Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #348

00:00:00.000 | My friend is telling me that the volcano seems to be starting to erupt.

00:00:04.000 | If that volcano goes off, we have nowhere to go.

00:00:08.760 | That got my attention.

00:00:10.720 | So if you say scared, I would say that I got the realization that what that meant.

00:00:16.240 | I went cold for like a fraction of a second, but that meant that just my adrenaline started

00:00:21.480 | to kick in.

00:00:22.480 | And it was a very, very strange experience because now you have tunnel vision.

00:00:27.000 | It's about survival.

00:00:28.000 | The following is a conversation with Natalie Cabral, an astrobiologist and scientist at

00:00:34.960 | the SETI Institute, directing the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.

00:00:40.880 | She explores some of the harshest places on earth, including free diving and volcanic

00:00:45.480 | lakes, all in the pursuit of understanding living organisms beyond earth.

00:00:50.520 | For this, she holds the woman's world record for diving at an altitude, both scuba and

00:00:56.320 | free diving.

00:00:58.200 | She's amazing.

00:00:59.840 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.

00:01:01.320 | To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

00:01:04.240 | And now, dear friends, here's Natalie Cabral.

00:01:08.560 | You are the director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute.

00:01:13.080 | SETI of course stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

00:01:17.720 | One of the things you do as part of that is travel to some of earth's most extreme and

00:01:22.560 | dangerous environments in search of organisms that live in conditions analogous to those

00:01:27.240 | on Mars.

00:01:28.240 | First, let me ask what the job posting for the work you do looks like.

00:01:33.320 | Is it like Shackleton's ad in 1900 that said people wanted for hazardous journey to the

00:01:38.360 | South Pole?

00:01:39.360 | Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger.

00:01:44.080 | And also, where do I apply?

00:01:46.720 | That's funny because there was not really a job application.

00:01:50.440 | In fact, when you're a scientist, you have questions in your mind and you have hypotheses

00:01:55.880 | and you start to list the kind of thing you need to answer.

00:01:58.680 | And then when you see the kind of thing you have to answer, then you kind of know the

00:02:04.340 | places where you need to go to do that.

00:02:07.040 | As far as science is concerned, I started with analyzing data from the Mars missions.

00:02:14.040 | And I had written a PhD about water on Mars, first looking at channels and the history

00:02:21.280 | evolution of water.

00:02:24.280 | But then during my postdoc, I started to look where that water was ponding.

00:02:31.480 | Interestingly enough, everybody was about channels and water and whether catastrophic

00:02:35.400 | or wetland or seepage.

00:02:38.000 | But when you are talking about ponding water like lakes or ocean, people started waving

00:02:45.000 | their arms a little bit.

00:02:46.460 | So it was a little bit of a battle, interestingly enough.

00:02:50.320 | But that got us on track with my husband.

00:02:53.880 | We were working together and we started developing the idea, the concept of lakes in impact craters.

00:03:01.660 | So why an impact crater?

00:03:03.240 | Because the Viking mission at the time, which is what we were working with, the resolution

00:03:10.380 | and the topography were so poor that there was really no way of telling where you had

00:03:15.440 | a real low in the topography.

00:03:17.600 | The only thing you knew was a hole in the ground was an impact crater.

00:03:22.280 | So when you saw valleys...

00:03:23.760 | What was the Viking mission?

00:03:25.760 | The Viking mission landed on Mars in 1976 and there were two landers and two orbiters.

00:03:32.200 | So they were really our first feet on the ground on Mars, but they were lander.

00:03:37.680 | They were not moving.

00:03:38.680 | They were not going up.

00:03:39.680 | And that was the data you were looking at?

00:03:41.080 | It was already in the 90s, but we didn't have yet the Mars Global Surveyor and whatnot.

00:03:47.660 | We still work for 20 years.

00:03:49.460 | We worked on that.

00:03:50.460 | I did my master and my PhD thesis on Viking missions.

00:03:53.560 | You mentioned that the places you go to are defined by the questions you want to ask.

00:03:59.200 | Let's just step back.

00:04:00.320 | What questions have always tugged at your heart?

00:04:03.000 | Well, that's the thing.

00:04:04.840 | That's why I was looking at those images and saw some lakes.

00:04:10.040 | And then came time where we started talking about sending landers and rovers on Mars and

00:04:17.600 | looking maybe at the possibility that Mars was habitable.

00:04:22.120 | And lakes are particularly good places to look for those questions.

00:04:26.280 | So this is how it all ties up.

00:04:28.080 | So you were always curious about life out there?

00:04:30.640 | I have been always curious about life in the universe and about questions on how we got

00:04:36.100 | to be here and the bigger question.

00:04:38.800 | Now with 25 years more in that business, it's more about understanding the origin and nature

00:04:46.900 | of life rather than whether there is life or not on Mars.

00:04:51.720 | This was really for me a stepping stone to bigger questions, but they were definitely

00:04:56.120 | important because they helped me frame my way of thinking about those questions.

00:05:03.160 | And so looking at Mars, at lakes, understanding what the conditions were 3.5 billion years

00:05:09.240 | ago or close to 4 billion years ago, then I knew the type of environment I needed to

00:05:14.880 | explore here on Earth as analogous to be able to understand what type of life still survives

00:05:23.200 | in those environment and what kind of instrument and what kind of resolution do I need to actually

00:05:29.200 | detect it.

00:05:30.680 | So this is how the whole thing started.

00:05:33.360 | And it started with a small grant, literally 40K.

00:05:37.200 | It was a discretionary fund.

00:05:39.000 | And this is how I got started in my career.

00:05:41.920 | And so many of these questions you can answer by looking at life in extreme conditions here

00:05:45.960 | on Earth.

00:05:46.960 | - Let's step back a little bit and look at Mars and lakes on Mars.

00:05:53.520 | Just going back to your PhD and before, and maybe today, what do we understand about life

00:05:59.440 | on Mars?

00:06:00.440 | What do we understand about lakes on Mars?

00:06:03.600 | Is there water on Mars?

00:06:04.600 | What do we understand about the conditions from 4 billion years ago on Mars?

00:06:08.440 | - Well, we've gone a long way.

00:06:10.480 | Remember from the Viking where we had no resolution.

00:06:12.760 | Well, we'll had a little bit more resolution than with Mariner.

00:06:16.240 | - What did you think at that time?

00:06:17.240 | Sorry to interrupt.

00:06:18.240 | Just take us back to that mindset.

00:06:20.000 | - It was really the exploration, like your first look at a planet.

00:06:25.680 | You have to remember that the first mission that successfully snapped some pictures of

00:06:31.360 | Mars was Mariner 4.

00:06:34.240 | And then everybody at that time was still under the spell of, you know, H. Wells and

00:06:40.360 | the idea that Mars looked with telescope so similar to the Earth.

00:06:47.800 | Polar caps, we could see them with a telescope and we knew it had season.

00:06:53.040 | The actual tilt is pretty much the same as the one for Earth.

00:06:57.560 | So when Mariner 4 left, everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people thought that we would

00:07:03.720 | see the crystal cities and domes and stuff, that another civilization might have evolved

00:07:09.520 | in parallel to us in the solar system.

00:07:12.080 | And of course, when the first images came back and Mars looked with that kind of resolution,

00:07:16.880 | it had like the moon, it was a huge disappointment.

00:07:21.600 | Then Mariner 9 came and that changed everything.

00:07:26.960 | There was a little bit of drama because Mars started one of the biggest dust storm it ever

00:07:34.080 | experienced.

00:07:35.080 | And so for three months, we had an orbiter circling around Mars and not seeing anything.

00:07:41.400 | But then when the dust cleared, all of a sudden we started discovering volcanoes, valleys,

00:07:48.680 | ancient channels, dune fields, polar caps, and see what I'm talking to you, I don't

00:07:53.680 | need to invent any words to describe Mars.

00:07:58.900 | And although the myth of extraterrestrial civilization on Mars was gone, all of a sudden

00:08:08.640 | the imagination of the scientists started to pick up because right away we're seeing

00:08:12.360 | something that was familiar that we could describe.

00:08:15.960 | So right away, Viking would put on the fast track and the idea was so Mars looks so much

00:08:23.360 | like Earth could have been, although it's arid and there is little atmosphere, et cetera,

00:08:29.840 | could there be life?

00:08:31.000 | And of course, behind this, at the time, there were people like Klein and Sagan, Carl Sagan,

00:08:39.720 | just thinking about how can we test the idea of biology of life on Mars?

00:08:46.960 | So this is what Viking did.

00:08:49.020 | But of course, at the time when the two landers arrived on Mars, we didn't have the context

00:08:56.200 | of the geology of the environment.

00:08:57.920 | We didn't have much data at all.

00:09:00.180 | So the data that Viking sent back was very confusing.

00:09:05.680 | Some people still think today that we discovered life on Mars at the time, because some of

00:09:10.920 | the experiment turned out to show a strange signal.

00:09:14.680 | But most of the community think that it can be explained by chemical reaction that we

00:09:18.880 | see today.

00:09:20.060 | So it was so confusing that NASA decided to say, okay, if we want to be serious about

00:09:24.920 | looking for life on Mars, we have to understand the environment because life and environment

00:09:30.880 | co-evolve.

00:09:32.580 | So as cause or effect, a planet is going to give you the physical chemical environment

00:09:38.560 | for life to happen.

00:09:40.400 | These are the boundaries.

00:09:41.640 | But once life is here, it's going to change everything.

00:09:45.120 | One of the biggest impact of life was to inject oxygen into the atmosphere of the Earth two

00:09:53.000 | billion years ago.

00:09:54.960 | And that changed everything, including our signature in space.

00:09:58.560 | So there is this co-evolution.

00:10:01.200 | So if you want to understand one, you have to remove the other from the equation.

00:10:04.600 | It's kind of a two or none equation.

00:10:06.960 | So even though oxygen changes our signature today, what if all life on Earth died and

00:10:13.680 | now we fast forward a billion years, what would be the traces left?

00:10:18.480 | So the question I'm trying to ask is, if life had existed on Mars, what would be the signs

00:10:25.340 | we would look for?

00:10:26.520 | That's a very good question.

00:10:27.700 | The thing is that if you draw the parallel with Earth, it took 82% of Earth's history,

00:10:36.080 | geological history, to go from very simple life, microbial life, to complexity.

00:10:42.040 | And when I'm saying complexity, I'm not even talking about us, I'm talking about animals.

00:10:46.380 | So Mars is smaller, lost its magnetic field very fast, and lost its atmosphere very fast.

00:10:54.440 | Life also appeared on Earth very fast.

00:10:58.100 | So the condition being quite similar at that time between the Earth and Mars, let's assume

00:11:02.160 | for a moment that life appeared on Mars.

00:11:04.480 | It would have been simple life when conditions started to degrade, which was less than a

00:11:11.160 | billion years after the planet had formed.

00:11:13.680 | So everything at the surface would have disappeared, except maybe for morphological traces of the

00:11:21.800 | interaction between life and its environment.

00:11:24.560 | So on Earth, the best example are what we call stromatolites.

00:11:28.760 | These are rock formations that are built by microbes.

00:11:33.320 | So we know that, we know how to recognize them.

00:11:37.080 | You could have chemical traces as well.

00:11:40.200 | There is some interesting question marks right now about carbon isotopes at Gale Crater,

00:11:46.560 | because we found an abundance of C12, which normally is used by life on Earth, but it

00:11:52.480 | can be produced by other things.

00:11:54.560 | So it's not that it's a real biosignature in itself, but it's intriguing.

00:11:59.080 | We have now the C12 and we have methane.

00:12:02.400 | But going back, it's a time on Mars 3.5 billion years ago, where you have lots of destructions,

00:12:09.480 | where you have lots of impact cratering, etc.

00:12:12.640 | But we still have very old rocks that survive from that time.

00:12:18.120 | So these are good places.

00:12:20.160 | That's why we're sending the rovers in those places, ancient lakes and impact craters,

00:12:24.720 | and places where you have very old rocks.

00:12:27.040 | So when you say ancient lakes and impact craters, the simple question, so impact crater is a

00:12:33.200 | crater created by a giant rock hitting the planet?

00:12:36.280 | And yes, a big rock that can be metal or rock, or it can be a comet as well, mostly ice.

00:12:42.600 | So is that good for life or bad for life?

00:12:45.640 | For creating life and destroying life?

00:12:47.960 | Both.

00:12:48.960 | It's actually both.

00:12:51.600 | Interestingly enough, the building blocks of life, the bricks, the stuff we are made

00:12:56.120 | of, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, they were included on our planet.

00:13:04.200 | They were built in just because our planet is made of these kinds of rocks, asteroids

00:13:09.320 | and comets coming together by what we call accretion.

00:13:13.400 | So they were built in.

00:13:15.040 | When an asteroid comes, there is a lot of destruction going on.

00:13:19.640 | But at the same time, those rocks, they bring with them those bricks of life, and they create

00:13:27.160 | lots of energy.

00:13:29.240 | And if the environment around is favorable, you might possibly have some seeding going

00:13:36.600 | on.

00:13:37.600 | That's one of the aspects of what we call panspermia, which is the fact that comets

00:13:43.160 | and asteroids have the building blocks of life embedded in them, and that given favorable

00:13:48.840 | conditions, they might be able to seed planets.

00:13:51.120 | This is a theory.

00:13:52.460 | What percent of you, when you're looking up at the stars and wondering about this stuff,

00:13:58.000 | thinks that panspermia is what happened on Mars or on Earth, which is the building blocks

00:14:04.840 | of life came from elsewhere?

00:14:06.560 | Well, but, you know, that's the thing.

00:14:09.280 | Panspermia is a vector, potential vector, which means that it actually distributes the

00:14:14.800 | stuff of life left and right, but it doesn't explain the origin of life.

00:14:20.160 | It's not the environment itself.

00:14:22.400 | It just promotes maybe, and we still have to prove this.

00:14:26.280 | And what we know is that the stuff we are made of is very abundant all over the place,

00:14:32.200 | including in interstellar medium.

00:14:35.120 | So it's all over.

00:14:36.640 | It's all over.

00:14:37.640 | The idea is that maybe it just waits to have the proper environment, and we know what it

00:14:43.200 | needs here on Earth.

00:14:44.400 | It needs water, it needs energy, shelter, and nutrients.

00:14:48.680 | So you're fundamentally interested in the origin of life and the big leaps in evolutionary

00:14:57.320 | history that could be like an origin of something, origin of eukaryotes, origin of photosynthesis,

00:15:05.240 | origin of whatever.

00:15:07.000 | I just think if we're a civilization here on Earth and we survive another few hundred

00:15:10.760 | years, I think it would be a good idea to take a big gun and just shoot life out there,

00:15:17.240 | like a life gun.

00:15:19.040 | Basically try to create panspermia.

00:15:20.520 | That's a good backup solution.

00:15:22.560 | So one way is to actually copy our brains and actual humans, some complex information,

00:15:29.680 | and send it out there.

00:15:31.200 | Another way to preserve life is just to send the basic building blocks.

00:15:36.100 | Send a bunch of bacteria, a bunch of whatever the rugged organisms are on Earth.

00:15:41.360 | Just send a bunch of those.

00:15:42.360 | - These are not the building blocks.

00:15:43.840 | They are actual organism.

00:15:45.200 | - Right, but isn't that a nice shortcut?

00:15:47.960 | Do we want to...

00:15:48.960 | Because you said building blocks are everywhere.

00:15:50.560 | - Yeah, the bricks of life, the carbon, hydrogen, et cetera, they were produced by the death

00:15:57.720 | of previous stars.

00:15:59.120 | So this is how they were produced.

00:16:02.600 | Stars like our sun started to form 10 billion years ago.

00:16:07.200 | That doesn't mean that the sun is the only kind of star that produce life or enables

00:16:13.480 | life, but actually was produced 10 billion years ago.

00:16:18.760 | Now what you're talking about is a little different.

00:16:22.280 | Right now there are many, many efforts to do the type of thing you are talking about,

00:16:31.280 | which is to put our DNA on whatever kind of substrate and preserve it in vaults, either

00:16:38.200 | in different place on Earth or on the moon.

00:16:41.720 | Some people are already thinking about putting DNA on the moon.

00:16:45.680 | As far as brains concerned, it's drawing towards transhumanism, which is the enhancement of

00:16:54.160 | who we are through AI and machine learning.

00:16:57.320 | Of course, having backups is a good thing.

00:17:00.040 | For me, I would say that taking care of our planets and going back to a place where we

00:17:05.720 | are in equilibrium with our environment would be also maybe the best backup possible.

00:17:12.360 | And let evolution do its things.

00:17:14.960 | Right now we are like teenagers with enough brain to create cool tools, but we don't have

00:17:21.680 | enough brain to understand yet the consequences of what we are doing.

00:17:26.160 | And right now we are paying for this.

00:17:28.440 | So the question is whether we are going to be able to move forward and learn from the

00:17:37.200 | mistakes we are making to become a mature civilization.

00:17:41.920 | You probably heard of the Drake equation, that would be the L at the very end, the duration.

00:17:47.800 | The duration of intelligent civilization.

00:17:50.920 | Exactly.

00:17:51.920 | Or at least the length of time a civilization remains detectable.

00:17:59.440 | It can disappear from the radar screen literally for a number of reasons.

00:18:03.280 | The first one is destroyed itself or being destroyed by external events.

00:18:11.440 | Or it can become so in tune with the universe and so advanced that it disappears because

00:18:18.520 | it melts really in the background and it's not visible anymore.

00:18:23.040 | There are some wild theories out there saying that civilization might be so advanced that

00:18:29.560 | you cannot distinguish them from physical processes.

00:18:34.160 | And that was an example.

00:18:35.680 | It doesn't say that this is the case, but some people say, imagine that in fact all

00:18:39.480 | the dark matter that we see or we theorized about is in fact some sort of a biological

00:18:46.280 | process.

00:18:49.040 | So you can think about a number of things.

00:18:51.640 | Personally, I believe that what you talk about, about preserving our information, is kind

00:18:59.040 | of what life does.

00:19:00.760 | We need to look at ourselves as not different of what the little self that started off was.

00:19:09.280 | And this is what tells you not about the origin of life, but in fact the nature of life, which

00:19:13.320 | is a lot more interesting to me.

00:19:15.240 | It is.

00:19:16.240 | The nature of life is really what is going to give you some universal signature to look

00:19:21.760 | for it all over the place.

00:19:23.440 | And not only around ponds of water for life as we know it.

00:19:28.220 | But the nature of life is telling you that life wants to get the most information possible

00:19:36.620 | around its surroundings.

00:19:38.240 | And complexity is in fact the ability to gather and exchange and preserve the most information

00:19:46.040 | possible.

00:19:48.000 | And so what you're saying is kind of preserving the kind of information we have.

00:19:54.440 | So in the things that we are doing, as life happened, and I say happened because we don't

00:20:03.280 | know what life is, we have 123 definitions of life and some people are saying we don't

00:20:08.760 | have any definition, we only have descriptions of life.

00:20:12.800 | And that's true.

00:20:13.960 | And that's true.

00:20:14.960 | So think about it for two minutes.

00:20:17.080 | We are looking for something we don't know it is.

00:20:19.000 | But we have a few clues about the nature of life.

00:20:22.160 | There are some really good theories.

00:20:24.460 | The first one was Schrodinger, right?

00:20:26.520 | In the 40s.

00:20:27.640 | Right now there is a guy named Jeremy England.

00:20:30.400 | It's another biophysical theory of life.

00:20:32.920 | It says life is the inevitable result of thermophysics.

00:20:40.120 | This is the best way to beat entropy, to fight entropy.

00:20:43.960 | But when you look at what we are doing, if you want to know what the nature of life is,

00:20:49.840 | look at our languages.

00:20:50.840 | And they can be very different languages, but they all have the same purpose, right?

00:20:56.080 | Exchange information, understand, you know, store information, and also whether it is

00:21:02.040 | with somebody at the outside or thoughts in yourself.

00:21:07.480 | That's the same thing the cell was doing.

00:21:09.880 | But now when you're looking at life and at the structure of our languages, life started

00:21:16.520 | with an atom.

00:21:18.640 | So it's an atom.

00:21:19.640 | They got together to create inorganic molecules.

00:21:23.720 | Then you have complex inorganic molecules.

00:21:26.840 | Then you get to organic molecules, complex inorganic molecules, and then you have RNA,

00:21:33.200 | DNA, etc.

00:21:34.700 | Look at the structure of our language.

00:21:36.920 | We created alphabets, letters.

00:21:40.800 | That's your atom.

00:21:42.420 | Then we put them together to create syllables, right?

00:21:46.200 | The syllables get together to create words.

00:21:49.240 | Words tell you something, but they are nothing without a verb that gives the direction.

00:21:55.160 | That's RNA and DNA.

00:21:58.000 | And then you can put all the complements you want.

00:22:00.680 | Our languages are built exactly as life is built.

00:22:05.160 | We are repeating patterns.

00:22:07.240 | I call this the Mandelbrot universe and the fractal universe because this is exactly what

00:22:11.800 | it is.

00:22:13.360 | I would say that as much as I do believe to sending probes to explore the universe, I

00:22:19.360 | say we should also look inward to find the answer to some of the profound questions of

00:22:26.520 | who we are, what's life, what's the nature of life, because we are expressing life.

00:22:31.320 | So searching not for life, but for the nature of life.

00:22:35.920 | The nature of life, absolutely.

00:22:37.400 | I am more interested in that because the day we understand the nature of life, then we

00:22:43.040 | have a universal biosignature.

00:22:46.720 | And it doesn't matter whether this life responds to the same kind of biochemical processes

00:22:53.640 | as we do, although it makes sense.

00:22:55.960 | I told you about the generational aspect of the bricks of life, the stuff we are made

00:23:01.600 | of.

00:23:02.600 | The sun is part of the youngest generation of stars.

00:23:06.040 | And the first two generations of stars didn't produce the kind of elements we are made of.

00:23:11.640 | They were stars that were either without metal, just made of helium and hydrogen, or poor

00:23:20.600 | in metals.

00:23:22.560 | So the stars died off and stars like the sun were born from those.

00:23:31.120 | And this is why we have elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc. now.

00:23:38.580 | And that's the life we are built on.

00:23:40.600 | So I think it's not stupid to be looking for something that looks like us, because right

00:23:46.040 | now in the universe, this is the stuff that's the most abundant.

00:23:49.200 | And we see with the exoplanets, with Kepler, with TESS, and now with James Webb, we see

00:23:55.840 | that there are many, many different types of planets that may be habitable in the habitable

00:24:00.680 | zone of their stars.

00:24:02.240 | There are countless stars like the sun.

00:24:05.100 | But more interestingly enough, there are other types of stars where you do have habitable

00:24:10.440 | zones as well, and where the duration of the stars is sometimes a thousand times more than

00:24:16.840 | our sun.

00:24:18.980 | So you can imagine all sorts of things.

00:24:21.600 | And you can imagine what type of life would be around those stars.

00:24:27.240 | The biochemistry might be quite similar, in fact, and especially for the simple life,

00:24:33.340 | because simple life starts really quickly on Earth.

00:24:37.280 | So my take on this is that the universe is full of cyanobacteria, but as far as intelligent

00:24:43.320 | life, it takes more time.

00:24:46.560 | So that can take different aspects.

00:24:49.000 | LR: So you think it's possible that the universe is full of bacteria, and even those stars

00:24:56.560 | that last a thousand times longer than the sun, even on the planets that orbit those

00:25:04.680 | stars, maybe it's bacteria, for billions and billions and billions of years?

00:25:13.440 | HA: We actually don't know what triggered the evolution to complexity on Earth.

00:25:18.880 | That's still a big question mark.

00:25:20.080 | LR: Is that the most impressive invention on Earth to you?

00:25:23.320 | HA: That Cambrian revolution is really what took us towards what we are.

00:25:29.440 | And in the meantime, there were the dinosaurs, etc.

00:25:32.080 | The dinosaurs were wiped out, so the evolution could have taken a completely different turn.

00:25:37.360 | It's always, I would say, mass extinction that are going to drive what's the end game.

00:25:43.200 | But yeah, you take two planets and you change those asteroid impacts, all those big geological

00:25:52.600 | events that wipe out like 90% of life at any time.

00:25:58.280 | The thing that seems to be interesting, there are two things.

00:26:03.960 | The first one is where you are located on our galaxy matters a lot.

00:26:10.960 | We actually are in the habitable zone of our galaxy.

00:26:15.680 | And if you are too close to the center, then it's a lot denser.

00:26:20.440 | And remember, we have the Oort cloud around our solar system.

00:26:25.440 | And if you are in the region of the galaxy that's too populated, then you're going to

00:26:30.480 | run gravitational interaction with all these stars.

00:26:35.120 | And since it's more dense, you will have more of the comets that are living in the Oort

00:26:40.840 | cloud being ejected from the Oort cloud and coming towards the inner solar system and

00:26:48.160 | collide with planets.

00:26:49.720 | So you will have more of these impacts if you are too close to the center of the galaxy,

00:26:54.520 | not to mention the radiation.

00:26:56.080 | There is a place in our galaxy where it's a really bad neighborhood.

00:27:00.080 | You don't want to be there.

00:27:01.220 | You wouldn't be able to have life.

00:27:03.400 | But what really matters is extinctions, but also the climate history of a planet has a

00:27:13.880 | role to play.

00:27:15.520 | And it seems that it's a theory.

00:27:20.560 | It still has to be backed up by more observation, but there is a good correlation between not

00:27:26.160 | only the passage of the solar system towards the center of the galaxy, there is one place

00:27:31.440 | where we get hit by asteroids because of the interaction I was telling you about.

00:27:36.800 | But the other one is the climate.

00:27:39.520 | During the Milankovitch cycles, big jumps in life's evolution seem to be associated

00:27:46.520 | with snowball earth episodes.

00:27:51.760 | We don't know why yet.

00:27:55.280 | Snowball episode, intuitively you would think that they are connected to a decrease in life

00:28:02.320 | because the whole earth is covered in ice.

00:28:06.760 | But for some reason, there were big jumps in evolution right after each of those episodes.

00:28:13.200 | And today there are other things like why all of a sudden you have mutation that seems

00:28:17.680 | to be responsible for a big jump in evolution.

00:28:21.600 | We are not clear yet.

00:28:22.760 | So all of those things, when you're thinking about life elsewhere, are going to come into

00:28:27.280 | play.

00:28:28.280 | And I cannot tell you that a planet that remains habitable for much longer than the earth will

00:28:36.640 | have an evolutionary path that's the same or different.

00:28:41.440 | Depends on extension, depends on climate, depends on whatnot.

00:28:45.900 | It's a little bit surreal that we're two descendants of apes.

00:28:49.520 | Well, I think that some people...

00:28:52.560 | Trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

00:28:55.160 | And I mean, we're very biased, even as...

00:28:58.000 | So you...

00:28:59.800 | We're biased as humans, you're less biased as a scientist.

00:29:04.320 | But we still love earth.

00:29:06.000 | We still don't know anything but this earth.

00:29:09.840 | And so even though you try to get escape from thinking of what life is, in the search for

00:29:15.920 | the nature of life, we're still kind of connected to the way we understand the nature of life

00:29:20.120 | here on earth.

00:29:21.120 | So I think that it's a little different than that.

00:29:24.680 | We are biased when it comes to the origin of life.

00:29:29.280 | Because well, we are the only model we know.

00:29:33.280 | And as I said, it makes sense because it seems that a lot of stars like the sun appeared

00:29:42.320 | 10 billion years ago.

00:29:44.200 | And there are lots of worlds that really resemble the earth and lots of water out there and

00:29:49.800 | lots of conditions that could be a repeat of what we know.

00:29:53.920 | And we know that this biochemistry works.

00:29:56.920 | So as again, as I mentioned, what is going to change is really the evolution of a planet,

00:30:03.200 | extinction, geology, etc.

00:30:05.440 | But our model is probably very abundant.

00:30:08.480 | I'm not saying that the endgame is going to resemble us because of all these extinction,

00:30:13.280 | etc.

00:30:14.280 | But this is a good bias.

00:30:16.700 | It's one that has the number for it.

00:30:19.440 | You know, the principle of mediocrity.

00:30:21.480 | I think that in that case, it really applies where the earth is representative of an abundance

00:30:31.720 | of other worlds.

00:30:33.480 | Now, of course, there can be other biochemistry.

00:30:37.160 | We have some examples in our own solar system.

00:30:39.880 | Titan might be a representative of that.

00:30:42.920 | We are not very clear of the kind of biochemistry that can come out of a world where you have

00:30:48.360 | hydrocarbon lakes and rains and things like that.

00:30:54.240 | But we are going there.

00:30:55.480 | So we will learn something about this.

00:30:58.720 | So the bias is right there.

00:31:01.120 | The nature of life is different.

00:31:03.560 | If really life is the best way the universe has to fight entropy, there is no bias there.

00:31:12.680 | Because physics is the same all across the universe, at least the universe we know.

00:31:16.520 | There might be other universes, but the one we know works with the same physics.

00:31:21.400 | So if life is the best way to fight entropy, you can imagine that life permeates the entire

00:31:29.080 | universe.

00:31:30.440 | And then the question might change to like flavors of ice cream.

00:31:34.600 | What are the flavors of complexity that this process, this nature of life leads to?

00:31:41.520 | And there we might have bias about what complexity looks like, what beautiful complexity looks

00:31:47.640 | like.

00:31:48.640 | We look at humans that operate a certain physical scale and time scale, and we think this is

00:31:55.000 | intelligence.

00:31:56.240 | We have another problem.

00:31:57.460 | We don't know what life is.

00:31:58.600 | We don't know what intelligence is, and we don't know what consciousness is.

00:32:02.360 | But we are trying to tackle the big question.

00:32:05.200 | Do we know what complexity is also?

00:32:07.680 | You don't know.

00:32:08.840 | I think that we have to be honest.

00:32:09.840 | And as a scientist, and I'm going to step back and talk about intelligence.

00:32:15.480 | For me, a bacteria that has survived, like cyanobacteria, that has survived just like

00:32:22.280 | us four billion years in one incarnation or another, and actually they are very similar

00:32:27.400 | to the one that they were 3.5 billion years ago, it has some intelligence about its environment.

00:32:34.040 | So for complexity, it might be that we need to take the world literally, which is an assemblage

00:32:42.680 | or additional capacity to gather, collect, store information.

00:32:47.640 | Maybe this is something like that, or actually use that information to do something with

00:32:51.480 | it.

00:32:53.400 | But I do completely agree with you when you talk about flavor of ice cream.

00:32:59.040 | I think this is exactly it.

00:33:01.880 | And I have a basic education about what physics is doing right now.

00:33:09.680 | And I look at quantum physics and what it says about the universe, and about the connection,

00:33:17.920 | about an atom here and an atom there, a photon here and a photon there.

00:33:23.440 | And I am starting to put maybe wrongfully two and two together.

00:33:28.600 | But in my mind, and of course it's nothing until I can prove it, but in my mind, the

00:33:34.680 | universe is connected everywhere in all different places.

00:33:38.800 | So this life connection is something that, as you said, permeates the universe.

00:33:45.320 | And the way to find life might be very different than to look for the origins of life.

00:33:51.000 | I think it's a good thing to go out there and look for the origin of life somewhere

00:33:54.520 | else, because it's the manifestation of the nature of life that all of a sudden becomes

00:34:00.120 | apparent, evident to our eye.

00:34:03.560 | But what I think would be our greatest achievement is that if we can find that process of life,

00:34:14.720 | because at that point, in my mind, the universe all of a sudden is going to illuminate itself

00:34:20.780 | with actually its living force.

00:34:23.600 | But I can only call it a living force.

00:34:26.120 | To me, this is what we are looking at, a universe that becomes more and more complex with time,

00:34:33.080 | more and more able to gather information, and interestingly enough, why?

00:34:38.840 | To understand itself.

00:34:40.840 | So Sagan was right when he was saying, "We are the universe trying to understand itself."

00:34:46.760 | And the more we go, the more the universe becomes alive, maybe intelligent, and maybe

00:34:54.000 | also conscious.

00:34:55.000 | - Conscious, self-aware.

00:34:56.000 | - Exactly.

00:34:57.000 | - Through us.

00:34:58.720 | It does make me a little bit sad as a human, just watching all the breakthroughs on the

00:35:04.240 | artificial intelligence side when applied to natural sciences, now more and more to

00:35:08.600 | physics, that the creatures that will solve the question of the origin of the nature of

00:35:16.600 | life or just the process, the nature of life, will be AI systems.

00:35:21.720 | It makes me a bit sad to--

00:35:24.720 | - I don't think so.

00:35:25.720 | - You don't think so.

00:35:26.720 | You think humans will.

00:35:28.200 | - At this point in time, remember, it was behind AI.

00:35:31.760 | You know, I'm not buying in the singularity thing yet.

00:35:36.600 | AI is not aware.

00:35:38.920 | AI is being built by humans.

00:35:42.080 | So AI is a tool, an extremely smart tool, as long as we build it.

00:35:49.240 | And as long as we use it as a tool, it remains a tool.

00:35:52.480 | And I think there is a lot of brouhaha, and of course, science fiction and movies, they

00:35:57.920 | don't help.

00:35:58.920 | - I gotta push back a little bit.

00:36:00.360 | Yes, I agree with you for the most part in terms of brouhaha and sci-fi, but there is,

00:36:08.360 | like in the work of DeepMind, we can look at chess or we can look at protein folding.

00:36:13.560 | So chess is a simple one to first look at.

00:36:18.080 | What AlphaZero, which is their game-playing engine, was able to discover in "Ostockfish"

00:36:26.000 | about chess, humbles the best human players.

00:36:30.560 | Not just it's better than them.

00:36:33.040 | It comes up with ideas that the humans don't understand.

00:36:37.200 | And so the AI now is telling you, even though it's programmed by humans, the AI is saying,

00:36:43.520 | like, "Sacrificing a pawn here is a good idea.

00:36:47.120 | Sacrificing a queen or a bishop here is a good idea."

00:36:49.920 | And then you start to kind of intuit as a human why, but you don't deeply understand.

00:36:55.040 | And you can say that AI is not conscious, it doesn't deeply understand the way humans

00:36:58.880 | do, but there's still a wisdom and a depth of knowledge in that chess-playing program

00:37:04.200 | that humans don't have.

00:37:06.160 | And the same with the alpha fold, with protein folding, there's a, and now they're applying

00:37:10.600 | it to physics, to simulating nuclear reactions and so on.

00:37:14.600 | It feels like there might be a way to understand the nature of life, that we can kind of intuit

00:37:20.120 | poetically as humans, but the true understanding will come from a system that's much more computationally

00:37:27.880 | sophisticated.

00:37:28.880 | Again, you know, I would push back on my turn because I still think that humans give themselves

00:37:34.800 | the ability to do that by building that tool.

00:37:40.000 | So the idea that the tool, you know, we are getting into the Kardashev scale and the dark

00:37:46.520 | forest and all these things, we can see the world this way.

00:37:51.080 | At this point in time, for me, I still see a great tool.

00:37:59.640 | Now whether the sci-fi scenario is going to, you know, happen, et cetera, I still think

00:38:07.320 | that we are far away from this.

00:38:09.800 | But if that tool is capable of giving me a new perspective, it's just that we are starting

00:38:16.360 | to jump into a deeper cognition of what the universe is, whether it's through our brain

00:38:24.520 | or through a different way of gathering information.

00:38:27.400 | Remember, this is what we do.

00:38:29.000 | Yeah, humans are able to actually build tools and then like integrate them into their way

00:38:35.000 | of thinking.

00:38:36.160 | Maybe another generation has to be born that is raised with those tools, but we seem to

00:38:40.760 | like take for granted all the cool technologies you integrate into your way of thinking.

00:38:47.680 | A lot of people that are growing up now, their mind is integrated with the internet.

00:38:53.240 | You basically reconfigure the way you memorize things.

00:38:57.400 | You no longer have to memorize a lot of facts because you can look them up really quickly.

00:39:01.400 | And so like, so you reallocate a lot of resources for thinking versus memory of just strict

00:39:10.480 | facts, that kind of stuff.

00:39:11.840 | And we integrate all of that.

00:39:13.320 | Yeah, and you know, there I would completely agree with you.

00:39:16.320 | In fact, I wrote about this again in this new book that's coming out.

00:39:22.000 | When is the book coming out?

00:39:23.440 | In January.

00:39:24.440 | It will be in French actually, to start with.

00:39:26.920 | You wrote it in French?

00:39:27.920 | Actually, I wrote it first in English.

00:39:30.760 | And I translated it into French.

00:39:32.400 | So the English version is already pretty much ready to go if we find a publisher in the

00:39:38.640 | US.

00:39:39.640 | But anyways, the point being here that I looked at this as a relationship with technology

00:39:49.040 | as a complete change.

00:39:51.080 | To me, this is the singularity more than anything else, which is the co-evolution of human with

00:39:57.520 | technology, not anymore with their environment.

00:40:00.320 | Why we are messing up the environment right now, why we don't respond to pandemic the

00:40:05.000 | way we should, because we are disconnected to the environment we are taking our information

00:40:10.040 | from and we were adapting from.

00:40:12.240 | Right now, exactly as you said, we take the information from the web, from the phones,

00:40:16.920 | etc.

00:40:17.920 | We have no filter over that information.

00:40:21.680 | Before you were out in the environment, the information you get is the one the planet

00:40:25.880 | is sending you.

00:40:27.240 | Now this information is coming from different way.

00:40:29.420 | You have no way of knowing if the information is correct or not.

00:40:32.080 | I got to push back on that.

00:40:33.360 | No, you look at this as an ecosystem and it explains a lot of our behavior.

00:40:38.960 | I like that you said teenagers.

00:40:41.160 | So the technology, I think, when we move past the teenager stage, enriches our ability to

00:40:48.160 | sense the earth, to understand what's going on with the environment.

00:40:52.520 | It's just that we're very, so it's not that technology disconnects us from the environment.

00:40:57.080 | It gives us more tools with which to understand what's going on with the environment.

00:41:01.680 | That's true for the people who are building the tools and know how to use it.

00:41:05.560 | Take those tools now, put them in the general public with no filter, which is happening

00:41:10.560 | with social media, which is happening with a lot of things.

00:41:13.940 | And you see the disaster this is creating.

00:41:16.440 | It's not the disaster.

00:41:17.440 | It is.

00:41:18.440 | You sound like a parent talking about a teenager.

00:41:21.680 | Yes.

00:41:22.680 | It's the growing pains of a civilization that is becoming deeply connected.

00:41:29.760 | We can communicate all across the world, even through the pandemic.

00:41:32.960 | That's the good thing about technology.

00:41:35.920 | This is also something I wrote.

00:41:37.200 | It's not the tools we create that are bad.

00:41:39.680 | It's the way we use them.

00:41:41.120 | Yes.

00:41:42.120 | But we're learning.

00:41:43.120 | This is the cool thing about humans.

00:41:44.120 | Well, and hopefully we'll do all the learning before it's too late, because our response

00:41:48.680 | to what's going on in the environment, our response to pandemics is deeply connected

00:41:53.440 | to this disconnect we have with nature.

00:41:56.960 | Anyways, we all agree that we are in growing pains and hopefully we can move forward because

00:42:05.000 | there is a fantastic universe, something absolutely magical around us.

00:42:10.400 | And I'm talking as a scientist.

00:42:11.640 | I mean, there is magic, not in sense of trickery, but in sense of wonder around us.

00:42:19.400 | And there are so many signs where we are getting so close to revolutions in cosmology, in astrobiology,

00:42:30.960 | in astronomy, which I think to me, this is where the hope lies.

00:42:36.580 | And also an awakening of understanding that we need to be in equilibrium with the planet

00:42:41.680 | if we want to move forward.

00:42:43.320 | Because even though we have these big dreams of going on Mars and the Moon, and listen,

00:42:47.920 | I am a planetary geologist, so I am all for exploration.

00:42:52.240 | Right now, the Moon or Mars is not going to save your butt, because for the logistics

00:42:57.040 | will still depend very much on the Earth and for a long time.

00:43:00.560 | I think this time we are living in will be remembered as a pivot in our history for a

00:43:12.440 | number of reasons.

00:43:13.920 | A time where there is a growing consciousness, where we are creating tools that are going

00:43:19.560 | a little bit ahead of us, that we have some difficult time to catch up on, where we have

00:43:25.880 | to deal with a population that's way too big for the planet we have.

00:43:32.080 | We need to really learn a sense of balance and maturity as a civilization.

00:43:39.000 | So how is this going to unfold?

00:43:42.200 | Right now I have no clue.

00:43:44.040 | I draw a lot of optimism from the similar things that happened many decades ago when

00:43:52.000 | nuclear weapons were developed.

00:43:54.560 | Boy, was that at the time even more terrifying.

00:43:58.760 | You just now created weapons that could destroy the entirety of life on Earth.

00:44:02.680 | Or not entirety, but a lot of it.

00:44:05.800 | And we somehow found a balance.

00:44:08.400 | And the threat constantly is out there.

00:44:11.120 | And that threat has been made more visceral in recent times because of the war in Ukraine.

00:44:19.120 | But we find a balance somehow.

00:44:22.240 | I have a thread of optimism for human civilization that we figure it out.

00:44:28.040 | We're clever teenagers, I think.

00:44:29.760 | We are clever teenagers.

00:44:31.600 | There is definitely a thread of optimism.

00:44:34.080 | But I think it's thin.

00:44:36.040 | It's thin because something that has changed as well is the mentality of humans.

00:44:45.480 | Although the threat was terrifying when nuclear weapons were created, there was a sense of

00:44:57.880 | limits you were willing to push in the threats.

00:45:03.400 | There was a sense of decency, of moral values.

00:45:09.160 | It was not perfect, but it was at least a time where people could come together from

00:45:16.080 | very different perspectives and agree that something was more important than destroying

00:45:22.280 | everything.

00:45:23.280 | But that's so hilarious you say that.

00:45:24.880 | Yes, you're talking about a small slither of humans, which is the scientists in the

00:45:30.040 | Manhattan Project, perhaps.

00:45:31.040 | No, absolutely not.

00:45:32.040 | But that was also the time when over 100 million people were tortured or murdered in China

00:45:38.880 | and in Europe.

00:45:39.880 | No, no, I agree with that.

00:45:40.880 | Absolutely, absolutely.

00:45:41.880 | I'm not talking about scientists here.

00:45:43.640 | Actually, I'm talking about politicians.

00:45:45.960 | We've gone beyond that point now.

00:45:49.000 | This is what I'm worried about.

00:45:50.680 | I mean, torture, et cetera.

00:45:53.800 | Unfortunately, well, we are apes, exactly what you said.

00:45:57.160 | So I think that there is a lot to be, not to blame grandpa for that, but because we

00:46:03.280 | can always get better.

00:46:05.200 | Grandpa was a wild man.

00:46:08.400 | But we have to improve a lot on that side before we can claim that we are a mature civilization.

00:46:14.040 | When you, just because you mentioned the magic, when you look out there, perhaps this is not

00:46:19.080 | a scientific question, but...

00:46:21.820 | You don't have to be scientific all the time.

00:46:23.760 | Yeah, well, you said magic.

00:46:25.520 | So there's a magic to magic that is in part scientific and in part, I don't know, whatever

00:46:31.280 | fills us with awe as humans when we look up at the stars.

00:46:35.240 | Do you think the universe is full of life or not?

00:46:40.400 | When you're sitting, drinking some wine, looking up at the stars and wandering as a human,

00:46:46.880 | do you think we're alone or do you think life is everywhere?

00:46:53.160 | I am going to make such an unmagical response to that.

00:46:58.160 | My response is, that's the scientific response, that if we are alone, then the universe is

00:47:06.400 | a statistical absurdity.

00:47:11.240 | And I have no doubt in my mind, and that is an unscientific response as well, but I have

00:47:17.360 | no doubt in my mind that the universe is teeming with life.

00:47:22.280 | What if it keeps dying?

00:47:27.040 | This is what life does, unfortunately.

00:47:32.760 | So that extinction, as a process, as a part of the process of life, extinction seems to

00:47:40.360 | be a fundamental, both negative and positive component.

00:47:45.340 | So what if all the complex life out there just keeps dying and not making way for...

00:47:52.120 | Like we're actually a statistical anomaly in us being able to survive that L in the

00:47:58.480 | Drake equation, being able to survive long enough to form complex organisms of the kind

00:48:04.240 | like mammals are, things with brains, things that are able to...

00:48:07.720 | L is not about that.

00:48:09.280 | L is about how long a civilization is capable of being detectable, which means that rich

00:48:15.520 | technologies and being detectable.

00:48:17.800 | Okay, so there's a more nuanced things to L, because you can have intelligent civilizations

00:48:21.840 | that are not very detectable.

00:48:23.200 | Yeah, we had civilization for thousands of years.

00:48:27.920 | We started to be detectable 150 years ago.

00:48:31.320 | So it's about technology, technology that we can actually capture from space.

00:48:38.200 | You become visible to your neighbors, and this is all about the Fermi paradox, right?

00:48:44.900 | It takes time, obviously, if we're taking again ourselves as a model, but this is the

00:48:50.440 | only one we have, to get to the point where we become detectable.

00:48:56.520 | But look at the age of the universe.

00:48:58.840 | Even if life as we understand it, not saying even as we know it, but as we can understand

00:49:05.680 | it, started 10 billion years ago, and it takes 4 billion years to get to the point where

00:49:13.200 | it becomes detectable.

00:49:14.920 | That means that the first planet where those civilizations started off, starting to be

00:49:18.880 | detectable when we were still cyanobacteria in pond.

00:49:22.520 | So they were, you know, throwing messages that were passing above our heads at that

00:49:27.480 | point.

00:49:28.880 | And those civilizations, when you look at them now, close to 10 billion years after

00:49:33.680 | the start, so their sun would be dead.

00:49:39.040 | In the best case scenario, they move somewhere else.

00:49:42.400 | And what that means is that civilizations are going to rise, die, or move and transform

00:49:50.160 | themselves.

00:49:51.160 | We can see ourselves changing.

00:49:52.680 | We know that humans are still changing as a species.

00:49:56.440 | The human being in a thousand or even 500 years from now might not be looking a lot

00:50:02.360 | like we are doing right now.

00:50:04.480 | Who knows where we will be.

00:50:06.200 | We might be migrating into our planetary system.

00:50:09.680 | We might be migrating somewhere else.

00:50:11.480 | Well, you said migrating, but it seems when you look at life, it doesn't necessarily

00:50:16.080 | migrate, it expands.

00:50:18.320 | So it's not "or" place A or place B, it's place A and place B.

00:50:25.080 | It could be.

00:50:27.840 | We are talking about the human civilization here.

00:50:31.680 | So there are different factors.

00:50:33.240 | If you are a cyanobacteria or any type of, even a mammal, that doesn't have the technology

00:50:39.040 | to escape the planet we were born on, then it's plan A, it's right there.

00:50:45.880 | Whatever happens to your planet, you are tied to it, you cannot escape it.

00:50:50.440 | For humans, it's a little different.

00:50:52.960 | It's A and B, or whatever we can.

00:50:57.280 | So we have to expect that a number of the extraterrestrial civilizations that might

00:51:05.240 | be technologically advanced, a number of them will have disappeared just because they

00:51:09.360 | were on the course of their evolution, or because their sun ran out of fuel and they

00:51:17.160 | didn't have a way to escape, or they were wiped out by any kind of event.

00:51:23.640 | And then there will be those that survive.

00:51:26.800 | Everything I've seen from life, it seems obvious that there's life everywhere out

00:51:31.640 | there.

00:51:32.640 | In fact, maybe I don't understand the jump from bacteria enough, but it seems obvious

00:51:39.880 | that there's intelligent civilizations out there.

00:51:43.920 | Now I don't know how to define intelligence, but there's beautiful complexity.

00:51:49.080 | Like when you look at a, I've looked at enough cellular automata, which is a very

00:51:53.840 | primitive mathematical construction, that when you run, complexity emerges.

00:52:00.920 | I've looked at that enough to know that it just seems like there's complexity everywhere

00:52:04.560 | out there.

00:52:05.560 | So that's why I'm deeply puzzled by the Fermi paradox.

00:52:09.600 | It makes no sense to me.

00:52:11.520 | I mean, they have trivial answers to it.

00:52:15.120 | Why haven't aliens at scale not shown up?

00:52:19.640 | I think the two possible options for me is either we're too dumb to see it.

00:52:25.520 | They're already here.

00:52:26.520 | They've been talking to us through processes we just don't understand.

00:52:30.280 | Like what we experience as life here on Earth is actually there everywhere.

00:52:36.920 | Aliens could be consciousness.

00:52:38.760 | That when we feel love for one another, that could be aliens.

00:52:42.240 | When we, I don't know, or feel fear or whatever, that could be aliens.

00:52:46.240 | I have to agree with you.

00:52:48.120 | None of this is scientifically provable.

00:52:50.600 | Right now we talked a little bit already about that.

00:52:53.940 | But I would say that I do not adhere to the Fermi paradox because it's very anthropomorphic.

00:53:04.400 | It's an interesting exercise, let's put it that way.

00:53:07.880 | But it's a typical example of seeing the universe through our own eyes.

00:53:14.520 | And this is where the limitation is.

00:53:18.840 | Understanding what's going on with complexity, as you said, and looking at the biophysical

00:53:23.600 | model and theories for the nature of life.

00:53:27.320 | I would agree that probably this extraterrestrial message is all around us.

00:53:33.920 | We're not yet capable of picking it up.

00:53:37.240 | But I think, unfortunately, even though that makes me sad, the way to pick it up is by

00:53:41.780 | studying life here on Earth, doing some of the science you're doing, better understand

00:53:45.800 | the nature of life until you realize, holy crap, the thing I was looking for all along

00:53:53.400 | has been here all along.

00:53:55.240 | Right?

00:53:56.240 | - Well, you know, a good example of that, and it doesn't need to be an extraterrestrial

00:54:01.200 | civilization, look at something that I really, you know, whether or not it's real, I don't

00:54:08.200 | care because in terms of intellectual exercise, I think it's fantastic.

00:54:13.000 | Look at the shadow biosphere.

00:54:15.280 | The idea that life didn't appear only once on Earth, but there were many different pathways

00:54:25.320 | of it.

00:54:26.840 | And today we know and we study the tree of life that led to us, from Luca to us.

00:54:38.160 | And the shadow biosphere is telling us that there is, or there are, other pathways that

00:54:45.760 | came up at the time where life originated, but they are so different that we cannot recognize

00:54:53.280 | them as being living.

00:54:56.920 | And we cannot pick them up in our test because our tests are being built to recognize life

00:55:03.960 | as we know it.

00:55:04.960 | And for me, again, I don't know if this theory will be verified or it would be discredited,

00:55:14.360 | but what I like about it is that it forces me to think on how do I look for life?

00:55:21.200 | I don't know.

00:55:23.200 | So that starts here on our planet, not even with little green men.

00:55:29.740 | It starts with very simple life that can be so different that it might be just right in

00:55:36.300 | front of our nose and we don't see it.

00:55:38.680 | - So that probably starts with the scientific humility of realizing that we might be too

00:55:46.880 | biased in our understanding of what is the phenomena we're trying to study.

00:55:50.680 | - Yeah, I don't like the term bias because it involves some moral connotation.

00:55:54.600 | - Sure.

00:55:55.600 | - But I understand the bias in terms of scientific pathway, intellectual framework, definitely.

00:56:02.100 | - What do you think about the UFO sightings?

00:56:06.080 | So the widespread experiences that people have in seeing different phenomena that are

00:56:15.080 | mysterious, that people project ideas about whether it's aliens or not, but they can't

00:56:20.600 | explain it and there's pictures and data and then the government is involved in releasing

00:56:26.440 | footage and all that kind of stuff.

00:56:28.320 | And that seems to captivate the public.

00:56:30.080 | - It always does.

00:56:31.080 | - It's imagination.

00:56:32.080 | - It always does.

00:56:33.080 | I mean, you know, there are a number of things that captivate people, especially children,

00:56:37.960 | actually, dinosaurs and aliens.

00:56:39.680 | - You're still a child.

00:56:40.680 | - Yeah, we are all still child at heart.

00:56:44.160 | So about UFOs, I am a scientist and I'm a citizen.

00:56:47.840 | So I'm going to tell you a couple of things.

00:56:50.320 | I don't mind talking about that at all because I think as a scientist, this is extremely

00:56:55.480 | interesting because the thing I don't know, I want to learn about it.

00:57:00.040 | This is more knowledge.

00:57:01.520 | So we all know the statistics about UFOs.

00:57:04.640 | 95% of them are just natural phenomenon or things that are being misinterpreted.

00:57:11.240 | We know that.

00:57:12.240 | Then you have the 2% that might be secret programs by whatever government, it's out

00:57:19.400 | there.

00:57:20.400 | Another percent say is about natural phenomenon that we don't know about yet and we cannot

00:57:26.920 | explain.

00:57:27.920 | And then there is this tiny percentage that don't fall into all these categories of thing.

00:57:32.160 | And I think that the report about the UAPs falls into the same kind of scheme, except

00:57:38.160 | that now they have at least some patterns of speed of other things that were in the

00:57:45.040 | report.

00:57:46.040 | Today, we don't know if these sightings are part of military program or actual UFOs.

00:57:56.800 | I always run into that question because of course, as the director of the Carl Sagan

00:58:01.080 | Center at the Study Institute, I received a number of emails about the subject.

00:58:05.480 | People are confused about what the Study Institute is.

00:58:09.520 | We are not studying UFOs.

00:58:11.720 | We are studying, we are actually looking for messages.

00:58:15.080 | The way I put it, you know, usually is that we are studying extraterrestrial in their

00:58:20.600 | natural habitat.

00:58:23.440 | And the UFO people are trying to understand whether they invaded our aerial space.

00:58:29.000 | So this is two very different things.

00:58:31.680 | And unfortunately, over the years, I actually respect very much people who are trying to

00:58:39.040 | go to the bottom of what UFO are following some very scientific ways of doing this.

00:58:46.280 | There are very, very credible agencies doing this.

00:58:49.840 | Unfortunately, there is a folklore around UFOs.

00:58:54.240 | And this has been a huge disservice to the scientific community.

00:59:00.160 | And this is why you have been having that much pushback for a long time by the scientific

00:59:05.040 | community because no congressman in the world wants to tell their taxpayer that they are

00:59:11.520 | supporting something that looking for flying saucers.

00:59:15.120 | And you know, when you see what's happening, it's terrifying.

00:59:18.440 | And I am actually concerned, you know, about that relationship that people do between folklore

00:59:28.600 | and real search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

00:59:32.880 | In fact, it's been so bad that until today, there is no government agency that is actually

00:59:41.760 | funding the SETI search.

00:59:44.440 | It is a private funded endeavor.

00:59:47.400 | What NASA funds right now, which is a progress, is a search for techno signature, which means

00:59:52.260 | that when you are looking at the atmosphere of a planet, you look for some disequilibrium

00:59:57.440 | that could tell you that something is there.

01:00:00.240 | But it's not going to fund an institute or whatnot that is looking for messages or other

01:00:08.920 | things like that.

01:00:09.920 | Is that just have to do with a taboo associated with the folklore?

01:00:12.760 | Yes.

01:00:13.760 | And I think there was a pushback from the political arena decades ago about that at

01:00:21.040 | the time where all the flying saucer were coming out.

01:00:24.640 | And then the SETI Institute got it started.

01:00:29.240 | But now there is more of a willingness to look at the UAP UFO phenomenon from a scientific

01:00:37.880 | standpoint.

01:00:38.880 | So much so that the government is actually seeking some help from a scientific institution.

01:00:47.440 | And there are programs to start looking into those phenomenon.

01:00:52.400 | And as a scientist, I am interested.

01:00:55.520 | What I'm not interested in, again, Carl Sagan comes back here.

01:00:59.400 | I don't want to believe.

01:01:01.160 | I want to know.

01:01:02.800 | And so to know, you have to have a real experiment, you have to have observation, and you have

01:01:10.640 | things that are done the right way.

01:01:12.720 | I don't want to have somebody that starts with "what if" as a question and then turns

01:01:18.160 | this "what if" into the only argument and the only conclusion there is.

01:01:22.880 | You understand what I'm saying?

01:01:23.880 | But still, I think it's valuable to appreciate the mystery and not deny the mystery.

01:01:30.240 | So...

01:01:31.240 | No, the mystery is there.

01:01:32.240 | But what I don't want is people taking advantage of the public and making money out of folklore.

01:01:36.920 | Well, let me flip that.

01:01:38.120 | I understand.

01:01:39.560 | But so there is a folklore in like the stuff I do, AI and robotics, for example.

01:01:44.480 | There's a clear fear terminator in movies and all those kind of stuff.

01:01:48.440 | You could say that I'm very concerned about this miscalibrated understanding of the public,

01:01:54.680 | of what robots' role are in society.

01:01:57.900 | Or you could see it as a, let's use a metaphor of a wave.

01:02:00.840 | You can say this giant wave that we'll call folklore is a really bad idea.

01:02:05.760 | We need to avoid it.

01:02:07.280 | We need to hide.

01:02:08.280 | We need to build dams.

01:02:09.280 | Or you can be a surfer and ride the wave as a scientist.

01:02:14.600 | To me, the fact that people are wondering about the mystery of UFOs, it means they're

01:02:19.560 | wondering.

01:02:20.560 | No, they are.

01:02:21.560 | But the thing, I will stop surfing that wave when it comes back to bite an entire scientific

01:02:27.960 | discipline.

01:02:28.960 | When it hurts the science, sure.

01:02:29.960 | For now, the past 60 years, we were not able to raise money from the government, no grants.

01:02:38.560 | It's a discipline that has no postdoc or very little postdoc, just because there is a fear

01:02:46.080 | of that folklore on the political arena.

01:02:49.600 | People don't want to be associated with that because they confuse the two.

01:02:53.440 | So I stop there.

01:02:56.400 | And as the director of the Carl Sagan Center, I am just very happy to see now that there

01:03:01.240 | is a course correction in the government seeking scientific investigators for this kind of

01:03:09.360 | issues.

01:03:10.360 | And hopefully that will right the ship there.

01:03:13.520 | I love it.

01:03:14.520 | I love to see it.

01:03:15.520 | But I want, and I love our little disagreements.

01:03:17.400 | I'm doing so obviously respectfully and with love, and it makes for a fun conversation.

01:03:23.160 | But I think, you know, just like with surfing a wave, there's some level of, the more you

01:03:29.340 | resist it, the worse it is.

01:03:32.000 | So I--

01:03:33.000 | - We didn't resist it.

01:03:34.000 | - Yes, it--

01:03:35.000 | - It didn't come from us and we pay the price.

01:03:38.480 | - I just think that the role of a scientist in part in the 21st century, and we talked

01:03:47.080 | about social media, is to direct this sense of wonder that people have into a direction

01:03:54.080 | of the rigors of science.

01:03:56.040 | - I think we do that pretty well.

01:03:57.520 | - I would disagree.

01:03:58.520 | - I don't think so.

01:03:59.520 | - I would say he does much better, but there's other places in science where--

01:04:03.360 | - The search for life is fairly, it's a fairly easy place to, you know, draw the wonder of

01:04:07.920 | people.

01:04:08.920 | - Yes, 100%.

01:04:09.920 | - Because it's a profound question that pretty much everybody has.

01:04:13.480 | - But I think, I just want to highlight the fact that I think a lot of scientists, my

01:04:18.440 | colleagues, friends, think that all you need to do is science.

01:04:22.720 | All you need to do is the scientific process, the peer review process, the data and so on.

01:04:28.480 | But I think communication is actually a fundamental part of the process.

01:04:33.200 | Because it has to do with funding, but it also has to do with like, we're a bunch of

01:04:36.840 | humans trying to ask big questions, trying to figure this whole puzzle out.

01:04:40.800 | - I totally agree.

01:04:42.440 | We do have more public presentation at the Institute than peer reviewed articles.

01:04:48.480 | And believe me, we have lots of peer reviewed articles.

01:04:51.520 | So our scientists are out there and they are sharing the wonder of discoveries.

01:04:55.840 | And it's so easy these days.

01:04:57.320 | I mean, there is not one day, tell me about writing a book right now about the search

01:05:01.240 | for life in the universe.

01:05:03.000 | I mean, it's almost every single day I had to correct something in the chapters I was

01:05:08.760 | writing.

01:05:09.760 | - So SETI in terms of both signatures and signals is a pretty active field.

01:05:14.800 | - So it's getting better right now.

01:05:17.400 | It's getting better.

01:05:18.400 | But remember that the SETI Institute is not only about the search for extraterrestrial

01:05:22.800 | intelligence.

01:05:23.800 | It's the historical root of the Institute, but it's about 10% of what we do.

01:05:29.840 | In fact, we are searching for life in the universe from the origins of life to extraterrestrial

01:05:35.160 | intelligence.

01:05:36.440 | So 90% of everything else is exoplanet.

01:05:39.960 | For instance, we have a good chunk of the Kepler team that is actually with the SETI

01:05:47.240 | Institute and they are working with tests right now.

01:05:50.040 | Some already have some time on the GEMS web.

01:05:52.760 | We have astrobiologists, we have astronomers.

01:05:55.240 | - And those are looking for data, for signals, for planets out there outside of our solar

01:06:02.040 | system.

01:06:03.040 | - Yeah, go to analog places to try and understand the type of life that survive in planetary

01:06:08.200 | type environments.

01:06:09.200 | I mean, people are always surprised when I tell them, you know, whatever flies in the

01:06:14.920 | solar system, has flown or will be flying, we are involved.

01:06:20.940 | So this is not something that pops in everybody's mind when they are thinking about the SETI

01:06:25.920 | Institute because we started off as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but the

01:06:32.220 | Institute has really bloomed into the search for life along the Drake equation, all the

01:06:37.560 | terms of the Drake equation.

01:06:39.580 | - Just to clarify, 'cause by the way, you're saying a bunch of terms sometimes, it's good

01:06:43.500 | to return to the basics.

01:06:44.700 | When you're saying whatever's flown, SETI is a part of the things that are flown.

01:06:52.060 | So we, 'cause we're using we elusive sometimes, we say we humans and sometimes we SETI.

01:06:57.320 | So the SETI is really broadly involved.

01:06:59.880 | A lot of the fingertips reaching out there towards the stars.

01:07:03.880 | - Think about Mars involved in landing site selection, in instrument that are actually

01:07:07.900 | on board, some of the mission in science teams, for instance, Cassini, New Horizons, also

01:07:15.680 | missions that will be coming.

01:07:18.040 | It's the search for life, we do this all across the Drake equation.

01:07:22.580 | So SETI is part of it and it's our route and it's expanding a little bit right now.

01:07:29.560 | We hope it will continue to expand.

01:07:31.380 | So this is a good time for the Institute.

01:07:35.020 | And it also, in my mind, was the very first astrobiology Institute because we have this

01:07:40.460 | multi-disciplinary approach where I can bring many of the scientists from different domains

01:07:47.820 | and disciplines to think about a question.

01:07:50.420 | And as you know, discoveries happen at the nexus of disciplines.

01:07:55.240 | And it's really a privilege when you are in an Institute like that.

01:07:59.900 | - You've dived in volcanic lakes at high altitudes to study the creatures within.

01:08:05.180 | Can you tell me the technical, the fun, the human story of that effort?

01:08:10.940 | - The image that is associated with a scientist is the person with the white coat in the lab.

01:08:17.180 | In fact, a number of us at the Institute are athletes doing extremes, what would be considered

01:08:24.340 | extreme stuff.

01:08:25.340 | And I mean, it's fun, it's a little dangerous too, but it's to get data and more knowledge.

01:08:33.460 | So there are so many stories.

01:08:35.140 | I don't even know where--

01:08:36.140 | - When was the first time you did a dangerous thing with a volcano?

01:08:40.620 | - So the first one associated to the search for life, understanding, was in 2002 where

01:08:50.260 | I started climbing those high volcanoes in the Andes that are 20,000 footers.

01:08:55.500 | The view out there is just beautiful.

01:08:57.420 | - You got, you're so hilarious at spending almost no time on some epic things.

01:09:04.740 | I love this, okay.

01:09:07.900 | How tall are these volcanoes?

01:09:08.900 | What are you doing with a volcano?

01:09:10.420 | What's required to prepare for that?

01:09:12.260 | What does a mission like that look like?

01:09:14.100 | I mean, that is true that this is science embodied.

01:09:19.180 | It's like athletics and it's science and you're studying the extreme conditions of life on

01:09:23.580 | Earth, extreme beauty of life on Earth in those conditions.

01:09:27.420 | So what are we talking about with this volcano?

01:09:31.460 | How big is it?

01:09:32.460 | - So remember when we were talking about how do I understand how I search for life on Mars?

01:09:37.180 | This is how it started for me.

01:09:38.900 | And then I looked at environment, in my head started going through the environments on

01:09:43.940 | Earth, that would be good analysis.

01:09:46.620 | And then you only have a few in the Andes in that case are some of the best in the world

01:09:52.660 | just because of the aridity of the place.

01:09:56.300 | And the higher you go, the least atmosphere you have, the more UV radiation you have.

01:10:04.300 | And the Andes are volcanic, hydrothermal, plus you have the climate change that's coming,

01:10:09.480 | you have evaporation.

01:10:11.400 | It's a picture of Mars 3.5 billion years ago.

01:10:14.920 | And so now you are actually entering a time machine, basically.

01:10:21.380 | So remember I'm a diver and the first time I got in 2002 to the places we wanted to explore,

01:10:32.740 | all of a sudden I was standing at 14,000 foot looking at 20,000 feet and saying, "Okay,

01:10:41.020 | well I need to get up there."

01:10:42.020 | - Are you scared?

01:10:43.020 | - No.

01:10:44.020 | No, because we are prepared.

01:10:48.020 | And the only thing I didn't know is if I was going to be able to make it to the top, because

01:10:51.900 | now you're dealing with high altitude.

01:10:53.720 | You can deal with high altitude sickness, you can deal with a number of things.

01:10:57.020 | And for God's sake, these are volcanoes and they are dormant, they are not extinct.

01:11:01.560 | That can bite us a couple of times.

01:11:04.300 | - What was your preparation for that kind of thing?

01:11:06.580 | I mean, this is...

01:11:07.580 | - There is a lot of, you know, hiking and trekking at high altitude around here, but

01:11:12.460 | not so high because we don't have anything closer to those elevations around here in

01:11:17.820 | the US.

01:11:19.620 | But in volcanic environment, climbing volcanoes here, we have plenty of those.

01:11:24.620 | Diving as well.

01:11:25.620 | I am a free diver, so this is where it's going to be hilarious because I started with a complete

01:11:31.980 | irrational fear of pressurized vessels that comes from an incident in my childhood.

01:11:38.940 | And so I became a free diver to avoid having to carry oxygen tanks on my back.

01:11:44.660 | - Free diving is diving without...

01:11:46.700 | - Without anything, just your lungs, right?

01:11:49.380 | - That started from childhood.

01:11:50.780 | - Yeah, no, it was to the point where when I saw a pressurized vessel, like a methane

01:11:57.500 | tank or anything, I would be, you know, going around and put a lot of distance between me

01:12:03.860 | and that tank.

01:12:05.200 | So I was not going to carry any oxygen tank.

01:12:09.240 | And the first time I actually dived at the summit of that lake was free diving.

01:12:14.800 | People look at me like I'm nuts.

01:12:16.280 | Well, maybe I am a little bit.

01:12:18.320 | - People that work with you as well?

01:12:19.320 | I mean, that kind of seems kind of nuts.

01:12:21.960 | - No, we knew...

01:12:22.960 | - It's a risk.

01:12:23.960 | - Actually, it's a lot of less of a risk than getting with conventional air.

01:12:30.640 | And I can explain that.

01:12:32.880 | But ultimately, what decided me to certify SCUBA and go over my fear was that as a scientist,

01:12:41.200 | I needed more time at the bottom of the lake to sample, you know, rationally, take my time

01:12:47.640 | to think.

01:12:49.440 | And I can stay quite long enough as a free diver underwater.

01:12:56.420 | But the last thing you want to do at 20,000 feet is to come up at the surface with empty

01:13:01.480 | lungs, because there is not much you can breathe out there to replenish your oxygen.

01:13:07.160 | So definitely your time underwater is cut short just for safety.

01:13:12.800 | And I realized that it was not a good trade-off for me at some point.

01:13:16.960 | So I certified SCUBA.

01:13:19.360 | And after three years of exploring that lake free diving, we finally came up with a full

01:13:26.000 | SCUBA diving expedition.

01:13:28.060 | But we were diving with rebreathers, which means that we dived with pure oxygen.

01:13:36.080 | So rebreathers give you a bag with stuff that looks like cat litters in it, which is basically

01:13:45.040 | to absorb the CO2 that you are expelling when you're breathing.

01:13:50.880 | And they're recycling oxygen this way.

01:13:53.620 | So basically you are rebreathing your own respiration.

01:13:57.120 | Wow.

01:13:58.120 | Yeah.

01:13:59.120 | How long can you do that?

01:14:00.120 | So what's interesting about that technology?

01:14:02.600 | So it's very interesting, because then that completely avoids the potential issues you

01:14:10.620 | may have with the binds.

01:14:12.920 | When you are diving, the risk of bubbles trapped in your lungs because of different pressures

01:14:19.420 | and different gases.

01:14:21.340 | So there's a complexity to the flow of oxygen underwater.

01:14:26.040 | When you are breathing regular air, when you are SCUBA diving here, you know that you have

01:14:30.960 | to do some different...

01:14:33.400 | When you're coming back, when you're diving deep and you have conventional air, then you

01:14:37.980 | need to stop so that you can equalize the gases in your lungs.

01:14:44.240 | If you come back too fast, then you can have air bubbles stuck, and then you can raise

01:14:52.160 | the binds, which you can risk to be paralyzed.

01:14:54.400 | You can raise a number of nasty issues.

01:14:56.740 | And we wanted absolutely to avoid that.

01:14:58.740 | So diving with pure oxygen avoids this completely.

01:15:03.660 | And it has another benefit at high altitude is that, well, the greater risk when you're

01:15:12.400 | at high altitude is altitude sickness.

01:15:15.820 | What is altitude sickness?

01:15:17.240 | It's just you not having enough oxygen in your blood.

01:15:20.580 | So this was a good benefit.

01:15:23.500 | It was a good trade-off.

01:15:24.500 | We were lucky enough to be also trained by the military.

01:15:29.100 | So we came up with not the civilian rebreather, which is the big thing on the back that you

01:15:35.820 | carry on your back.

01:15:36.880 | We actually were given Navy SEALs commando rebreathers.

01:15:41.860 | You worked with Navy SEALs for this?

01:15:43.500 | The director of military operations.

01:15:46.100 | Yes, we were trained like astronauts for three months.

01:15:51.740 | I spent more time, I had a joke that if somebody wanted to reach me, they better put a phone

01:15:57.640 | line at the bottom of the swimming pool because this is where I was.

01:16:00.960 | So we trained and we trained, and our manual about the safety was about that thick.

01:16:07.040 | So it was a real operation.

01:16:10.260 | That was three years into it because when you are free diving in the years prior, there

01:16:15.060 | is no risk.

01:16:16.060 | You don't have any other gas in your lung than what you are breathing.

01:16:20.020 | The only risk is come short of air and then you're in trouble, which happened to me one

01:16:25.420 | time seriously.

01:16:26.420 | Tell me about that time.

01:16:28.580 | I got to ask you about free diving before we return to the rebreathers.

01:16:32.220 | Well all these lakes I had altitude, they are cold.

01:16:35.260 | They are the minimum temperature that you can have on bodies of water, clear bodies

01:16:40.060 | of water, which is four degrees C. It's very, very cold.

01:16:44.020 | And so you cannot just dive with a wetsuit.

01:16:55.200 | So the idea was to take a dry suit.

01:17:00.480 | And I learned how to free dive with a dry suit, which is really the worst thing you

01:17:05.820 | can do.

01:17:06.820 | What's a wetsuit?

01:17:07.820 | What's a dry suit?

01:17:08.820 | So a wetsuit is usually what you use in the ocean when it's not too cold.

01:17:13.440 | You can use also a dry suit.

01:17:14.640 | But the wetsuit basically is going to keep you warm because water is getting into the

01:17:19.420 | suit and at the contact of your skin is getting to body temperature.

01:17:25.280 | And so for a while you can dive like that.

01:17:28.920 | But in the ocean here, that's fine.

01:17:33.440 | The dry suit is the opposite.

01:17:35.600 | It's completely closed, which means that you don't have any contact with the water

01:17:40.880 | outside and you keep your warmth through your body temperature and even clothing that you

01:17:47.560 | can put into it.

01:17:48.560 | So these dry suits, they are used by divers who go really deep in very cold water and

01:17:54.840 | need to stay a long time underwater.

01:17:57.680 | So what's the bad part?

01:17:59.240 | The bad part is that when you have those dry suits, you have a lot of air that can be trapped

01:18:10.000 | in it.

01:18:11.240 | Usually we do what we call burping the suit.

01:18:14.000 | It's not a very pleasant expression, but you get in the water and as soon as you get

01:18:18.360 | in the water, you can see the air pockets all over the place, right?

01:18:22.000 | So you burp the suit, you open the valve and the air comes out.

01:18:26.280 | Once you have done that, then you look with your lead belt and you know when you're ready

01:18:31.960 | to go down.

01:18:33.080 | And so what happened that day is that I actually did burp the suit, but didn't realize I burped

01:18:39.240 | it completely.

01:18:41.080 | And so I went down and immediately I felt an air pocket going to my legs.

01:18:49.600 | So basically air was trapped in the suit and went on my legs as I was diving like that.

01:18:56.480 | And so I didn't pay too much attention to that.

01:18:58.640 | Because you're diving down?

01:18:59.920 | Yeah, I was diving down.

01:19:01.760 | And so I didn't pay too much attention about that as I was busy.

01:19:07.240 | Just an awkward position.

01:19:09.000 | But then I wanted to turn and go up.

01:19:14.560 | Well no can do.

01:19:15.840 | I was just like a buoy.

01:19:19.400 | And I was like that.

01:19:20.520 | So the first time I say, "Okay."

01:19:23.240 | I tried a second time and a third time.

01:19:26.000 | And by the fourth time, I kind of realized I was in trouble.

01:19:29.560 | And the fifth time I say, "Okay, now you better give it your best try.

01:19:33.880 | Otherwise it's going to be big trouble."

01:19:35.840 | So this is free diving?

01:19:39.120 | I was free diving.

01:19:40.280 | And then you can't.

01:19:42.240 | And I cannot turn around.

01:19:43.240 | What were you feeling?

01:19:44.240 | I mean, is there a panic or not?

01:19:45.520 | No.

01:19:46.520 | There is no panic because you can't.

01:19:47.640 | You cannot afford to be panicking.

01:19:50.160 | In fact, you are always thinking because there is training.

01:19:52.840 | This is the best part about training.

01:19:54.640 | Your training allows you that space to keep you cool and composed, which you need to be

01:20:00.360 | in that kind of situation.

01:20:02.520 | And so finally, after the fifth time, I was able to rectify the position and get myself

01:20:08.440 | up.

01:20:09.960 | But when I got up, my lungs were empty.

01:20:13.400 | I had been in the water for quite some time.

01:20:16.880 | And I knew what was going to happen.

01:20:20.440 | So I decided to just be the plank, not move and don't do anything.

01:20:25.200 | Just open my mouth and try to suck oxygen.

01:20:28.040 | But obviously oxygen at 6,000 meters, 20,000 feet, there is not that much.

01:20:33.880 | It's about a little, it's 48% of what you breathe at sea level.

01:20:39.560 | So although it was noon at that time, the sky stayed pretty dark and starry for about

01:20:49.040 | a minute or two.

01:20:50.040 | So just stars everywhere?

01:20:51.040 | Oh my God, yes.

01:20:52.040 | The funny thing was...

01:20:55.040 | And that's the first time you experienced that kind of, I mean, can you possibly train

01:20:59.920 | for that?

01:21:00.920 | Like, can you also pass out?

01:21:02.880 | Oh, you could.

01:21:03.880 | I mean, the fact that I was already seeing dark was a real sign that my brain was starved

01:21:09.800 | of oxygen.

01:21:11.520 | And I had one of my friends or colleagues on the shore just telling me, because I'd

01:21:18.120 | been under for a little while and say, "Is everything okay?"

01:21:21.920 | And I remember trying to say something and I was just like...

01:21:27.440 | That's I think the best lie I ever, ever...

01:21:31.600 | I get the thumb down.

01:21:32.640 | You were lying to the friend and maybe to yourself?

01:21:35.160 | No, because I knew I was going to be okay, but it took me to be still for a few minutes.

01:21:41.080 | Well, can you talk about free diving?

01:21:43.120 | I mean, what's the technical skill involved here?

01:21:46.680 | It just seems exceptionally difficult.

01:21:50.640 | Like for most people that swim, you go underwater.

01:21:54.160 | It's hard.

01:21:55.160 | So what's the skill there?

01:21:56.800 | I think you probably can get good or better at free diving by training.

01:22:03.040 | So you have different techniques.

01:22:05.400 | You can train in swimming pool and you can say...

01:22:08.120 | Frankly for me, I go at the bottom of the swimming pool and I sit there.

01:22:13.840 | And then you have relaxation techniques.

01:22:17.560 | Some people meditate.

01:22:18.560 | I can't.

01:22:19.560 | I am not a good person that can meditate.

01:22:21.160 | Or if I do, I don't know about it.

01:22:24.040 | But my way of doing things and taking my mind off the situation I'm in is by singing in

01:22:32.120 | my head.

01:22:33.120 | I love music or hearing music.

01:22:35.720 | And in fact, knowing the kind of song I'm singing, I know about the length of time that

01:22:40.240 | I'm staying underwater as well.

01:22:42.040 | So this is my own way.

01:22:44.760 | People have different ways.

01:22:45.760 | What kind of music are we talking about?

01:22:47.960 | All sorts of music.

01:22:48.960 | It can be classical, it can be pop music, you know, just songs.

01:22:52.840 | When you really know that you are relaxed and something I experienced actually at 20,000

01:23:00.680 | feet, which was the greatest experience of my life in those terms, is when you forget

01:23:07.400 | that you have water around you.

01:23:09.400 | At that point, you cannot tell whether you are the water or water is you.

01:23:14.520 | There is actually no separation anymore.

01:23:17.500 | And I felt that when I was training in the swimming pool.

01:23:21.460 | I never could have imagined that I would feel that way once on top of that volcano.

01:23:28.820 | And it happened.

01:23:30.020 | And it was absolutely amazing.

01:23:31.300 | It was, you know, we were talking about how life consciousness permeates the universe.

01:23:38.420 | At that point in time, on that volcano, that day, it took me by surprise.

01:23:44.540 | I was not expecting it.

01:23:46.860 | Everything around me, the lake was arctic blue with all the ray of the suns.

01:23:54.380 | You could tell them apart, every single one of them.

01:23:56.980 | I was surrounded by golden darts.

01:24:00.520 | And it was the most incredible experience.

01:24:02.780 | And I don't know if it's that kind of environment that led me to just, you know, go into whatever

01:24:11.140 | state of meditation or whatnot.

01:24:14.080 | But all of a sudden, there was no separation anymore between me, the water, the volcano.

01:24:20.580 | And if I came with questions, they didn't matter anymore.

01:24:24.220 | Because for that fraction of a second, it seemed that I had all the answers in the universe.

01:24:29.340 | Was it the connectedness with everything?

01:24:32.360 | You can call it that way.

01:24:33.660 | I still don't know what it means, you know, literally.

01:24:36.680 | But it is that moment where you feel that it doesn't matter.

01:24:41.460 | It really doesn't matter anymore.

01:24:44.080 | It was absolute peace, absolute understanding.

01:24:49.300 | And it was incredible.

01:24:50.980 | It was an absolute awareness.

01:24:54.540 | - Could you describe it as beautiful?

01:24:57.020 | - That could go beyond that.

01:24:58.340 | I think that there is clearly in my mind today, no words that can express how perfect this

01:25:07.100 | was.

01:25:08.100 | - Does that start to speak to why you love diving?

01:25:10.700 | Or is there something special about that place, diving at such elevations and volcanoes?

01:25:16.540 | - You know, I started diving pretty much, this is the first thing I did when I was near

01:25:21.140 | water.

01:25:22.140 | In fact, there is a very fun little incident with my parents, me being on the shore of

01:25:27.100 | a lake on vacation.

01:25:28.540 | I was three years old, maybe.

01:25:31.900 | And I had these little lifesavers, you know, on my arms.

01:25:35.980 | And my parents were not watching.

01:25:38.100 | And in my little brain, I still can remember today, saying, "Well, nothing bad can happen

01:25:44.980 | to me.

01:25:45.980 | I cannot drown if I go underwater."

01:25:47.940 | See that's the logic of a three-year-old.

01:25:49.460 | - Yes.

01:25:50.460 | It kind of works.

01:25:51.460 | I mean, that's pretty brilliant.

01:25:53.900 | - So I removed the lifesavers that I had, and I just went in the water.

01:25:59.020 | My mom said before she could do anything, I was under.

01:26:03.380 | And it was like a natural thing.

01:26:05.240 | And for me, I felt immediately at home.

01:26:09.020 | And you know, as little as I was, completely.

01:26:12.220 | And it goes beyond that.

01:26:14.300 | You know, this sense of connectiveness or oneness or whatever, I always felt good underwater.

01:26:22.820 | So it doesn't matter really if it's 20,000 feet.

01:26:26.020 | The thing that matters at that point is that you need to get there.

01:26:30.320 | So you need to get with all the gears, with your hiking, trekking equipment, high mountaineering

01:26:38.220 | gears.

01:26:39.300 | And when you get on top of that, you have to remove all that and don a suit.

01:26:44.660 | - Is there something you can speak to the challenging aspects of that process?

01:26:49.100 | Or is it just like this rigorous process that's well-designed, you have to go through, and

01:26:53.420 | you don't think one step at a time?

01:26:55.740 | - This is where most of the risk is, because you can be well-prepared, but for one reason

01:27:03.600 | or another, you get sick, you know?

01:27:06.200 | And you can get sick not only because of high altitude sickness.

01:27:09.620 | It can be a number of things.

01:27:12.300 | Or you can be tired, or you can catch a cold.

01:27:15.540 | And then of course you have the mountain itself.

01:27:18.080 | We had a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hitting one day when we were 50 meters away from the

01:27:24.600 | summit.

01:27:25.600 | - You can't obviously plan for that.

01:27:26.880 | - No, you can't.

01:27:27.880 | And that's the acts of God.

01:27:29.080 | You know, working with NASA, although I am the director of the SETI Institute, my grants

01:27:36.040 | are coming from NASA, so I'm a NASA contractor.

01:27:38.720 | And every time we go to those environments, we have to go through the rigorous process

01:27:42.760 | of training with NASA and checking all the boxes for safety.

01:27:47.300 | So they are training and training and training us.

01:27:49.440 | And I have to thank them, because a lot of those trainings are the things that are in

01:27:54.560 | your brain when these kind of things happen.

01:27:57.420 | You know how to react, and you are not freaking out.

01:28:00.680 | But in all of the things they are training us for, you have the green risk, the yellow

01:28:05.600 | risk, and the red risk.

01:28:07.480 | So the green risks are basically the don't be stupid, and don't do the kind of thing

01:28:11.480 | you wouldn't be doing at home, like jumping on rocks that are not stable.

01:28:16.340 | You can tweak your ankle, you know?

01:28:19.680 | And then you have other risks, like high altitude sickness.

01:28:23.340 | How you prepare for that, how you recognize that.

01:28:26.320 | These are the yellow risks.

01:28:27.420 | And then the red risks.

01:28:28.600 | The red risks are what they call the acts of gods, the kind of thing that they can happen,

01:28:34.320 | you know there is nothing you can do about it, and you accept that when you do that.

01:28:38.520 | So those are volcanic eruptions, when you're in this kind of environment, earthquakes,

01:28:45.760 | and everything that, and avalanches, for instance.

01:28:47.720 | So you're on this giant mountain, and it's shaking.

01:28:51.160 | No, it's not shaking.

01:28:52.760 | That's the interesting part of it.

01:28:55.560 | There was a whole background of things that happened that day when we started off.

01:29:00.600 | But we got to 50 meters from the summit, and I have part of my logistics team that is at

01:29:07.440 | the foot of the mountain.

01:29:10.120 | And being so close to the summit, we have to go under an overhang of lava.

01:29:14.900 | So it's just like we are just under this big vault of lava, and it's actually beautiful.

01:29:20.560 | If you want something beautiful, it's the Altiplano seen from 20,000 feet.

01:29:25.040 | It's just absolutely stunning.

01:29:26.040 | What's the colors?

01:29:27.040 | What are we looking at?

01:29:28.040 | The colors are that of early Earth, which means primordial Earth.

01:29:32.920 | It's ochres, yellows, oranges, browns, with a dark blue sky.

01:29:40.620 | And so you are just, you know, it's a time machine.

01:29:43.360 | You're just out there, and you're climbing 42 degree slopes.

01:29:47.440 | So all of a sudden, I'm right next behind the guide, and the guide has been with us,

01:29:53.840 | his family, you know, we've been together for 10 years.

01:29:57.040 | And he's starting to do that.

01:30:00.240 | I don't discuss.

01:30:01.880 | When Macario does that, you know, I listen, and I ask the team to do the same thing, where

01:30:07.360 | maybe half a dozen.

01:30:09.240 | And then I want to talk to him and say, "What's going on?"

01:30:11.400 | He's on the radio.

01:30:13.040 | And then he gives me the radio.

01:30:14.800 | I'm talking to my logistics chief officer, who was at the bottom, and he said, "We're

01:30:18.720 | having a tremendous earthquake."

01:30:21.960 | He was saying that the, actually the ground was waving.

01:30:25.480 | It was so bad.

01:30:28.320 | And he was freaking out because he said, "Everything is avalanching, and I'm very puzzled because

01:30:33.360 | we are in a very dangerous part of the volcano.

01:30:35.960 | Nothing's happening."

01:30:36.960 | I turn around, and then this is when I realized there is dust absolutely everywhere.

01:30:42.800 | Everything that I saw two minutes before, it's gone, just disappearing into a wall of

01:30:46.800 | dust.

01:30:47.840 | But nothing's happening where we are.

01:30:50.280 | And our friends down, they were freaking out because they were seeing everything avalanching,

01:30:56.200 | and especially the other side of the mountain we were on was avalanching.

01:30:59.760 | So they have no visuals.

01:31:00.760 | They have no visual.

01:31:02.000 | They thought that we are caught in the avalanching.

01:31:04.240 | So I said, "No."

01:31:06.200 | But some, so at that point, I said-

01:31:09.800 | So they thought you were screwed.

01:31:11.520 | Yeah.

01:31:12.520 | So I said, "Okay, so if this is what's happening, then I'm taking everybody to the summit because

01:31:19.120 | we have a very large crater that will take care of avalanching.

01:31:22.120 | We'll be safe.

01:31:23.560 | And I'm waiting for the aftershock because this is what you do, you know, when you have

01:31:27.280 | earthquakes."

01:31:28.680 | So here we go, taking everybody in the crater.

01:31:32.200 | And now you have half a dozen scientists in the crater with the crater lake, and this

01:31:39.880 | is why we came for.

01:31:41.760 | So we just had a 7.8 earthquake.

01:31:44.960 | And what do you think they do?

01:31:45.960 | Well, of course, they do the science they came to do.

01:31:49.680 | So the only thing is that I couldn't because my radio was only working when I was on the

01:31:56.240 | rim of the crater.

01:31:58.120 | But I had a little assistant with me, a young Bolivian teenager.

01:32:03.840 | He had been shadowing me for three weeks, so he knew exactly what to do.

01:32:08.080 | And he said, "Natalie, no problem.

01:32:10.040 | Give me your bag.

01:32:11.040 | I'll do the sampling for you."

01:32:12.280 | So I was monitoring the situation.

01:32:15.720 | And I wasn't at that point.

01:32:21.360 | And there was another moment.

01:32:24.120 | My friend downstairs, I could, you know...

01:32:26.680 | At the foot.

01:32:27.680 | At the foot, yeah.

01:32:28.680 | We've known each other.

01:32:29.680 | As I said, we're family.

01:32:30.680 | This team is family.

01:32:31.680 | We've known each other.

01:32:32.680 | I am the godmother of kids, so we are close.

01:32:37.280 | And I could feel for the first time in my life that he actually was scared.

01:32:44.200 | And he was calling me every 30 seconds, telling me stuff.

01:32:48.120 | I said, "You have to stop this now.

01:32:51.040 | Just call me to give me information that is useful for me to make decisions."

01:32:55.960 | And so I said, "Okay, what's going on?"

01:32:59.960 | All right.

01:33:00.960 | He tells me, you know, there is still avalanching, etc.

01:33:04.600 | And then a few minutes later, he calls me, he says, "I think that Lascar is erupting.

01:33:08.120 | So now I have to tell you, we are on a volcano.

01:33:11.400 | The next volcano, we share a slope with it.

01:33:13.960 | It's a little lower, but that's the most temperamental volcano of the entire chain.

01:33:20.320 | And this one has a history of eruption."

01:33:23.760 | And then my friend is telling me that the volcano seems to be starting to erupt.

01:33:28.400 | If that volcano goes up, we have nowhere to go.

01:33:32.880 | That got my attention.

01:33:34.840 | So if you say scared, I would say that I got the realization that what that meant.

01:33:40.360 | I went cold for like a fraction of a second, but that meant that just my adrenaline started

01:33:45.600 | to kick in.

01:33:46.600 | And it was a very, very strange experience because now you have tunnel vision.

01:33:51.120 | It's about survival.

01:33:52.120 | And I say, "Okay, now you are going to tell me what I need to know.

01:33:56.840 | Tell me, what do you see?"

01:33:58.720 | He say, "I see smoke."

01:34:00.440 | I say, "What kind of smoke?"

01:34:02.080 | He say, "It's white."

01:34:03.480 | I say, "No big deal.

01:34:05.440 | That's water vapor."

01:34:06.440 | "Okay, where is it going?"

01:34:08.360 | "It's going to Argentina."

01:34:09.800 | That was the opposite direction of where we are.

01:34:11.880 | I said, "Okay, I'm staying where I am because right now there is no danger."

01:34:17.760 | And there was still the issue of the aftershock.

01:34:20.640 | I didn't want to have the team caught in the gully, in the central gully of the volcano

01:34:25.660 | with an avalanche coming at us.

01:34:28.060 | So we stayed there.

01:34:29.760 | And he called me after that and say, "Well, it's still going to Argentina."

01:34:33.040 | "Fine, okay."

01:34:35.960 | And then a little later he calls me and say, "Natalie, things are changing here."

01:34:42.080 | I say, "Okay, what's going on?"

01:34:43.760 | I say, "Well, the cloud is a little yellow."

01:34:49.000 | And I was thinking to myself, "Shit."

01:34:54.000 | What does it mean when it's yellow?

01:34:56.320 | Sulfur.

01:34:57.400 | And when you have sulfur mixed with the water vapor or the water in your lungs, this turns

01:35:04.320 | into sulfuric acid.

01:35:06.480 | Then you're really screwed.

01:35:08.160 | And I say, "Okay, where is the cloud going?"

01:35:13.880 | He said, "The wing is shifting.

01:35:15.800 | It's coming your direction."

01:35:17.040 | So yeah, that was a day like that, you know.

01:35:20.560 | And I am talking to him on the radio and I'm turning around.

01:35:24.360 | And as I turn around, I see the cloud starting to pop on the opposite side of the rim.

01:35:31.000 | So at that time, we had no choice anymore because now you have to figure out what's

01:35:35.960 | going to kill you first.

01:35:38.320 | And so there was the risk or the potential of an avalanche.

01:35:43.720 | But at least you can see the rocks.

01:35:46.480 | The gas is going to kill you before you can see it.

01:35:49.760 | So I called everybody back.

01:35:51.360 | We gather our stuff.

01:35:53.760 | I didn't give too much detail, but I say, "It's time to go downhill and fast."

01:36:00.000 | So which we did.

01:36:01.680 | We stopped only when we were at mid-camp.

01:36:04.640 | And then at that point, we saw the cloud just completely covering the summit where we were.

01:36:10.280 | So we did well to bail out.

01:36:12.600 | But that was 500 meters higher than we were.

01:36:16.840 | So we are safe.

01:36:17.840 | I was just making sure that it would not go down the slope where we were.

01:36:21.320 | We are safe.

01:36:22.320 | We did and just rested for a little while.

01:36:26.200 | And after that, we descended.

01:36:28.560 | And it was all on adrenaline.

01:36:29.560 | I can tell you what, I had two of my crew with headaches.

01:36:33.200 | Part of one of them was because of the altitude.

01:36:35.280 | We climbed very fast.

01:36:36.600 | The other one was because of the cloud.

01:36:38.640 | She was the closest to the cloud when it happened.

01:36:42.280 | So we descended fast.

01:36:43.280 | Wow, that was close.

01:36:45.320 | That was close.

01:36:46.440 | And it's interesting how the human body and mind works because I know that from the moment

01:36:51.160 | my friend told me that the volcano seemed to be erupting, I was going on adrenaline.

01:36:58.560 | But when we got close to them and I saw him, we were getting close to the cars, I saw him

01:37:04.080 | coming towards me.

01:37:05.920 | And the slope, all of a sudden, all the adrenaline went away.

01:37:10.080 | I was a mess.

01:37:11.300 | I had to find the first rock and sit down.

01:37:14.960 | It was gone.

01:37:15.960 | I mean-- Fascinating.

01:37:16.960 | So you just basically physically and mentally collapsed once you saw--

01:37:20.680 | There was nothing left of me.

01:37:23.680 | I got in the car and I felt in the car as we were heading back towards our camp, I could

01:37:29.200 | have passed out.

01:37:30.360 | I really fought back and I'm not the kind of passing out really, you know, easy.

01:37:35.360 | But there was nothing left.

01:37:37.560 | I had no energy, no nothing.

01:37:40.200 | It's fabulous how you react and how this is embedded in your brain from eons of evolution,

01:37:49.480 | of reaction to a dangerous situation, basically.

01:37:55.080 | The drive to survive.

01:37:56.640 | Yeah, something like that.

01:37:58.400 | You just told us one heck of a story.

01:38:01.000 | And as you said, such story comes along with many of the diving expeditions that you do.

01:38:07.400 | But on the science side, what is that world that simulates, that travels back in time

01:38:14.520 | into the Martian landscape?

01:38:17.080 | What does the science reveal?

01:38:19.040 | So the science reveals that life is resilient.

01:38:24.280 | When I started that project, I told my husband, I said, "This is going to be very fast.

01:38:28.360 | We are going in such nasty environment that we're not going to find anything.

01:38:32.960 | And we'll be back home fairly soon."

01:38:36.920 | So 20 years later, we are still studying those environments.

01:38:39.280 | That was a gut feeling like nothing, not much can possibly survive in those conditions.

01:38:43.800 | The UV environment is so nasty, but there you find the same microorganism that made

01:38:51.560 | the very first fossils on earth 3.5 billion years ago.

01:38:56.720 | And they keep surviving.

01:38:58.040 | They developed an adaptation, Swiss army knife, if you prefer.

01:39:04.000 | And so you learn about that.

01:39:05.760 | You learn about what they are, how they adapt through times and through environmental changes,

01:39:12.520 | which is really important.

01:39:14.560 | What are their signatures?

01:39:15.920 | We learn to recognize them.

01:39:17.760 | We learn what kind of instrument we need, what kind of signature, whether it's chemical

01:39:23.600 | or morphological or whatnot.

01:39:27.120 | So basically we learn how to explore.

01:39:29.720 | But I would say that to me, and this is a realization, interestingly enough, that came

01:39:34.640 | three years into the project, I really woke up literally one morning saying, "We've

01:39:43.480 | been coming here for three years now, trying to understand how to search for life on Mars.

01:39:50.320 | But what this place is showing us is what's happening right here, right now on our own

01:39:54.520 | planet."

01:39:56.800 | And by exploring those extreme environments, we are also reaching to places not too many

01:40:01.620 | people go.

01:40:03.320 | And so we are learning more about our own biospheres and the diversity of our own life

01:40:09.880 | here on Earth.

01:40:11.160 | So these are the two main thing that I would say.

01:40:14.560 | - What kind of life survives up there?

01:40:18.000 | - On top of those volcanoes, it's about bacteria, mostly.

01:40:22.800 | - Is there something specific about that bacteria that's able to be so rugged?

01:40:27.960 | - Yes.

01:40:28.960 | They have adapted to very high UV radiation, and it's not only because they are at high

01:40:33.680 | altitude, it's because early Earth didn't have an ozone layer.

01:40:39.500 | So when the ancestors of those bacteria originated, they had to survive a world where you had

01:40:48.040 | lots of short UV coming down at the surface, and also lots of hydrothermal environment,

01:40:54.160 | volcanoes and hot water, lots of salt.

01:40:57.520 | And you see all this toolbox still embedded in those microorganisms today, four billion

01:41:05.240 | years later.

01:41:06.240 | It's just amazing.

01:41:08.000 | And depending on the environment, they are going to switch some of these defenses adaptation

01:41:13.920 | on or off.

01:41:16.120 | The UV situation there is so nasty that here you have bacteria like that.

01:41:25.160 | I know bacteria, you find them everywhere.

01:41:27.200 | That's really something you find all over the place.

01:41:29.640 | But if you find them here in California, they will turn their protection against UV during

01:41:36.440 | the day in summer, and they will switch it off at the end of the day.

01:41:42.560 | There in the Andes, it's so nasty that that thing stays on all the time.

01:41:47.640 | But if you take samples and bring them back here and start to culture them, like we did

01:41:55.680 | on top of a building, leaving them, you will see the second generation of this organism,

01:42:03.040 | they are starting to switch on and off again.

01:42:06.520 | So they're extremely adaptable, extremely rugged, and that's why they are still here.

01:42:13.640 | And probably that's why we're here, because life finds ways.

01:42:18.560 | Is there some degree to which the harshness of the conditions enables the flourishing

01:42:25.800 | of life versus shuts it down?

01:42:28.520 | Well, it will shut down those that cannot survive.

01:42:33.080 | Obviously, this is a statement that's kept in obvious right there, but it's also the

01:42:38.400 | survival of the fittest.

01:42:40.600 | And this is what evolution is, right?

01:42:43.800 | So they are here because they were the most adaptable.

01:42:48.560 | And so evolution is going to show the path of the fittest.

01:42:57.080 | The one that cannot resist, they might have a good time for a little while, but then...

01:43:03.080 | We've seen this at much different scale and with complex life.

01:43:08.520 | Not so long ago, a hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthal was side by side by Homo

01:43:15.080 | sapiens, but Neanderthal was completely adapted to a cold earth, to a glacial earth of the

01:43:22.520 | end of the Pleistocene.

01:43:24.720 | And when conditions change, it couldn't last.

01:43:28.200 | You think, I mean, there's still some mysteries around that, right?

01:43:30.800 | Like exactly what were the harshness of the conditions?

01:43:35.800 | I still really suspicious.

01:43:37.760 | What did Homo sapiens do?

01:43:38.760 | No, no, no, no.

01:43:39.760 | I really want to know.

01:43:40.760 | No, no.

01:43:41.760 | Some shady stuff that happened.

01:43:43.640 | Shady stuff happened.

01:43:44.640 | They met, they bred together, they fought against each other.

01:43:49.120 | What humans do.

01:43:50.120 | You had to expect that.

01:43:51.440 | But the thing is that Neanderthal was completely adapted for a very long time to live at the

01:43:58.440 | edge of those glaciers.

01:44:00.840 | We're probably in a weakened situation when Homo sapiens came and started to spread.

01:44:09.040 | So basically this is what life does.

01:44:13.600 | It adapts and if it cannot adapt anymore, it disappears and something else takes over.

01:44:19.600 | You hold the women's world record for diving at altitudes, both scuba and free diving.

01:44:24.760 | So I have to ask, can you describe the details of those records?

01:44:29.080 | I never looked for those.

01:44:31.280 | I'm not after records at all.

01:44:33.320 | In fact, I didn't know I had broken those records when that happened.

01:44:38.600 | We did that as part of our expedition, our scientific expedition.

01:44:41.960 | So it's basically sport in the name of science versus...

01:44:45.000 | No, it's science in the name of science.

01:44:47.920 | And it's just a very physical thing that you have to do.

01:44:50.760 | So we trained ourselves like athletes.

01:44:53.120 | Yeah.

01:44:54.120 | To get the job done.

01:44:55.200 | To get the job done.

01:44:56.400 | You're holding your breath underwater for a very long time, like with free diving.

01:45:00.480 | What are we talking about?

01:45:02.320 | Do you think in terms of time?

01:45:04.200 | Is there like layers where you know through training you're in a good place?

01:45:08.640 | Like I'm sure you take time off and you get rusty.

01:45:11.560 | Right?

01:45:12.560 | Yes.

01:45:13.560 | And I have not been diving in a while, so probably I need to go back to the drawing

01:45:17.840 | board at the bottom of the swimming pool.

01:45:20.600 | But having training from the past, I think, you know, it will pick up much more faster

01:45:24.560 | then.

01:45:25.560 | Basically, I would never at those altitude, I would never go over three minutes.

01:45:31.520 | That would be suicidal.

01:45:33.440 | So the altitude is much tougher than the pool back at ground level.

01:45:37.360 | It is, but it's not...

01:45:39.840 | Oh, it's because when you come up and you have to get the oxygen.

01:45:41.960 | That's not the going in the water.

01:45:43.520 | When I'm underwater, I'm fine.

01:45:45.300 | And if I wanted, I could stay longer, but you wouldn't be very wise.

01:45:49.480 | You've written about the history of life on Mars.

01:45:54.080 | Like you said, you're kind of exploring that by looking at the lakes here.

01:45:59.960 | Do you think there's been life on Mars?

01:46:02.800 | Do you think there is life on Mars?

01:46:04.640 | Right.

01:46:05.640 | So when you're looking at the environment of Mars early on, it's fairly similar to that

01:46:11.080 | of early Earth.

01:46:12.660 | Never was exactly the same because Mars was always farther from the sun than the Earth.

01:46:17.560 | Right?

01:46:18.560 | So it's always a little cooler, but you have to imagine maybe the Arctic during the summer.

01:46:24.840 | That would be early Mars with a lot going on for it in terms of environment.

01:46:30.220 | Very favorable to even life as we know it.

01:46:33.520 | So we don't know how fast life happened on Earth.

01:46:39.920 | There are signs right now showing that it might have actually originated only 200 million

01:46:45.320 | years after the crust cooled down.

01:46:47.600 | Wow.

01:46:48.600 | Yeah.

01:46:49.600 | This still has to be verified, but that's the closest.

01:46:51.520 | And these are indirect evidence like carbon left by the activity of life, not life itself.

01:46:57.960 | And there is a twist in the story for Mars is that it seems that Mars came together as

01:47:05.200 | a planet faster than the Earth and had water earlier than the Earth.

01:47:12.180 | So it may be that Mars was habitable and might have seen the beginning of life earlier than

01:47:20.920 | the Earth.

01:47:22.960 | So all of this is speculation.

01:47:24.640 | Obviously we haven't found any evidence or solid evidence yet.

01:47:30.000 | I would say unambiguous evidence, but unambiguous evidence of life is going to be something

01:47:37.720 | interesting to prove because we don't know what life is, remember.

01:47:41.000 | So I always joke that the only way we would know that there is life on Mars if there was

01:47:44.760 | a rabbit jumping in front of the rover, but we might be gathering, we have what we call

01:47:51.920 | a ladder of life detection, which is that you have a series of rungs that you need to

01:47:58.760 | go through that actually are not proving you that you discovered life, but are making the

01:48:08.600 | possibility that what you discovered was made only by the environment more and more improbable.

01:48:17.000 | So we are trying to prove the contrary, right?

01:48:20.040 | So this is what we have right now.

01:48:22.480 | And as far as I'm concerned, considering all the unknowns we have, I think there was as

01:48:27.440 | much chance that life originated on Mars than it did on Earth.

01:48:33.120 | And if it was at the surface, then it got in trouble after 500 million years because

01:48:40.200 | of the disappearance of the magnetosphere, the loss of the magnetosphere and the atmosphere.

01:48:45.360 | But as we know, life doesn't only stay in one place.

01:48:51.400 | As soon as it's out there, it's going to adapt, it's going to give itself more chance to survive.

01:48:58.240 | And that to me means that if life appeared, I would say it's still there and probably

01:49:06.160 | on the ground where it can be in an environment that's more stable.

01:49:10.420 | So I don't know how stability is good or not, it might not be so good, but they might be

01:49:15.200 | in a different type of metabolism through dormancy, waiting for different climate cycles.

01:49:21.680 | And there is the fact that Mars changes a lot faster than the Earth and climate changes

01:49:29.340 | are a lot stronger in magnitude.

01:49:31.940 | So there might be a place on Mars, we know that there is a place on Mars deeper in the

01:49:36.920 | subsurface where temperature and pressure are good for liquid water to stay there.

01:49:42.120 | So these would be good places for a stable habitat over time, no matter what happens

01:49:45.960 | at the surface.

01:49:48.040 | But if life is also caught between that deep zone and the surface, there is an active layer,

01:49:58.640 | there is a lot of ice in the subsurface of Mars.

01:50:01.440 | And when the climate changes, when the obliquity goes beyond 30 degrees, then at that point,

01:50:08.660 | you will have some activation of that zone.

01:50:12.580 | You have thawing of the ice, so all this region is reactivated and maybe that's a way where

01:50:20.220 | you have pathways for life to move from the deep zone to closer to the surface.

01:50:26.780 | This is why I am one of those scientists who thinks that life might not be so far from

01:50:33.220 | the surface than we think.

01:50:35.980 | So we don't have to dig very far to find it.

01:50:38.660 | We probably won't.

01:50:39.660 | And the reason I'm--

01:50:40.660 | That would be so amazing.

01:50:42.100 | I am thinking of that just because of this experience as well of extreme environments.

01:50:47.860 | You know, you have to sit and look and listen, basically.

01:50:52.180 | The story of my life, if I want to understand where microbes are located on Mars, I have

01:50:56.780 | to become the microbe, right?

01:50:58.260 | This is the thought experiment.

01:51:00.180 | And if I want to understand where ET is, then I have to become ET.

01:51:04.100 | So it's a big stretch.

01:51:05.940 | But in extreme environment, you sit in the desert for a while and you just, you know,

01:51:12.860 | try to understand where the wind's coming from, where the humidity, when it's showing

01:51:17.500 | up, and then you start to understand the patterns of those things.

01:51:21.220 | What are the useful signals that you need for survival?

01:51:24.500 | You need to know where water is, where the source of energy is going to be drawn from.

01:51:29.600 | You need to find shelters.

01:51:31.120 | And shelters don't mean that, for instance, you can have a water column of a lake or a

01:51:35.860 | river or whatnot, or the ocean.

01:51:38.500 | It can be also a very thin layer of dust.

01:51:43.340 | Or it can be a translucent rock.

01:51:47.140 | And you see what we call endoliths.

01:51:49.020 | These are the same cyanobacteria, but a different version of them.

01:51:52.660 | They live inside the rocks, inside those crystals, because they have the best of life.

01:51:57.900 | They are into translucent crystals so that they receive the light from the sun.

01:52:05.020 | They can do the photosynthesis.

01:52:07.740 | But there is enough of that crystal so that the nasty UV is being stopped.

01:52:14.980 | And they are in their little house.

01:52:19.420 | And when you are looking at temperature within those rocks, they tend to make it toastier

01:52:25.940 | than the outside temperature.

01:52:27.520 | So there is a lot of things going on.

01:52:30.640 | So what I'm saying for Mars is that, yeah, right now you don't have an atmosphere very

01:52:35.860 | much.

01:52:36.860 | 160 times thinner than the Earth.

01:52:38.860 | 6 millibars is really not much, but it's there.

01:52:43.840 | But you still have a lot of short UV, like the nasty ones, UVA, UVB, UVC, that can really

01:52:50.100 | mess up your DNA and destroy it beyond repair.

01:52:55.060 | But as soon as you have a little alcove into a rock or a cliff, I'd be looking at those

01:53:03.600 | places.

01:53:04.600 | But you have to understand Mars, or any other planet for that matter, at the level that

01:53:09.240 | matters for the microbe.

01:53:11.200 | And so then you need--

01:53:14.480 | Be one with the microbe.

01:53:16.160 | Be one with the microbes, which means that we have lots of orbital data, which is good

01:53:21.760 | to understand habitability at the planet level or at the regional level.

01:53:26.920 | But we have very little data right now that is very useful to understand habitability

01:53:34.160 | at the scale that matters for the microbes at this point in time.

01:53:37.440 | So we need to do a better job with that.

01:53:40.160 | My idea is to have arrays of environmental stations that could have a lot of benefits.

01:53:47.880 | One would be to give us that vision for the microbes.

01:53:51.960 | That would be good for us through biology.

01:53:54.160 | And second--

01:53:55.160 | A collection of stations on Mars.

01:53:57.360 | On Mars, yeah.

01:53:58.360 | That give us a good map of the planet.

01:54:01.280 | High resolution.

01:54:02.560 | We can do that regionally.

01:54:04.460 | And on top of that, so that's good for us through biology, for the search for life on

01:54:07.640 | Mars.

01:54:08.760 | That's good about how to learn where microbes could be that can be a problem for contamination

01:54:14.560 | both ways.

01:54:16.400 | So that's good for planetary protection.

01:54:19.240 | And since those stations would have communication capabilities on them, that's excellent for

01:54:26.040 | human exploration because not only you have weather stations all over the place that can

01:54:30.960 | tell your astronauts, you know, learn the pattern when it's a good time to go out or

01:54:35.320 | not go out, and also help them communicate when they go and do sorties.

01:54:41.600 | So there are a number of things we can do that can tell you lots of information.

01:54:46.760 | Let's rewind the clock a little bit.

01:54:48.160 | You grew up in Paris.

01:54:49.160 | I was just there.

01:54:51.520 | Helen McDonald in her New York Times amazing profile piece of you writes that your teenage

01:54:56.680 | years were troubled.

01:54:58.960 | So how did the challenging early years make the human being the scientist that you are

01:55:04.880 | today?

01:55:05.880 | Everything.

01:55:07.240 | I think that this is what's taking me on top of those big mountains.

01:55:14.880 | And the irony is for me to be looking for the origin and nature of life because I was

01:55:20.880 | so close to losing it.

01:55:22.720 | But to me that was a great lesson learned.

01:55:27.080 | And that helped me see through the beauty of life.

01:55:32.840 | Going on the other side of that, it became really what made me and helped me go through

01:55:39.400 | absolutely everything and anything in life.

01:55:43.120 | Climb mountains and tell me there is something I want to know.

01:55:47.480 | And I am going to give it my best and I won't give up and I won't give in.

01:55:56.120 | And this is a message that I carried all my life and I'm so very grateful that I did because

01:56:03.920 | all the things that I would have missed if I hadn't done that.

01:56:07.200 | You know, this is something that I wrote in my first book and part of it is the reason

01:56:11.500 | why I wrote it.

01:56:13.120 | Just because I felt that there were messages in my path.

01:56:19.040 | Oftentimes teenagers are troubled.

01:56:20.520 | It can be one way or another.

01:56:22.760 | Or if it's not a troubled teenage, you have times in your life where you doubt, where

01:56:26.880 | you know, you're just waving your arm and say, "What's the purpose?

01:56:31.000 | What's the reason why I carry on?"

01:56:33.680 | And when I see all the things that I'm doing, the dream that I was able to fulfill, what

01:56:40.560 | a waste it would have been, you know?

01:56:43.520 | So there was a point in your life where you thought about suicide?

01:56:48.640 | Oh yeah, yeah.

01:56:50.160 | I did more than thinking about it, but I was a lucky one.

01:56:54.520 | For some reason I'm still here.

01:56:55.720 | I still don't know why, but I'm still here.

01:56:58.720 | And the lesson for me was that never ever again, because you have to give tomorrow a

01:57:05.000 | chance.

01:57:06.000 | You never can think about tomorrow in the terms of the present.

01:57:11.280 | You never know what can happen.

01:57:12.500 | You know what is going to happen if you go through what you want to do.

01:57:18.200 | Tomorrow's never happening, you know?

01:57:20.080 | And I had the other lesson came a few years later, where actually somebody was drowning

01:57:27.040 | and I went after that person.

01:57:28.960 | I almost died that day too, not that I wanted to, but it's just because the condition were

01:57:33.200 | very, very difficult.

01:57:35.760 | That person died from there, although we took him out of the water.

01:57:41.280 | But I had a lot of difficulty coming out.

01:57:44.200 | I came out, but then I thought a lot about that guy.

01:57:47.360 | He was in his 30s.

01:57:49.560 | And it was like a sort of a echo from a few years before telling me that person would

01:57:56.360 | never have a tomorrow.

01:57:58.560 | That person would never be able to fulfill his dream or even have dreams of any kind.

01:58:04.280 | And I was here and I was going to give myself the best chance to fulfill all the dreams

01:58:09.040 | I wanted to and go after all the questions I wanted to.

01:58:12.700 | And this is what kept me going now, you know?

01:58:15.800 | So the advice there is even if you don't see a why, an answer to the why question, why

01:58:22.520 | live today?

01:58:23.520 | Give tomorrow a chance, always.

01:58:29.200 | Do you think about your death today?

01:58:32.640 | Do you think about your mortality?

01:58:37.200 | Not really.

01:58:38.200 | You've been so close with it so many times.

01:58:40.840 | Yeah, that's part of life.

01:58:42.960 | And you know what, if something happens to me while I'm doing the stuff I love, what

01:58:48.240 | a way of going.

01:58:50.320 | This will happen wherever it catches me.

01:58:54.000 | I don't know.

01:58:55.000 | I don't care.

01:58:56.080 | It will be what it will be.

01:58:57.720 | And I had the best of all masters for that.

01:59:01.640 | I had my husband.

01:59:03.160 | My husband and I were 44 years apart in age.

01:59:07.400 | And it was just a pure love story.

01:59:10.880 | And he never looked at his age, never thought about himself or defined himself by his age.

01:59:18.960 | In fact, he reinvented life for himself at an age where everybody retires.

01:59:23.640 | We met when he was 66.

01:59:26.160 | And that was a blessing and a curse, but a blessing most of it, because we took every

01:59:31.200 | single day as if it was the last.

01:59:33.840 | So we enjoyed life.

01:59:36.080 | And right now, it's not so much.

01:59:40.160 | I have to really think of him.

01:59:42.200 | He just passed away this August, last August.

01:59:46.760 | And for me, it's more like I have to draw from his example, on him always telling me,

01:59:57.520 | look forward, trust life, be happy, live.

02:00:05.280 | Every day, every single day, I have to remind several times a day of this.

02:00:10.280 | It's not easy.

02:00:11.840 | But he had the recipe.

02:00:13.640 | He never thought about death, because when you start thinking too much about death, that

02:00:17.920 | prevents you from living.

02:00:21.680 | Do you miss him?

02:00:22.680 | Oh, gosh, we were so close.

02:00:24.760 | I think we were, it's more like one spirit in two bodies.

02:00:29.960 | We were that close.

02:00:31.200 | So missing him doesn't even cut it.

02:00:34.280 | I mean, it's the toughest mountain I ever climbed.

02:00:42.000 | What's the role of love in the human condition?

02:00:45.440 | I think, I hope, that this is the force that drives the universe.

02:00:49.720 | Although we might be experiencing the other side of it, maybe just to learn how important

02:00:55.560 | love is.

02:00:57.160 | That might be it.

02:01:00.560 | For me, my experience with my husband, where I never had to wake up every single morning

02:01:09.400 | ever wondering if I was loved, I had to look in his eyes and him looking back at me to

02:01:16.520 | know it.

02:01:19.120 | So when you get to that point where you don't question it anymore, I would hope for humanity

02:01:24.760 | to reach that point where you can feel the same love for the person that is unknown in

02:01:31.200 | the street, that you feel for the people you love.

02:01:34.760 | I think that at that point we are going to be reaching the maturity of that civilization

02:01:39.840 | we are hoping for.

02:01:41.220 | And seeing the universe through love, that doesn't run spacecrafts, of course, but putting

02:01:51.000 | love into our intent of going into and settling into another planet instead of, "Oh my God,

02:01:57.860 | we need to escape because we are freaking messing up with our own planet."

02:02:04.080 | I think that this is the answer to so many things.

02:02:10.040 | Is there a part of you that maybe just a little bit wants to step foot on Mars, like you personally?

02:02:17.840 | Oh yeah, of course.

02:02:19.240 | I'm curious.

02:02:20.240 | I'm a scientist and I've been working on Mars.

02:02:23.640 | I was actually privileged to be working on Gusev Crater and deciding for the landing

02:02:28.480 | site of the Spirit rover, which means that I worked on that landing site for 15 years

02:02:33.560 | and I got to see it from the ground.

02:02:35.960 | That's the closest to being there and exploring.

02:02:39.520 | Of course, that's not physically being present there.

02:02:43.000 | If you were giving me the opportunity, of course I would go, but I know one thing, I

02:02:49.160 | would want to come back.

02:02:52.120 | So given the option of dying on Mars or dying on Earth, you'd visit Mars, but you would

02:03:01.000 | like to spend your last days here.

02:03:02.640 | Yeah, because of a number of things.

02:03:05.640 | I think that first, we're not ready to set on Mars, regardless of what being said.

02:03:11.840 | It will happen.

02:03:13.720 | It will happen and because we are explorers, humans, you know, they're explorers.

02:03:17.560 | So this will happen and it's a good thing.

02:03:20.840 | Depending on how we go about this, it can be a very good thing.

02:03:24.880 | You know, with time, as much as I've been exploring, continue to explore the big questions

02:03:29.440 | of origin and nature of life or exploring of a planet, the love, you were talking about

02:03:35.920 | love, the love for my own planet has grown deeper and my concern about it has grown deeper.

02:03:44.320 | So the data that I'm collecting to learn about other planets, I'm also using it to understand

02:03:50.320 | better our home planet and trying to make it a little better for the next generation.

02:03:56.400 | So if you were talking about love, this is love that would drive me back here.

02:04:02.800 | Yeah, this planet, it's just sometimes I just pause and I'm in awe at the incredible thing

02:04:10.320 | we have here and just I have deep gratitude for all the life forms here, the beautiful

02:04:18.600 | complexity.

02:04:19.600 | Of course, there's darkness behind it, all the death, all the extinction that led up

02:04:25.320 | to us two descendants of apes sitting here today.

02:04:29.000 | I feel that's a responsibility.

02:04:31.560 | We're the fittest that survived.

02:04:33.960 | You're right, as the dominant species, at least, technologically, et cetera, maybe not

02:04:43.160 | the wisest one, but the dominant species, we have a responsibility towards the entire

02:04:47.920 | biosphere because the decisions we're making now not only affect us, they're affecting

02:04:56.360 | the entire biosphere.

02:04:58.000 | And right now, the choices we are making are leading to the disappearance of 150 species

02:05:03.640 | every single day.

02:05:05.960 | All the big mammals on this earth today are on the brink of extinction.

02:05:13.640 | We are within the sixth greatest extinction.

02:05:18.520 | It's unfolding before our eyes.

02:05:21.640 | And I would strongly suggest that we use our smart to help a little bit this situation.

02:05:33.220 | And we can do this.

02:05:34.320 | I think we can do this.

02:05:35.840 | We just need to redirect our energy.

02:05:41.520 | - In the name of love.

02:05:43.800 | This was an incredible conversation.

02:05:45.360 | I'm really honored that you sit with me.

02:05:47.720 | I've been a fan of your work for a long time now, so this is really awesome.

02:05:51.960 | Thank you so much for talking to me.

02:05:52.960 | - You're very welcome.

02:05:53.960 | Thanks.

02:05:54.960 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Nathalie Cabral.

02:05:58.280 | To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.

02:06:02.260 | And now, let me leave you with some words from Stanislav Lem and Solaris.

02:06:07.200 | How do you expect to communicate with the ocean when we can't even understand one another?

02:06:13.680 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:06:15.800 | [END]

02:06:16.300 | Stanislav Lem, Solaris

02:06:17.300 | www.stanislavlem.com

02:06:19.300 | www.stanislavlem.com

02:06:21.300 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #348

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