Jack's war. Yeah, you're not comparing to hundreds or something. Yeah, so I I would just sort of hold my breath on that one and wait. Let's revisit that in 10 years and I bet it'll be totally normal. Would be my guess. Looks like the hundreds we find. All right, number eight. It arrived from a direction coincident with the radio quote wow signal unquote to within 9° with a likelihood of .6%. I don't know what that means. Okay, so it was a radio signal was detected in the 1970s called the wow signal that a lot of people think is the most convincing evidence of a alien transmission we've ever received.
0:33It was detected by the Big Ear telescope in Ohio State. Um and it's still anomalous. There's no Yeah, people it was just like literally when we had like print you know ticket tape printouts and you just see this like beep this like one part of the sky suddenly get loud in the radio.
0:52Um I've actually written papers about that signal before trying to figure out exactly what it is.
0:57Um it's a mystery. It remains a mystery. It it's never repeated and that's kind of curious. I've been advocating that we should observe it more intensely because um a lot of people a lot of astronomers said hey the fact it hasn't repeated means it's not aliens but we haven't actually looked at that carefully. So I've been advocating that we need to have more serious effort to survey that guy.
1:17Um and so this if you look at whereabouts in the sky that comes from 3I Outlets it's coming um 9° off. But 9° is a lot. I mean it's actually not in space close at all. I mean if you stretch that out That's crazy. these kind of distances you're talking like tens of thousands of light years separated. So this is this just isn't it's too far to be like a meaningful If it was like exactly where it was within like .1° or something then I'd be like okay Avi's got a point but 9° is just is massive.
1:44>> Yeah, we're thinking about it in near term effects. Like if I do this right here. Right. You stretch that out by by huge cosmic distances and you're talking about things which are so far apart from each other.
1:56I've actually written papers about that signal before trying to figure out exactly what it is. Um it's a mystery. It remains a mystery. It it's never repeated and that's kind of curious. I've been advocating that we should observe it more intensely because um a lot of people a lot of astronomers said hey the fact it hasn't repeated means it's not aliens but we haven't actually looked at that carefully. So I've been advocating that we need to have more serious effort to survey that guy. Um and so this if you look at whereabouts in the sky that comes from 3I Outlets it's coming um 9° off. But 9° is a lot. I mean it's actually not in
2:11space close at all. I mean if you stretch that out these kind of distances you're talking like tens of thousands of light years separated. So this is this just isn't it's too far to be like a meaningful If it was like exactly where it was within like .1° or something then I'd be like okay Avi's got a point but 9° is just is massive. Yeah, we're thinking about it in near term effects.
2:26Like if I do this right here. And if I do 45 degrees that looks like an artist's impression. Yeah.
2:32I don't think I don't think this is necessarily a a single image. It's just a collection of observations put together.
2:41They've they've pieced that yeah.
2:44Let's go to number 10.
2:46Whatever that is.
2:49>> [snorts] >> All right, so 3I Outlets exhibits non-gravitational acceleration which requires massive evaporation of at least 13% of its mass but preliminary post-perihelion images do not show the evidence for it so far.
3:06Yeah, I mean again this this is exactly what comets do. They lose a ton of mass when they get close to the sun. It's a ball of ice and snow. As it gets close to a a freaking star is going to boil off a lot of that snow and ice. So the fact it's losing a lot of mass is exactly what a comet should do. So yeah, I don't I don't really get this one as an anomaly. It's just it's exactly what it should do. I think all of these anomalies by the way are are like changing. So when the when the first Avi was first writing about this I think there was only like four or five anomalies and it's kind of like the list
3:40has grown. And that's a little bit precarious as well because you're kind of like oh it did something else. I'm going to add this on and add this on.
3:46But all the stuff that it does that's normal you don't add on. So you know it's again this kind of like P-hacking mentality of just like selectively choosing things to kind of engineer the narrative to be to to be as as strange as you want it to be. So I think that's a little bit precarious. And some of the things I mean when it was some of the initial anomalies that Avi was writing about was the fact it doesn't have a coma. So when it was first detected it we couldn't see any coma or tail off it at all. But that was when it was really far out and they had you know really far out in the solar system.
4:14And then it started to develop a coma.
4:16And so as soon as it had a coma and a tail that seemed a lot of us a lot of astronomers were like oh that's going to Avi's going to give up on this now because um it's doing the thing that a comet does which is have a coma and a tail. He's going to forget about that. But then instead he said um he wrote this on his blog that um actually I think this is a spaceship that's producing a shield.
4:36It's like flying off particles to try and protect it from space dust and it just happens to like look very similar to what a comet would do. So again it's kind of like you're changing the story as you go along. Like just if it's if it's a ship and it's not producing anything then just stick with that hypothesis and that hypothesis is now out. Like once you've got observations which undermine your hypothesis it's rejected. But you can't keep editing the hypothesis on the fly to fit the data in real time cuz then it's not that's not science. That's just um that's just story weaving, right? So this is the big aliens is like such a
5:13flexible hypothesis.
5:16Aliens can explain anything. So literally anything that happens in the universe in this room uh the reason why your mom doesn't call you tomorrow or the reason why you dropped your coffee down the stairs. You could always just say oh aliens did that and I can't prove you wrong but it doesn't make it a good hypothesis just cuz it can it's too malleable and too flexible. I think you really need to see something pretty extraordinary. So but yeah like I said if it stopped if it shined a laser beam at us or something I sent a radio emission at us like you know hey we're here like here's a television signal beamed your way or
5:48something. I'd be down with it. But this everything on this list is like very much what comets do. Maybe it's a slightly unusual thing like extreme example of what a comet would do but it's definitely very comet-like everything it's doing. We know approximately how old it it is. We know where it's coming from. We know the path it's been taking and therefore the projected path it's going to take past that. And it hasn't like you you gave an example early on the conversation like well if it suddenly went up or down or all around or okay you might think like something's maneuvering that but it hasn't there's no evidence to show it's
6:23done any of that. And I can't disprove a negative. No one can. So I can't prove to anyone here who's listening who really believes this is an alien spaceship. I can't prove to you it's not an alien spaceship because you can't.
6:33You can never prove that something is not alien. I can't prove that anything in this room is not made by an alien, right? It's impossible to do that. So if you want to like have that as a personal hypothesis you can but unless it unless it does something that nature just absolutely cannot do and it breaks our understanding of nature then that's the only time that I think that the scientific community are going to get behind it. And look I think what we all want do you really want to have like a personal hypothesis that is just you I think um this thing is alien or I think we all want to convince peers. We want
7:05to convince our friends that what we saw was real. You know that this was a real alien ship that you encountered. And the only way to get buy-in is to provide really compelling evidence that even the you want the evidence to be so good that even the skeptics are like I can't I can't fault you man. Like you're right.
7:20Like there's no you know it's like Michael Jordan was so good that even the people that hated Michael Jordan were like damn he's the best. Like there's no there's no way around that. And that's what we want in science. We want it to be like so clear and crisp that even the skeptics have to shut up because and that's how all of science works. It's not particular to aliens. If you're going to claim you've got like a new theory of gravity or you think you've discovered a new exoplanet it has to be that everyone who comes at that data is going to arrive at the same conclusion no matter what different assumptions
7:48they're making. So this is and I think aliens is is like it's got an even bigger responsibility to sort of you know take this more carefully because we're so invested in it. 100% and it's like you can't get too excited about it. And what it seems like from what you're telling me today is that you know in for this particular argument a lot of the scientific community seems to be on the other side of Avi Loeb and saying like this is probably what we're looking at.
8:16It's probably not an alien spaceship because the evidence like this is a lot of this is too chancery. I'm making up a word there but it's not it's not like intense like down to point 40 million zeros one evidence or anything like that. Everything's on the on is is either completely exactly what a comet should do like have a tail and a comet and produce those gases or it's comet-like but like an extreme comet.
8:39It's a but yeah if it was a Trojan horse like why would it why wouldn't why wouldn't it do a better job if that was true? So I just I think the alien hypothesis is is is in deep trouble with this object but I do admire Avi for um pushing cuz this is I mean it's easy to to say this and get ridiculed, right?
8:57And I think Avi has been ridiculed for that. And I don't ridicule Avi for pushing the alien hypothesis um because I do think we need um it's easy to get stuck in groupthink and get too conservative and just like ridicule anyone who tries to do something different and and push the envelope. So even though I disagree with Avi that I don't think this is alien.
9:18I'm not going to like throw on him and say he's an idiot for saying this. I think it's he's he's you know pursuing his scientific ideas and I disagree with it in a respectful way.
9:30Um but I'm not going to like personally attack him as saying like he's he's a doofus for like coming up with this idea. That's how it should be. This is what science is supposed to be. We've lost sight of this in the modern era and it's not just science. It's every part of culture. It's like you throw mud on each other to get more clicks and therefore every everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot and that doesn't get anyone anywhere. I've always said you know the greatest lie we ever perpetuated on humanity was that science and religion were competing. They're both seeking the answer to the same
10:01thing. And then I we that's just been downstream to everything else, be it politics, culture, whatever it may be.
10:06We are always thinking that, you know, the other idea can exist for us to exist or whatever, and that's not how it is.
10:13You're constantly trying to find things that one day are going to disprove every single thing that like a brilliant guy like Albert Einstein came up with.
10:20That's the whole point, you know?
10:22>> Yeah, I agree. It's It's kind of like a business. Like if you're an entrepreneur and you start a company, your first company might fail and the second one might fail, but maybe you know if you if you keep getting chances, you'll eventually figure out how it works and break through. And America's great because you know, it has really good like loan forgiveness and like it lets people keep trying. Whereas if you try if you start business in France and it fails, like you're not allowed to get a loan for like 50 years.
10:43>> [laughter] >> Like right? They just They don't want you to ever try again. And I do kind of worry maybe Avi's wrong about this, but hey, maybe he'll be right about another signal. Maybe not a comet, but something else in the future. And I'm worried that a lot of scientists will just not pay attention to him because they're like, you burned your reputation, dude, with this one. I'm not I'm not going to listen to anything you say ever again.
11:04And that's that's also very close-minded. Like we have to It's like Icarus, right? You're going to You have to fly close to the sun to take to to really advance. And maybe in this case, in my opinion, I think the wings are melting off and he's falling, but we should keep giving the dude a chance to like to push the envelope, yeah.
11:22>> Yeah. Yeah, if you bring evidence, it should be evaluated. And if the evidence is good, then you take a further look.
11:28If it's things that maybe can be refuted in good scientific mathematical ways, then you go, okay, this isn't the one, pal. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it shouldn't be that hard. But when did you like did you grow up wanting to be an astrophysicist? Were you just fascinated with space as a little kid? I was always fascinated space. Yeah, I remember I remember living planets in the universe as a kid. I loved sci-fi. I loved Star Trek. I grew up I loved Star Trek growing up. Next Generation was my bag.
11:55>> [laughter] >> Yeah, and Star Wars and that kind of stuff.
11:58And then yeah, I thought I was going to be a physicist when I was about sort of 12, 13. I was getting really interested in physics and I had a great high school teacher, Mr. Fox, and he gave me a lot of physics books and the science like, you should check this out. And I was reading it and I was like, oh wow, this is crazy. Like there's neutrinos passing through my brain right now. It's like all these particles everywhere. It kind of was like an enlightenment like when you realize the world's so much more complicated than you think. So I studied physics at college. And then when I was at college, I started to come back to
12:27space because I got the impression for right or maybe it's probably wrong. I think it is partially wrong, but that to make progress in physics was was getting really hard. Like you needed like billions and billions of dollars to you know, have these huge teams of thousands of people and you were just going to be one very small cog in that machine.
12:47Whereas in astronomy, there's a hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and there's only eight billion people on Earth. So each of us can have a hundred stars to ourselves, more than that, right? Just You can have just a hundred stars that you yourself could study your whole life and everyone else can have their own hundred stars. We could all move there and have our This is my hundred star system that I live on. And each of those would have about ten planets and you know, you could have a thousand planets to yourself, right?
13:13[laughter] So That's That's just how ridiculous the scale of the universe is and I realized we are never going to like get bored of this. We're never going to run out of stuff to discover because we only know of a percent of a percent of a percent of what's out there. And in physics, it kind of I'm sure there's a vast amount we don't know about as well, but it felt to me like all the rapid progress and discovery was happening in in the universe, yeah.
13:40So you start to take that journey through school itself and then you get into that and eventually like and you've mentioned this term several times today. I think you started to explain it once, but you developed a specialty in identifying exoplanets and observing them. So for people out there that just want to understand what that is as a recap, what is an exoplanet?
14:02>> Yeah, it's just a planet that orbits another star. That's what it means. So exo means outside. So extrasolar is is the full name, but we just shorten it to exoplanets.
14:11So we know of about 5,000 to 6,000 exoplanets, I believe at the time of writing, which is obviously a lot. We've only discovered those in the last 20 years.
14:205,000 to 6,000? About six I think it's about 6,000 confirmed planets now.
14:26Um and the discovery started about 20, 25 years ago and there's been a you know, a rapid explosion in discovery over that time. And yeah, I was in college when the first ones were being discovered. And to me as a young person, this was like this is It's like the gold rush in San Francisco, right? Everyone you know, as a young person you're like, this is where all the shit's happening.
14:44I want to get over there and pick up some gold for myself. And I've discovered myself like probably a dozen planets or something. Like I don't even count them, but yeah, I've just I've found >> [laughter] >> Thank you very much myself in my career.
14:55Which is kind of weird to think about, you know? How do you find How do you find one? So the way [snorts] I There's a few different ways. The way I normally use is called the transit method, which is to look for eclipses, basically. So these planets are so far away, you know, thousands of light years away sometimes that you can't possibly take a photo of them. They're just At that distance, the star and the planet are just a blob of light. You can't possibly see them. But if the orbital inclination is correct, it will sometimes eclipse in front of the star. The same reason why we had like the you know, the when the moon
15:25eclipsed the sun, called a solar eclipse.
15:28Maybe you saw those two great American eclipses we had fairly recently in the US, which was awesome to see.
15:32>> Stare right at it.
15:33>> Yeah, yeah. It was Well, you want the glasses, but yeah. Be careful with that.
15:36So yeah, I really enjoyed watching those. And it's the same thing. You can also see transits of Venus. Venus sometimes goes in front of the sun.
15:44And you can catch that. Probably need a telescope or good binoculars to catch those, but those are fun to watch.
15:48And so in the same sense, some of these exoplanets will serendipitously pass in front of their star. And as they do, the star gets dimmer, right? Cuz some of the light's being blocked out. So that's what we look for. We just look for these like stars that are winking at us, basically. Just getting like a little bit dimmer and then they get back to normal. And we notice that every ten days that happens. And so if it happens every ten days, that means the planet is on an orbital period of ten days around its star. So that's its year. And you can identify that that's a planet versus you know, some sort of like loose piece
16:19in space or something like that strictly because of the size. Yeah, well you know it's an orbiting object if it repeats.
16:25The the size of it basically tells you.
16:27So a lot of the objects we detect are typically like you know, between the size of Neptune and Jupiter. So that's not debris, obviously if it's the size of Neptune, that's that's a pretty big object. Yeah, if you make the planet twice as big, it blocks out four times the amount of light. So that means big planets are really easy to find, but small planets are really hard to find.
16:45And the smallest planets we can currently detect are about the size the moon at best, but typically the Earth. So we can find Earth-size planets.
16:54There's a really beautiful star system called TRAPPIST-1. The TRAPPIST-1?
16:59>> Yeah, that I recommend everyone Google at some point. It has It's the most famous exoplanet system at this point.
17:04It has seven planets. They're all Earth-size. Three of them in the habitable zone of the star. In the hat meaning like you could actually land on them and you're not frying to death or freezing to death.
17:14>> habitable zone here just means that the temperature is similar to the Earth, basically.
17:18>> Wow. Yeah, so they have the right distance for life. This is at TRAPPIST-1?
17:23>> Yeah, and this is most astronomers' favorite exoplanet system.
17:27The seven It's a really dim star. The star is about eight times less massive than the sun.
17:33And so it's a really diminutive star.
17:35It's very red because it's so cool. And so the planets are actually packed in really close in. I think all seven planets are closer in than Mercury is around the sun. All seven of them.
17:45So you know, like the They're kind of the same sort of distance that the moon is from us.
17:50So if there's an alien civilization here, they could like hop from planet to planet like no problem. You've super easy. If I even like if there was life on one of these planets, it would almost certainly just spread out between the planets by rocks just being knocked off from between them. How far away is this approximately? About 30 light years, which is actually pretty close. That's actually really close by astronomy standards, yeah. So this is a very nearby favorite object. James Webb is is spending a lot of time looking at this thing. And planet E, right in the middle there, that is we think the most
18:22Earth-like planet of the bunch in terms of its is like the perfect distance, really. And so there's a huge amount of attention to try and figure out does that have an atmosphere? And does that atmosphere maybe have oxygen? Does it have, you know, these molecules that we [clears throat] have in our planet?
18:37>> But we can't tell that yet with the tools we have. Like it's too still too far.
18:41>> So far what we can tell is that planet B and C do not have atmospheres. That's something that James Webb has told us.
18:47So in the last year, we've discovered that. The inner two planets are so close to the star that the atmosphere must have been removed somehow. It's probably like been stripped off from the stellar from the stellar activity. Wow, so almost like burned away. Yeah. So the question is what's D like? D, there's some ambiguity.
19:05We need a bit more data. And E, we're collecting that data right now. So we Have we even been able to tell like, oh, there there's water there? Or still no?
19:14No. We don't even know if there's an atmosphere there at this point, yeah.
19:17Now how do you collect that data then?
19:19Like you say we're collecting that data now. Yeah, so it's mostly it's a lot of transit work, actually. So that same technique of how we detect the planet, imagine you do that same observation, you see the dip in light of starlight.
19:32Now you repeat that observation, let's say we're imagining the Earth transit the sun. And we do it in the blue wavelengths of light. And we do it in the red wavelengths of light. Now what color is the sky?
19:45To me, it's blue.
19:46>> Yeah, it's blue sky. And that's because our atmosphere is Chris Chris Pack. was I was waiting for a trick question there. I'm like, to me that shit's [laughter] blue. Yeah, Pack right here, A plus. We're we go.
19:58>> [laughter] >> We got We have a blue sky because the molecules in our atmosphere scatter blue light.
20:06So, if we didn't have an atmosphere, obviously that wouldn't happen. The sky would just look black. You wouldn't have any of that. So, if a alien was watching the Earth transit the Sun and they did it in the blue wavelength, the you can kind of think of the atmosphere as being like a peak. Like it would block out all the blue light. So, all the blue light wouldn't be able to travel through the atmosphere. It gets stopped by our atmosphere. And that and bounces around.
20:26That's what makes it look blue.
20:28So, therefore, the planet is effectively a bit bigger because it's the rock plus the atmosphere. So, that's its size. Whereas in the red wavelengths of light, when you can see a sunset, the red light just goes straight through, no problem. So, red just travels straight through the atmosphere and it will come out the other end, no problem. So, the red light the the atmosphere is not there essentially. It's just the rock by itself. So, you would see a bigger planet in blue wavelengths and a smaller planet in red wavelengths. And you can break that down into more fine colors.
20:59You know, you could look at individual wavelengths of light. And carbon dioxide, for example, absorbs at exactly 4.6 microns, I think it is. And it makes the planet look huge. So, you're looking at all these wavelengths like 4.0, 4.1, 4.2. It's just the same size, same size, same size. And then you go to 4.6 and suddenly the planet looks bigger. And you're like, "Holy like it's got carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cuz that's the thing that absorbs at that that wavelength." So, that's how we can tell. Like we see the planets get bigger basically at the wavelengths of light where certain molecules absorb.
21:31Whoa. Yeah, it's pretty clever.
21:33>> It all And it all comes back to the >> smell. We can smell the atmosphere. We can smell it?
21:38>> That's what we do, right?
21:40Wait, what? Wait, now you're losing me.
21:41Not not literally, but Okay.
21:43>> [laughter] >> We are we are kind of figuring out the chemical composition. We're It's like a sniffascope. You're You're seeing the light break down. You can figure out the the chemical the chemicals. It is essentially, you know, it's using the sense of smell I Maybe it's not a good analogy. That's the way I think about it. Yeah, you got to watch it cuz I'll start believing you when you start telling [laughter] me like, "Yeah, we can smell that shit." I think the future I In future armor, like he actually builds a sniffascope in in the show where >> [laughter] >> Well, they say art imitates life,
22:14[laughter] life imitates art. So, you never know. Yeah. But what So, when you you have this whole cool cool worlds program over at Columbia that you've been doing, you also have an amazing YouTube channel where you bring it to the public >> [snorts] >> as well. But like, what's your process?
22:26Like do you walk in there and say, "All right, let's find an exoplanet today?"
22:30Or is it more way more targeted than that? And like trying to look at the exoplanets you already know that then allows you to find other exoplanets some way through that.
22:38>> Yeah, I mean different groups have different goals and aspirations. It really comes down to the individual leaders of these teams.
22:46For me, I'm not that interested in just discovering more planets. I'm kind of done with that a little bit. Like, okay, we've got 6,000. We've got 6,000 of them things. Like we don't need any more.
22:54Like we've we've seen a bunch of planets at this point. So, for me I always want to do something new. Like it has to be something that's never been done before that's pushing the envelope. So, for me one of my big challenges has been to look for exomoons. So, moons around those planets. That's no We have no confirmed exomoons whatsoever. Zero?
23:10Zero. Wow. I found two candidates using the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb and the Kepler Space Telescope. So, we have two candidate objects and we are trying to get more data from James Webb to try and find even more and confirm the ones that we have. So, what makes them candidates? Cuz we just have one dip. So, you know I talked about earlier like with these dips of light, you want to see like repeated dips. And then you're like, "Okay, that's real."
23:34But if it's a one-off, like you never know. Like it could just be something weird with it. Maybe there's someone shook the telescope that day or something went wrong, something electronic defect or something. So, you just want to make sure that it's real.
23:45And exomoons would be pretty cool to find. They could be habitable in their own right like Pandora in Avatar's like that, right? You got all these blue aliens running around on the moon.
23:55So, they could be like a huge fraction of alien Maybe like most aliens live on moons and they look at the Earth and like, "There's no point looking there cuz that's not a moon." Right? They just think that planets are like boring places to look at. Our own moon actually is probably super influential for the Earth being habitable. Some people say if you took away the moon, we wouldn't be here.
24:13It stabilizes our axis.
24:16So, if you took away the moon the actual tilt is about 23 degrees, but it would wander. It would drift. And so, you'd be sometimes where the North Pole was just pointing straight at the Sun. And so, the South Pole would just totally the Southern Hemisphere would just totally freeze out Yeah, wouldn't we also have like massive tide problems and stuff, too?
24:34Without the moon Well, you'd have less tides without the moon. You'd have you'd have fewer tides without the moon. So, but actually tides are thought to be good thing for life as well.
24:43One of the theories of the origins of life is like rock pools basically. So, if you go to a beach and you see a rock pool the chemicals get kind of concentrated in these little pools. And when the moon first formed, it was way closer. It would have been like about 30, 40 times larger in the sky.
24:59It was really close. And it would have raised an it would have made tides that were so big, the entire continent would have been covered in tides.
25:05>> I'm saying in like Bruce Almighty when it's like Yeah, it would have been like that. Yes, and then it's like flooding the whole Earth. The whole planet would have been flooded basically. And that would have happened every day. And so, that Well, it's maybe maybe not good for building a house, but actually kind of good for getting things going for life cuz you can have loads of these rock pools covering the entire continent.
25:24>> try that. I don't I don't want to try that, but fortunately we don't have the ability to try that anyway.
25:28>> [laughter] >> Okay. So, that could be useful. And then you know, the third reason is we want to one day actually take a photo of an of another Earth. I talked about this telescope before, the Habitable Worlds Observatory that we'd love to build if we could with NASA. We're doing some of the early calculations now about what that would look like.
25:42Maybe you can Google Pale Blue Dot for me.
25:45Pale Blue Dot?
25:46>> Yeah, this is a famous photo of the Earth actually. So, you're talking directly with NASA about that?
25:51Well, not me. I mean, I'm one of many astronomers. Yeah, it's not like Hey NASA.
25:56>> Yeah, you don't have David Kipping here.
25:57Stop building [laughter] Oh, okay. Yes, sir. We'll we'll get on it right away. [laughter] I'll keep doing podcasts. We'll get you there.
26:06So, yeah, if you look at that maybe the BBC image is kind of a cool one there.
26:11So, that is a photo of the Earth taken by I think it was the one of the Voyager spacecrafts that took this image and Carl Sagan asked the asked the vehicle to turn around and take a photo of the Earth.
26:23So, this is taken from I think where Neptune is from the distance of Neptune.
26:26>> Yeah, so it's really far out. And obviously the Earth is just like basically a single pixel of just this this smudgy blue thing. And that's kind of the image we're probably going to get one day of an exoplanet as we build these telescopes. So, we'll hopefully get an image like that of another ex you know, an Earth-like planet far from its star. But where's the moon in that image? You can't see it.
26:46>> It's just smooshed in there.
26:47>> Yeah. And so, one of the reasons we want to look for these moons is because we need to know if that moon's in there or not cuz it makes a big difference to all this chemistry stuff I was talking about. So, one of the possible signatures of life is oxygen that we talked about. But oxygen can also be made without life.
27:04Water makes oxygen actually quite easily cuz it is you know, made of oxygen. So, if you just split hydrogen up and oxygen, you get you get oxygen in the atmosphere.
27:13So, that can happen. It's called photolysis. So, people say oxygen's not enough. You need both oxygen plus something else and methane is usually the other molecule that people talk about. Now, Titan is a moon of Saturn that has tons of methane.
27:27So, if the Earth didn't have life, it it might still form oxygen through this photolysis, a small amount. And if it had a Titan-like moon, it would have methane. And so, you'd look at this blob and you'd see, "Oh, it's got oxygen.
27:39It's got methane. Boom, we're done. It's got life." But actually it could be a lifeless world. So, if you didn't know the moon was there, the moon could trick you into thinking you detected life when there isn't really life. So, if we ever want to understand these images properly, we have to know if there's a moon there or not. So, that's one of the other big reasons I think this is really cool to try and figure out the moon population in the universe. What's like the effect though when planets have multiple moons? Like we have one here, but like if you ran I'm making some up if you ran into an exoplanet.
28:10But if you even ran into an exoplanet somewhere else, so not just within our our solar system. Like you know, when you see one with four.
28:18Mhm.
28:19What effect does that have on life? Or is there even a way to Could it be multiple possibilities? Depends on what the moons are doing. What their orbits look like. Yeah, so the the moons of Jupiter instance, there's there's four big moons of Jupiter. So, so that the Galilean moons.
28:34And they do really wild stuff between them. So, Io's like super volcanic. And the reason is it's cuz it's it's like a a rock stuck between a hard place. It's got these three moons on the outside which are kind of tugging it out. And it's got Jupiter on the inside which is tugging it in. So, it's just being like pulled each way. And it kind of distorts and stretches the rock and that actually causes all this volcanism on the surface of the moon.
28:57It also these moons don't stay in the same place. They move. So, our own moon is moving away from us about 1 inch per year.
29:03So, you know, in principle you could lose moons eventually in a billions of years.
29:08Yes, I said the moon used to be a lot closer and that's the speed it's moving out. But I feel like we could make that up somehow with tech. Like yank it back a little bit. Moves 10 inches, you know.
29:17It's a lot of mass. It's big. It's a lot of mass.
29:19>> Yeah, you'd have a lot of energy to do that.
29:21It doesn't really affect us in any way.
29:22Actually, the cool thing is we do Well, it's not cool, but we'd eventually lose solar eclipses.
29:27Cuz you know, the moon is like the basically the perfect size to block out the Sun.
29:30As it gets further away, it will get smaller in a in a in a projected sense.
29:35And so, eventually you won't get solar eclipses anymore. It's kind of weird.
29:38It's like one of those simulation things. Like what It's kind of weird that we even have a moon which happens to be exactly the same size as the Sun in terms of the angles.
29:48>> it up perfectly, right?
29:50>> [laughter] >> And And not only Not only the same size, but yeah, that they're in the same plane to allow for those eclipses. This is why the Earth would be like the alien tourist hotspot, in my opinion, right?
30:00There's probably there's probably very few planets in the universe where you could see a solar a perfect solar eclipse. We are probably and they would surely know that. They would surely be able to look at the you know, if they could an alien had this image of Earth, they'd be able to figure out the moon, be able to figure out the planet get the geometry be like, "Oh, holy these guys get solar eclipses."
30:19I This is why I don't This is why the Fermi paradox is actually to me such a strange thing. Like there's I'm sure an alien would look at the Earth and be like, "Damn, that is There's stuff going on there."
30:31>> Right. So, you're not one of these people that's like, "Oh, they'd be like, that's not interesting at all." You think the opposite. Oh, no. No, I think I mean, from everything we know I mean, about exoplanets is that the the solar system is not normal. Um even having a Jupiter-sized planet is weird. Only 10% of stars have a Jupiter-sized planet.
30:47We've got two of the damn things. But we also only know and I say only just looking at it in the full context of like the universe, we only know of 5,000 to 6,000 exoplanets and X number or whatever it is of solar systems and yet, you know, the universe the known universe you said that exists within what we can tell by light could just be one little marble ball from that Men in Black, you know, last scene where it's a marble inside of a marble inside of a marble and someone playing with it and hypothetically that could mean that there are quadrillion trillion billion gazillion, you know, planets like this that exist
31:26out on the plane. So, maybe if you're an advanced civilization that I don't know has figured out some way to be able to see into other parts of the universe at any given time, you might have a gazillion types of Earth to choose from even if based on what we know right now, which seems to be a lot, is like, "Wow, that we can't find anything like Earth."
31:45Yeah, I mean, if you you can't if you imagine aliens being basically able to do magic, you know, they're so sophisticated, they can do stuff we can't possibly contemplate, >> Right. then all bets are off, right?
31:56It's It's really hard for us to speculate about either their interests, their activities, the way they think about the universe, how special or rare anything is. For those guys, like all bets are off. Um so, I I don't even worry about that too much. To frankly, I mean, another This is Arthur C. Clarke or Arthur C. Clarke, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There's a another sci-fi artist a sci-fi writer called uh Karl Schroeder, who is a modern guy, and he took a twist on that and he said, "Any sufficiently advanced aliens is indistinguishable from nature."
32:30From nature? Yeah. So, let's take um the galaxy.
32:35We see the galaxy and we just assume it's natural.
32:38Um we think we we can kind of come up with a story of how it was made and make sense to us, but it is possible that that's just an alien made that.
32:47Right? We We don't know that. There's no We can't prove that the the Milky Way is not an industrial project of another civilization that's just so far beyond us, we think it's natural because we can't even contemplate the possibility of someone that advanced being able to do those things. Maybe all stars are engineered products.
33:06Right? We think of stars a natural thing. Who knows if that's true or not.
33:10So, all of our astrophysics is kind of based on the assumption of na- I mean, all of science is based on the assumption of naturalism. That's kind of a fundamental tenant to science is that the the universe is natural and it's our job to try to come up with um a natural explanation for why everything happens, a mechanistic. And that's worked really well for us. Through that naturalistic view of the universe, we can predict how a semiconductor will act if you give it a charge and that allows you to have an iPhone and that allows you to build computers and have airplanes and all of us and all of society and technology is
33:37basically built on this assumption. But when you try and extrapolate that to the whole universe, like it is hard. Like we we have to kind of operate on that assumption, but it's unproven. It's unfounded. Um so, I am open-minded to that possibility, but it doesn't really have much utility to a scientist because what what am I supposed to do with that?
33:55Like it's fun to philosophically play with, but it's pro- it's probably not a useful starting point for trying to like make predictions cuz who knows what what these creatures would do.
34:06Yeah, and and I've heard some of the scientists obviously argue on on with with the Fermi paradox where it's like it'd be uninteresting. It's just you don't even you can't even conceive how an advanced civilization, regardless of how advanced they are, would even think or what their, you know, utopian world view, whatever that is, could be. So, it it is weird to think about, but there are, to your point, so many perfect things that line up in our in our little area of the universe that you have to wonder like what did create that. If it is more What was the name of that scientist again who came up with the
34:44nature indistinguishable from Oh, that's that's Karl Schroeder. So, Schroeder.
34:49>> yeah. So, if it's along Schroeder's lines and potentially nature was created by some form of man, so you know, some form of alien somewhere else, okay. Or, you know, you can get to the question of like there has to be a creator on top of something like this cuz everything's so perfect and so aligned, not just in our area, but everything we're looking to solve in the universe is based on math and light and, you know, the senses coming together in weird ways. What's your opinion on that? Do you have you thought about where it all comes from?
35:21Yeah, this is kind of getting into an idea of like fine-tuning as well a little bit. So, yeah, you can't it's not just the conditions of our planet, but even the conditions of the universe seem well well constructed for life. Um the you know, if you make a good example is the mass of the proton and neutron. The mass of the neutron is a little bit heavier than the proton, but only by about 0.14% I think it is.
35:45And that's suspiciously close. If it was 0.3% or higher, um basically you wouldn't be able to have atoms. The atomic nuclei would be unstable. They would immediately decay.
35:56And if it was either way around and protons were heavier, then protons would decay into neutrons. So, and then you'd be you wouldn't be able to have any atoms that way either. So, there's like this very narrow corridor of basically between 0 and 0.2% that those have to be balanced within and it's perfect. It's perfect. And it's not just that those two numbers. There's like a bunch of numbers like that in the universe that seem really finely tuned. So, there's two way There's a few different ways of answering that, but the you know, two very common ways are yeah, you say you have to invoke a creator or
36:25something or say it's, you know, a simulated universe or a god or something created this and that's why it seems that way. Um The other hypothesis is that you could say there's a multiverse. There's There's countless numbers of universes out there and most of them have arbitrary values of these numbers and we don't live in any of those cuz like of course we don't. There's no one in there There's no atoms in those universes. So, >> What do you mean arbitrary values of those numbers?
36:51>> So, let's make the mass of the electron, you know, three times heavier than it is in our universe.
36:56>> in another multiverse.
36:57>> Well, you could just choose those numbers to be whatever you want, right?
37:00Especially I mean, if you if you believe buy into the string theory, string theory comes up with, you know, 10 to the 80 different universes that are possible and each of them have different rules of physics, different constants, and all of them are real solutions to string theory. So, it's possible there are many many different universes out there with different values and those would never have creatures in them. They would never have life in them. And so, um maybe some of them do. Maybe there's some like weird combinations of things that we hadn't anticipated where you actually do get aliens, but if we
37:32shouldn't be surprised to live in a universe where things seem finely tuned cuz it would be impossible for us to live in a universe where that was not a so. So, uh it's kind of like a chicken and egg type situation, the catch-22.
37:46Like you start to have eat your own tail in this logic. Um but it is fascinating and lots of cosmologists are deeply interested in this in this problem. And it seems and there are some credible reasons to believe in a multiverse as well that that could maybe give us some credence. What What are What are some of besides what you were just going through right there? What are What are some of the most credible reasons you're seeing right now? Cuz I I I've had Brian Keating sitting here who was a couple times who was working on a project for 15 years to basically prove that the universe, if they were
38:16able to prove it, was inflationary, which would the way he explained it scientifically, you would know better than me, basically would say that means yes, we have a multiverse. Turned out he was looking at universal dust and not what they were looking for, so they couldn't prove that. But like what kinds of things could point to us having the different transistor radios? Yeah, I mean, I would say the same thing more or less as what Brian, you know, would have told you that um it the theory of inflation is the theory It's kind of almost the theory of the Big Bang. It's like what happened in the earliest stages of the universe. How did
38:48we get this extreme rapid expansion phase of the universe? And we believe um we believe if you don't have inflation, you can't really explain so many things about about the light that we see from all directions in the universe. This is called the CMB, the cosmic microwave background. So, we see light from all directions. It's the leftover radiation from this earliest period, the Big Bang itself essentially.
39:11And what you notice is that it's the same temperature in all directions. Hm.
39:16And there are some correlations embedded within those um that are very weak, but are detectable. And they imply that somehow um one region of space on this side of the universe and one region of space over that side of the universe were in contact with each other.
39:31And um when you look at the rate of expansion of the universe, that shouldn't happen. They should never have been in contact with each other. There's no way for light to have possibly had time, given the age of the universe, to have gone from here to here even if you reverse the clock. So, the solution to that is inflation. Inflation says, "Look, I have a I have a way of explaining that. There was a period where the universe was expanding faster than the speed of light, super fast, and then everything can kind of come back into causal contact." Um you could also try other things like changing the speed
39:57of light. You could say, "Maybe the speed of light was faster in the early universe than it is today." And that would be a way of of making these things have contact with each other as well. Um but that comes with lots of other problems and it generally is not as favored as inflation.
40:09So, inflation has a few different predictions. Um and one of them that BICEP was looking for was these gravitational waves that'd be left over from the Big Bang as well.
40:19Um so, we did we definitely have quite a bit of evidence for inflation at this point. And if you It's not There's many different theories of inflation, there's not just one. But in almost all of them, you end up with a multiverse.
40:31So, a multiverse is just very difficult to avoid in inflationary theories. And it it asks an interesting philosophical question as to whether this is science or not, to be honest, because by definition, a universe outside of our universe can't ever be testable, right?
40:47And science is all about evidence, testing. Testable here? In our universe.
40:53Yeah, there's no no one in our universe could ever detect the presence of another universe, but cuz the universe is supposed to be everything, right? So, you can't possibly leave your universe as far as we know. And so, the question is then is another is the concept of another universe even truly science anymore? Like, what are we talking about?
41:10>> Interesting. I've never heard that argument. Okay. I mean, it makes sense what you're saying.
41:14>> Yeah. But I don't know, I'm getting a little Philip K. Dick now if we start talking about this, but you've I'm sure you're familiar with at least some of his work and stuff. He's he's a legend from the sci-fi space. But in I'm thinking of like the one example, The Man in the High Castle, which they later made a TV show as well. The way that they were bending time there, time traveling, was they were traveling between dimensions, which would mean someone from this dimension if you were ever able to figure out how to do this was going into another dimension to observe and test things in that dimension. In that case, if you are
41:51coming from the dimension we're in to go in and you're actually were able to figure out a way to go in, tap into the other dimension to study something, does that then constitute science? Because we're coming from the place where science exists. Yeah, if you could interact, if you could traverse or interact with them, then I think you could do experiments and test it and prove it. Um and it's it's important to be clear there's many different definitions of multiverse. So, we already talked about one earlier on the show with um this Hugh Everett stuff of like That's like a multiverse, right? The many worlds
42:22hypothesis says in a in a quantum sense, there's another universe right here in this room that's almost like slightly offset from us, is decohered from us, and therefore we can't interact with it, but it is literally in the same space and time as us.
42:35Um This multiverse is different. This is like saying if you travel in a spaceship just forever and ever and ever, you just keep going, keep going, you'll eventually reach regions of space where the laws of physics could be different.
42:46And that's still in a sense part of the infinite universe, but in another sense, it's it's a completely different pocket universe all to its own.
42:53And then inflation says uh you can't There's another type of multiverse beyond that. You can't even leave this bubble. If you You could just travel forever. There's infinite space inside each bubble, but there's also an infinite number of bubbles. So, this is where it gets really trippy. There's an infinite number of universes each with infinite amount of space within each of them. So, that really is like the marbles from Men in Black. And um those, you know, that that some of them will be identical to us, which is really wild cuz there's infinity is involved.
43:23There'll be an There'll be an infinite number of all of us having this conversation.
43:27Um and so, like a small butterfly effect across each Yeah. transistor motion >> Yeah, so one will be some maybe wearing a red T-shirt in some of them, and that that's the only difference, but in other ones, they'll just be almost identical.
43:41Um and so, this is where science starts to get a bit philosophical, a bit metaphysical, and um there are legitimate questions. Some cosmologists and physicists like strongly feel like this is just pseudoscience. This is not legitimate.
43:55But inflation is definitely not pseudoscience. It explains a ton of observations. It's real, it's credible, makes predictions that were confirmed, um real predictions that have been confirmed like superhorizon scales in the CMB, for instance. So, there's a ton of stuff it's predicted. Superhorizon scales in the CMB?
44:11>> Yeah, that's these kind of like these points being in contact with each other that that shouldn't be able to be in contact with each other. So, you should When they looked at the power spectrum of the CMB So, that's sort of asking like uh yeah, does this does the temperature of this have any correlation to the temperature of this part over here? Um they inflation predicted, if it was right, and it was actually predicted to explain different problems.
44:34It was invoked to explain why we don't have magnetic monopoles, but that's a different story. Um so, that was why it was invented. Um and then one of the predictions of the theory was that um there you should find, once we get the technology to to assess this, that parts of the universe that are so far apart from each other that shouldn't be in contact with each other will appear to have been in contact with each other.
44:55And that was then uh confirmed later on.
44:57So, that was a real prediction of the theory. Um and an inevitable consequence, more or less an inevitable consequence of inflation, is this multiverse. So, what do you do when you have a theory where much of it is scientific and credible, but of all of the predictions it makes, it happens to make one extra one which is totally untestable?
45:16But is perhaps the most philosophically intriguing one of them all.
45:20>> Untestable in what we know now, but eventually possibly testable.
45:24>> Yes. I mean This is where you get to kind of yeah, invoke magic, invoke miracles. Yeah, I I try to avoid invoking miracles because yeah, that's part of science is let's let's think about what is, you know, the bounds of what is known, but um it's pretty slippery slope in my opinion to invoke miracles and magic cuz then just sort of everything goes. And then there isn't any science left at that point.
45:46Like, you just say yeah, you may as well be in literally in the in a Tolkien world of Lord of the Rings at that point.
45:51>> Yes.
45:52>> [laughter] >> Yes. And I like I think about this one a lot just cuz it's it is so theoretical and it's so trippy and it can tie together a whole bunch of ideas like you mentioned simulation theory and all that, but it's like what if you die in this dimension and you're spawned into another dimension from that, but it's only a year before you died or 10 years before you died in another one or 30 years before you died or you're in a different set of circumstances. You were married to some girl in this one, you're married to a different girl in that one. It gets so weird, and I can imagine in the
46:24scientific community when you have now taken like thread on a thread on a thread on a thread, they're like, "Wait, wait, wait. Slow down. Stop." Because if one thread's wrong, the whole house of cards like we're here and it doesn't even make You're a Terrence Howard.
46:37Like, you know, you just went way far beyond where it was actually like provable or feasible. Yeah. It's It's a It's always hard as a scientist cuz you're you're walking this fine edge between pushing the boundaries of knowledge and being open-minded to wild and speculative ideas, but at the same time, like the whole point of science is to have stuff which you can prove and show is absolutely right. And doesn't mean the other things are wrong. That it's not exclusionary in that sense. It sometimes excludes things, but most of it we just want to know what is right and how the world works. To have rules
47:08that we can use in our lives, right? To use them to build stuff and to explore the universe. Yeah, and I think like the way we label things also can rule out like I don't know. It almost create attitudes on how we view things. We were talking about it with labeling, you know, three-eyed atlases potentially alien.
47:26Get some scientists to be like, "Shut the up." But like even when you say a word like alien and think about what that is. In our head, we think, "All right, green man in spacesuit coming here in UFO." But then, you know, what what is the actual definition? Does it have to do with place, space, and time?
47:43Meaning I've always looked at the movie Interstellar, and I look at Matthew McConaughey and he leaves this Earth at a given time at, you know, age 40-something.
47:55He's I think he's gone for 2 years total. He comes back 85, 90 years later. Yeah. He is only aged 2 years, and the place he comes back to, which actually technically wasn't Earth, but let's assume it was literally Earth he came to. The people who were there are some of the same people he left, but they're in a completely different part of life, and it is a completely different reality than the lived time that he left and came back to. So, I look at Matthew McConaughey and I go, "That's an alien."
48:22Yeah. You know what I mean? He's from a different a different period, a different time. So, to the planet he's on, he's an alien. So, when people start generalizing and saying like it has to be something from light-years away, that's like a person or or [snorts] or you know, a a green man or whatever.
48:36It's like, "Well, who's to say that there's not something that's been been figured out in humanity to say, 'Oh, there could be, you know, some sort of future human or past human element that has figured out how to bend time?' Like, is that crazy to think about or am I also way [snorts] too far in that theoretical >> No, no. Um Yeah, I think certainly being a coach for alien is 100% right. Like, he's I think that's true. Like, you could definitely be You travel to Japan, you feel like an alien. Like, you just walking around, you just it's so different. And [snorts] I'm sure they feel the same way when they first come
49:07over here. Um But the the time travel thing is interesting. So, yeah, I think forwards time travel is obviously trivially possible, and that's what Matthew McConaughey does. He travels forwards through time 90 years.
49:21To go backwards, that doesn't happen in that uh movie. And that's because Kip Thorne was one of the Yes. science directors uh behind that film, and he he knows he knows his stuff. And uh it it that should not That caused a lot of problems to physics if that's possible.
49:37So, a good example actually um is wormholes. People often talk about wormholes as a possible way of going backwards through time.
49:44Even if you would create a two wormholes right here, like a well, one wormhole but two mouths, you could always put one mouth on a spaceship, travel super fast close to the speed of light, then come back, and you'd offset them in time. So, now you have a time travel machine. Okay, sounds good. But the there's a problem here.
50:02So, now you can have a particle, and this is something Stephen Hawking imagined.
50:07You have a random particle, like a virtual particle even, that it pops up and it travels through the one of the tunnels, like say A, and comes out in the past into B. And then it over overtakes itself. So, now at this point in space between these two mouths, I have a duplicate, a clone, two Matthew McConaugheys.
50:27And then those two now go through the mouth, and now there's four.
50:31And now there's eight, and now there's 16, and it just keeps going. And because this in you know, this is there's an infinite number of loops that can happen, you would end up with infinite amounts of energy in between the two.
50:44Even though there was only one particle, that one particle has now turned into infinite amount of energy in between the two wormholes. And that an infinite amount of energy Well, it doesn't have to be infinite, but a large amount of energy will destabilize the wormhole.
50:56So, the idea is that Stephen Hawking said this is kind of like putting a microphone to a loud speaker. You get like a feedback.
51:04sound. The same thing happens with the two wormholes with these virtual particles. You get a feedback of this particle.
51:09And so that that loud sound becomes an infinite amount of gravity, basically, that rips apart the the two wormholes. So, the moment you build a time machine, in this case these two wormholes, it immediately destroys itself.
51:25The the very second you activate it, it destroys itself.
51:28And so Stephen Hawking suggested he gave the example there of the two wormholes.
51:32But he suggested this was a general rule that whenever you build any time machine, the moment you turn it on, one of these effects will be ruinous.
51:41The universe just won't allow it to happen. And because if it did, it would kind of break the universe. And it's true, like if you were if if the universe was a simulation, that you wouldn't want time travel to be allowed in that simulation cuz cuz it would be if you're running the simulation real time, now you have to have a time machine in your real world to be able to account for the fact people are doing time loops in your simulation. Maybe that's not forbidden in their universe, either.
52:08It would also allow for infinite amounts of memory for the same reason, right?
52:11Cuz now you could have two Matthew McConaugheys, four Matthew McConaugheys.
52:13So, now you have to have an infinite amount of memory on the computer to handle the infinite versions of events that can happen. So, it would very quickly destroy the computation, the memory, and even maybe the logic of their own universe that they operate in. So, there's good reasons why if you were designing a universe, you would not want that to happen. And of course you can have paradoxes, like grandfather paradox, where you can like kill your your granddad or something, that just have no logical solution. So, like how is the simulation supposed to proceed past that point?
52:40>> Yeah, that was all that was a that was a point Michio Kaku made with like hypothetical time travel and stuff. He's like, if you went back to April 14th, 1865 to try to stop John Wilkes Booth, you're not stopping it in this multiverse. You're you're creating a new reality that's a separate verse.
53:00>> don't know that. We don't know it, but he's saying that that's exactly right.
53:03That's one resolution. That's one resolution. The problem with that is now, yeah, now you have to create another whole universe. So, now every time someone uses a time machine, it creates another universe. And what's that? Because that's not an Everettian multiverse. That's not an inflationary multiverse. That's not a infinite space.
53:18It's not It's a different It's another type of multiverse that you've just invented to explain this, to accommodate a time machine. So, yeah, you have to have a lot of miracles work. Again, it's like how many miracles do you need before breakfast to accept something being true? [laughter] So, I think for my money um yeah, I think time machines run into so many problems, reverse time machines, that they're probably not possible. Forward time machines, no problem. But going back, changing things in the past, I think it's probably prohibited.
53:47Unfortunately.
53:48>> Yeah, time travel's one of those ones I would talk about all day. We we would stay on that a long time cuz there's so many possibilities.
53:54>> back to the start of this podcast and Yeah, exactly, [laughter] exactly. We'll go back, you can do it all over again.
53:58But the one other thing I did want to talk to you about before you got out of here is this leaked memo that just happened with NASA for project Athena.
54:07Have you seen this?
54:08>> No.
54:09Okay. Dave, can we pull this up? So, the broad strokes are I think a guy who's his name's Jared I Jared Isaacman. He's like >> He's the he's going to be the hopefully next NASA administrator.
54:21>> Yeah, the head of NASA.
54:22>> Yeah. So, this memo leaks where he's talking about how essentially, and I'm really broad brushing it here, they're going to create a more like incentivize the private industry to come in and basically work more hand in hand and get budget that way. Meaning like some of the private people like Elon Musk who have a trillion are going to have a trillion dollars could start contributing more without the government necessarily like creating a way bigger NASA. So, you've mentioned today, this is why I bring it up, like that you have obviously had discussions with NASA and like it's something you care about and
54:59you've [clears throat] been around it.
55:00Like what needs to change there? I'm not saying this is the solution, but like what is the future here with the relationship between NASA, which is a government entity, and like the private people like the Elons and the Bezos's and the SpaceX's obviously owned owned by Elon who are trying to run their own missions to get to frontiers in space. Yeah, there's a lot of overlapping interests and reasons for collaboration and optimism there, I think. Yeah.
55:29Um NASA I mean, a lot of people think NASA builds rockets, but it doesn't. I mean, it's always contracted out people like Lockheed Martin to build its rockets and other companies. So, it's it's not like it's it's contracting out SpaceX is some novel thing. It's always done that. Um NASA is is the contractor. They're they're Yeah, they they solicit the contracts and find the best vendor to deliver these services. So, if the private industry can pull down those costs for whatever service it is, then I'm 100% in favor of that. I think the the only anomaly here is this is question of science science funding. Um if you're
56:06doing fundamental science, like the origins of the universe, something like that. Um and you want a private investor to do that. You say, "Oh, it's okay. The private industry will will solve the problem of the origin of the universe."
56:19They're not going to do that. There's like there's no economic incentive.
56:24There's no possible investment you can imagine in a human lifetime that would give a positive return on your investment. The it's it had to be philanthropy. That's the only reason you would do it. Um maybe if we lived for thousands and thousands of years to come back to your you know, extended lifetime, maybe then we'd give a cuz then we'd be like, "Well, a thousand years we'll be traveling the universe, so then we actually need to know this shit." But and that's the whole point of science. Science is multi-generational.
56:48It's not all about answers that are going to solve problems. And when you know, all the discoveries of like Maxwell's equations and quantum physics were being discovered in the 1920s, no one had any idea we'd be using that to build you know, iPhones one day. That's like it's radical. Um so, it's very difficult in a human lifetime to predict how investments in fundamental science are going to reap rewards, but they always do. They always like lead to profound shifts in society and technology as we as we increase our knowledge and development. So, I'm a little bit worried about that. Like if if we said um if NASA said or the
57:28government said like we're just going to let private industry do all the science, they would do a lot of science. There's still lots of science which is applicable in our everyday lives, like maybe you know, health care stuff or vaccinations and drugs. Um you can imagine getting plenty of funding cuz that affects people in a day-to-day sense.
57:43But looking for exoplanets or you know, trying to study another galaxy far away, that's just going to fall off the wayside. Like that's not going to be funded by anyone. Yeah. And I think um I was having this conversation with a colleague the other day, like why do we do science like fundamentally?
58:01I don't think it's that different from why we do art.
58:03Um why do you play a musical instrument?
58:06Why do you watch Interstellar? Why do you Why do people make movies?
58:10Some of it's to make money, but some of it's just the human condition of of wanting to engage in these activities cuz they enrich our lives. They make It'd be kind of a sad state of affairs if you just lived in a closed box room, you woke up, you ate food, you took a and then you went to sleep, and you woke up next day, and you rinse, wash, repeat, and everything about your life was just about pure survival economic benefit. That was it.
58:33You know, picking up a guitar and playing that in the middle of that day would enrich your life so much more.
58:36Drawing a painting, contemplating the size of the universe.
58:40These are things we do not because they are beneficial to our survival. So, often they are as well, but fundamentally, I believe the reason why we do these things is because it's part of what makes us as being human beings.
58:52We're just animals if we're not doing that. We're just We may as well just live like a rat. You know, there's not anything else to our existence. So, um yeah, I think if we it's it's sometimes hard for private industry to be so short-term. They care about the quarterly stock revenue and you know, the returns on the capital investments, all this kind of stuff.
59:12That it's it's difficult for me to imagine how private industry would invest in fundamental science. That's why government is the best place for it.
59:21I'm I'm thinking that there's got to be some beautiful balance to strike there.
59:25You know, I I I agree with you. If you just pushed it all onto the private side, you know, you're they're going to be tactically focused on the stuff that makes money right away and not in the discovery of it as well. But that also means government's got to take it seriously to be able to fund discovery of of these things and not just, you know, obviously there's always a war to fight somewhere. So they're putting money towards that, but where where do you make sure you keep that excitement you had for space that we had five, six decades ago that we lost there for a while. Now we're starting to get
59:56it back. How do we keep that going? How do we keep the next generations trying to find like I love that point you make right there. Like the art in space and and the interest of it. And I do think
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