Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Clara Souza Silva,

00:00:02.880 | a quantum master chemist at Harvard,

00:00:04.880 | specializing in spectroscopy of gases

00:00:07.560 | that serve as possible signs of life on other planets,

00:00:11.180 | most especially the gas phosphine.

00:00:14.160 | She was a co-author of the paper that in 2020

00:00:18.120 | found that there is phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus

00:00:21.340 | and thus possible extraterrestrial life

00:00:24.560 | that lives in its atmosphere.

00:00:26.800 | The detection of phosphine was challenged, reaffirmed,

00:00:29.880 | and is now still under active research.

00:00:32.640 | Quick mention of our sponsors,

00:00:34.280 | Onnit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed.

00:00:37.960 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

00:00:41.320 | As a side note, let me say that I think the search for life

00:00:44.080 | on other planets is one of the most important endeavors

00:00:46.840 | in science.

00:00:47.920 | If we find extraterrestrial life and study it,

00:00:50.560 | we may find insights into the mechanisms

00:00:53.200 | that originated life here on Earth,

00:00:55.480 | and more than life, the mechanisms that originated

00:00:58.200 | intelligence and consciousness.

00:01:00.680 | If we understand these mechanisms, we can build them.

00:01:04.240 | But more than this, the discovery of life on other planets

00:01:07.280 | means that our galaxy and our universe is teeming with life.

00:01:11.800 | This is humbling and terrifying, but it is also exciting.

00:01:15.840 | We humans are natural explorers.

00:01:17.800 | For most of our history, we explored the surface of the Earth

00:01:20.600 | and the contents of our minds.

00:01:22.720 | But now, with space-faring vessels,

00:01:25.200 | we have a chance to explore life beyond Earth,

00:01:27.740 | their physics, their biology,

00:01:29.880 | and perhaps the contents of their minds.

00:01:33.120 | This is the Lux Friedman Podcast,

00:01:35.320 | and here is my conversation with Clara Sousa Silva.

00:01:38.740 | Since you're the world expert in, well, in many things,

00:01:44.120 | but one of them is phosphine,

00:01:45.800 | would it technically be correct

00:01:48.040 | to call you the Queen of Phosphine?

00:01:51.920 | - I go for Dr. Phosphine.

00:01:54.200 | Queen is an inherited title, I feel.

00:01:56.880 | - But you still rule by love and power,

00:02:01.880 | but while having the doctor title.

00:02:04.320 | I got it. - Kindness.

00:02:05.480 | - Kindness, kindness.

00:02:07.660 | In September 2020, you co-authored a paper

00:02:11.300 | announcing possible presence of phosphine

00:02:13.440 | in the atmosphere of Venus,

00:02:15.320 | and that it may be a signature of extraterrestrial life.

00:02:20.320 | - Big maybe.

00:02:22.000 | - Big maybe.

00:02:22.960 | There was some pushback, of course,

00:02:26.240 | from the scientific community that followed.

00:02:28.200 | Friendly, loving pushback.

00:02:30.120 | Then in January, another paper from University of Wisconsin,

00:02:35.280 | I believe, confirmed the finding.

00:02:37.360 | So where do we stand in this saga,

00:02:40.480 | in this mystery of what the heck is going on on Venus

00:02:44.560 | in terms of phosphine and in terms of aliens?

00:02:47.220 | - Okay, let's try to break it down.

00:02:50.600 | The short answer is we don't know.

00:02:53.960 | I think you and the rest of the public

00:02:56.720 | are now witnessing a pretty exciting discovery,

00:02:59.020 | but as it evolves, as it unfolds,

00:03:03.400 | we did not wait until we had years of data

00:03:08.040 | from 10 different instruments

00:03:11.400 | across several layers of the atmosphere.

00:03:14.040 | We waited until we had two telescopes

00:03:17.200 | with independent data months apart.

00:03:20.840 | But still, the data is weak, it's noisy, it's delicate,

00:03:24.800 | it's very much at the edge

00:03:26.480 | of instrument sensibility, sensitivity.

00:03:29.360 | And so we still don't even know if it is phosphine.

00:03:33.080 | We don't even really know if the signal is real.

00:03:35.480 | People still disagree about that.

00:03:37.600 | And I think at the more philosophical end

00:03:41.040 | of how this happened, I think it is a distinction,

00:03:44.160 | and myself and other co-authors were talking about this,

00:03:46.840 | it's a distinction between hypotheses generation

00:03:50.520 | and hypotheses testing.

00:03:52.520 | Now, hypothesis testing is something that I think

00:03:56.560 | is the backbone of the scientific method,

00:04:01.080 | but it has a problem, which is if you're looking

00:04:03.480 | through very noisy data and you wanna test the hypotheses,

00:04:06.440 | you may by mistake create a spurious signal.

00:04:09.400 | The safest, more conservative approach

00:04:12.960 | is hypothesis generation.

00:04:14.680 | You see some data and you go,

00:04:16.520 | what's in there with no bias?

00:04:18.920 | Now, this is much safer, much more conservative.

00:04:21.000 | And when there's a lot of data, that's great.

00:04:23.880 | When there isn't, you can clean the noise

00:04:25.920 | and take out the signal with it.

00:04:28.280 | The signal with a bathwater,

00:04:30.080 | whatever the equivalent of the analogy would be.

00:04:33.200 | And so I think the healthy discourse

00:04:35.400 | that you described is exactly this.

00:04:37.240 | There are ways of processing the data,

00:04:39.520 | completely legitimate ways,

00:04:40.640 | checked by multiple people and experts,

00:04:42.840 | where the signal shows up and then phosphine

00:04:45.720 | is in the atmosphere of Venus,

00:04:47.640 | and somewhere it doesn't.

00:04:49.080 | And then we disagree what that signal means.

00:04:51.400 | If it's real and it is an ambiguously phosphine,

00:04:56.520 | it is very exciting because we don't know

00:04:58.520 | how to explain it without life.

00:05:00.880 | But going from there to Venusians is still a huge jump.

00:05:05.800 | And so- - Venusians.

00:05:07.120 | So that would be the title for the civilization

00:05:09.800 | if it is a living and thriving on Venus's Venusians.

00:05:14.200 | - Until we know what they call themselves

00:05:16.120 | and that's the name, yes.

00:05:18.520 | - So this is the early analysis of data

00:05:20.960 | or analysis of early data.

00:05:23.320 | It was nevertheless, you waited until

00:05:27.600 | the actual peer-reviewed publication to-

00:05:29.680 | - Of course, and analysis of the two different instruments

00:05:32.320 | months apart, so that's ALMA and JCMT, the two telescopes.

00:05:36.840 | - I mean, it's still, I mean, it's really exciting.

00:05:39.200 | What did it feel like sort of sitting on this data?

00:05:42.360 | Like kind of anticipating the publication

00:05:45.440 | and wondering and still wondering, is it true?

00:05:50.360 | Like how does it make you feel that a planet

00:05:53.560 | in our solar system might have phosphine in the atmosphere?

00:05:56.880 | - It's nuts, it's absolutely nuts.

00:05:59.800 | - In a- (laughs)

00:06:01.440 | - I mean- - In the best possible way?

00:06:03.520 | - I've been working on phosphine for over a decade.

00:06:07.820 | - Before it was cool.

00:06:10.000 | - Way before it was cool.

00:06:12.560 | Before anyone could spell it or heard of it.

00:06:15.160 | And at the time people either didn't know what phosphine was

00:06:18.560 | or only knew it for being just possibly

00:06:22.400 | the most horrendous molecule that ever graced the earth.

00:06:26.720 | And so no one was a fan.

00:06:29.320 | And I had been considering looking for it

00:06:32.800 | because I did think it was an unusual and disgusting

00:06:35.480 | but very promising sign of life.

00:06:37.840 | I've been looking for it everywhere.

00:06:40.120 | I really didn't think to look in the solar system.

00:06:42.320 | I thought it was all pretty rough around here for life.

00:06:47.320 | And so I wasn't even considering the solar system at all,

00:06:52.480 | nevermind next door Venus.

00:06:54.120 | It was only the lead author of the study, Jane Greaves,

00:06:56.840 | who thought to look in the clouds of Venus

00:06:59.400 | and then reached out to me to say,

00:07:01.860 | I don't know phosphine, but I know it's weird.

00:07:05.280 | How weird is it?

00:07:06.680 | And the answer is very weird.

00:07:09.000 | - And so the telescopes were looking at,

00:07:10.800 | this is visual data.

00:07:12.200 | - That's what I mean by visual.

00:07:14.400 | You wouldn't see the phosphine.

00:07:15.880 | - Well, but I mean, it's a telescope.

00:07:18.920 | - It's remote.

00:07:19.760 | - It's remote.

00:07:20.800 | You're observing, you're what,

00:07:23.760 | zooming in on this particular planet.

00:07:25.800 | I mean, what does the sensor actually look like?

00:07:28.840 | How many pixels are there?

00:07:30.680 | What does the data kind of look like?

00:07:32.720 | It'd be nice to kind of build up intuition

00:07:36.020 | of how little data we have based on which.

00:07:40.080 | I mean, if you look at like,

00:07:41.920 | I've just been reading a lot about gravitational waves

00:07:44.520 | and it's kind of incredible how from just very little,

00:07:48.560 | like probably the world's most precise instrument,

00:07:52.600 | we can derive some very foundational ideas

00:07:55.320 | about our early universe.

00:07:57.280 | And in that same way, it's kind of incredible

00:07:59.480 | how much information you can get from just a few pixels.

00:08:03.080 | So what are we talking about here

00:08:05.440 | in terms of based on which this paper

00:08:09.600 | saw possible signs of phosphine in the atmosphere?

00:08:13.560 | - So phosphine, like every other molecule,

00:08:15.480 | has a unique spectroscopic fingerprint,

00:08:18.160 | meaning it rotates and it vibrates in special ways.

00:08:21.880 | I calculated how many of those ways it can rotate

00:08:25.040 | and vibrate in 16.8 billion ways.

00:08:28.520 | What this means is that if you look at the spectrum of light

00:08:32.320 | and that light has gone through phosphine gas

00:08:34.820 | on the other end, there should be 16.8 billion tiny marks

00:08:39.820 | left, indentations left in that spectrum.

00:08:43.840 | We found one of those on Venus, one of those 16.8 billion.

00:08:48.840 | So now the game is, can we find any of the other ones?

00:08:53.320 | - Yeah.

00:08:54.160 | - But they're really hard to spot.

00:08:55.080 | They're all in terrible places

00:08:57.080 | in the electromagnetic spectrum.

00:08:59.560 | And the instruments we use to find this one

00:09:02.440 | can't really find any other one.

00:09:04.320 | There's another one of the 16.8 billion we could find,

00:09:07.020 | but it would take many, many days of continuous observations

00:09:10.460 | and that's not really in the cards right now.

00:09:13.160 | - I mean, how do you, there's all kinds of noise,

00:09:15.500 | first of all.

00:09:16.340 | - Yes.

00:09:17.160 | - There's all kinds of other signal.

00:09:20.820 | So how do you separate all of that out

00:09:24.500 | to pull out just this particular signature

00:09:28.520 | that's associated with phosphine?

00:09:30.960 | - So the data kind of looks somewhat like a wave

00:09:34.840 | and a lot of that is noise and it's a baseline.

00:09:37.760 | And so if you can figure out the exact shape of the wave,

00:09:40.400 | you can cancel that shape out

00:09:42.120 | and you should be left with a straight line

00:09:44.240 | and if there's something there, an absorption, so a signal.

00:09:48.760 | So that's what we did.

00:09:49.600 | We tried to find out what was this baseline shape,

00:09:52.680 | cleaned it out and got the signal.

00:09:54.760 | That's part of the problem.

00:09:55.600 | If you do this wrong, you can create a signal.

00:09:58.920 | But that signal is at 8.904 wave numbers

00:10:03.640 | and we actually have more digits than that,

00:10:06.960 | but I don't remember by heart.

00:10:08.240 | And an ALMA in particular is a very, very good telescope,

00:10:12.520 | array of telescopes and it can focus

00:10:15.080 | on exactly that frequency.

00:10:16.840 | And in that frequency, there are only two known molecules

00:10:20.160 | that absorb it all.

00:10:22.360 | So that's how we do it.

00:10:23.320 | We look at that exact spot where we know phosphine absorbs.

00:10:27.200 | The other molecule is SO2.

00:10:28.680 | - If there is extraterrestrial life,

00:10:32.520 | whether it's on Venus or on exoplanets

00:10:36.160 | where you looked before, how does that make you feel?

00:10:40.440 | How should it make us feel?

00:10:42.200 | Should we be scared?

00:10:43.280 | Should we be excited?

00:10:44.740 | Let's say it's not intelligent life.

00:10:47.840 | Let's say it's microbial life.

00:10:50.220 | Is it a threat to us?

00:10:53.240 | Are we a threat to it?

00:10:54.920 | Or is it only, not only, but mostly,

00:10:57.680 | possibly to understand something fundamental,

00:11:00.600 | something beautiful about life in the universe?

00:11:04.200 | - Hard to know.

00:11:05.040 | You would have to bring on a poet

00:11:07.080 | or a philosopher on the show.

00:11:08.860 | - You don't feel--

00:11:11.640 | - I feel those things.

00:11:12.720 | I just don't know if those are the right things to feel.

00:11:14.880 | I don't, certainly don't feel scared.

00:11:16.520 | I think it's rather silly to feel scared.

00:11:19.000 | Definitely don't touch them.

00:11:20.720 | Sometimes in the movies, don't go near it.

00:11:24.680 | Don't interfere.

00:11:26.240 | I think one of the things with Venus is because of phosphine

00:11:31.240 | now there is a chance that Venus is inhabited.

00:11:35.200 | And in that case, we shouldn't go there.

00:11:38.920 | We should be very careful with messing with them,

00:11:42.920 | bringing our own stuff there that contaminates it.

00:11:46.780 | And Venus has suffered enough.

00:11:49.600 | If there's life there,

00:11:50.680 | it's probably the remains of a living planet

00:11:54.640 | the very last survivors of what once was

00:11:59.040 | potentially a thriving world.

00:12:00.800 | And so I don't want our first interaction

00:12:03.120 | with alien life to be massacre.

00:12:06.600 | So I definitely wouldn't want to go near out of a,

00:12:09.560 | let's say galactic responsibility, galactic ethics.

00:12:13.400 | And I often think of alien astronomers watching us

00:12:17.200 | and how disappointed they would be if we messed this up.

00:12:20.440 | So I really want to be very careful

00:12:23.360 | with anything that could be life.

00:12:25.060 | But certainly I wouldn't be scared.

00:12:28.040 | Humans are plenty capable of killing one another.

00:12:30.320 | We don't need extraterrestrial help to destroy ourselves.

00:12:34.560 | - Scared mostly of other humans.

00:12:36.000 | - Exactly.

00:12:36.840 | - But this life, if there is life there,

00:12:40.320 | it does seem just like you said, it would be pretty rugged.

00:12:43.100 | It's like the cockroaches or Chuck Norris.

00:12:46.700 | I don't know.

00:12:47.540 | It's some kind of, it's something that survived

00:12:50.880 | through some very difficult conditions.

00:12:53.080 | That doesn't mean it would handle us.

00:12:55.680 | It could be like war of the worlds.

00:12:58.120 | You come just because you're resilient in your own planet

00:13:01.280 | doesn't mean you can survive another.

00:13:02.880 | Even our extremophiles, which are very impressive,

00:13:06.000 | we should all be very proud of our extremophiles.

00:13:08.480 | They wouldn't really make it in the Venetian clouds.

00:13:11.920 | So I wouldn't expect, because you're tough,

00:13:14.960 | even Chuck Norris tough,

00:13:16.880 | that you would survive on an alien planet.

00:13:19.600 | - And then from the scientific perspective,

00:13:22.320 | you don't want to pollute the data gathering process

00:13:26.360 | by showing up there.

00:13:27.880 | The observer can affect the observed.

00:13:31.760 | - How heartbreaking would it be

00:13:32.840 | if we found life on another planet

00:13:34.280 | and then we're like, oh, we brought it with us.

00:13:37.120 | It was my sandwich.

00:13:38.280 | - But that's always the problem, right?

00:13:40.480 | And it's certainly a problem with Mars

00:13:42.120 | because we visited, if there is life on Mars

00:13:47.120 | or like remains of life on Mars,

00:13:49.880 | it's always going to be a question of like,

00:13:51.920 | well, maybe we planted it there.

00:13:53.600 | - Let's not do the same with Venus.

00:13:54.960 | It's harder 'cause when we try to go to Venus,

00:13:57.520 | things melt very quickly.

00:13:59.120 | And so it's a little harder to pollute Venus.

00:14:03.960 | It's very good at destroying foreigners.

00:14:08.000 | - Yeah, well, in terms of Elon Musk and terraforming planets,

00:14:11.840 | Mars is stop number one, then Venus maybe after that.

00:14:15.320 | So can we talk about phosphine a little bit?

00:14:19.520 | So you mentioned it's a pretty--

00:14:20.360 | - I love phosphine.

00:14:22.800 | - What's your Twitter handle?

00:14:23.640 | It's like Dr. Phosphine?

00:14:24.840 | - It's Dr. Phosphine, yes.

00:14:26.360 | You'll be surprised here.

00:14:27.320 | It wasn't taken already.

00:14:28.440 | I could just, I just grabbed it.

00:14:30.360 | Didn't have to buy it off anyone.

00:14:32.800 | - Yeah, so what is it?

00:14:34.840 | What's phosphine?

00:14:36.360 | You already mentioned it's pretty toxic and troublesome.

00:14:40.720 | What, and--

00:14:42.760 | - Troublesome.

00:14:43.600 | - Troublesome, sorry.

00:14:44.640 | - No, I love it.

00:14:45.480 | I'm gonna stop calling it troublesome.

00:14:47.440 | - The, so maybe what are some things

00:14:51.120 | that make it interesting chemically

00:14:53.880 | and why is it a good sign of life

00:14:58.240 | when it's present in the atmosphere?

00:15:00.280 | Like you've described in your paper,

00:15:02.240 | aptly titled the phosphine as a biosignature gas

00:15:06.200 | in exoplanet atmospheres.

00:15:08.280 | I suppose you wrote that paper before Venus.

00:15:10.960 | - I did, yes.

00:15:11.800 | I did.

00:15:13.480 | And no one cared.

00:15:14.440 | You know, in that paper I said something like,

00:15:16.440 | if we find phosphine on any terrestrial planet

00:15:19.080 | can only mean life.

00:15:20.160 | And everyone's like, yeah, that sounds about right.

00:15:21.520 | Let's go.

00:15:22.360 | And then Venus shows up and I was like, are you sure?

00:15:24.400 | I'm like, I was sure before I was sure.

00:15:27.600 | Now that it's right here, I'm less sure

00:15:31.680 | now that my claims are being tested.

00:15:35.760 | So phosphine, phosphine is a fascinating molecule.

00:15:38.600 | So it's shaped like a pyramid with a phosphorus up top

00:15:41.920 | and then three hydrogens.

00:15:43.840 | It's actually quite a simple molecule in many ways.

00:15:46.400 | And you know, it's the most popular elements in the universe

00:15:50.760 | carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur.

00:15:54.720 | When you add hydrogen to them, it makes quite simple,

00:15:57.480 | quite famous molecules.

00:15:59.800 | You do it to oxygen, you get water.

00:16:01.920 | You do it to carbon, you get methane.

00:16:03.920 | You do it to nitrogen, you get ammonia.

00:16:06.000 | These are all molecules people have heard of.

00:16:08.280 | But you do it to phosphorus, you get phosphine.

00:16:11.280 | People haven't heard of phosphine

00:16:12.680 | because it's not really popular on earth.

00:16:16.440 | We really shouldn't find it anywhere on earth

00:16:19.120 | because it is extremely toxic to life.

00:16:22.240 | It interacts with oxygen metabolism

00:16:24.800 | and everything you know and love uses oxygen metabolism

00:16:29.800 | and it interacts fatally.

00:16:31.680 | So it kills in several very imaginative

00:16:35.360 | and very macabre ways.

00:16:37.600 | So it was used as a chemical warfare agent

00:16:41.040 | in the first world war and most recently by ISIS.

00:16:43.760 | So really bad, most life avoids it.

00:16:47.040 | Even life that might not avoid it.

00:16:49.520 | So life that doesn't use oxygen metabolism, anaerobic life

00:16:53.320 | still has to put crazy amounts of effort into making it.

00:16:56.040 | It's a really difficult molecule to make

00:16:58.080 | thermodynamically speaking.

00:16:59.280 | It's really difficult to make that phosphorus

00:17:01.600 | want to be together with that hydrogen.

00:17:04.000 | So it's horrible, everyone avoids it.

00:17:07.600 | When they're not avoiding it,

00:17:08.680 | it's extremely difficult to make.

00:17:10.400 | You would have to put energy in,

00:17:12.160 | sacrifice energy to make it.

00:17:14.040 | And if you did go through all that trouble and made it,

00:17:16.920 | it gets reacted with the radicals in the atmosphere

00:17:20.560 | and gets destroyed.

00:17:22.120 | So we shouldn't find it anywhere and yet we do.

00:17:24.360 | It's kind of weird molecule that seems to be made by life

00:17:29.360 | and we don't even know why.

00:17:31.520 | Life clearly finds a use for it.

00:17:33.520 | It's not the only molecule that life is willing

00:17:35.280 | to sacrifice energy to make,

00:17:36.600 | but we don't know how or why life is even making it.

00:17:39.680 | So absolutely mysterious, absolutely deadly,

00:17:44.560 | smells horrifically when it's made,

00:17:46.840 | it produces other kind of diphosphenes

00:17:48.800 | and it's been reported as smelling like

00:17:51.320 | garlicky fishy death.

00:17:53.760 | Once someone referred to it as smelling like the,

00:17:56.440 | let me see if I remember,

00:17:57.560 | the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan.

00:18:00.600 | - Oh, very nice.

00:18:01.520 | - Yeah, very, very vivid.

00:18:03.440 | And so-

00:18:04.280 | - See, you're a poet after all.

00:18:05.800 | - I didn't call that, someone else did.

00:18:08.040 | And so it's just this horrific molecule

00:18:10.560 | that it is produced by life, we don't know why.

00:18:13.920 | And when it is produced by life

00:18:15.720 | is done with enormous sacrifice

00:18:17.720 | and the universe does not sacrifice, life sacrifices.

00:18:22.360 | And so it's this strange contradictory molecule

00:18:25.480 | that we should all be avoiding

00:18:26.800 | and yet seems to be an almost an ambiguous sign of life

00:18:30.280 | on rocky planets.

00:18:31.460 | - Okay, can we dig into that a little bit?

00:18:34.600 | So on rocky planets,

00:18:36.640 | what, is there biological mechanisms that can produce it?

00:18:40.800 | And is there,

00:18:41.880 | you said that why is unclear, why life might produce it,

00:18:48.440 | but is there an understanding of what kind of mechanisms

00:18:51.800 | might be able to produce it,

00:18:53.080 | this very difficult to produce molecule?

00:18:55.960 | - We don't know yet.

00:18:57.200 | The enzymatic pathways of phosphine production by life

00:19:00.120 | are not yet known.

00:19:01.920 | This is not actually as surprising as it might sound.

00:19:04.480 | I think something like 80% of all the natural products

00:19:08.640 | that we know of, so we know biology makes them.

00:19:11.480 | We don't know how.

00:19:12.680 | It is much easier to know life produces something

00:19:14.960 | 'cause you can put bacteria in a Petri dish

00:19:17.360 | and then watch and then that gas is produced,

00:19:19.520 | you go, oh, life made it.

00:19:21.200 | That actually happened with phosphine.

00:19:23.360 | But that's much easier to do, of course,

00:19:25.200 | than figuring out what is the exact metabolic pathway

00:19:29.420 | within that life form that created this molecule.

00:19:33.000 | So we don't know yet.

00:19:34.960 | Phosphine is really understudied.

00:19:37.040 | No one had really heard of it until now-ish.

00:19:40.520 | - What you were presenting is the fact

00:19:42.440 | that life produces phosphine,

00:19:44.720 | not the process by which it produces phosphine.

00:19:47.680 | Is there an urgency now?

00:19:49.840 | Like if you were to try to understand the mechanisms,

00:19:53.440 | the, what did you call them,

00:19:54.760 | enzymatic pathways that produce phosphine,

00:19:58.440 | how difficult is that of a problem to crack?

00:20:00.760 | - It's really difficult.

00:20:02.240 | If I'm not mistaken, even the scent of truffles,

00:20:05.760 | obviously a billion dollar industry, huge deal,

00:20:09.240 | until quite recently, it wasn't known exactly

00:20:11.920 | how those scents, those molecules

00:20:13.840 | that create this incredible smell were produced.

00:20:16.200 | And this is a billion dollar industry.

00:20:18.640 | As you can imagine, there is no such pressure.

00:20:21.040 | There's no phosphine lobby or anything

00:20:22.960 | that would push for this research.

00:20:25.760 | But I hope someone picks it up and does it.

00:20:29.040 | And it isn't crazy because we know

00:20:32.200 | that phosphine is really hard to make.

00:20:33.560 | We know it's really hard for it to happen accidentally.

00:20:36.400 | Even lightning and volcanoes

00:20:38.760 | that can produce small amounts of phosphine.

00:20:41.560 | It's extremely difficult

00:20:42.400 | for even these extreme processes to make it.

00:20:44.680 | So it's not really surprising that only life can do it

00:20:47.480 | because life is willing to make things at a cost.

00:20:51.080 | - So maybe on the topic of phosphine,

00:20:54.920 | what, again, you've gotten yourself into trouble.

00:20:58.840 | I'm gonna ask you all these high level poetic questions.

00:21:01.320 | I apologize.

00:21:02.200 | - No, I would love it.

00:21:03.240 | - Okay.

00:21:04.080 | When did you first fall in love with phosphine?

00:21:08.000 | - It wasn't love at first sight.

00:21:11.440 | It was somewhere between a long relationship

00:21:16.440 | and Stockholm syndrome.

00:21:19.000 | - Yeah.

00:21:20.360 | - When I first started my PhD,

00:21:22.280 | I knew I wanted to learn about molecular spectra

00:21:25.160 | and how to simulate it.

00:21:26.560 | I thought it was really outrageous

00:21:28.640 | that we as a species couldn't detect molecules remotely.

00:21:32.200 | We didn't have this perfect catalog ready

00:21:34.800 | of the molecular fingerprint of every molecule

00:21:36.760 | we may want to find in the universe.

00:21:38.920 | And something as basic as phosphine,

00:21:41.200 | the fact that we didn't really know

00:21:42.880 | how it interacted with light,

00:21:44.320 | and so we couldn't detect it properly in the galaxy,

00:21:48.280 | just, I was so indignant.

00:21:50.040 | And so initially I just started working on phosphine

00:21:53.760 | because people hadn't before.

00:21:55.840 | And I thought we should know what phosphine looks like.

00:21:59.600 | And that was it.

00:22:01.160 | And then I read every paper

00:22:02.440 | that's ever been published about phosphine.

00:22:04.320 | It was quite easy 'cause there aren't that many.

00:22:07.480 | And that's when I started learning about

00:22:11.000 | where we had already found it in the universe

00:22:13.280 | and what it meant.

00:22:14.160 | I started finding out quite how little we know about it

00:22:17.920 | and why.

00:22:20.320 | And it was only when I joined MIT

00:22:22.240 | and I started talking to biochemists

00:22:25.120 | that it became clear that phosphine

00:22:28.760 | wasn't just weird and special

00:22:30.960 | and understudied and disgusting.

00:22:33.440 | It was all these things for oxygen loving life.

00:22:36.800 | And it was the anaerobic world that would welcome phosphine.

00:22:40.600 | And that's when the idea of looking for it

00:22:43.920 | on other planets became crystallized

00:22:46.400 | because oxygen is very powerful and very important on Earth,

00:22:50.120 | but that's not necessarily going to be the case

00:22:52.960 | on other exoplanets.

00:22:54.120 | Most planets are oxygen poor.

00:22:56.520 | Overwhelmingly, most planets are oxygen poor.

00:22:59.720 | And so finding the sign of life

00:23:01.840 | that would be welcomed by everything

00:23:05.260 | that would live without oxygen on Earth seemed so cool.

00:23:10.260 | (Lex laughing)

00:23:12.560 | - But ultimately the project at first

00:23:14.520 | was born out of the idea

00:23:15.560 | that you wanna find that molecular fingerprint

00:23:17.920 | of a molecule.

00:23:22.160 | And this is just one example.

00:23:24.520 | And that's connected to then looking for that fingerprint

00:23:29.520 | elsewhere in a remote way.

00:23:33.480 | And obviously that then,

00:23:35.140 | at that time where exoplanets already,

00:23:37.080 | when you were doing your PhD,

00:23:38.260 | and by the way, I should say your PhD thesis was on phosphine.

00:23:41.520 | - It was all on phosphine, 100% on phosphine.

00:23:44.760 | With a little bit of ammonia.

00:23:45.880 | I have a chapter that I did

00:23:48.400 | where I talked about phosphine and ammonia.

00:23:51.280 | So I-- - Got it.

00:23:53.040 | - But no, phosphine was very much my thesis.

00:23:55.400 | - But at that time when you were writing it,

00:23:58.160 | there was already a sense that exoplanets are out there

00:24:01.080 | and we might be able to be looking for biosignatures

00:24:04.800 | on those exoplanets?

00:24:08.280 | - Pretty much.

00:24:09.120 | So I finished my PhD in 2015.

00:24:11.540 | We found the first exoplanets in the mid to late '90s.

00:24:15.680 | So exoplanets were known.

00:24:17.600 | It was known that some had atmospheres.

00:24:20.120 | And from there, it's not a big jump to think,

00:24:22.120 | well, if some have atmospheres,

00:24:23.520 | some of those might be habitable.

00:24:25.640 | And some of those may be inhabited.

00:24:27.940 | - So how do you detect, you started to talk about it,

00:24:33.120 | but can we linger on it?

00:24:35.000 | How do you detect phosphine on a far away thing?

00:24:38.880 | Rocky thing, rocky planet?

00:24:41.680 | What is spectroscopy?

00:24:45.700 | What is this molecular fingerprint?

00:24:47.720 | What does it look like?

00:24:49.360 | You've kind of mentioned the wave,

00:24:50.920 | but what are we supposed to think about?

00:24:52.880 | What are the tools?

00:24:54.400 | What are the uncertainties?

00:24:55.800 | All those kinds of things.

00:24:57.280 | - So the path can go this way.

00:24:59.720 | You've got light, kind of pure light.

00:25:03.820 | You can crack that light open with a prism

00:25:06.280 | or a spectroscope or water and make a rainbow.

00:25:09.620 | That rainbow is all the colors

00:25:12.840 | and all the invisible colors, the ultraviolet, the infrared.

00:25:17.120 | And if that light was truly pure,

00:25:19.320 | you could consider that rainbow

00:25:20.640 | to just cover continuously all of these colors.

00:25:24.760 | But if that light goes through a gas,

00:25:26.760 | we may not see that gas.

00:25:28.080 | We certainly cannot see the molecules within that gas,

00:25:31.120 | but those molecules will still absorb some of that light.

00:25:36.120 | Some, but not all.

00:25:38.120 | Each molecule absorbs only very specific colors

00:25:41.160 | of that rainbow.

00:25:42.720 | And so if you know, for example,

00:25:44.160 | that shade of green can only be absorbed by methane,

00:25:48.280 | then you can watch as a planet passes in front of a star.

00:25:52.080 | The planet's too far away, you can't see it.

00:25:54.240 | And it has an atmosphere.

00:25:55.680 | That atmosphere is far too small.

00:25:56.960 | You definitely can't see it.

00:25:58.740 | But the sunlight will go through that atmosphere.

00:26:01.160 | And if that atmosphere is methane,

00:26:03.080 | then on the other side, that shade of blue,

00:26:06.080 | I can't remember if I said blue or green,

00:26:07.280 | but that color will be missing because methane took it.

00:26:11.800 | And so with phosphine, it's the same thing.

00:26:14.440 | It has specific colors, 16.8 billion colors,

00:26:18.960 | that it absorbs it and nothing else does.

00:26:21.920 | And so if you can find them and notice them missing

00:26:25.140 | from the light of a star

00:26:27.640 | that went through a planet's atmosphere,

00:26:30.000 | then you'll know that atmosphere contains that molecule.

00:26:33.160 | How cool is that?

00:26:34.000 | - That's incredible.

00:26:35.040 | So you can have this fingerprint within the space of colors

00:26:39.520 | and there's a lot of molecules.

00:26:40.720 | And I mean, I wonder,

00:26:42.200 | it's a question of like how much overlap there is.

00:26:44.560 | How close can you get to the actual fingerprint?

00:26:48.160 | Like can phosphine unlock the iPhone with its lights on?

00:26:52.320 | He says 16.8 billion.

00:26:54.640 | So presumably this rainbow is discretized

00:26:58.840 | into little segments somehow.

00:27:00.560 | - Exactly.

00:27:01.400 | - How many total are there?

00:27:02.960 | How a lot is 16.8 billion?

00:27:06.520 | - It's a lot.

00:27:07.880 | We don't have the instruments to break these,

00:27:11.040 | break any light into this many tiny segments.

00:27:14.120 | And so with the instruments we do have,

00:27:16.520 | there's huge amounts of overlap.

00:27:18.560 | Methane, as an example,

00:27:20.480 | a lot of the ways it's detectable

00:27:24.080 | is because the carbon and the hydrogens,

00:27:26.720 | they vibrate with one another,

00:27:28.640 | they move, they interact.

00:27:30.560 | But every other hydrocarbon, acetylene, isoprene,

00:27:34.880 | has carbon and hydrogens also vibrating and rotating.

00:27:39.160 | And so it's actually very hard to tell them apart

00:27:41.120 | at low resolutions.

00:27:42.720 | And our instruments can't really cope

00:27:45.880 | with distinguishing between molecules particularly well.

00:27:48.960 | But in an ideal world, if we had infinite resolution,

00:27:53.560 | then yes, every molecule's spectral features will be unique.

00:27:57.400 | - Yeah, like almost too, like it would be too trivial.

00:28:02.120 | - At the quantum level, they're unique.

00:28:04.120 | At our level, there's huge overlap.

00:28:07.040 | - Yeah, but then you can start to then,

00:28:09.240 | what, try to disambiguate like what the miss,

00:28:15.000 | the fact that certain colors are missing,

00:28:16.760 | what does that mean?

00:28:17.960 | And hopefully they're missing in a certain kind of pattern

00:28:20.560 | where you can say,

00:28:21.400 | with some kind of probability that it's this gas,

00:28:23.480 | not this gas.

00:28:24.640 | So you're solving that gaseous puzzle.

00:28:28.480 | I got it, okay.

00:28:29.320 | - We can go back to Venus actually and show that.

00:28:31.560 | So with this, I mentioned those two molecules

00:28:34.440 | that could be responsible for that signal,

00:28:36.360 | the resolution that we have,

00:28:37.720 | it was phosphine and SO2, sulfur dioxide.

00:28:41.720 | And at that resolution, it could really be one or the other,

00:28:46.040 | but in that same bandwidth,

00:28:47.440 | so in the kind of the same observations,

00:28:49.680 | there was another region where phosphine does not absorb,

00:28:52.360 | we know that, but SO2 does.

00:28:55.000 | So we just went and checked and there was no signal.

00:28:58.560 | So we thought, oh, then it must be phosphine.

00:29:01.840 | And then we submitted the paper.

00:29:03.440 | (both laughing)

00:29:05.560 | The rest is history.

00:29:07.240 | - I got it.

00:29:08.080 | Well, yeah, that's beautifully told.

00:29:12.920 | Is there, so the telescopes we're talking about

00:29:15.920 | are sitting on earth.

00:29:17.000 | What, can it help solving this fingerprint,

00:29:22.160 | molecular fingerprint problem if we do a flyby?

00:29:25.840 | Does it help if we get closer and closer?

00:29:28.320 | Or are telescopes pretty damn good

00:29:31.440 | for this kind of puzzle solving?

00:29:33.960 | - Telescopes are pretty good,

00:29:34.960 | but the earth's atmosphere is a pain.

00:29:37.960 | I mean, I'm very thankful for it,

00:29:39.840 | but it does interrupt a lot of measurements

00:29:43.240 | and a lot of regions where phosphine would be active.

00:29:46.080 | They are not available.

00:29:47.160 | The earth is not transparent in those wavelengths.

00:29:52.120 | So being above the atmosphere would make a huge difference.

00:29:55.240 | Then proximity matters a lot less,

00:29:57.160 | but just escaping the earth's atmosphere would be wonderful.

00:30:00.960 | But then it's really hard to stay very stable.

00:30:03.120 | And if there is phosphine on Venus,

00:30:06.040 | there's very little of it in the clouds.

00:30:08.560 | And so the signal is very weak

00:30:11.240 | and the telescopes we can use on earth

00:30:14.440 | are much bigger and much more stable.

00:30:16.520 | So it's a bit of a trade-off.

00:30:18.320 | - So is it, are you comfortable

00:30:22.280 | with this kind of remote observation?

00:30:24.440 | Is it at all helpful to strive for going over to Venus

00:30:30.400 | and grabbing a scoop of the atmosphere?

00:30:34.200 | Or is remote observation really a powerful tool

00:30:38.280 | for this kind of job?

00:30:39.120 | Like the scoop is not necessary.

00:30:40.800 | - Well, a lot of people want to scoop.

00:30:43.400 | I get it.

00:30:44.840 | I get it completely. - That's my natural inclination.

00:30:47.400 | - I don't want to scoop specifically because if it is life,

00:30:50.600 | I want to know everything I can remotely before I interfere.

00:30:54.680 | So that's my, I've got ethical reasons against the scoop

00:30:58.080 | more than engineering reasons against the scoop.

00:31:00.720 | But I have some engineering reasons against the scoop.

00:31:03.200 | Scoop is not a technical term,

00:31:04.480 | but I feel like now it's too late.

00:31:06.000 | - Thank you for going along with this.

00:31:07.520 | - It's too late to take it back.

00:31:08.920 | - I appreciate it.

00:31:09.960 | - We don't understand the clouds well enough

00:31:11.920 | to plan the scoop very well.

00:31:14.160 | - Because it's not that saturated.

00:31:16.600 | Like there's not that much of it present.

00:31:19.000 | - No, and the place is nasty.

00:31:21.680 | You know, it's not going to be easy to build something

00:31:24.960 | that can do the task reliably and can be trusted.

00:31:29.280 | The measurements can be trusted

00:31:31.120 | and then pass that message on.

00:31:33.080 | So actually I'm for an orbiter.

00:31:35.520 | I think we should have orbiters

00:31:36.760 | around every solar system body

00:31:39.320 | whose job is just to learn about these places.

00:31:42.200 | I'm disappointed we haven't already got an orbiter

00:31:45.320 | around every single one of them.

00:31:47.400 | A small, it can be a small satellite.

00:31:49.200 | Just getting data, figuring out, you know,

00:31:50.880 | how do the clouds move?

00:31:52.000 | What's in them?

00:31:53.160 | How often is there lightning

00:31:54.680 | and volcanic activity?

00:31:56.080 | Where's the topography?

00:31:57.120 | Is it changing?

00:31:58.840 | Is there a biosphere actively doing things?

00:32:02.000 | We should be monitoring this from afar.

00:32:04.960 | And so I'm for over the atmosphere,

00:32:08.520 | hopefully around Venus.

00:32:10.120 | That would be my choice.

00:32:12.680 | - Okay, so now recently Venus is all exciting

00:32:16.540 | about a phosphine and everything.

00:32:18.240 | Is there other stuff maybe before

00:32:21.120 | we were looking at Venus

00:32:22.440 | or now looking out into other solar systems?

00:32:26.720 | Is there other promising exoplanets

00:32:29.120 | or other planets within the solar system

00:32:32.040 | that might have phosphine

00:32:34.160 | or might have other strong biosignatures

00:32:38.560 | that we should be looking for like phosphine?

00:32:41.620 | - There's a few, but outside the solar system,

00:32:45.840 | all are kind of promising candidates.

00:32:48.340 | We know so little about them.

00:32:49.920 | For most of them, we barely know their density.

00:32:52.320 | Most of them, we don't even know

00:32:54.960 | if they have an atmosphere,

00:32:56.160 | nevermind what that atmosphere might contain.

00:32:59.200 | So we're still very much at the stage

00:33:00.720 | where we have detected promising planets,

00:33:03.840 | but they're promising in that

00:33:05.400 | they're about the right size,

00:33:07.080 | about the right density.

00:33:08.700 | They could have an atmosphere

00:33:10.640 | and they're about the right distance

00:33:12.200 | from their host star.

00:33:13.440 | But that's really all we know.

00:33:15.040 | Near future telescopes will tell us much more,

00:33:17.440 | but for now, we're just guessing.

00:33:21.160 | - So you said near future.

00:33:22.240 | So there's hope that there'll be telescopes

00:33:24.520 | that can see that far enough

00:33:26.080 | to determine if there's an atmosphere

00:33:28.400 | and perhaps even the contents of that atmosphere?

00:33:31.240 | - Absolutely.

00:33:32.080 | JWST launching later this year

00:33:34.360 | will be able to get a very rough sense

00:33:37.880 | of the main atmospheric constituents of planets

00:33:42.280 | that could potentially be habitable.

00:33:44.320 | And that's this year.

00:33:45.880 | - What's the name of the--

00:33:46.920 | - JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope.

00:33:49.520 | - Okay.

00:33:50.360 | And that's going to be out in space,

00:33:51.760 | past the atmosphere?

00:33:53.200 | - Yes.

00:33:54.040 | - Is there something interesting to be said

00:33:55.240 | about the engineering aspect of the telescope?

00:33:58.120 | - It's an incredible beast,

00:33:59.760 | but it's a beast of many burdens.

00:34:01.920 | So it's going to do--

00:34:04.160 | (laughs)

00:34:05.960 | - See, you are a poet.

00:34:07.040 | (laughs)

00:34:08.080 | Yeah, I love it.

00:34:09.560 | This is very eloquent.

00:34:11.160 | You're speaking to the audience, which I appreciate.

00:34:13.240 | (laughs)

00:34:15.240 | So yeah, so it's a giant engineering project.

00:34:17.800 | And is it orbiting something?

00:34:19.920 | Do you know?

00:34:20.760 | - So it's going to be above the atmosphere

00:34:22.640 | and it will be doing lots of different astrophysics.

00:34:26.160 | And so some of its time will be dedicated to exoplanets,

00:34:31.160 | but there's an entire astronomy field fighting for time

00:34:35.560 | before the cryogenic lifetime of the instrument.

00:34:40.320 | And so when I was looking for the possibility

00:34:43.480 | of finding phosphine on distant exoplanets,

00:34:46.000 | I used JWST as a way of checking with this instrument

00:34:51.000 | that we will launch later this year,

00:34:53.240 | could we detect phosphine on an oxygen-poor planet?

00:34:56.600 | And there I put very much a hard stop

00:34:59.360 | where some of my simulations said,

00:35:01.520 | yes, you can totally do it,

00:35:02.640 | but it will take a little under the cryogenic lifetime

00:35:05.920 | of this machine.

00:35:06.880 | So then I had to go, well, that's not going to,

00:35:09.560 | no one's going to dedicate all of JWST

00:35:11.920 | to look for my molecule that no one cared about.

00:35:15.280 | So we're very much at that edge,

00:35:17.940 | but there'll be many other telescopes in the coming decades

00:35:21.080 | that will be able to tell us quite a lot

00:35:23.600 | about the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets.

00:35:26.680 | - So you mentioned simulation.

00:35:28.320 | This is super interesting to me.

00:35:29.840 | And this perhaps could be a super dumb question, but-

00:35:33.580 | - Not such a thing.

00:35:35.480 | - I am going to prove you wrong on that one.

00:35:38.840 | You simulate molecules to understand

00:35:41.280 | how they look from a distance is what I understand.

00:35:43.600 | Like, what does that simulation look like?

00:35:46.660 | So it's talking about which colors

00:35:50.720 | of the rainbow will be missing.

00:35:52.080 | Is that the goal of the simulation?

00:35:54.600 | - That's the goal, but it's really just a very,

00:35:56.800 | very nasty Schrödinger's equation.

00:35:59.440 | So it's a quantum simulation.

00:36:01.520 | - Oh, so it's simulating at the quantum level.

00:36:03.720 | - Yes, so I'm a quantum astrochemist.

00:36:06.360 | Hi, I'm Clara.

00:36:07.200 | I'm a quantum astrochemist.

00:36:08.400 | It's how we should have started this conversation.

00:36:10.840 | Can you describe the three components of that,

00:36:14.200 | quantum, astro, and chemist,

00:36:16.320 | and how they interplay together?

00:36:18.720 | - So I study the quantum behavior of molecules,

00:36:22.720 | hence the quantum and the chemist,

00:36:25.560 | specifically so I can detect them in space, hence the astro.

00:36:29.780 | So what I do is I figure out the probability

00:36:35.500 | of a molecule being in a particular state.

00:36:38.480 | There's no deterministic nature to the work I do,

00:36:41.520 | so it's every transition is just a likelihood.

00:36:45.800 | But if you get a population of that molecule,

00:36:48.560 | it will always happen.

00:36:50.520 | And so this is all at the quantum level.

00:36:52.320 | It's a Schrödinger equation on, I think, 27 dimensions.

00:36:55.900 | I don't remember it by heart.

00:36:57.800 | And what this means is I'm solving

00:36:59.560 | these giant quantum matrices,

00:37:03.600 | and that's why you need a lot of computer power,

00:37:05.840 | giant computers, to diagonalize these enormous matrices,

00:37:10.760 | each of whom describes a single

00:37:14.120 | vibrational behavior of a molecule.

00:37:17.300 | So I think phosphine has 17.5 million

00:37:22.300 | possible states it can exist in.

00:37:24.660 | And transitions can occur between pairs of these states.

00:37:29.960 | And there's a certain likelihood that they'll happen.

00:37:31.920 | This is the quantum world.

00:37:32.880 | Nothing is deterministic.

00:37:34.560 | There's just a likelihood that it will jump

00:37:36.440 | from one state to another.

00:37:38.400 | And these jumps, they're transitions,

00:37:41.440 | and there's 16.8 billion of them.

00:37:44.080 | When energy is absorbed,

00:37:45.840 | that corresponds to this transition.

00:37:47.480 | We see it in the spectrum.

00:37:48.920 | This is more quantum chemistry than you had asked for.

00:37:50.760 | I'm sorry.

00:37:51.600 | - No, no, I'm sorry.

00:37:52.680 | Brain's broken.

00:37:53.680 | So when the transitions happen between the different states,

00:37:57.460 | somehow the energy maps the spectrum.

00:38:00.920 | - Exactly.

00:38:01.760 | Energy corresponds to a frequency,

00:38:04.240 | and a frequency corresponds to a wavelength,

00:38:06.160 | which corresponds to a color.

00:38:08.040 | - So there's some probability assigned to each color then?

00:38:11.800 | - Exactly.

00:38:12.640 | And that probability determines how intense

00:38:14.440 | that transition will be, how strong.

00:38:16.960 | - And so you run this kind of simulation for particular,

00:38:20.840 | let's say that's 17.5 squared or something like that.

00:38:23.560 | - Exactly.

00:38:24.400 | 17.5 million energies,

00:38:26.840 | each one of whom involves diagonalizing a giant matrix

00:38:30.480 | with a supercomputer.

00:38:32.160 | - Actually, I wonder what the most efficient algorithm

00:38:33.760 | for diagonalization is.

00:38:35.840 | But there's some kind of-

00:38:37.040 | - There's many.

00:38:37.880 | - There's many, yeah.

00:38:38.700 | - Depends on kind of the shape of the matrix.

00:38:41.800 | So they're not random matrices.

00:38:43.480 | So some are more diagonal than others.

00:38:45.160 | And so some need more treatment than others.

00:38:48.320 | Most of the work ends up going in describing the system,

00:38:51.640 | this quantum system in different ways

00:38:53.360 | until you have a matrix that is close to being diagonal,

00:38:56.760 | and then it's much easier to clean it up.

00:38:59.360 | - So how hard is this puzzle?

00:39:03.760 | So you're solving this puzzle for phosphine, right?

00:39:06.560 | Is this, are we supposed to solve this puzzle

00:39:10.840 | for every single molecule?

00:39:13.840 | Oh boy.

00:39:14.920 | - Yes, I calculated if I did the work I did for phosphine,

00:39:18.720 | again, for all the molecules for which we don't have spectra,

00:39:22.440 | for which we don't have a fingerprint,

00:39:24.760 | it would take me 62,000 years, a little over.

00:39:28.280 | - 62,000 years.

00:39:30.040 | Well, time flies when you're having fun.

00:39:31.680 | Okay, but you write that there are about 16,000 molecules

00:39:36.320 | we care about when looking for a new earth

00:39:39.360 | or when we try to detect alien biosignatures.

00:39:42.960 | If we want to detect any molecules from here,

00:39:45.360 | we need to know their spectra, and we currently don't.

00:39:49.240 | Solving this particular problem, that's my job.

00:39:53.400 | - Well, it's the hat.

00:39:54.360 | I mean, that's absolutely correct.

00:39:55.920 | I could have not said it better myself.

00:39:58.040 | Did you take that from my website?

00:39:59.280 | - Yeah, I think I stole it.

00:40:00.600 | And your website is excellent,

00:40:02.160 | so it's a worthy place to steal stuff from.

00:40:05.160 | How do you solve this problem

00:40:07.320 | of for the 16,000 molecules we care about,

00:40:11.160 | of which phosphine is one?

00:40:12.680 | - Yes.

00:40:13.520 | - And so taking a step a little bit out of phosphine,

00:40:18.520 | is there...

00:40:21.440 | - But we were having so much fun.

00:40:23.680 | - We were having so much fun.

00:40:24.760 | No, we're not saying, bye.

00:40:26.320 | It's sticking around.

00:40:27.440 | I'm just saying, more friends coming to the party.

00:40:30.560 | How do you choose other friends to come to the party

00:40:33.040 | that are interesting to study

00:40:35.240 | as we solve one puzzle at a time

00:40:37.720 | through the space of 16,000?

00:40:40.200 | - So we've already started.

00:40:41.560 | Out of those 16,000, we understand water quite well,

00:40:44.200 | methane quite well, ammonia quite well, carbon dioxide.

00:40:47.680 | I could keep going.

00:40:49.520 | And then we understand molecules like acetylene,

00:40:52.200 | hydrogen cyanide, more or less.

00:40:55.800 | And that takes us to about 4% of those 16,000.

00:40:59.160 | We understand about 4% of them, more or less.

00:41:02.000 | Phosphine is one of them.

00:41:03.240 | But the other 96%, we just really have barely any idea

00:41:08.080 | at all of where in the spectrum of light

00:41:11.680 | they would leave a mark.

00:41:13.400 | I can't spend the next 62,000 years doing this work.

00:41:18.320 | And I don't want to, even if somehow I was able,

00:41:22.280 | that wouldn't feel good.

00:41:26.320 | So one of the things that I try to do now

00:41:29.400 | is move away from how I did phosphine.

00:41:32.520 | So I did phosphine really the best that I could,

00:41:36.080 | the best that could be done

00:41:36.960 | with the computer power that we have,

00:41:38.760 | trying to get each one of those 16.8 billion transitions

00:41:42.400 | mapped accurately, calculated.

00:41:44.760 | And then I thought, what if I do a worse job?

00:41:49.920 | What if I just do a much worse job?

00:41:52.960 | Can I just make it much faster

00:41:55.360 | and then it's still worth it?

00:41:57.480 | How bad can I get before it's worthless?

00:42:01.960 | And then could I do this for all the other molecules?

00:42:05.280 | So I created exactly this terrible, terrible system.

00:42:10.280 | - So what's the answer to that question,

00:42:12.440 | that fundamental question I ask myself all the time

00:42:14.600 | in other domains?

00:42:15.560 | - How crappy can I be before I'm useless?

00:42:17.240 | - Before somebody notices.

00:42:19.280 | - Turns out, pretty crappy.

00:42:21.320 | - Because no one has any idea

00:42:23.720 | what these molecules look like,

00:42:26.120 | anything is better than nothing.

00:42:28.520 | And so I thought, how long will it take me

00:42:30.600 | to create better than nothing spectra

00:42:32.960 | for all of these molecules?

00:42:34.400 | And so I created RASCAL,

00:42:36.160 | Rapid Approximate Spectral Calculations for All.

00:42:40.200 | And what I do is I use organic chemistry

00:42:45.360 | and quantum chemistry and kind of cheat them both.

00:42:48.560 | I just try to figure out

00:42:49.880 | what is the fastest way I could run this?

00:42:52.680 | And I simulate rough spectra for all of those 16,000.

00:42:57.440 | So I've managed to get it to work.

00:42:59.480 | It's really shocking how well it works,

00:43:00.980 | considering how bad it is.

00:43:03.000 | - Is there insights you could give

00:43:05.080 | to the tricks involved in making it fast?

00:43:08.480 | Like what are the, maybe some insightful shortcuts taken

00:43:13.480 | that still result in some useful information

00:43:16.600 | about the spectra?

00:43:18.080 | - The insights came from organic chemistry from decades ago.

00:43:22.140 | When organic chemists wanted to know

00:43:24.480 | what a compound might be,

00:43:25.720 | they would look at a spectrum and see a feature

00:43:27.920 | and they would go, "I've seen that feature before."

00:43:30.960 | That's usually what happens

00:43:32.120 | when you have a carbon triple bonded to another carbon.

00:43:35.960 | And they were mostly right.

00:43:37.200 | Almost every molecule that has a carbon triple bonded

00:43:39.640 | to another one looks like that.

00:43:41.400 | Has other features different

00:43:44.040 | that distinguish them from one another,

00:43:45.840 | but they have that feature in common.

00:43:49.280 | We call these functional groups.

00:43:51.200 | And so most of that work ended up being abandoned

00:43:55.200 | because now we have mass spectrometry,

00:43:57.040 | we've got nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

00:43:59.080 | So people don't really need to do that anymore.

00:44:03.080 | But these ancient textbooks still exist

00:44:06.040 | and I've collected them all, as many as I could.

00:44:09.480 | And there are hundreds of these descriptions

00:44:11.420 | where people have said,

00:44:13.000 | oh, whenever you have a iodine atom connected to this one,

00:44:18.000 | there's always a feature here.

00:44:19.960 | And it's usually quite sharp and it's quite strong.

00:44:22.840 | And some people go, oh yeah, that's a really broad feature

00:44:24.920 | every time that combination of atoms and bonds.

00:44:28.120 | So I've collected them all

00:44:29.360 | and I've created this giant dictionary

00:44:31.080 | of all these kind of puzzle pieces,

00:44:34.120 | these Lego parts of molecules.

00:44:36.440 | And I've written a code that then puts them all together

00:44:39.920 | in some kind of like Frankenstein's monster of molecules.

00:44:43.640 | So you ask me for any molecule and I go,

00:44:45.520 | well, it has these bonds and this atom

00:44:48.480 | dangling off this atom and this cluster here.

00:44:51.840 | And I tell you what it should look like.

00:44:55.160 | And it kind of works.

00:44:57.240 | - So this creates a whole portfolio

00:45:00.000 | of just kind of signatures that we could look for.

00:45:03.560 | - Rough, very rough signatures.

00:45:05.120 | - But still useful enough to analyze the atmospheres,

00:45:08.960 | the telescope generated images of other planets.

00:45:13.720 | - Close, right now it is so complete.

00:45:18.880 | So it has all of these molecules that it can tell you,

00:45:22.080 | say you look at an alien atmosphere

00:45:24.120 | and there's a feature there.

00:45:26.240 | It can tell you, oh, that feature, that's familiar.

00:45:29.040 | It could be one of these 816 molecules.

00:45:32.040 | - And there's the megalo. - Best of luck.

00:45:33.040 | - Yes.

00:45:34.000 | - So I think the next step, which is what I'm working on

00:45:36.440 | is telling you something more useful

00:45:38.600 | than it could be one of those 816 molecules.

00:45:41.160 | That's still true, I wouldn't say it's useful.

00:45:43.720 | So it can tell you, but only 12% of them

00:45:47.080 | also have a feature in this region, so go look there.

00:45:49.640 | And if there's nothing there, it can't be those and so on.

00:45:53.320 | It can also tell you things like,

00:45:55.320 | you will need this much accuracy

00:45:57.120 | to distinguish between those 816.

00:46:00.160 | So that's what I'm working on, but it's a lot of work.

00:46:04.400 | - So this is really interesting,

00:46:06.520 | the role of computing in this whole picture.

00:46:09.000 | You mentioned code.

00:46:10.080 | So you, as a quantum astrochemist,

00:46:14.760 | there is some role for programming in your life,

00:46:18.760 | in your past life, in your current life, in your group.

00:46:20.640 | - Oh yeah, almost entirely.

00:46:22.000 | I'm a computational quantum astrochemist,

00:46:23.960 | but that doesn't roll off the tongue very easily.

00:46:25.760 | - So this is fundamentally computational.

00:46:28.440 | Like if you wanna be successful in the 21st century

00:46:30.760 | in doing quantum astrochemistry,

00:46:32.400 | you wanna be computational?

00:46:33.720 | - Absolutely, all quantum chemistry

00:46:35.000 | is computational at this point.

00:46:36.480 | - Okay.

00:46:37.960 | Does machine learning play a role at all?

00:46:40.480 | Is there some extra shortcuts that could be discovered

00:46:43.640 | through, like you see all that success

00:46:46.680 | with protein folding, right?

00:46:48.320 | A problem that thought to be extremely difficult

00:46:51.960 | to apply machine learning to because it's,

00:46:55.340 | I mean, mostly because there's not a lot

00:47:01.360 | of already solved puzzles to train on.

00:47:04.840 | I suppose the same exact thing is true

00:47:07.120 | with this particular problem,

00:47:08.480 | but is there hope for machine learning to help out?

00:47:11.240 | - Absolutely.

00:47:12.240 | Currently you've laid out exactly the problem.

00:47:14.920 | The training set is awful.

00:47:18.280 | And because there's so, a lot of this data

00:47:21.280 | that I'm basing it on is literally many decades old.

00:47:23.960 | The people who worked on it and data that I get,

00:47:26.520 | often they're dead.

00:47:27.720 | And the files that I've used,

00:47:30.720 | some of them were hand drawn by someone tired in the 70s.

00:47:34.840 | So I can of course have a program training on these,

00:47:39.320 | but I would just be perpetuating these mistakes

00:47:41.240 | without hope of actually verifying them.

00:47:43.680 | So my next step is to improve this training set by hand

00:47:48.680 | and then try to see if I can apply machine learning

00:47:52.120 | on the full code of the full 16,000 molecules

00:47:54.960 | and improve them all.

00:47:56.020 | But really I need to be able to test the outcomes

00:47:59.440 | with experimental data,

00:48:00.760 | which means convincing someone in a lab

00:48:02.840 | to spend a lot of money putting very dangerous gases

00:48:07.080 | in chambers and measuring them at outrageous temperatures.

00:48:11.120 | So it's a work in progress.

00:48:13.360 | - And so collecting huge amounts of data

00:48:15.040 | about the actual gases.

00:48:16.840 | So you are up for doing that kind of thing too.

00:48:22.400 | So actually like doing the full end to end thing,

00:48:27.960 | which is like having a gas, collecting data about it

00:48:31.440 | and then doing the kind of analysis

00:48:33.920 | that creates the fingerprint

00:48:35.520 | and then also analyzing using that library,

00:48:38.480 | the data that comes from other planets.

00:48:40.440 | So you do the full.

00:48:41.560 | - Full from birth to death.

00:48:44.080 | - Interesting.

00:48:45.320 | - Yes, I worked in an industrial chemistry laboratory

00:48:47.560 | when I was much younger in Slovenia.

00:48:50.300 | And there I worked in the lab,

00:48:52.040 | actually collecting spectrum and predicting spectrum.

00:48:56.360 | - What's it like to work with a bunch of gases

00:48:58.400 | that are like not so human friendly?

00:49:00.720 | - Terrifying, it's horrific.

00:49:03.040 | It's so scary.

00:49:03.960 | And I love my job.

00:49:06.320 | I'm willing to clearly sacrifice a lot for it.

00:49:08.800 | You know, job, stability, money, sanity.

00:49:13.800 | But I only worked there for a few months.

00:49:17.680 | It was really terrifying.

00:49:20.320 | There's just so many ways to die.

00:49:22.760 | You know, usually you only have a handful

00:49:24.280 | of ways to die every day, you know,

00:49:26.040 | but if you work in a lab, there's so many more,

00:49:28.720 | like orders of magnitude more.

00:49:30.680 | And I was very bad at it.

00:49:32.960 | I'm not a good hands-on scientist.

00:49:35.880 | I want a laptop connected to a remote supercomputer

00:49:40.580 | or a laptop connected to a telescope.

00:49:43.320 | I don't need to be there to believe it.

00:49:46.880 | And I am not good in the lab.

00:49:48.600 | - Yeah, when there's a bunch of things that can poison you,

00:49:51.960 | a bunch of things that could explode and they're gaseous

00:49:54.120 | and they're often, maybe they might not even have a smell

00:49:57.320 | or they might not be visible.

00:49:59.640 | It's like-

00:50:00.480 | - So many of them give you cancer.

00:50:02.160 | It's just so cruel.

00:50:03.560 | And some people love this work,

00:50:05.500 | but I've never enjoyed experimental work.

00:50:08.920 | It's so ungrateful, so lonely.

00:50:12.920 | - Well, most, I mean, so much work is lonely

00:50:15.760 | if you find enjoying it, but you enjoy the results of it.

00:50:19.880 | - Yes.

00:50:20.840 | I'm very thankful for all the experimentalists in my life.

00:50:24.260 | But I'll do the theory, they do the experiment,

00:50:26.980 | and then we talk to one another and make sure it matches.

00:50:30.420 | - Okay, beautiful.

00:50:31.540 | What are spectroscopic networks?

00:50:34.260 | Those look super cool.

00:50:35.420 | Are they related to what we were talking about?

00:50:37.540 | The picture looked pretty.

00:50:38.900 | - Oh, yes, slightly.

00:50:40.780 | So remember when I mentioned the 17.5 million energy levels?

00:50:44.340 | - Yes.

00:50:45.260 | - There are rules for each molecule

00:50:47.620 | on which energy levels it can jump from and to

00:50:51.540 | and how likely it is to make that jump.

00:50:53.780 | And so if you plot all the routes it can take,

00:50:57.580 | you get this energy network, which is like a ball.

00:51:02.300 | - So these are the constraints of the transitions

00:51:04.900 | that could be taken.

00:51:05.860 | - Exactly, for each molecule.

00:51:07.860 | - Interesting.

00:51:08.700 | And so it's not a fully connected,

00:51:11.340 | it's like it's sparse somehow?

00:51:14.180 | - Yes, you get islands sometimes.

00:51:15.740 | You get a molecule can only jump

00:51:18.140 | from one set of states to another,

00:51:20.220 | and it's trapped now in this network.

00:51:22.060 | It can never go to another network

00:51:24.340 | that could have been available to other siblings.

00:51:27.620 | - Is there some insights to be drawn from these networks?

00:51:29.980 | Like something cool that you can understand

00:51:31.780 | about a particular molecule because of it?

00:51:33.960 | - Yes, some molecules have what we call

00:51:36.140 | forbidden transitions, which aren't really forbidden

00:51:38.980 | 'cause it's quantum.

00:51:39.860 | There are no rules.

00:51:40.700 | No, I'm not, there are rules.

00:51:42.180 | It's just the rules are very often broken

00:51:44.820 | in the quantum world.

00:51:45.660 | And so forbidden transitions doesn't actually mean

00:51:48.420 | they're forbidden.

00:51:49.260 | - Low probability.

00:51:50.220 | - Exactly, they just become deeply unlikely.

00:51:52.660 | - Yeah, cool.

00:51:53.700 | And so you could do all the same.

00:51:55.500 | Like I'm coming from a computer science world,

00:51:57.700 | you know, I love graph theory.

00:51:59.900 | So you can do all the same like graph theoretic

00:52:02.620 | kind of analysis of like clusters or something like that.

00:52:05.700 | - Exactly.

00:52:06.540 | - All those kinds of things and draw insights from it.

00:52:09.220 | Cool.

00:52:10.060 | - And they're unique for each molecule.

00:52:10.880 | So the networks that you mentioned,

00:52:13.120 | that's actually not too difficult a layer of quantum physics.

00:52:17.700 | By then all the energies are mapped.

00:52:19.900 | So we've had high school children work on those networks.

00:52:23.280 | And the trick is to not tell them

00:52:24.580 | they're doing quantum physics until like three months in

00:52:26.780 | when it's too late for them to back out.

00:52:29.060 | And then you're like, you're a quantum physicist now.

00:52:30.940 | And it's really nice.

00:52:32.220 | - Yeah, okay.

00:52:33.060 | But like the promise of this, even though it's 16,000,

00:52:36.060 | even just a subset of them, that's really exciting

00:52:38.140 | 'cause then you can do as the telescope data

00:52:40.940 | get better and better, especially for exoplanets,

00:52:43.600 | but also for Venus.

00:52:45.980 | You can then start like getting your full,

00:52:49.220 | like you know how you get like blood worked on

00:52:50.900 | or like you get your genetic testing

00:52:52.580 | to see what your ancestors are.

00:52:54.700 | You can get the same kind of like high resolution information

00:52:58.180 | about interesting things going on on a particular planet

00:53:01.460 | based on the atmosphere, right?

00:53:02.740 | - Exactly.

00:53:03.580 | How cool would that be if we could scan an alien planet

00:53:06.740 | and go, oh, this is what the clouds are made of.

00:53:08.980 | This is what's in the surface.

00:53:10.520 | These are the molecules that are mixing.

00:53:12.420 | Here are probably oceans

00:53:14.260 | because you can see these types of molecules above it.

00:53:16.580 | And here are the Hadley cells.

00:53:19.140 | Here are how the biosphere works.

00:53:22.220 | We could map this whole thing.

00:53:24.420 | - Wouldn't it be cool if the aliens

00:53:25.740 | like are aware of these techniques

00:53:27.400 | and like would spoof like the wrong gases

00:53:29.760 | just to like pretend that's how they can be.

00:53:32.640 | It's like an invisibility cloak.

00:53:34.580 | They can generate gases that would throw you off

00:53:37.420 | or like, or do the opposite.

00:53:39.380 | They pretend they will artificially generate phosphine.

00:53:42.140 | So like the dumb apes on earth again,

00:53:46.420 | like go out like flying in different places

00:53:48.740 | 'cause it's just fun.

00:53:49.580 | It's like some teenager alien somewhere just pranking.

00:53:53.460 | Yeah.

00:53:54.660 | - I was asked that exact question this Saturday

00:53:57.020 | by a 70 year old boy in Canada.

00:53:59.740 | - Oh, old seven?

00:54:00.580 | - Seven, yes.

00:54:01.420 | (laughing)

00:54:03.900 | But it was the first time I'd been asked that question.

00:54:05.780 | This is the second in a week.

00:54:10.320 | - We're kindred spirits, him and I.

00:54:12.440 | - We can.

00:54:14.240 | They can prank us to some extent,

00:54:16.600 | but this work of interpreting an alien atmosphere

00:54:20.560 | means you're reading the atmosphere as a message.

00:54:23.600 | And it's very hard to hide signs of life in an atmosphere

00:54:27.360 | because you can try to prank us,

00:54:30.440 | but you're still going to fart and breathe

00:54:33.120 | and somehow metabolize the environment around you

00:54:36.720 | and call that whatever you call that

00:54:39.240 | and release molecules.

00:54:41.080 | And so that's really hard to hide.

00:54:43.000 | You can go very quiet.

00:54:44.740 | You can throw out some weird molecule to confuse us further,

00:54:49.080 | but we can still see all your other metabolites.

00:54:51.680 | - It's hard to fake.

00:54:53.320 | Is there, so you kind of mentioned like water.

00:54:56.520 | What other gases are there that we know about

00:55:01.520 | that are like high likelihood as biosignatures

00:55:06.000 | in terms of life?

00:55:07.200 | I mean, what are your other favorites?

00:55:09.200 | So we've got phosphine,

00:55:12.720 | but like what else is a damn good signal

00:55:16.400 | to be, that you think about that we should be looking for

00:55:19.400 | if we look at another atmosphere?

00:55:21.320 | Is there gases that come to mind

00:55:22.800 | or are there all sort of possible biosignatures

00:55:26.320 | that we should love equally?

00:55:28.060 | - There's many.

00:55:30.040 | So there's water.

00:55:31.480 | We know that's important for life as we know it.

00:55:33.360 | There's molecular oxygen on earth.

00:55:35.240 | That's probably the most robust sign of life,

00:55:37.240 | particularly combined with small amounts of methane.

00:55:40.280 | And it's true that the majority of the oxygen

00:55:41.960 | in our atmosphere is a product of life.

00:55:44.600 | And so if I was an alien astronomer

00:55:47.300 | and I saw earth's atmosphere,

00:55:49.160 | I would get a Nobel, I think.

00:55:52.680 | - What would you notice?

00:55:53.520 | I mean, this is a really.

00:55:55.240 | - I would be very excited about this.

00:55:57.280 | - About the oxygen.

00:55:58.400 | - About finding 20%, 21% of oxygen atmosphere.

00:56:02.120 | That's very unusual.

00:56:03.320 | - So would that be the most exciting thing to you

00:56:05.520 | from an alien perspective about earth

00:56:07.160 | in terms of the tech, like analyzing the atmosphere?

00:56:10.160 | Like what are the biosignatures of life on earth,

00:56:12.760 | would you say, in terms of the contents of the atmosphere?

00:56:15.400 | Is oxygen, high amount of oxygen, pretty damn good sign?

00:56:19.620 | - I mean, it's not as good as the TV signals

00:56:21.640 | we've been sending out.

00:56:22.960 | Those are slightly more robust than oxygen.

00:56:27.320 | Oxygen on its own has false positives for life.

00:56:30.100 | So there's still ways of making it.

00:56:32.120 | But it's a pretty robust sign of life

00:56:35.600 | in the context of our atmosphere

00:56:37.240 | with the radiation that the sun produces,

00:56:40.240 | our position in relation to the sun,

00:56:42.360 | the other components of our atmosphere,

00:56:44.560 | the volcanic activity we have,

00:56:46.560 | all of that together makes the 20% of oxygen

00:56:49.840 | extremely robust sign of life.

00:56:53.760 | But outside that context,

00:56:55.200 | you could still produce oxygen without life.

00:56:58.460 | But phosphine, although better in the sense of,

00:57:01.720 | it is much harder to make, it has lower false positives,

00:57:04.840 | still has some.

00:57:06.160 | So I'm actually against looking for specific molecules,

00:57:10.720 | unless we're looking for like CFCs.

00:57:12.520 | If we find CFCs, that's definitely aliens,

00:57:14.520 | I feel confident.

00:57:15.480 | Chlorofluorocarbons, and so,

00:57:18.120 | if aliens had been watching us,

00:57:19.760 | they would have been going, "Oh no, CFCs,

00:57:22.520 | "I mean, they're not gonna last long.

00:57:25.060 | "Let's, everyone's writing their thesis

00:57:27.220 | "on the end of the earth."

00:57:30.360 | And then we got together, we stopped using them.

00:57:33.280 | I like to think they're really proud of us.

00:57:35.600 | They literally saw our ozone hole shrinking.

00:57:38.200 | They've been watching it and they saw it happen.

00:57:40.200 | - I think to be honest,

00:57:41.320 | they're more paying attention to the whole nuclear thing.

00:57:43.800 | - I don't think they care, it's not gonna bother them.

00:57:46.380 | Oh, I mean, worried about us, oh yes.

00:57:48.040 | - No, worried about us.

00:57:49.440 | I mean, this is why the aliens have been showing up recently.

00:57:52.440 | (Sohla laughs)

00:57:53.280 | Like if you look at, I mean, there is,

00:57:55.680 | I mean, it's probably,

00:57:56.640 | there's a correlation with a lot of things,

00:57:58.760 | but what the UFOlogists quote unquote often talk about

00:58:02.080 | is that there seems to be a much higher level

00:58:06.160 | of UFO sightings since like in the nuclear age.

00:58:09.600 | So like if aliens were indeed worried about us,

00:58:12.520 | like if you were aliens, you would start showing up

00:58:14.720 | when the living organisms first discovered a way

00:58:18.360 | to destroy the entire colony.

00:58:22.520 | - Couldn't the increase in sightings not have to do

00:58:26.820 | with the fact that people now have more cameras?

00:58:29.720 | - It's an interesting thing about science,

00:58:31.580 | like with UFO sightings,

00:58:33.480 | it's like either 99.9% of them are false

00:58:38.480 | or 100% of them are false.

00:58:40.120 | The interesting thing to me is in that 0.01%,

00:58:44.480 | there's a lot of things in science

00:58:46.400 | that are like these weird outliers

00:58:50.320 | that are difficult to replicate.

00:58:52.000 | You have like, there's even physical phenomena,

00:58:54.080 | ball lightning.

00:58:55.000 | There's difficult things to artificially create

00:58:57.620 | in large amounts or observe in nature in large amounts

00:59:01.780 | in such a way that you can do it

00:59:02.980 | to apply the scientific method.

00:59:05.260 | That could be just things that like,

00:59:07.060 | happen like a few times, like or once,

00:59:11.040 | and you're like, what the hell is that?

00:59:13.260 | And that's very difficult for science to know what to do it.

00:59:16.260 | I'm a huge proponent of just being open-minded

00:59:18.380 | 'cause when you're open-minded about aliens, for example,

00:59:22.000 | is it allows you to think outside of the box

00:59:25.500 | in other domains as well.

00:59:27.420 | And somehow that will result,

00:59:28.980 | like if you're open-minded about aliens

00:59:31.500 | and you don't laugh it off immediately,

00:59:34.580 | what happens is somehow that's gonna lead to a solution

00:59:37.220 | to P equals NP or P not equals NP.

00:59:39.580 | Like in ways that you can't predict,

00:59:42.220 | the open-mindedness has tertiary effects

00:59:45.460 | that will result in progress, I believe,

00:59:47.620 | which is why I'm a huge fan of aliens

00:59:49.660 | 'cause it's like, 'cause too many scientists

00:59:53.280 | roll their eyes at the idea of aliens, alien life.

00:59:57.200 | And to me, it's one of the most exciting possibilities

01:00:00.600 | in the biggest, most exciting questions

01:00:05.400 | before all of human civilization.

01:00:08.080 | So to roll your eyes is not the right answer.

01:00:12.440 | To roll your eyes presumes that you know anything

01:00:14.780 | about this world as opposed to just knowing

01:00:16.840 | 0.0001% of this world.

01:00:19.460 | And so being humble in the face of that,

01:00:21.460 | being open to the possibility of aliens

01:00:26.460 | visiting Earth is a good idea.

01:00:28.000 | Not everything though.

01:00:30.220 | I'm not so open-minded to the flat Earth hypothesis

01:00:33.620 | as there's a growing number of people believing in,

01:00:37.220 | but even then-

01:00:38.380 | - Or the inner Earth,

01:00:39.300 | I've got shouted at in a public talk about it.

01:00:42.140 | - So like the Earth is hollow?

01:00:44.140 | - Yeah, my understanding is that there's

01:00:46.940 | this conspiracy theory that as far as I can tell

01:00:50.300 | has no grounding in reality

01:00:52.020 | is that there's a slightly smaller Earth inside this one,

01:00:55.260 | which is just too cute as a concept.

01:00:56.980 | - That's awesome.

01:00:57.820 | - And you can access it, I think from Antarctica.

01:01:00.540 | And that's where we keep, and I quote,

01:01:02.900 | "The mammoths and the Nazis."

01:01:04.720 | - Yeah, I mean, that one is ridiculous, but like I do like-

01:01:09.540 | - Hey, I thought you were keeping an open mind.

01:01:11.700 | - This is-

01:01:12.860 | - I genuinely think that's more likely

01:01:14.780 | than aliens visiting the Earth.

01:01:16.020 | And I say this as someone who has dedicated her life

01:01:19.740 | to finding alien life.

01:01:21.380 | And so that's how improbable I think the visitations are.

01:01:26.380 | Because interstellar distances are so huge

01:01:30.940 | that it's just not really worth it.

01:01:32.660 | - See, I have a different view on this whole thing.

01:01:34.600 | I think the aliens that look like little green men

01:01:39.140 | are like extremely low probability event.

01:01:43.020 | - Like mammoths and Nazis under?

01:01:44.740 | - Yeah, yeah, that's similar.

01:01:47.240 | But other kind of ideas, like the sad thing to me,

01:01:52.240 | and I think in my view,

01:01:57.500 | if there's other alien civilizations out there

01:02:00.020 | and they visited Earth,

01:02:01.900 | neither them or perhaps just us

01:02:04.500 | would be even able to detect them.

01:02:06.780 | Like we wouldn't be open-minded enough to see it.

01:02:10.260 | Like if, because our understanding of what is life,

01:02:15.260 | and I just talked to Sarah Walker, who's-

01:02:20.740 | - You know Sarah?

01:02:21.580 | - Yeah, we talked for three hours

01:02:23.860 | about the question of what is life.

01:02:25.980 | - Sarah's a good person to talk to about what is life.

01:02:29.140 | - But like the whole point is we don't really,

01:02:31.080 | we have a very narrow-minded view of what is life.

01:02:34.140 | And when it shows up, and it might be already here,

01:02:38.060 | trees and dolphins and so on.

01:02:39.860 | (both laughing)

01:02:42.820 | And, or mountains, or I don't know,

01:02:46.260 | or the molecules in the atmosphere,

01:02:49.220 | or like I, people make fun of me,

01:02:53.260 | but I do think that ideas are kind of aliens themselves,

01:02:56.520 | or consciousness could be the aliens,

01:02:58.480 | or it could be the method by which they communicate.

01:03:00.540 | We don't know shit about the way our human mind works.

01:03:03.340 | And the fact that this thing is-

01:03:05.380 | - It could be a quantum process.

01:03:07.020 | - Please, no, I understand this.

01:03:09.460 | It's not woo-woo, I'm not, I,

01:03:11.820 | but it very well could be.

01:03:12.940 | There could be something at the physics level, right?

01:03:16.020 | It could be at the chemical, at the biological level,

01:03:18.140 | things that are happening that we're just close,

01:03:19.980 | too close-minded, because our conception of life

01:03:23.220 | is at the level of like us,

01:03:26.500 | like at the jungle level of mammals,

01:03:29.860 | and on the time scale that's the human time scale,

01:03:32.340 | we may not be able to perceive

01:03:34.500 | what alien life is actually like,

01:03:37.680 | the scale at which their intelligence realizes itself,

01:03:42.720 | we may not be able to perceive.

01:03:44.820 | And the other thing that's really important

01:03:46.780 | about alien visitations, whether it happened or not,

01:03:50.780 | is especially after COVID in 2020,

01:03:54.020 | I'm losing a little bit of faith of our government

01:03:56.620 | being able to handle that well, not our government,

01:04:00.140 | but us as a society, as a collective,

01:04:03.980 | being able to deal with new things in an effective way

01:04:08.780 | that's inspiring, that's efficient,

01:04:11.600 | that like, whether it's, if it's a dangerous thing

01:04:16.600 | to deal with it, to alleviate the danger,

01:04:19.440 | whether it's the possibility of new discoveries

01:04:22.020 | and something inspiring to ride that wave

01:04:24.780 | and make it inspiring, all those kinds of things.

01:04:27.100 | I honestly think if aliens showed up,

01:04:29.180 | they would look around, everybody would ignore them,

01:04:31.700 | and the government might like hide it,

01:04:34.020 | try to like see, to keep it from the Chinese and the Russians

01:04:37.260 | if it's the United States,

01:04:38.540 | call it a military secret in a very close-minded way.

01:04:42.780 | And then the bureaucracy would drown it away

01:04:44.900 | to where through paperwork,

01:04:47.220 | the poor aliens would just like waste away in a cell somewhere

01:04:50.580 | like there's a certain-

01:04:51.400 | - That would never happen.

01:04:53.380 | Part of the reason that I feel so confident

01:04:55.420 | that aliens have not visited,

01:04:57.340 | because they would have had to visit

01:04:58.700 | just to have a look remotely,

01:05:00.780 | from Neptune or something, which makes no sense

01:05:03.500 | because interstellar travel is so difficult

01:05:07.220 | that it would be quite a ridiculous proposition.

01:05:10.780 | But that's the bit that I think is technically possible.

01:05:13.420 | If they did come here and they were visible by anyone,

01:05:16.180 | detectable by anyone, the thought that any government,

01:05:20.180 | no matter, or any military could just contain them,

01:05:23.140 | these beings are capable of traveling interstellar distances

01:05:26.900 | when we can barely go to the moon, like barely go to the moon.

01:05:31.140 | - These things would be way, way, way, way-

01:05:32.340 | - Way, and the fact that we think our puny military,

01:05:36.980 | even if all the military in the world got together,

01:05:39.300 | and the fact that they could somehow contain,

01:05:42.060 | that's the bit that's left.

01:05:44.260 | - It's like ants trying to contain a human

01:05:45.740 | that visited them. - Exactly, exactly.

01:05:48.020 | And scientists, you would have to bring scientists on board.

01:05:50.460 | You've met a lot of scientists.

01:05:52.100 | How good are they at keeping secrets?

01:05:53.940 | 'Cause in my experience,

01:05:55.100 | they're absolutely appalling at keeping secrets.

01:05:58.660 | - Yeah, that's terrible.

01:05:59.540 | - Even the phosphine on Venus thing,

01:06:00.900 | which was a pretty well-kept secret.

01:06:03.220 | - Oh, this is true.

01:06:04.060 | You had a bunch of people that were-

01:06:05.340 | - I told my dad.

01:06:06.660 | - Yeah. - My dad knew.

01:06:08.060 | And hopefully he didn't tell anyone,

01:06:11.140 | but if there had been an alien visiting,

01:06:12.700 | he probably would have told a mate.

01:06:14.420 | And so these secrets could not be kept by any scientist

01:06:20.020 | that I know, and certainly not collaborative scientists,

01:06:22.100 | which would be needed.

01:06:22.940 | You need all sorts of scientific teams.

01:06:26.020 | So between the pathetic power of any world's military

01:06:31.020 | compared to any civilization capable of traveling,

01:06:35.180 | and our absolute inability to keep secrets,

01:06:39.180 | absolutely not, I will bet everything

01:06:43.060 | that we have not been visited

01:06:44.140 | because we are too pathetic to hold that truth.

01:06:47.140 | - Well, let me push back,

01:06:48.860 | if we're just making a $10 bet.

01:06:51.220 | The possibility here that the main alien,

01:06:55.420 | say there exists one alien,

01:06:57.060 | other intelligent alien civilization in the galaxy.

01:07:00.320 | To me, if they visit Earth,

01:07:05.420 | what's going to visit Earth is like the crappy,

01:07:09.060 | like the really crappy-

01:07:10.580 | - Short straw.

01:07:11.580 | Yeah, yeah.

01:07:12.620 | - Like this really dumb thing that's, I don't know,

01:07:17.540 | like the early Game Boys or something.

01:07:19.260 | - I think there's a cartoon about this.

01:07:20.620 | There's an alien that gets sent to Earth,

01:07:23.580 | Commander Spiff or something,

01:07:25.940 | and it's kind of a punishment or something.

01:07:28.420 | But that's not possible.

01:07:29.460 | That's the thing, because interstellar distances

01:07:31.420 | are so hard to cross.

01:07:33.980 | - You have to do it on purpose.

01:07:35.100 | - You have to do it on purpose.

01:07:35.940 | It has to be a big, big deal.

01:07:37.700 | And we know this because, yes, you're right.

01:07:39.940 | We don't know enough about galactic biology.

01:07:43.540 | We don't know what the universal rules of biology

01:07:46.260 | or biochemistry are because we only have the Earth.

01:07:49.700 | But we do know that the laws of physics are universal.

01:07:53.460 | We can predict behavior in the universe

01:07:55.900 | and then see it happen based on these laws of physics.

01:07:58.980 | We know that the laws of chemistry are universal.

01:08:01.780 | We know the periodic table is all they have to choose from.

01:08:05.100 | So yes, there may be some sort of unimaginable intelligence,

01:08:09.300 | but they still have to use the same periodic table

01:08:12.700 | that we have access to.

01:08:14.140 | They still have a finite number of molecules

01:08:16.260 | they can do things with.

01:08:17.940 | So they still have to use the resources around them,

01:08:21.180 | the stars around them, the universe around them.

01:08:23.340 | And we know how much energy is in these places.

01:08:26.540 | And so, yes, they may be very capable,

01:08:29.620 | capable beyond our wildest dreams,

01:08:32.100 | but they're still in the same universe.

01:08:33.980 | And we know a lot of those rules.

01:08:35.340 | We're not completely blind.

01:08:36.860 | - But there's a colleague of yours at Harvard,

01:08:40.980 | Kamran Vafa, he's a theoretical physicist.

01:08:43.300 | I don't know if you know him.

01:08:45.260 | - I've only joined Harvard about six months ago.

01:08:48.020 | - Okay.

01:08:48.980 | It's time to meet all the theoretical physicists.

01:08:51.840 | So he's a string theorist,

01:08:54.220 | but his idea is that aliens that are sophisticated enough

01:08:59.220 | to travel interstellar, like those kinds of distances,

01:09:04.620 | will figure out actually ways to hack the fabric

01:09:07.500 | of the universe enough to have fun in other ways.

01:09:10.540 | Like this universe is too boring.

01:09:12.780 | Like you would figure out ways to create other universes

01:09:15.240 | or like you go outside the physics as we know it.

01:09:19.300 | So the reason we don't see aliens visiting us

01:09:22.020 | all over the place is they're having fun elsewhere.

01:09:24.300 | This is like way too boring.

01:09:25.980 | We humans think this is fun,

01:09:27.320 | but it's actually mostly empty space

01:09:29.700 | that no fun is happening.

01:09:31.700 | Like there's no fun in visiting Earth

01:09:33.860 | for a super advanced civilization.

01:09:35.740 | So he thinks like if alien civilizations are out there,

01:09:38.820 | they found outside of our current standard models

01:09:43.100 | of physics ways of having fun,

01:09:44.980 | that don't involve us.

01:09:47.040 | - And that's probably true.

01:09:48.460 | But even the notion of visiting,

01:09:49.720 | that's so literally pedestrian.

01:09:52.460 | Of course we want to go there

01:09:53.920 | 'cause going there is the only thing we know.

01:09:55.720 | We see a thing we want, we wanna go there and get it.

01:09:58.360 | But that is probably something

01:10:00.080 | they've no longer got need for.

01:10:03.640 | I specifically don't particularly wanna go to space.

01:10:07.920 | Sounds awful.

01:10:08.840 | None of the things I like are gonna be there.

01:10:11.880 | And my whole work is my whole career

01:10:16.080 | is finding life and understanding the universe.

01:10:17.880 | So I care a lot.

01:10:20.040 | But I care about knowing about it.

01:10:22.000 | And I feel no need to go there to learn about it.

01:10:25.480 | And I think as we develop better tools,

01:10:27.480 | hopefully people will feel less and less

01:10:29.240 | the need to go everywhere that we know about.

01:10:32.840 | And I would expect any alien civilization worth their salt

01:10:36.400 | have developed observation tools

01:10:39.000 | and tools that allow them to understand

01:10:41.480 | the universe around them and beyond

01:10:44.320 | without having to go there.

01:10:45.680 | This going is so wasteful.

01:10:48.280 | - Yeah, so more focused on the knowledge

01:10:50.520 | and the learning versus the colonization,

01:10:52.240 | like the conquering and all those kinds of things.

01:10:55.080 | - That's beneath them.

01:10:57.240 | - That's beneath them.

01:10:58.640 | I mean, that said, do you think there's

01:11:01.320 | in your hopeful search for life

01:11:03.360 | through phosphine and other gases,

01:11:06.160 | do you think there's other alien civilizations out there?

01:11:10.800 | First, do you think there's other life out there?

01:11:13.680 | First, do you think there's life in the solar system?

01:11:16.600 | Second, do you think there's life in the galaxy?

01:11:21.480 | And third, do you think there's intelligent life

01:11:24.960 | in the solar system or the galaxy outside of earth?

01:11:27.860 | - So intelligent life, I have no idea.

01:11:30.200 | It seems deeply unlikely possible,

01:11:33.360 | but I'm not even sure if it's plausible.

01:11:35.360 | - So that's the special thing to you about earth

01:11:37.040 | is somehow intelligent life came to be.

01:11:38.480 | - Yes, and it's only very briefly,

01:11:41.360 | probably extremely briefly.

01:11:44.160 | - Uh-oh, you mean like it's always going to be,

01:11:47.120 | like we're gonna destroy ourselves?

01:11:48.320 | - Exactly.

01:11:49.160 | - Oh boy.

01:11:49.980 | - And life will continue on earth happily,

01:11:52.520 | probably more happily.

01:11:54.280 | - The trees and the dolphins will be here, I'm telling you.

01:11:56.800 | - And the cockroaches and the incredible fungi,

01:12:00.960 | they'll be fine.

01:12:02.280 | So life on earth will be fine,

01:12:04.800 | was fine before us and will be fine after us.

01:12:08.080 | So I'm not that worried about intelligent life,

01:12:10.400 | but I think it is unlikely.

01:12:11.800 | Even on earth is unlikely.

01:12:13.740 | Out of, what is it, 5 billion species

01:12:15.660 | across the history of the earth?

01:12:16.920 | - Yes.

01:12:17.920 | - There's been one, an intelligent one,

01:12:19.680 | and for a blink of an eye,

01:12:21.480 | possibly not much longer than that.

01:12:23.580 | So I wouldn't bet on that at all,

01:12:27.340 | though I would love it, of course.

01:12:29.040 | I wanted to find aliens since I was a little girl.

01:12:34.560 | And so of course I initially wanted to find ones

01:12:38.800 | that I could be friends with.

01:12:40.680 | And I've had to let go of that dream

01:12:42.320 | because it's so deeply implausible.

01:12:44.200 | - But see the nice, and sorry to interrupt,

01:12:45.880 | but the nice thing about intelligent alien civilizations,

01:12:48.880 | they may have more biosignatures than non-intelligent ones.

01:12:52.400 | So they might be easier to detect.

01:12:54.680 | That would be the hope.

01:12:56.280 | - On earth that's not the case,

01:12:57.400 | but it could be the case elsewhere.

01:12:59.040 | - Oh, it's not the case on earth.

01:13:00.320 | - Most of the biosignatures we have on earth

01:13:02.120 | are created by quite simple life.

01:13:04.320 | If you don't count pollution, pollution is all,

01:13:08.040 | all us babies.

01:13:08.880 | - So you don't see polluting gases as a possible like.

01:13:16.120 | - I look for polluting gases.

01:13:18.600 | I would love to find polluting gases.

01:13:20.920 | Well, I'd be worried for them, of course,

01:13:23.840 | the same way I think about my alien colleagues all the time,

01:13:27.720 | looking at us and I'm sure they worry about our pollutions.

01:13:30.560 | But it would be a really good, robust,

01:13:34.360 | unambiguous sign of life if we found complex pollutants.

01:13:38.000 | So I look for those too.

01:13:39.520 | I just don't have any hope of finding them.

01:13:41.080 | I think intelligent life in the galaxy

01:13:44.200 | at the same time that we're looking is deeply implausible.

01:13:49.200 | But life I think is inevitable.

01:13:53.080 | And if it is inevitable, it is common.

01:13:56.040 | So I think there'll be life everywhere in the galaxy.

01:13:59.960 | Now how common that life is, I think will depend a lot

01:14:03.720 | on whether there's life in the solar system beyond earth.

01:14:06.960 | So I'll adjust my expectations very much based

01:14:10.160 | on there being life in the solar system.

01:14:13.080 | If there's life in the Venusian clouds,

01:14:16.040 | if there's life in the, if there are biosignatures

01:14:19.440 | coming out of the plumes of Enceladus,

01:14:21.840 | if there's life on Titan.

01:14:23.560 | - Oh yeah, that's right.

01:14:24.400 | Enceladus, yeah, yeah, yeah, plumes of Enceladus.

01:14:26.000 | That's the Saturn one.

01:14:28.040 | It's the moon that has the geysers that come out.

01:14:30.280 | And so you can't see the subterranean oceans, but.

01:14:34.120 | - It's supposed, so it would be in the atmosphere.

01:14:36.560 | I was gonna ask you about that one.

01:14:38.920 | Have you looked at that?

01:14:40.160 | Have you, is that a hope for you to use the tools

01:14:43.800 | you're using with RASCO and other ways

01:14:48.360 | for detecting the 16,000 molecules

01:14:53.480 | that might be biosignatures to look at Enceladus?

01:14:56.720 | - Yes, that's absolutely the plan.

01:14:59.000 | - Is there, what's the limiting factor currently?

01:15:01.480 | Is it the quality of the telescopes?

01:15:03.840 | Is it, what's the quality of the data?

01:15:07.160 | - Yeah, the quality of the data, the observational data,

01:15:09.760 | and also the quality of RASCO and other associated things.

01:15:13.440 | So we're missing a lot of fundamental data

01:15:15.080 | to interpret the data that we get,

01:15:16.680 | and we don't have good enough data.

01:15:19.160 | But hopefully we will, in the coming decades,

01:15:22.720 | we'll get some information on Titan.

01:15:24.680 | We have Dragonfly going over.

01:15:27.300 | We'll get the plumes of Enceladus.

01:15:29.820 | We will look at the clouds of Venus,

01:15:32.940 | and there's other places.

01:15:33.940 | And so if we find any life or any sign of life ever,

01:15:38.940 | like on Mars, then I'll adjust my calculations,

01:15:42.940 | and I'll say life is not just inevitable and common,

01:15:46.620 | but extremely common,

01:15:48.220 | because all of these places we've mentioned,

01:15:50.100 | the subterranean oceans on Enceladus,

01:15:51.820 | the methane oceans of Titan, the clouds of Venus,

01:15:56.020 | the acidic clouds of Venus,

01:15:57.580 | these are places that are very different

01:15:59.620 | from the places where we find life on Earth,

01:16:02.020 | even the most extreme places.

01:16:04.060 | And so if life can originate

01:16:05.540 | in all of these completely different habitats,

01:16:09.060 | then life is even more resourceful than we thought.

01:16:12.700 | - Yeah, that's really- - Which means it's everywhere.

01:16:14.660 | - That's really exciting if it's everywhere.

01:16:16.820 | If there's life on just one of the moons, if it's on Mars.

01:16:21.420 | - Anywhere, anywhere in the solar system,

01:16:22.980 | and I will bet everything I own

01:16:25.620 | that every solar system, every planetary system

01:16:28.100 | has a potential for habitability,

01:16:31.140 | because even if they don't have a habitable planet,

01:16:33.060 | they'll have moons around other giant planets,

01:16:36.020 | and there'll be so much life.

01:16:39.180 | So for me, that's the only thing to figure out now,

01:16:43.060 | whether life is inevitable and quite common

01:16:45.540 | throughout the galaxy or everywhere,

01:16:49.580 | but it's somewhere between those two.

01:16:51.380 | Intelligent life, I make no bets.

01:16:54.500 | And if I had to bet, I would be against.

01:16:56.500 | - See, to me, two discoveries in the 21st century

01:17:02.180 | would change everything.

01:17:03.520 | One is, and maybe I'm biased,

01:17:08.460 | but one is the discovery of life in the solar system.

01:17:12.860 | I feel like that would change our whole conception

01:17:15.620 | of how unique we are in the universe.

01:17:18.700 | I think I'm much more eager than you are

01:17:20.940 | to jump from basic life to intelligent life.

01:17:23.580 | I feel like if there's life everywhere,

01:17:26.320 | like the odds are there has, like we cannot,

01:17:30.600 | like you have, oh, I see, you're saying

01:17:35.000 | there could have been many intelligent civilizations

01:17:36.980 | out there, but they just keep dying out.

01:17:38.420 | It's like little- - Yeah, I was detecting them,

01:17:40.100 | you know, ships in the night.

01:17:41.260 | - Ships in the night.

01:17:43.260 | Now that's ultra sad, just like-

01:17:45.980 | - Is it sad?

01:17:47.060 | - A graveyard of things. - The Earth is not better

01:17:48.700 | for having us.

01:17:49.860 | It doesn't owe us anything.

01:17:53.340 | - Would you be sad to find alien giraffes?

01:17:56.020 | Would you be disappointed if you found alien giraffes?

01:17:59.140 | 'Cause I would not.

01:18:00.300 | - No, well, giraffes, first of all,

01:18:02.020 | they look goofy with their necks and everything, but-

01:18:03.860 | - But no, we do not shit on giraffes.

01:18:06.140 | - Okay. - Giraffes are wondrous animals,

01:18:07.940 | are deeply understudied.

01:18:09.180 | We still know so little about them

01:18:10.780 | 'cause no one does PhDs in giraffes.

01:18:12.940 | I am disappointed I made a PhD in phosphine

01:18:15.920 | when people aren't doing PhDs in giraffes.

01:18:17.600 | We do not know enough about giraffes.

01:18:19.460 | - I think it was like Ricky Gervais

01:18:20.780 | that did a whole, like a long thing about-

01:18:22.740 | - I don't trust Ricky Gervais to talk about giraffes.

01:18:25.020 | That is not his expertise.

01:18:26.620 | - Yeah, but it's a stupid neck.

01:18:29.540 | It doesn't make any sense.

01:18:31.580 | I mean, that's fine.

01:18:32.420 | - Giraffes are very resourceful animals

01:18:34.020 | who do incredible things and can kick a lion in the face.

01:18:36.700 | - Why don't you climb the tree?

01:18:38.020 | Why don't you climb the tree?

01:18:39.180 | You don't need to grow through the lengthy evolutionary-

01:18:42.340 | - I'm not shitting on giraffes.

01:18:44.020 | - Okay, fine. - Giraffes are wondrous animals.

01:18:45.980 | - I would very appreciate it. - Take it back.

01:18:48.060 | - I take it back, I apologize.

01:18:49.980 | I trust your expertise on this.

01:18:52.600 | The thing that makes humans really fascinating,

01:18:57.780 | and I think the earth, but I'm a human,

01:19:01.300 | is we create- - It's a timer.

01:19:04.100 | - Yeah, we create things that are,

01:19:07.140 | yes, there's all the ugliness in the world.

01:19:09.300 | There's all the, on the biological,

01:19:11.620 | on the chemical level, there's the pollution,

01:19:13.660 | but we create beauty.

01:19:18.420 | If you even from a physics perspective look at symmetry

01:19:22.060 | as somehow capturing beauty, the breaking of symmetries,

01:19:24.980 | stuff grounded in all the different definitions of symmetry,

01:19:28.160 | we're good at creating things.

01:19:31.380 | - So are spiders.

01:19:32.620 | - But not giraffes, okay.

01:19:36.340 | But yes, this is- - Spiders.

01:19:38.100 | - Yes, this is the point. - There are spiders

01:19:39.140 | that create little bubbles of air

01:19:41.020 | so they can breathe underwater.

01:19:42.460 | They can literally scuba dive.

01:19:44.620 | There are spiders that can create parachutes

01:19:46.660 | so they can glide.

01:19:47.940 | And talk about symmetry, look what spiders can do.

01:19:51.540 | And I just thought of spiders,

01:19:52.980 | but if I was an alien species coming to earth,

01:19:56.620 | there'll be plenty to wander,

01:19:58.420 | and we would just be one- - One of the things.

01:20:01.300 | - Yeah, clunky, naked monkey.

01:20:05.260 | - Yeah, the ants might be even more fascinating.

01:20:07.620 | - The ants, ants can figure out exactly

01:20:10.580 | through some emergent consciousness

01:20:13.500 | what the maximum distance between their trash,

01:20:16.700 | their babies, and their food is,

01:20:19.220 | just from without any of them knowing how to do this.

01:20:22.820 | And collectively, they've learned how to do this.

01:20:24.980 | If I was an alien species, I'll be looking at that.

01:20:27.620 | - Well, so that was the other thing I was gonna mention.

01:20:29.220 | The second thing is I tend to believe

01:20:31.740 | we can engineer consciousness,

01:20:33.700 | but at the basic level,

01:20:35.260 | understand the source of consciousness.

01:20:37.700 | Because if consciousness is unique to humans,

01:20:42.380 | and if we can engineer it,

01:20:44.220 | that gives me hope that it can be present

01:20:46.460 | elsewhere in the universe.

01:20:47.580 | That's the other thing that makes,

01:20:49.820 | it's an open question, - The great-

01:20:50.860 | - that makes humans perhaps special

01:20:53.620 | is not maybe the presence of consciousness,

01:20:55.980 | but somehow a presence of elevated consciousness.

01:21:00.140 | It does, again, maybe human-centric,

01:21:02.580 | but it feels like we're more conscious than giraffes,

01:21:04.740 | for example, and spiders.

01:21:06.860 | - Yes, I won't deny that.

01:21:08.860 | There is something special about humans.

01:21:10.860 | They're my favorite species.

01:21:12.900 | - They are.

01:21:14.100 | - They are.

01:21:14.940 | Some of my best friends are humans.

01:21:18.380 | - Yeah.

01:21:19.220 | - I think highly of humans.

01:21:23.580 | It's great.

01:21:24.860 | I just don't have great hope for our longevity,

01:21:29.220 | and specifically, I don't have great hope,

01:21:30.940 | given that we're the only species out of 5 billion

01:21:33.140 | that did this cool consciousness trick.

01:21:35.660 | I just, I don't wanna bet on finding a kin ship elsewhere.

01:21:42.100 | - That's quite interesting to think about.

01:21:44.060 | I don't think I've even considered that possibility

01:21:47.660 | that there would be life in the solar system.

01:21:51.580 | So that indicates that very possibly,

01:21:54.780 | life is literally everywhere.

01:21:57.100 | - Yeah, everywhere it can happen, it does.

01:21:58.780 | - Yeah, and especially what we're discovering

01:22:01.700 | with the exoplanets now, how numerous they are,

01:22:06.140 | or Earth-like, habitable, quote-unquote, planets.

01:22:10.940 | Like, they're everywhere.

01:22:12.180 | - The most common type of planet is rocky, it seems.

01:22:15.380 | - But I didn't consider the possibility

01:22:18.020 | that life is literally everywhere,

01:22:20.740 | and yet, intelligent life is nowhere long enough

01:22:25.740 | to communicate with each other,

01:22:28.020 | to form little clusters of civilizations

01:22:31.380 | that expand beyond the solar system, and so on.

01:22:33.740 | Man, maybe becoming a multi-planetary species

01:22:39.540 | is a less likely pursuit than we imagined.

01:22:44.140 | - I agree.

01:22:44.980 | - But one of the things that makes humans beautiful

01:22:47.380 | is we hope.

01:22:48.980 | - But I hope for humanity,

01:22:52.820 | and one of the things I hope for

01:22:54.620 | is that we become less obsessed with conquering,

01:22:57.940 | and we become less obsessed with spreading ourselves.

01:23:02.260 | I hope that we transcend that,

01:23:06.660 | that we're happy with the universe

01:23:08.420 | without having to go and take it.

01:23:10.100 | So, you can hope for the species

01:23:13.460 | without hoping for a multi-planetary existence.

01:23:16.960 | That is only, I think, the drive

01:23:20.940 | of our most primitive instincts to go and take,

01:23:25.540 | to go and plant a flag somewhere.

01:23:28.220 | We love planting a flag somewhere,

01:23:30.980 | and maybe we could overcome that minor drive.

01:23:35.220 | And once we do, the AI systems we build will destroy us

01:23:39.660 | because we're too peaceful,

01:23:41.260 | and they will go and conquer and plant the flags.

01:23:43.540 | - Best of luck to them.

01:23:44.460 | The cockroaches will be happy to keep to the business

01:23:49.460 | as they always have.

01:23:50.900 | - I tend to believe that robots can have the same elegance

01:23:53.900 | and consciousness and all the qualities of kindness

01:23:59.420 | and love and hope and fear that humans have.

01:24:02.700 | - In principle, they could, yes.

01:24:05.100 | - I don't really trust the people who make them.

01:24:08.020 | - This is about the giraffe comment, isn't it?

01:24:12.540 | Okay.

01:24:13.900 | - I haven't forgiven you for shitting on giraffes.

01:24:16.180 | What have they done to you?

01:24:18.260 | - Just as a small tangent,

01:24:19.780 | your master's thesis is also fascinating.

01:24:22.260 | Maybe we could talk about it for just a little bit.

01:24:24.820 | It's titled "Influence of a Star's Evolution

01:24:27.620 | on its Planetary System."

01:24:29.900 | So, this interplay between a star and a planet,

01:24:33.660 | is there something interesting

01:24:34.860 | you could say about what you've learned

01:24:36.460 | about this journey that a star takes

01:24:40.620 | and the planets around it?

01:24:42.720 | - Well, when I was younger and I was told

01:24:44.900 | what would happen ultimately to the earth

01:24:48.460 | as the sun expands towards a red giant

01:24:51.100 | and Mercury would just like fall in

01:24:55.460 | and then Venus fall in and the sun doesn't care.

01:25:00.220 | And it just seemed so, I felt so small.

01:25:05.220 | I felt like the earth and everything on it,

01:25:08.380 | it's just the universe doesn't care.

01:25:10.340 | Even our sun doesn't care.

01:25:12.300 | And I think I felt like our sun should feel

01:25:13.940 | some sort of responsibility for its planets, you know?

01:25:17.660 | And it just felt like such a violent

01:25:19.860 | and neglectful parent.

01:25:21.700 | - It's like a parent eating its own children.

01:25:23.340 | - It's horrible.

01:25:24.180 | It's just a horrible notion.

01:25:25.760 | But it made me think, what if there's some sort

01:25:29.520 | of generation?

01:25:30.940 | And so at the time when I was doing my master's,

01:25:34.000 | there was a notion of the white dwarf cemetery,

01:25:36.300 | which is this idea that when stars become white dwarfs,

01:25:39.040 | that death is so horrible that planets,

01:25:42.400 | potentially habitable planets

01:25:43.660 | that could have been habitable before, they're now gone.

01:25:46.380 | There's no chance for life.

01:25:49.380 | But then I thought, what if life returns?

01:25:51.940 | You know, now it's a white dwarf, it's calmed down.

01:25:54.300 | It's not gonna go anywhere.

01:25:55.180 | White dwarfs are very stable across universal timescales.

01:25:59.600 | And so could you have planets around a white dwarf

01:26:03.120 | that could themselves get life again?

01:26:05.280 | Life doesn't care.

01:26:07.880 | And so my work was basically killing dozens of planets

01:26:12.880 | thousands of times.

01:26:14.460 | I just ran thousands and thousands of end body simulations.

01:26:18.640 | - Oh, you simulated this?

01:26:19.720 | - Yeah, so I simulated the star growing

01:26:22.520 | and just eating all these planets up

01:26:24.560 | and just absolute chaos.

01:26:26.800 | The orbits of the planets would change

01:26:28.720 | as the star loses mass.

01:26:30.080 | So you would have like Jupiter planets

01:26:32.880 | just crashing into the other planets,

01:26:34.520 | throwing them into the sun early.

01:26:36.360 | It was terrifying to watch these simulations.

01:26:40.640 | It was absolute carnage.

01:26:44.400 | But if you run thousands of these simulations,

01:26:47.400 | some systems find new balanced ways of staying alive.

01:26:51.680 | Some systems post star death

01:26:55.720 | find stable orbits again for billions of years,

01:26:59.000 | more than enough for life to originate again.

01:27:01.720 | And so that was my idea during that time

01:27:04.920 | that Thesis was trying to explore

01:27:06.760 | this notion of life coming back

01:27:11.800 | and this idea of the universe doesn't care

01:27:15.800 | if you're here or not.

01:27:17.280 | And it will go about its business.

01:27:18.840 | You know, Andromeda will crash into us

01:27:20.720 | and doesn't care.

01:27:23.320 | No one cares if you're alive in the universe.

01:27:25.760 | And so letting go of that preciousness of life,

01:27:29.560 | I found very useful at that stage in my career.

01:27:31.880 | And instead I just thought,

01:27:33.600 | what if life is inevitable?

01:27:36.280 | It doesn't matter that it came by 4 billion years ago.

01:27:39.000 | It can start again 4 billion years later.

01:27:41.320 | And maybe that is nice.

01:27:43.960 | Maybe that's where hope lies,

01:27:45.440 | the Phoenix rising everywhere.

01:27:48.920 | Planets being destroyed and created and we're here now

01:27:53.360 | and others will be more or less here-ish

01:27:56.320 | billions of years later.

01:27:57.600 | - So accepting the cycle of death and life and yeah.

01:28:02.240 | - I'm not taking it personally.

01:28:03.760 | - Not taking it personally.

01:28:05.000 | - The sun doesn't owe us anything.

01:28:06.560 | It's not a bad parent.

01:28:08.160 | It's not a parent at all.

01:28:10.160 | - Yeah.

01:28:11.360 | I was looking at the work of Freeman Dyson

01:28:13.880 | and seeing how this universe eventually

01:28:18.520 | will just be a bunch of super massive black holes

01:28:21.560 | before they also evaporate.

01:28:22.400 | - A bunch of tiny black holes too.

01:28:24.840 | - Yeah.

01:28:25.660 | - Absolute quiet.

01:28:26.560 | Everyone, all the black holes,

01:28:27.960 | a little too far away from one another to even interact

01:28:31.080 | until it's just silence forever.

01:28:33.400 | But until then, many, many cycles of death and destruction

01:28:39.000 | and rebirth.

01:28:40.540 | - And rebirth.

01:28:42.320 | You kept bringing up sort of coding stuff up.

01:28:45.000 | I wanted to ask two things.

01:28:46.840 | First of all, what programming language do you like?

01:28:51.840 | And also, what, 'cause you're as a computational,

01:28:57.080 | quantum astrochemist, no.

01:29:01.880 | - No, no, that's correct.

01:29:02.720 | - That's right.

01:29:03.540 | You're kind of, you could say you're actually understanding

01:29:09.920 | some exceptionally complicated things

01:29:12.640 | with one of the things you're using

01:29:14.120 | is the tools of computation, of programming.

01:29:18.040 | Is there a device you can give to people?

01:29:20.440 | 'Cause I know quite a few that have not practiced that tool

01:29:25.440 | and have fallen in love with a particular science,

01:29:27.360 | whatever it's, biology and chemistry and physics and so on.

01:29:30.400 | And if they were interested in learning to program

01:29:34.800 | and learning to use computation as a tool

01:29:37.440 | in their particular science,

01:29:39.280 | is there advice you can give on programming

01:29:41.300 | and also just maybe a comment on your own journey

01:29:44.240 | and the use of programming in your own life?

01:29:47.680 | - Well, I'm a terrible programmer.

01:29:50.960 | A lot of scientists, their programming is bad

01:29:52.880 | because we never learned formal programming.

01:29:55.240 | We learned science, physics, chemistry.

01:29:57.880 | And then we were told, oh, you have to get these equations

01:30:01.600 | modeled and run through a simulation.

01:30:04.160 | And you're like, oh, okay,

01:30:05.000 | so I'm gonna learn how to code to do this.

01:30:07.400 | And you learn just as much as you need

01:30:10.040 | to run these simulations.

01:30:11.200 | And no more, so they're rarely optimized.

01:30:14.360 | They're really clunky.

01:30:15.200 | Six months later, you can't read your own code.

01:30:17.160 | All my variable names are extremely embarrassing.

01:30:19.600 | I still have error messages for different compilation errors

01:30:24.600 | that say things like, at least your dad loves you, Clara.

01:30:29.600 | You know, it doesn't help me at all.

01:30:30.440 | - Oh, so there's like humor?

01:30:31.680 | - Yeah, just like you suck at coding,

01:30:34.200 | but there's other things in your life.

01:30:36.600 | So I'm a bad programmer.

01:30:37.800 | And so, if that will give hope to anyone else

01:30:40.120 | who's a bad programmer,

01:30:41.000 | I can still do pretty impressive science.

01:30:44.240 | But I learned, I think I started learning MATLAB and Java

01:30:47.600 | when I was in college.

01:30:48.680 | It did me no good at all.

01:30:50.440 | It has not been particularly useful.

01:30:52.680 | I learned some Fortran.

01:30:54.080 | That was very useful,

01:30:55.240 | even though it's really not a fun language

01:30:58.360 | because so much of legacy code is in Fortran.

01:31:02.560 | And so if you wanna use other people's code

01:31:04.760 | who have now retired, Fortran will be nice.

01:31:08.120 | And then I used IDL to visualize.

01:31:10.080 | So that simulation and body simulation,

01:31:12.640 | that was all Fortran and IDL.

01:31:14.760 | But thankfully, since I've left college,

01:31:17.040 | I've just learned Python like a normal person

01:31:19.320 | and that has been much nicer.

01:31:21.440 | So most of my code now is in Python.

01:31:24.400 | - I should also make a few quick comments as well.

01:31:26.720 | So one is, you say you're sort of bad at programming.

01:31:30.520 | I've worked with a lot of excellent scientists

01:31:34.760 | that are quote unquote bad at programming.

01:31:36.760 | They're not, it gets the job done.

01:31:38.880 | In fact, there's a downside to sort of,

01:31:42.580 | especially getting a software engineering education.

01:31:46.440 | If I were to give advice,

01:31:47.840 | especially if you're doing a computer science degree

01:31:50.240 | and you're doing software engineering,

01:31:52.280 | is not to get lost in the optimization of the correct,

01:31:57.280 | there's an obsession, you can see it in Stack Overflow,

01:32:00.920 | of the correct way to do things.

01:32:03.560 | And I think you can too easily get lost

01:32:07.400 | in constantly trying to optimize

01:32:10.520 | and do things the correct way

01:32:11.720 | when you actually never get done.

01:32:13.360 | The same thing happens,

01:32:14.360 | you have like communities of people obsessed with

01:32:18.200 | productivity and they keep researching productivity hacks.

01:32:22.200 | And then they spend like 90% plus of their time

01:32:25.120 | figuring out how to do things productively

01:32:27.040 | and then never actually do anything.

01:32:29.400 | So there's a certain sense,

01:32:30.940 | if you focus on the task that needs to be done,

01:32:33.960 | that's what programming is for.

01:32:35.720 | So not over-optimizing, not thinking about variable names

01:32:40.560 | in the following sense.

01:32:43.320 | Sometimes you think, okay, I'm gonna write code

01:32:45.360 | that's gonna last for decades.

01:32:47.360 | In reality, your code,

01:32:49.520 | if it's well-written or poorly written,

01:32:51.120 | will be very likely obsolete very quickly.

01:32:54.520 | And the point is to get the job done really well.

01:32:57.560 | So there's a trade-off there that you have to,

01:33:00.320 | you have to make sure to strike.

01:33:02.160 | I should also comment as a public service announcement

01:33:05.820 | or a request, if there's any world-class

01:33:09.400 | Fortran or Cobalt programmers out there,

01:33:11.920 | I'm looking for them, I wanna talk to you.

01:33:14.700 | 'Cause I think that- - That will not be me.

01:33:16.200 | I'm a terrible Fortran programmer.

01:33:18.320 | - But it's fascinating 'cause so much of the world

01:33:20.680 | in the past and still runs these programming languages

01:33:24.160 | and there's like no experts on it, so.

01:33:26.320 | - They're all retiring. - Yeah.

01:33:28.040 | I disagree slightly in that I think

01:33:30.760 | because I can get the job done, I'm a programmer.

01:33:33.520 | But because no one else can look at my code

01:33:35.480 | and know how I got my job done, I'm a bad programmer.

01:33:38.560 | That's how I'm defining it.

01:33:40.240 | - Including yourself six months later.

01:33:41.080 | - Including myself six months later.

01:33:42.520 | I'm working with a new student right now

01:33:44.200 | and she sent me some messages on Slack being like,

01:33:46.920 | what is this file that you've got

01:33:50.920 | with some functions around?

01:33:53.280 | And I was like, this was from 2018.

01:33:57.160 | It wasn't that long ago.

01:33:58.240 | And I can no longer remember what that code does.

01:34:00.440 | I'm gonna spend now two days reading through my own code

01:34:04.280 | and trying to improve it.

01:34:06.160 | And I do think that's frustrating.

01:34:08.440 | And so I think my advice to any young people

01:34:11.320 | who want to get into astronomy or astrobiology

01:34:15.720 | or quantum chemistry is that I certainly find it much easier

01:34:20.320 | to teach the science concepts to a programmer

01:34:23.680 | than the programming to a scientist.

01:34:25.720 | And so I would much, much faster hire someone

01:34:29.760 | who knows programming but barely knows where space is

01:34:34.760 | than teach programming to an astronomer.

01:34:37.880 | - Oh, that's fascinating.

01:34:38.960 | Yeah, okay, this is true.

01:34:40.320 | I mean, yeah, there's some basics.

01:34:42.400 | I'm focusing too much on the silver lining

01:34:45.240 | 'cause the people that write like MATLAB code,

01:34:47.800 | yeah, single letter variable names, those kinds of things.

01:34:52.320 | - And it's accessibility, right?

01:34:54.560 | I want my code to be open source, and it is.

01:34:57.960 | It's on GitHub, anyone can download it.

01:34:59.280 | But is it really open source

01:35:00.760 | if it's written so cryptically, so poorly

01:35:03.560 | that no one can really use it to its full functionality?

01:35:06.120 | Have I really published my work?

01:35:09.360 | And that weighs on me.

01:35:11.600 | I feel guilty for my own inadequacies as a programmer.

01:35:15.260 | But you can only do so much.

01:35:18.080 | I've already learned quantum chemistry and astrophysics.

01:35:23.000 | - Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of ways

01:35:26.880 | to contribute to the world.

01:35:27.840 | One of them is publication.

01:35:29.640 | But publishing code is a fascinating way

01:35:32.320 | to contribute to the world, even if it's very small,

01:35:35.020 | very basic element, great code.

01:35:38.960 | I guess I was also kind of criticizing

01:35:41.240 | the software engineering process,

01:35:43.240 | versus like, which is a good thing to do.

01:35:46.240 | It's code that's readable,

01:35:48.360 | almost like without documentation, it's readable.

01:35:51.320 | It's understandable.

01:35:52.720 | The variable names, the structure,

01:35:54.480 | all those kinds of things.

01:35:55.720 | - That's the dream.

01:35:56.800 | - That's the dream.

01:35:57.760 | This is a dumb question.

01:35:59.960 | What do you, all right.

01:36:01.880 | - No, no, tell me your dumb question, I wanna hear it.

01:36:04.720 | - Okay.

01:36:06.120 | I mean, okay, this is the question about beauty.

01:36:08.080 | It's way too general, it's very impossible.

01:36:09.880 | It's like asking what's your favorite band?

01:36:12.120 | What's your favorite music band?

01:36:13.760 | - Oh, I thought you meant Wavelength Band.

01:36:15.080 | I was like, I definitely have favorite Wavelength Bands.

01:36:16.920 | Absolutely.

01:36:18.200 | - Well, it's hard to narrow it down, huh?

01:36:20.160 | Okay, what to you is the most beautiful idea in science?

01:36:25.160 | - It's not a dumb question.

01:36:27.960 | Do you wanna try that question again, proudly?

01:36:29.640 | - Okay.

01:36:30.480 | I have a really good question to ask you.

01:36:35.720 | - Okay, don't oversell it.

01:36:37.240 | (both laughing)

01:36:38.320 | I've got an okay question to ask you, you know?

01:36:41.320 | - Yeah.

01:36:42.160 | What to you is the most beautiful idea in science?

01:36:48.360 | Something you just find inspiring or just,

01:36:51.400 | maybe the reason you got into science

01:36:53.960 | or the reason you think science is cool.

01:36:57.360 | - My favorite thing about science is

01:37:02.880 | kind of the connection between the scales.

01:37:05.320 | So when I was little and I wanted to know about space,

01:37:08.760 | I really felt that it would make me feel powerful

01:37:12.840 | to be able to predict the heavens,

01:37:14.800 | something so much larger than myself

01:37:17.680 | that felt really powerful.

01:37:19.520 | It was almost a selfish desire.

01:37:22.080 | And that's what I wanted.

01:37:23.520 | There was some control to being able to know exactly

01:37:26.760 | what the sky would do.

01:37:28.640 | And then as I got older and I got more into astronomy

01:37:32.440 | and I didn't just wanna know how the stars moved,

01:37:34.920 | I wanted to know how the planets around them moved.

01:37:37.960 | And then as I got deeper into that field,

01:37:39.800 | I really didn't care that much about the planets.

01:37:41.920 | I wanted to know about the atmospheres around the planets

01:37:43.840 | and then the molecules within those atmospheres

01:37:46.200 | and what that might mean.

01:37:48.400 | So I ended up shrinking my scale

01:37:51.280 | until it was literally the quantum scale.

01:37:53.680 | And now all my work, the majority of my work

01:37:56.200 | is on this insane quantum scale.

01:37:59.680 | And yet I'm using these literal tiny, tiny tools

01:38:04.680 | to try and answer the greatest questions

01:38:10.080 | that we've ever been able to ask.

01:38:12.880 | And this crossing of scales from the quantum

01:38:15.680 | to the astronomical, that's so cool, isn't it?

01:38:20.680 | - Yeah, it spans the entirety, the tiny and the huge.

01:38:24.520 | That's the cool thing about, I guess,

01:38:26.360 | being a quantum astrochemist.

01:38:29.080 | - Yeah. - Is you're using

01:38:30.120 | the tools of the tiny to look at the heavenly bodies,

01:38:34.200 | the giant stuff.

01:38:35.320 | - And the potential life out there,

01:38:37.960 | that this is the thing that connects us,

01:38:40.560 | that you can't escape the rules of the quantum world

01:38:43.120 | and how universal they themselves are

01:38:44.800 | despite being probabilistic.

01:38:47.600 | And that makes me feel really pleased to be in science,

01:38:52.600 | but in a really humbling way.

01:38:56.000 | It's no longer this thirst for power.

01:38:58.440 | I feel less special the more work I do,

01:39:03.800 | less exceptional the more work I do.

01:39:05.640 | I feel like humans and the earth

01:39:07.840 | and our place in the universe is less and less exceptional.

01:39:11.040 | And yet I feel so much less lonely.

01:39:14.720 | And so it's been a really good trade-off

01:39:16.560 | that I've lost power, but I've gained company.

01:39:19.100 | - Wow, that's a beautiful answer.

01:39:21.600 | I don't think there's a better way to actually end it.

01:39:23.560 | You're right, I asked a mediocre question

01:39:25.920 | and you came through, you made the question good

01:39:29.560 | by a brilliant answer. - That's what I wanted

01:39:30.400 | to make it do.

01:39:31.240 | - You're the Michael Jordan and I'm the,

01:39:36.360 | who's the Dennis, I'll be the Dennis Rodman.

01:39:39.040 | This is a-- - I don't know enough

01:39:40.160 | about basketball.

01:39:41.000 | I mean, literally you've reached the peak

01:39:42.760 | of my basketball knowledge

01:39:43.840 | because I know that those people are basketball--

01:39:45.840 | - But that's it.

01:39:46.920 | - Pros, I believe, but only 'cause I watched Space Jam,

01:39:49.320 | I think.

01:39:50.160 | - Are there books or movies in your life long ago

01:39:54.240 | or recently, do you have any time for books and movies?

01:39:57.200 | Had an impact on you?

01:39:58.840 | What ideas did you take away?

01:40:01.240 | - I absolutely have time for books and movies.

01:40:04.240 | I try as best I can to not work very hard.

01:40:08.960 | I mostly fail, I should point out,

01:40:11.280 | but I think I'm a better scientist

01:40:13.880 | when I don't work evenings and weekends.

01:40:16.760 | If I get four good hours in a day, I often don't.

01:40:21.160 | I often get eight crappy hours,

01:40:23.520 | emails, meetings, bad code, data processing,

01:40:28.000 | but if I can get four high quality scientific hours,

01:40:31.240 | I just stop working for the day

01:40:33.400 | because I know it's diminishing returns after that.

01:40:35.800 | So I have a lot of time.

01:40:37.440 | I try to make as much time as I can.

01:40:40.160 | - Can you kind of dig into what it takes

01:40:45.040 | to be, one, productive, two, to be happy as a researcher?

01:40:50.040 | Because I think it's too easy in that world to basic,

01:40:55.680 | 'cause you have so many hats you have to wear,

01:40:58.520 | there's so many jobs, you have to be a mentor, a teacher,

01:41:02.480 | a head of a research group, do research yourself,

01:41:06.200 | you have to do service, all the kinds of stuff

01:41:08.280 | you're doing now with education.

01:41:10.240 | - Interviews.

01:41:13.220 | - So as a public science, being a public communicator,

01:41:20.160 | that's a job, the whole thing.

01:41:23.120 | - Pays very poorly.

01:41:24.040 | - I'll pay you in Bitcoin, okay?

01:41:29.240 | - I'll take Bitcoin.

01:41:33.280 | - So is there some advice you can give

01:41:37.360 | to the process of being productive and happy

01:41:41.200 | as a researcher?

01:41:42.920 | - I think sadly it's very hard to feel happy as a scientist

01:41:45.840 | if you're not productive.

01:41:47.400 | It's a bit of a trap, but I certainly find it very difficult

01:41:51.880 | to feel happy when I'm not being productive.

01:41:54.720 | It's become slightly better if I know my students

01:41:57.560 | are being productive, I can be happy.

01:42:00.440 | But I think a lot of senior scientists,

01:42:03.120 | once they get into that mindset,

01:42:05.040 | they start thinking that their student science is theirs.

01:42:07.920 | And I think this happens a lot of senior scientists.

01:42:10.760 | They have so many hats, as you mentioned,

01:42:13.280 | they have to do so much service and so much admin

01:42:15.920 | that they have very little time for their own science.

01:42:18.800 | And so they end up feeling ownership over the junior people

01:42:22.160 | in their labs and their groups,

01:42:24.240 | and that's really heartbreaking, I see it all the time.

01:42:27.320 | And that, I think I've escaped that trap.

01:42:32.000 | I feel so happy even when I'm not productive,

01:42:35.520 | when my students are productive.

01:42:37.440 | I think that sensation I was describing earlier,

01:42:40.800 | they only need to be half as productive as me

01:42:44.880 | for me to feel like I've done my job for humanity.

01:42:49.400 | So that has been the dynamic I've had to worry about.

01:42:55.160 | But to be productive is not clear to me

01:42:57.400 | what you have to do.

01:42:58.360 | You have to not be miserable otherwise.

01:43:00.160 | I find it extremely hard when I'm having conflicts

01:43:02.960 | with collaborators, for example,

01:43:06.240 | kind of very hard to enjoy the work we do,

01:43:08.280 | even if the work is this fantastical phosphine

01:43:12.080 | or things that I know I love, still very difficult.

01:43:15.960 | So I think choosing your collaborators

01:43:18.760 | based on how well you get along with them

01:43:21.400 | is a really sound scientific choice.

01:43:25.840 | Having a miserable collaborator ruins your whole life.

01:43:29.440 | It's horrible.

01:43:30.480 | It makes you not want to do the science.

01:43:32.280 | It probably makes you do clumsy science

01:43:34.480 | 'cause you don't focus on it.

01:43:35.640 | You don't go over it several times.

01:43:37.400 | You just want it to be over.

01:43:39.440 | And so I think in general,

01:43:42.440 | just not being a douchebag

01:43:45.120 | can get so much good science done.

01:43:47.680 | Just find the good people in your community

01:43:50.200 | and collaborate with them.

01:43:51.320 | Even if they're not as good scientists as others,

01:43:53.480 | you'll get better science out.

01:43:55.640 | Yeah, don't be a douchebag yourself

01:43:57.120 | and surround yourself by other cool people.

01:43:59.160 | Exactly.

01:44:00.000 | And then you'll get better science

01:44:02.360 | than if you had tried to work with three geniuses

01:44:04.800 | who are just hell to be around.

01:44:07.540 | Yeah, I mean, there's parallel things like that.

01:44:12.160 | I'm very fortunate now.

01:44:13.520 | I was very fortunate at MIT

01:44:16.240 | to have friends and colleagues there

01:44:18.280 | that were incredible to work with.

01:44:20.200 | But I'm currently sort of,

01:44:22.120 | I'm doing a lot of fun stuff on the side,

01:44:27.200 | like this little podcast thing.

01:44:30.120 | And I mentioned to you, I think, robotics-related stuff.

01:44:34.400 | I was just at Boston Dynamics yesterday,

01:44:38.120 | checking out their robots.

01:44:39.740 | And I'm currently, I guess, hiring people

01:44:44.160 | to help me with a very fun little project

01:44:46.400 | around those robots.

01:44:47.240 | You wanna put an ad in?

01:44:48.440 | No, I have more applications I can possibly deal with.

01:44:52.160 | There's thousands.

01:44:53.680 | So, it's not an ad, it's the opposite.

01:44:57.560 | It's like-

01:44:58.400 | You need to put an ad out for someone

01:44:59.400 | to help you go through the applications?

01:45:00.800 | Well, that too is already there.

01:45:02.800 | That's over 10,000 people applied for that.

01:45:04.880 | An infinite Master Yoshikun doll of application management.

01:45:09.480 | But the point is, it's not exactly,

01:45:12.720 | the point is, what I'm very distinctly aware of

01:45:16.880 | is life is short and productivity is not a good thing.

01:45:22.880 | It is not the right goal to optimize for, at least for me.

01:45:26.360 | The right goal to optimize for is how happy you are

01:45:29.320 | to wake up in the day and to work with the people

01:45:33.000 | that you do, because the productivity

01:45:34.960 | will take care of itself.

01:45:36.200 | Agreed.

01:45:37.200 | And so, it's so important to select the people well.

01:45:42.040 | And I think one of the challenges with academia,

01:45:44.840 | as opposed to the thing I'm currently doing,

01:45:46.960 | is saying goodbye is sometimes a little bit tougher,

01:45:51.580 | because-

01:45:52.420 | Really tough.

01:45:53.240 | Your colleagues are there.

01:45:55.320 | I mean, goodbye hurts, and then if you have to spend

01:45:59.560 | the rest, for many years to come,

01:46:01.480 | still surrounded by them in the community, it's tougher.

01:46:04.440 | It kind of adds, puts extra pressure to stay

01:46:07.840 | in that relationship, in that collaboration.

01:46:12.840 | And in some sense, that makes it much more difficult,

01:46:16.160 | but it's still worth it.

01:46:17.000 | It's still worth it to break ties

01:46:19.480 | if you're not happy, if there's not that magic, that dance.

01:46:24.480 | I talked to this guy named Daniel Kahneman.

01:46:30.920 | Oh, I know, Danny Kahneman.

01:46:32.720 | Danny, yeah.

01:46:34.360 | Boy, did that guy make me realize

01:46:37.480 | what a great collaborator is.

01:46:39.980 | Well, he had Tversky, right?

01:46:41.640 | Yeah, but so they had, obviously,

01:46:44.160 | they had a really deep collaboration there,

01:46:45.920 | but I collaborated with him on a conversation,

01:46:50.880 | just talking about, I don't know what we were talking about.

01:46:53.740 | I think cars, autonomous vehicles.

01:46:55.680 | But the brainstorming session, I'm like a nobody,

01:46:59.480 | and the fact that he would, with that childlike curiosity,

01:47:02.120 | and that dance of thoughts and ideas,

01:47:04.400 | and the push and pull, and the lack of ego,

01:47:08.440 | but then enough ego to have a little bit of a stubbornness

01:47:10.840 | over an idea, and a little bit of humor,

01:47:12.920 | and all those things, it's like, holy shit,

01:47:15.440 | that person, also the ability to truly listen

01:47:18.440 | to another human, it's like, okay,

01:47:21.040 | that's what it takes to be a good collaborator.

01:47:23.440 | It made me realize that I haven't been,

01:47:26.260 | I've been very fortunate to have cool people in my life,

01:47:28.440 | but there's levels even to the cool.

01:47:31.600 | Yeah, I don't think you can compete

01:47:32.820 | with Danny Kahneman on cool.

01:47:34.200 | He's just incredible.

01:47:36.300 | But it was like, okay, I guess what I'm trying to say

01:47:39.720 | is that collaboration is an art form,

01:47:42.320 | but perhaps it's actually a skill,

01:47:43.780 | is allowing yourself to develop that skill,

01:47:47.480 | 'cause that's one of the fruitful skills.

01:47:49.840 | And praise it in students, you know,

01:47:52.200 | and I think it is something you can really improve on.

01:47:56.760 | I've become a better collaborator as the years have gone on.

01:47:59.720 | I don't have some innate collaborative skills.

01:48:03.280 | I think they're skills I've developed.

01:48:05.120 | And I think in science, there's this

01:48:06.920 | really destructive notion of the lone wolf,

01:48:11.960 | the scientist who sees things where others don't,

01:48:14.620 | you know, then that's really appealing,

01:48:16.500 | and people really like either fulfilling that

01:48:18.740 | or pretending to be fulfilling that.

01:48:21.060 | And first of all, it's mostly a lie.

01:48:24.220 | Any modern scientist, particularly in astronomy,

01:48:27.420 | which is so interdisciplinary,

01:48:29.100 | any modern scientist that's doing it on their own

01:48:31.940 | is doing a crappy job, most likely,

01:48:34.860 | because you need an independent set of eyes

01:48:37.380 | to help you do things.

01:48:38.980 | You need experts in the sub-fields that you're working on

01:48:41.460 | to check your work.

01:48:42.880 | But most importantly, it's just a bad idea.

01:48:46.840 | It's not,

01:48:47.860 | it doesn't lead to good science,

01:48:51.800 | and it leaves you miserable.

01:48:54.160 | I was, recently I had some work that I was avoiding,

01:48:57.440 | and I thought,

01:48:58.280 | maybe I shouldn't pursue this scientific project

01:49:00.080 | because I don't care enough about the outcome,

01:49:02.800 | and it's going to be a lot of hard work.

01:49:04.360 | And I was trying to balance these two things.

01:49:06.320 | It can be really difficult,

01:49:07.640 | and the outcome is that maybe 10 people will cite me

01:49:09.780 | in the next decade because it's not,

01:49:12.320 | no one's asking for this question to be answered.

01:49:14.720 | And then I found myself working

01:49:18.280 | with this collaborator, Jason Dittman,

01:49:20.760 | and I spent a whole afternoon, hours,

01:49:23.000 | with him working on this, and time flew by,

01:49:25.720 | and I just felt taller, and I could breathe better.

01:49:32.040 | I was happier, I was a better person when it was done,

01:49:35.040 | and that's because he's a great collaborator.

01:49:38.680 | He's just a wonderful person that brings out joy

01:49:42.180 | out of science that you're doing with him.

01:49:44.280 | And that's really the trick.

01:49:46.840 | You find the people that make you feel that way

01:49:48.800 | about the science you're doing,

01:49:50.320 | and you stop worrying about being the lone wolf.

01:49:55.320 | That's just a terrible dream that will leave you miserable,

01:49:58.300 | and your science will be shit.

01:49:59.940 | - And since I'm Russian, just murder anybody

01:50:04.360 | who doesn't fall into that beautiful,

01:50:07.660 | collaborative relationship.

01:50:09.000 | We were talking about books.

01:50:12.200 | - Books, yes.

01:50:13.360 | - Is there books, movies?

01:50:14.200 | - Why was I talking about my productivity?

01:50:16.440 | Oh, you said you maybe don't have time

01:50:18.160 | for books and movies, yes.

01:50:19.000 | - And you said you must make time for books and movies.

01:50:22.680 | - Make time to not work.

01:50:24.520 | Make time to not work, whatever that looks like to you.

01:50:27.960 | But there's plenty.

01:50:31.240 | When I was younger, I found a lot of

01:50:34.240 | my scientific fulfillment in books and movies.

01:50:36.880 | Now, as I got older, I have plenty of that in my work,

01:50:40.320 | and I try to read outside my field.

01:50:43.720 | I read about Danny Kahneman's work instead.

01:50:45.920 | But when I was little, it was "Contact," the book,

01:50:50.500 | the Carl Sagan book.

01:50:52.120 | I really thought I was just like Ellie,

01:50:56.980 | and I was going to become Ellie.

01:50:59.980 | It really resonated with me, that character,

01:51:02.720 | and the notions of life and space and the universe,

01:51:07.040 | even the idea of, then the movie came out,

01:51:11.840 | and I got to put Jodie Foster in that, which helped.

01:51:16.400 | But even the notion of, if it is just us,

01:51:21.240 | what an awful waste of space,

01:51:23.140 | I find extremely useful as a concept to think.

01:51:26.280 | Maybe we are special, but that would suck,

01:51:29.520 | is a really nice way of thinking of the search for life,

01:51:32.720 | that it's much better to not be special and have company.

01:51:36.940 | I got that from Carl Sagan.

01:51:39.280 | So that's what I always recommend.

01:51:42.020 | - Let me ask one other ridiculous question.

01:51:45.820 | We talked about the death and life cycle

01:51:50.800 | that is ever-present in the universe

01:51:52.720 | until it's not, until it's supermassive,

01:51:55.060 | and little black holes, too, at the end of the universe.

01:51:58.640 | What do you think is the why, the meaning of it all?

01:52:03.240 | What do you think is the meaning of life here on Earth,

01:52:07.600 | and the meaning of that life that you look for,

01:52:11.000 | whether it's on Venus or other exoplanets?

01:52:14.320 | - I think there's none.

01:52:16.040 | I find enormous relief in the absence of meaning.

01:52:19.760 | I think chasing for meaning is a human desire

01:52:24.120 | the universe doesn't give two shits about.

01:52:26.840 | (Lex laughing)

01:52:29.040 | - But you still enjoy--

01:52:31.240 | - I enjoy finding meaning in my life.

01:52:33.400 | I enjoy finding where the morality lies.

01:52:38.400 | I enjoy the complication of that desire,

01:52:43.480 | and I feel that is deeply human,

01:52:46.760 | but I don't feel that it's universal.

01:52:49.680 | - It's somehow absolute, like we conjure it up.

01:52:52.560 | We bring it to life through our own minds,

01:52:56.400 | but it's not in any kind of fundamental way real.

01:52:59.400 | - No, and the same way the sun is not to be blamed

01:53:04.240 | for destroying its own planets.

01:53:07.720 | The universe doesn't care because it has no meaning.

01:53:12.560 | It owes us nothing, and looking for meaning in the universe

01:53:16.080 | is demanding answers.

01:53:18.040 | Who are we?

01:53:18.960 | We're nothing.

01:53:19.880 | We don't get to demand anything, and that includes meaning,

01:53:23.240 | and I find it very reassuring

01:53:25.320 | because once there is no meaning, I don't have to find it.

01:53:29.200 | (Lex laughing)

01:53:31.960 | - Yeah, once there's no meaning,

01:53:35.160 | it's a kind of freedom in a way.

01:53:38.000 | You sound a bit like--

01:53:39.360 | - I'm happy about it.

01:53:42.120 | This isn't a depressing outlook as far as I'm concerned.

01:53:44.200 | - It's happiness, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:53:45.560 | So I mean, there's a, I don't know if you know

01:53:47.800 | who Sam Harris is, but he, despite the pushbacks

01:53:52.520 | from the entirety of the world, really argues hard

01:53:55.560 | that free will is an illusion,

01:53:58.560 | that the deterministic universe,

01:54:02.440 | and it's all already been predetermined,

01:54:04.320 | and he's okay with it, and he's happy with it,

01:54:08.080 | that he's distinctly aware of it, and that's okay.

01:54:12.120 | - The quantum world will disagree with him

01:54:13.560 | on the deterministic nature of nature.

01:54:17.040 | - Well, he's not saying it's deterministic,

01:54:20.560 | but he's saying that the randomness doesn't help either.

01:54:23.400 | Like, randomness does not help in the experience

01:54:28.400 | of feeling like you're the decider of your own actions,

01:54:32.780 | that he kind of is okay with being a leaf flowing

01:54:36.560 | on the river, or being the river, right,

01:54:40.520 | as opposed to having, or being like a fish or something

01:54:43.040 | that can decide a swimming direction.

01:54:45.840 | He's okay just embracing the flow of life.

01:54:48.600 | I mean, in that same way, it kind of sounds

01:54:51.160 | like your conception of meaning.

01:54:54.380 | I mean, it just is.

01:54:55.920 | It doesn't, the universe doesn't care.

01:54:58.840 | It just is what it is, and we experience certain things,

01:55:01.960 | and some feel good, and some don't, and that's life.

01:55:05.880 | - But I don't feel like that about life.

01:55:10.060 | I think life does have meaning, and there's,

01:55:12.760 | and it's laudable to look for that meaning in life.

01:55:16.160 | I just don't think you can apply that beyond life,

01:55:20.080 | and certainly not beyond Earth,

01:55:21.920 | that this notion of meaning is a human construct,

01:55:25.440 | and so it only applies within us,

01:55:29.200 | and the other life forms and planet types

01:55:34.200 | that suffer from our intrusions,

01:55:36.900 | or rejoice from our interactions.

01:55:40.420 | But it's this, this meaning is ours to do as we please.

01:55:44.700 | We've created it, we've created a need for it,

01:55:47.320 | and so that's our problem to solve.

01:55:49.480 | I don't apply it beyond us.

01:55:51.160 | I think we as humans have a lot of responsibilities,

01:55:53.480 | but they're moral responsibilities,

01:55:55.480 | and a lot of the responsibilities

01:55:56.880 | are much more easily fulfilled if you find meaning in them.

01:56:00.720 | So I think there's value to meaning,

01:56:02.600 | whether it's real or not.

01:56:04.640 | I just think we gain nothing from trying

01:56:07.260 | to anthropomorphize the entire universe,

01:56:10.840 | and also, that's the height of hubris.

01:56:13.600 | That's not for us to do.

01:56:15.340 | - Yeah, it also could be,

01:56:17.240 | just like duality in quantum mechanics,

01:56:19.520 | it could be both that there is meaning,

01:56:23.720 | and then there isn't.

01:56:25.480 | And we're somehow depending on the observer,

01:56:29.260 | depending on the perspective you take on the thing.

01:56:33.280 | - I mean, even on Earth, that's true.

01:56:35.480 | Whether things have meaning or not

01:56:38.040 | depends a lot on who's looking.

01:56:39.660 | - Whether it's us humans, the aliens,

01:56:43.440 | or the giraffes.

01:56:44.540 | Clara, this was an incredible conversation.

01:56:48.800 | I mean, I learned so much,

01:56:51.760 | but I also am just inspired by the passion you have.

01:56:55.280 | - In not finding meaning in the universe.

01:56:58.640 | - Yeah, right.

01:56:59.480 | For someone who finds meaning in the universe.

01:57:00.320 | - I'm very passionate about

01:57:01.560 | not finding meaning in the universe.

01:57:04.040 | - You're the most inspiring nihilist I've ever met.

01:57:06.600 | I'm just kidding.

01:57:07.440 | I mean, you are truly an inspiring communicator

01:57:13.040 | of everything from phosphine to life

01:57:15.760 | to quantum astrochemistry.

01:57:19.040 | I can't wait to see what other cool things you do

01:57:21.880 | in your career, in your scientific life.

01:57:24.880 | Thank you so much for wasting your valuable time

01:57:27.480 | with me today.

01:57:28.320 | I really appreciate it.

01:57:30.120 | - It was my pleasure.

01:57:30.960 | I'd already got my four hours of productivity

01:57:32.920 | before I got here, and so it's not a waste.

01:57:35.160 | - It's all downhill from there.

01:57:37.200 | Thank you.

01:57:38.500 | Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:57:39.880 | with Clara Sousa Silva,

01:57:41.200 | and thank you to Anit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed.

01:57:46.200 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

01:57:50.340 | And now let me leave you with some words

01:57:51.800 | from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

01:57:54.000 | "The earth is the cradle of humanity,

01:57:56.680 | but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever."

01:58:00.200 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

01:58:02.960 | (upbeat music)

01:58:05.540 | (upbeat music)

01:58:08.120 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets | Lex Fridman Podcast #195

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