знаю, в шесть, и я потом,
02:24:13 как так может быть, что кока кола украла продукт и
02:24:17 сделала то же самое?
02:24:18 То есть я никогда, я долго думал, что и пепси, и кока
02:24:26 колу изобрели, типа, в 92 году.
02:24:30 So for people who don’t speak Russian, Konstantin was talking
02:24:33 about basically his first, in 1992, interaction with capitalism,
02:24:39 which is Pepsi, and at first he discovered Pepsi, and then he
02:24:43 discovered Coke, and he was confused how such, how such
02:24:47 theft could occur.
02:24:48 Yeah, like an intellectual property theft.
02:24:50 And remember, Pepsi arrived to the Soviet Union first,
02:24:55 and there was some, there’s some complicated story which I
02:24:58 don’t quite understand the details of.
02:25:00 For a while, Pepsi like commanded submarines or
02:25:05 something.
02:25:06 Yeah, Pepsi had like a fleet of Soviet submarines that it
02:25:09 was.
02:25:10 They were sponsoring tanks and this fascinating.
02:25:13 And I remember, there’s certain things that trickled in, like
02:25:16 McDonald’s, I remember that was a big deal.
02:25:18 Oh yeah.
02:25:19 Certain aspects of the West.
02:25:20 Absolutely.
02:25:21 So, I mean, we went to McDonald’s, and we stood on, I mean,
02:25:25 this is, this is absurd, right, from, kind of looking at it
02:25:29 from today’s perspective, but we stood in line for like six
02:25:33 hours to get into this McDonald’s, and I remember inside
02:25:38 it was just like a billion people, and I’m just taking a
02:25:42 bite out of that Big Mac, and we’re like, wow.
02:25:47 What was it, an incredible experience for you?
02:25:49 So, like, what is this taste of the West like?
02:25:52 Did you enjoy it?
02:25:53 I enjoyed the fact that, I mean, this is like, this is getting
02:25:58 into the weeds, but I really enjoyed the fact that the top of
02:26:01 the bun had those seeds, you know, like, and I remember how
02:26:06 on the commercials, like, the Big Mac would kind of bounce.
02:26:08 I was like, the seeds, how do they inject the seeds into the
02:26:12 bread?
02:26:13 Like, amazing.
02:26:14 Yeah.
02:26:15 Right.
02:26:16 So, I think it was…
02:26:17 Artistry.
02:26:18 Yeah.
02:26:19 But you enjoyed the artistry of the culinary experience.
02:26:21 Exactly.
02:26:22 It was the, you know, it was the food art that is the Big Mac.
02:26:25 Actually, I still don’t know the answer to that.
02:26:27 How do they get the sesame seeds on the bun?
02:26:28 It’s better to not know the answer.
02:26:31 You just wander the mystery of it all.
02:26:33 Yeah, I remember it being exceptionally delicious, but I’m with you, I don’t know, you didn’t
02:26:39 mention how transformative Pepsi was, but to me, basically sugar based stuff, like Pepsi
02:26:45 was, or Coke, I don’t remember which one we partook in, but that was an incredible experience.
02:26:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.
02:26:53 And, you know, I think it’s, you know, it was an important and formative period.
02:27:04 I sometimes, I guess, rely on that a little bit, you know, in my daily life, because I
02:27:10 remember, like, the early 90s were real rough, you know, like my parents were kind of on
02:27:18 the bottom of the spectrum in terms of, you know, in terms of financial well being.
02:27:26 So kind of like just when I run into trouble, not like, you know, money trouble, just any
02:27:35 kind of trouble these days, it just kind of is not particularly meaningful when you compare
02:27:42 it to that turbulent time of the early 90s.
02:27:45 And the other thing is, I think there’s like an advantage to being, you know, an immigrant,
02:27:52 which is that you go through the mental exercise of changing your environment completely early
02:27:59 in your life, right?
02:28:00 You go, it’s by no means, you know, pleasant in the moment, right, but like going into
02:28:07 Japanese elementary school, right, like, I didn’t go to some, like, private, you know,
02:28:13 thing, I just went to a regular, like, Japanese public elementary school, and I was the non
02:28:19 Japanese person in my class.
02:28:22 So just like to learn Japanese and just kind of.
02:28:26 So that’s a super humbling experience in many ways was when you like made fun of all that
02:28:30 kind of stuff.
02:28:31 Oh, yeah.
02:28:32 Being the outsider.
02:28:33 Oh, absolutely.
02:28:34 But, you know, you kind of do, you kind of do that, and then you kind of, then you just
02:28:41 kind of are okay with stuff, you know what I mean?
02:28:44 And so like doing that, again, in middle school in the US, it was arguably easy, because I
02:28:50 was like, yeah, well, I’ve already done this before.
02:28:53 So I think it kind of prepares you mentally a little bit for switching up for whatever,
02:28:59 you know, changes that will come up for the rest of your life.
02:29:02 So I wouldn’t trade that, that experience really for anything.
02:29:08 It’s a huge aspect of who I am, and I’m sure you can relate to a lot of this.
02:29:14 Yes.
02:29:15 Is there advice from your life that you can give to young people today, high school, college,
02:29:22 you know, about their career, or maybe about life in general?
02:29:26 I’m not like a career coach, but I’m definitely not a life coach.
02:29:32 I don’t have it all figured out.
02:29:33 But I think there’s a perpetual cycle of, you know, thinking that there is a, there’s
02:29:45 kind of like a template for success, right?
02:29:48 Maybe there is, but in my experience, I haven’t seen it, right?
02:29:56 You know, I would say people in high school, right?
02:30:01 So much of their focus is on getting straight A’s, filling their CV with this and this and
02:30:07 this so that it looks impressive, right?
02:30:13 That is not, I think, a good way to optimize your life, right?
02:30:17 Do the thing that fills your life with passion.
02:30:20 Do the thing that fills your life with interest.
02:30:24 And you know, do that perpetually, right?
02:30:28 A straight A student, you know, is really impressive, but also, you know, somewhat boring,
02:30:36 right?
02:30:37 So, I think, you know, injection of more of that kind of interest into the lives of young
02:30:44 people would go a long way in just both upping their level of happiness and then just kind
02:30:51 of ensuring that, looking forward, they are not suffering from a, you know, perpetual
02:30:58 condition of, oh, I have to satisfy these, like, you know, check boxes to do well, right?
02:31:04 Because you can lose yourself in that whole process for the rest of your life, but it’s
02:31:08 nice if it’s possible, like Max Tegmark was exceptionally good at this at MIT, figure
02:31:13 out how you can spend a small part of your, percent of your efforts that, such that your
02:31:20 CV looks really impressive.
02:31:21 Yeah, absolutely.
02:31:23 There’s no, like, without a doubt, like, that’s a baseline that you need to have.
02:31:31 And then, so like, spend most of your time doing like amazing things you’re passionate
02:31:35 about, but such that it kind of like Planet Nine produces objects that feed your CV, like,
02:31:44 slowly over time.
02:31:45 Like getting good grades in high school, maybe doing extracurricular activities or in terms
02:31:50 of like, you know, for programmers that’s producing code that you can show up on GitHub,
02:31:55 like leaving traces, like, throughout your efforts, such that your CV looks impressive
02:32:01 to the rest of the world.
02:32:02 In fact, I mean, this is somewhat along the lines of what I’m talking about, see, like,
02:32:08 getting like good grades is important, but grades are not a tangible, like, product.
02:32:14 You cannot, you know, show your A and have your A live a separate life from you.
02:32:21 Code very much does, right?
02:32:24 Music very much takes on, you know, provided somebody else listens to it, like, takes on
02:32:31 a life of its own.
02:32:33 That’s kind of what I mean, right?
02:32:36 Creating stuff that can then get separated from you is exceptionally attractive, right?
02:32:45 It’s like a fun and…
02:32:47 And it’s also very impressive to others.
02:32:50 I think we’re moving to a world where grades mean less and less, like certifications mean
02:32:54 less and less.
02:32:55 If you look at, especially again in the computing fields, getting a degree, finishing your,
02:33:02 especially just finishing your degree, whether it’s bachelor’s or master’s or PhD is less
02:33:07 important than the things you’ve actually put out into the world.
02:33:11 And that’s a fascinating kind of, that’s great that in that sense, the meritocracy is in
02:33:16 its richest, most beautiful form is starting to win out.
02:33:20 Yeah, it’s weird because like, you know, my understanding, and I’m not like, I don’t know
02:33:26 the history of science well enough to speak very confidently about this, but, you know,
02:33:31 the advisor of my advisor of my advisor from undergrad, like didn’t have a PhD, right?
02:33:39 So I think it was a more common thing back in the day, even in the academic sector to,
02:33:49 you know, not have, you know, Faraday, like Faraday didn’t know algebra and drew diagrams
02:33:56 about, you know, magnetic fields and Faraday’s law was derived entirely from intuition.
02:34:03 So it is interesting to how the world of academia has evolved into a, you’ve got to do this
02:34:11 and then get PhD, then you have to postdoc once and twice and maybe thrice and then like
02:34:17 you move on.
02:34:18 So, you know, it does, I do wonder, you know, if we’re, you know, if there’s a better approach.
02:34:25 I think we’re heading there, but it’s a fascinating historical perspective, like that we might
02:34:29 have just tried this whole thing out for a while where we put a lot more emphasis on
02:34:34 grades and certificates and degrees and all those kinds of things.
02:34:38 I think the difference historically is like we can actually, using the internet, show
02:34:43 off ourselves and our creations better and better and more effectively, whether that’s
02:34:51 code or producing videos or all those kinds of things.
02:34:54 That’s right.
02:34:55 I want to become a certified drone pilot.
02:35:00 Of all the things you want to pick, yeah, for sure.
02:35:03 Or you could just fly and make YouTube videos against hundreds of thousands of views with
02:35:06 your drone and never getting a certificate.
02:35:10 That’s probably illegal.
02:35:11 Don’t do it.
02:35:12 What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
02:35:14 So you look at planets, they seem to orbit stuff without asking the why question.
02:35:23 And for some reason, life emerged on Earth such that it led to big brains that can ask
02:35:28 the big why question.
02:35:30 Do you think there’s an answer to it?
02:35:34 I’m not sure what the question is.
02:35:37 Meaning of life?
02:35:38 The meaning of life.
02:35:40 It’s 42.
02:35:41 It’s 42.
02:35:42 Yeah.
02:35:43 But aside from that, I think the question you’re asking is why we do all this, right?
02:35:54 Why we do all this.
02:35:58 It’s part of the human condition, right?
02:36:00 Human beings are fundamentally, I feel like, sort of stochastic and fundamentally interested
02:36:11 in kind of expanding our own understanding of the world around us.
02:36:18 And creating stuff to enable that understanding.
02:36:21 So we’re like stochastic, fundamentally stochastic.
02:36:24 So like there’s just a bunch of randomness that really doesn’t seem like it has a good
02:36:27 explanation and yet there’s a kind of direction to our being that we just keep wanting to
02:36:33 create and to understand.
02:36:34 That’s right.
02:36:35 There are people that claim to be anti science, right?
02:36:41 And yet in their anti science discussion, they’re like, well, if you’re so scientific,
02:36:50 then why don’t you explain to me how, I don’t know, this works.
02:36:54 And like it always, there’s that fundamental seed of curiosity and interest that is common
02:37:00 to all of us.
02:37:02 That is absolutely what makes us human, right?
02:37:08 And I’m in a privileged position of being able to have that be my job, right?
02:37:16 I think as time evolves forward and the kind of economy changes, I mean, we’re already
02:37:26 starting to see a shift towards that type of creative enterprise as taking over a bigger
02:37:36 and bigger chunk of the sector.
02:37:39 It’s not yet, I think, the dominant portion of the economy by any account.
02:37:45 But if we compare this to sometime when the dominant thing you would do would be to go
02:37:53 to a factory and do the same exact thing, I think there’s a tide there and things are
02:38:00 sort of headed in that direction.
02:38:02 Yeah, life’s becoming more and more fun.
02:38:04 I can’t wait.
02:38:05 Honestly, what happens next?
02:38:06 I can’t wait to just chill.
02:38:07 Just chill.
02:38:08 The terminal point of this is just chill and wait for those Kuiper Belt objects to complete
02:38:13 one orbit.
02:38:14 I’m going to credit you with this idea.
02:38:17 I do hope that we definitively discover a proof that there is a Planet 9 out there in
02:38:24 the next few years so you can sit back with a cigar or cigarette or vodka or wine and
02:38:29 just say, I told you so.
02:38:32 That’s already happening.
02:38:33 I’m going to do that later tonight.
02:38:36 As I mentioned, confidence is essential to being a rock star.
02:38:40 I really appreciate you explaining so many fascinating things to me today.
02:38:45 I really appreciate the work that you do out there and I really appreciate you talking
02:38:50 with me today.
02:38:51 Thanks, Constantine.
02:38:52 It was a pleasure.
02:38:53 Thanks for having me on.
02:38:54 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Constantine Batygin and thank you to
02:38:57 Squarespace, Litterati, Onnit, And, and I.
02:39:02 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
02:39:06 And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to
02:39:10 the Galaxy.
02:39:12 Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm
02:39:18 of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
02:39:23 Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant
02:39:30 little blue green planet whose ape descendant life forms are so amazingly primitive that
02:39:36 they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
02:39:41 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.