Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Brian Keating On The Leon Logothetis Podcast ​(#221)

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

The following is my appearance on the Leon Logothetis Podcast. Leon is the creator of THE KINDNESS DIARIES on Netflix and Amazon. He’s known for creating content around the world to highlight the best in humanity, and it was a privilege to be on his show. The show’s premise is that Leon does NOT know who is going to be his guest. That is why we start off with introductions. I was a bit nervous about going in blind, but Leon made it a great experience. Subscribe to his podcast here. From Leon’s show notes: “My guest this week is Brian Keating, who is an expert in the study of the universe’s oldest light, the cosmic microwave background, using it to learn about the origins and evolution of the universe. Brian is an author, speaker, inventor and a Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of physics at the Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences (CASS) in the Department of Physics at the University of California, San Diego.  It was a privilege to have Brian on the show and share his incredible knowledge about the cosmos. I left this conversation 38% smarter than before it!” Please Visit our Sponsors: LinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/impossible to post a job for FREE Athletic Greens, makers of AG1 which I take every day. Get an exclusive offer when you visit https://athleticgreens.com/impossible AG1 is made from the highest quality ingredients, in accordance with the strictest standards and obsessively improved based on the latest science. All 33 Chairs. My All33 Chair is the ideal chair for all of us ‘knowledge workers’ suffering through unending Zoom calls. Sitting still is bad for you. All33 chairs are my choice because they allow your pelvis to move the way it does while you walk — so all 33 vertebrae align into perfect posture. The result? Better breathing, better blood flow, and relief from pain. It’s crazy what you can do when you set your body to it. To get $100 off your order, visit https://all33.com/impossible Search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to jordanharbinger.com/subscribe Please join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php  Produced by Stuart Volkow (P.G.A) and Brian Keating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the by the door's please. Hello. Hello there. How are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm doing really well.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. And who am I meeting? Well, you're meeting a Keating. My name is Brian Keating. I'm a professor of astrophysics and cosmology at the University. of California, San Diego, and the host of the Into the Impossible podcast as well. Okay. So you are an expert in space. I'm a space expert. I study physics, astronomy,

cosmology, the origin of the universe, and the evolution of what's going to happen to the universe in just a few short billion years. The origin of the universe. So maybe you can answer. the question that I have wanted to be answered since the beginning of my existence. What happened before the Big Bang? What was there before the Big Bang? That is the $1 million question. I say one million because that's how much money you win if you win a Nobel Prize. So if we can answer that question with the observatory, if you're watching this. There's an observatory, a bunch of little telescopes in the background.

That is the Simon's Observatory, which is designed to answer your question, Leon. It's designed to answer the question of, as I say, what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bay? There are some, such as a famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who said that question is meaningless. You can't even ask the question, not let alone answer it, because it's nonsensical to speak about time before the existence of time itself. So how could there be before or an after? When time itself came into existence, according to Professor late grade Stephen Hawking coming up on four years since he passed away. And others say, no, no, no, no, no, Stephen. He was wrong about many things. He made many bets in his life, lost them, including wages, wagers, such as subscriptions to

Playboy magazine and very expensive bottles of alcohol that he lost to his everyone. he bet. And that is to say, no, there was something that happened before the Tuesday that our universe began. And that event was a cataclysmic event as well, very much like a big bang in reverse, sort of a big crunch. So they're competing philosophies. They're competing interpretations, but lay on the hard part is there were no eyewitnesses. There's no direct evidence from that epoch, we're talking about at least as far back as 13,800 million years ago when our current universe began. The question is, was there a universe 13 billion, 800 million and one years before that? And that is the perhaps hottest question in all of science, in my opinion.

Wow. So I'm just going to go all out here and ask you questions that I know are not answerable, but maybe they are. So what 50 trillion years ago, what was there? There may have been nothing. There may have been absolute absence of not only matter, such as protons and neutrons and my favorite, the crouton, but there could also be an absence of time itself. And even if there was a beginning, Leon, if you think about it, imagine for one second,

the universe did come into existence at a specific date. And you could actually, if you had a calendar at that time, you could go back and find out, oh, it was March 4th, you know, negative 13 billion years ago, right? Let's say you could do that. But now ask the question for one second, how does a second proceed when time itself comes into existence? So to answer your question, first you have to define what is time. right? Because you're asking me to go back in time, perhaps before time existed. Perhaps there was

a notion of time. Perhaps the universe existed and time existed too for all eternity, for an infinite amount of what we now conceive of as time. But time is very tricky. It's a very tricky quantity. It's in some sense very mysterious because there is no unified definition of time. Some say, very simply, almost like a Zen koan, they say time is what a clock measures. And then what is a clock made of? It's something that measures time. So time is change. Some people say change is related to something called entropy, which we can discuss.

And some say in the absence of either one, you have an emergence of time, just as we have an emergence of temperature. If you think about it, imagine you're in a room right now. Are you in L.A.? Right now, Leah? Yes, I am. So, L.A. is the same as San Diego. It's about 70 degrees outside, not to make people jealous, you know, watching on the East Coast or wherever in Europe. It's not 70 degrees, beautiful sunshine, no clouds in the sky. And now you zoom in in in the room that you're in. You're in a room. It's filled with gas molecules, filled with oxygen, a lot of nitrogen, other water vapor, et cetera. Now, zoom in with the thermometer and move it around the room. It'll pretty much be constant. A little bit warmer near where you are. It'd be 98.6, hopefully. You're looking quite healthy. Maybe if there's a window, it'll be a little bit warmer, colder perhaps.

And now keep zooming in to the size of a molecule and then ask, what's the temperature of that molecule? You actually can't define that. In other words, the concept of temperature is what's called emergent. It's a property of a collective, just as the properties of a beehive cannot purely be understood from the properties of individual insects. but instead only emerge when considered as a collective. Same is true of temperature. And temperature is intimately related to this concept of motion. Motion is a type of change.

The molecules are in motion. When you stop their motion, you bring them to absolute zero. They do not move at all. And there is complete order. And these notions, time, temperature and entropy are uniquely interrelated. And yet you cannot give a unique, all-impotry. an all-encompassing definition of all of these. And it just boggles the mind that we take for granted these notions of time, of space,

of energy, of temper. We take it for granted. But we, and I'm not even talking about individual laypeople like yourself, talking about experts. We just take it for granted. We go about our day. But in reality, these are the reasons that I got into science to answer these most mysterious questions about the nature of reality.

And the more that we learn, the more we realize how much more there is still to learn, even about a question as basic in some sense is a question you asked me. What happened, you know, an incomprehensible amount of time before the big bank? I think I just became 1.7% cleverer after listening to what you just said. But not clever enough to fully understand what you just said, right? So why did you, why do you do what you do? Why did you, it seems that you dedicate, I mean, I don't know who you are, right? But it seems that you've dedicated your life to this. Why?

I think it's the most fascinating thing a human being can do. I'm acutely aware of my own mortality in that we only have a certain amount of time, lifetime. We only have a certain amount of attention. We only have a certain amount of innocence of protecting the things that we are uniquely able to do, to be parents, to be, you know, teachers, to be lovers, to be whatever. In my case, you know, hopefully not all three at the same time, but in my case, I want to suck out of life all that it has to offer, which means exercising this three-pound supercomputer that all of us human beings are given uniquely. You know, Leanna, you know, it's not commonly appreciated. The name of the human species is homo sapien. What does homo sapien mean? It means man who has wisdom or knowledge. But what does he have knowledge of? obviously women too.

Women probably have more wisdom. But what do they have knowledge up? We're the only creature. Did you ever think about this? I don't know if you have any pets. I've got a couple of dogs, cats, whatever. They don't know that their life is finite. Only human beings know that life is finite.

Only you and I know that we come with an expiration date. And so I have known that for a very long time. And I don't want to waste my time doing stuff that is fundamentally aberrant or taking me away. from my core mission, which is to learn as much while I can, teach as much while I can as an educator, as a professor, and as a parent, not just by biological children, which I'm blessed to have, but of ideological children, to get people as interested in curate. My YouTube channel, my motto is ABC, always be curious. Because curiosity, you do with no expectation of reward. I've always been curious since I was a kid. It sounds like you were too. You asked these questions.

you said for as long as you've existed, that's a fundamental, unique aspect of human beings. I talk to a lot of biologists and neuroscientists and sometimes my YouTube channel, and they'll often say, you know, the human animal, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'll stop them. I'm like, no, no, no, we're not an animal. We may be animated and that we can move and we can do the things that animal means, but we're intrinsically different. There's something unique about what we have, this knowledge that we hear with a perishable

expiration date. So I want to take, make the most of it. And my vehicle to do that is to encourage and stoke the imaginative fires that come through curiosity. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage.

Wow. Do you think that we will find an energy source? This is a random question, but you seem pretty clever, so I'm going to ask you. Do you think that we will find an energy source that can take us to different galaxies like they do in start? trick. I don't think the issue is energy. It's actually not an issue of energy. It's, and maybe I could reinterpret your question to not mean other galaxies necessarily, because I think their mission was to go throughout our galaxy. I'll take a step back. The universe, our solar system is comprised of eight planets. When I was a kid, it was nine.

Pluto got the boot. But nevertheless, there are eight planets in our solar system. Our solar system, our planets orbit around the sun. In our galaxy, our galaxy, our galaxy, is made of 100 billion suns or more, each one with at least eight, probably thousands of planets or asteroids, planetary bodies, all of which, you know, in some cases could have supported life potentially at some era in their existence. And therefore, the universe is quite big, but it's much bigger than our galaxy. And the problem is our galaxy is enormous. It's almost incomprehensibly big. And then you start to think, well, there's other galaxies. and related to what I study is a concept,

as mind-blowing as any of that, which is that there may be other universes. We'll get into that. So I'll reinterpret your question. Is there a possibility of human beings traversing our galaxy, going boldly where no man has gone before or a woman, right? So that is very much a possibility.

That which is not forbidden in physics is mandatory. In other words, if it's not impossible, it happens somewhere, somehow. Now, there are no laws that prevent us from doing that. I've had on the famous Carl Sagan's widow. Her name is And Drurian. And she participated in some of Carl Sagan's exploits. And she told me a story on the interview I did with her.

And it was about how she recorded her brainwaves just a few weeks after falling in love with Carl Sagan. They recorded it onto this golden disc of record made. of solid gold affixed to a spacecraft called Pioneer. Pioneer was launched decades ago, and it flew out of our solar system. It's actually on a mission to some star right now. It's not going to do the same kinds of high-resolution photographs or dig up parts of some planet, but it's actually the first kind of inverse meteor. You know, meteors, you've ever seen a meteor there in L.A. It's a little hard, but you'll see these shooting stars. Those are chunks of space rocks traveling from our solar system, impacting our atmosphere at fantastic velocities

tens of thousands of miles per hour. They slam them with such explosive force. They light up and they provide this amazing, beautiful sight. Well, human beings for the first time, just in the last few decades, have had, in the billion years of history of Earth, are now doing invert. We're shooting out chunks of our planet into the universe, and some of them are on a voyage to the star. So it's completely possible. Now, these don't contain people just yet, and their energy is purely chemical. You know, or in some cases, they have nuclear energy generators to generate electricity, but not to generate thrust. But there's nothing that impedes us from constructing a nuclear-powered rocket or an ion drive or something like that that could accelerate at modest accelerations.

It doesn't take very long to accelerate to very high velocities. The problem, again, Leon, is the size of the galaxy. It is enormous. We have a galaxy that traveling at the speed of light, which no physical object can reach, we take over 100,000 years to cross it at the speed of light. Then there's a problem of, well, once you get where you want to go, you have to slow down. Unless you want to be splattered like a bug on a windshield, you have to do so. gracefully and gradually, and that takes even, you know, maybe just as long. So you're looking at

things that far exceed the human lifespan by thousands of times. And yet, it's not impossible. The question is, would we want to do it? Or would we do something much more simple, which is to have this type of a situation that you and I are enjoying? In other words, a digital experience becoming digital nomads, vagabonds, traversing the galaxy with almost all the same experiences that we and I are having right now. It would be nice to be in person. I don't know why we're not. We're close. I guess they didn't want to ruin the surprise and you know, you might have canceled the interview. But anyway, the point being, what is experience other than mainly chemical signals perceived by visual sensors, by touch, by hearing? And then transmutation.

into chemical signals that enter into your nervous system and then are perceived as physically tangible or whatever. But with the rate of progress that we're seeing right now, there's nothing that could prevent us from having a fully virtual metaverse type experience, traveling the galaxy, exploring it without ever leaving the comfort of our podcast studios. So I think that's another way to look at it. Is it the same if your body doesn't go with you? Well, what is your body, if not a chemical sensory processing kind of center attached to this

three-pound supercomputer that no human being can never replicate? So I ask you, you know, would you take that? Or would you take the possibility of having to be cryogenically suspended for 100,000 years at the minimum and then hopefully reawakened on another planet? I don't know. I would take probably the former one. Well, I would certainly watch the like metaverse version of it, right? I mean, that would just be beyond incredible.

I mean, are you really saying that that's possible that you could put, again, this is a very crude way of saying, right? But you could put a camera on a rocket ship, send it somewhere, and that camera would work 50 trillion miles away. Well, so that was in part. part what I was saying, but actually even simpler than that in some ways, you and I didn't send cameras to each other, right? We sent a web link. Eric, your wonderful producer sent me this wonderful thing and your team is phenomenal. They just sent me encrypted data. In other words,

it's your data that I am interacting with. I'm not interacting with you. I didn't send you a camera microphone. You didn't send me one, although I'll accept one because you have a great setup there and I love your production quality. But if you were to do that, no, we're just saying we, we have either visual sensors or if we could communicate with some other alien civilization, the first thing that we'd want to know about is what they're like, what their civilizations like, what their technology is like. And how much are they like our civilization? Do they have a society? Do they have an order? Do they have the same genetic material that we have? do they have affiliation between successive genetic lines and themselves?

In other words, like hereditary kinship. Is it completely different? Is it like insects that like self-reproduce, one individual becomes a drone and that just continues? Or is it unique like we are with, you know, duplicate sets of copies of genetics that improve over time through natural selection and evolution? We don't know. So I guess what I'm saying is we need for there to be. for us to experience it, we would need to have another caller at the end of the line. On the other hand, there's immediately plans by colleagues and friends of mine to actually

do what you suggested a few minutes ago, send little cameras with sensors whizzing by foreign star systems, and then radioing and telemetering back the signals from those voyages. Again, very far removed from us, from us physically getting on a rocket. but then much faster, or perhaps a quarter of the speed of light. And to reach our nearest neighbor solar system called Proxima Centauri would take these probes about 20 years traveling at about one-fifth the speed of light. And that is being funded right now by a team led by a Russian billionaire. I almost said oligarch, but he's not an oligarch.

Uri Milner, he's a tech investor up in the Bay Area. And he's funding a project called Breakthrough Star Shot to do just this. And so, yes, we're approaching us on many different fronts. And then the third and final frontier, if you like, is to ask questions about the value and virtue of simulating other worlds. In other words, us learning about these other worlds through new technology like the James Webb Space Telescope recently launched are the types of telescopes that I build in the Otocama Desert and the South Pole Antarctica, where I've been twice taking those types. of cosmological realizations and sending them and then asking questions about what those virtual worlds could be like. That's another way of exploring.

It's purely digital. And so all these have different merits. All of them will happen at some point or another. Whether or not that's on a timescale that's convenient for you and me to buy a ticket is still an open question, though. Hold on. You just said something. You said that you build telescopes.

Yes. Okay. What type of telescopes do you build? And what is the most amazing thing you've ever seen on one of these telescopes? So we built telescopes that are designed not to provide images to the human eye or even pitch pretty pictures in a sense. We are listening using radio waves to the most violent process in the history of the entire universe, which is the birth of the universe itself. We are using radiotoloscopes, and if you're watching on YouTube, you can see them behind me. These are dishes that look like satellite TV dishes, except they're much, much bigger. Some of them are 20 feet across. And they're used to detect the afterglow of the Big Bang itself.

And in so doing, we are aspiring to determine whether or not the universe came into existence because of what is called a quantum fluctuation, a disturbance in the force, where the force, in this case, are the laws of quantum mechanics itself. If the universe is unique in a one-time affair, it had a start date and actually has an expiration date, we can discuss that a different time, perhaps, but its start date is like it's birthday. And I've asked probably hundreds of people this call. I'll ask you, I'll put on my podcast. Now you're in the guest seat, Leon. If I ask you, sir, what's the favorite day or most important day on the calendar to you? What do you tell me? The day that I feel and share the most love, whatever that day may be.

That's beautiful. That is just delightful. And I love to hear it. But I ask for a calendar day. So you have to tell me some event or something akin to an event that's, recurring that you would look forward to. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill,

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So what is January 1st? It's the start of a new year. January is named after the Roman god Janus. What does Janus do? Janus, the Roman god, looks forwards and backwards and backwards and represents a portal to another dimension. Now, January 1st is traditionally in our secular calendar the beginning of the year.

So no, you told me. Most people will say that. They'll say Christmas. They'll say their anniversary, their kid's birthday, their own birthday. They're kind of self-centered like me. What are those? What do they all have in common? Only one thing.

They're a beginning. They represent some beginning, some beginning that launched a new perception of who they are or what's important to them. So they look forward to. And so it's a natural human desire to want to understand origins. That's what I'm getting at. People want to know what they're, Their origin was, if it's their birthday, it's an origin of a year.

What's looking ahead? What do we learn from the past? It's an origin. It's a portal. And in so doing, I think it reveals a very fundamental and beautiful human trait that we love and fascinated by origin. So that's what my telescope seek to do. We're trying to determine by looking at this heat permanent left over from the formation of the first elements that ever existed in the universe.

we're asking the question, was the universe unique? Was there a universe before our universe? How violent was its birth? And then, as I said, what will happen deep into the future? Along with other questions, such as what is the universe made of predominantly? We don't know. We don't know 95% of what makes up our universe. We know that the universe has a certain amount of energy.

Einstein's famous theory and equation, E equals MC squared, It says for any amount of energy, you can equate it to a mass, the M, times the speed of light square. We don't know what 95% of that E is. And in the mass M term, we don't know 80% of what the mass is. And yet we confidently predict things like the age of the universe. We know that. We know how fast the universe is expanding. We know what it's made of in terms of the ordinary matter that we're made up of.

And yet, there are all these mysteries. that we don't know about. And so these telescopes are designed to take the first and oldest light in the universe, which is now in the form of a heat or radio wave called a microwave background. We're using that to discern the imprimatur of the very first fingerprints of creation. And we're hoping to have this deployed in Chile by the end of 2024. and currently we have a project that we are now sort of competing against, but it was a project that I started a long time ago when I was in L.A. at Caltech, and that's called Bicep, and that's

at the South Pole in Antarctica. And we actually claimed we did discover the origin of the universe on St. Patrick's Day, 2014. And I wrote a book about it, and it's called Losing the Nobel Prize. And it's a story about how scientists and my own ambition, a memoir of what it feels like to do what I feel is the most important science you could do, and come very close to the highest accolade human beings have ever constructed. It's called the Nobel Prize and come up short for reasons that are related to the fact that human beings are the people that do science. People think science is done by robots or automaton or whatever. No, despite the stereotypes of the contrary, you know, there's a famous joke, Leon, I don't know if you've heard it, but, you know, how do you know a scientist is outgoing? Well, he looks at your shoes when he talks to you. And that, you know, has some validity as a lot of jokes do. But in this case, it is really undermining the fact that we who do science are also human beings. And we have desires and biases and prejudices and goals and wonder and curiosity. Everything that's good, about children and their wonderment, but also everything that's bad. You know, children, I've got a few children, and, you know, they're wonderful.

They're inquisitive. They're curious. They're imaginative. They're playful. They're delightful. They don't play well with others. They're jealous. They're petty.

They take their ball and go home. You got to realize that people are intrinsically of, like Janus, two sides. They have a good side. They have a bad side. And some of those things can come to play, as they did for me in this story that I tell in losing the Nobel Prize, how did we come to understand what we need to do better next time? And that in this case is to build an instrument that can see what we want to say, but also see some of the things we don't want to see and separate those things out.

So those are types of telescopes that I built. They are sensitive to invisible signals, not visible light. and they can be uniquely probative of the properties that led to the universe as we observe it today. So what is the oldest thing you've seen or heard? We measured the impact of the what's called dark matter, how much dark matter. So there's ordinary matter that we're made of like protons, neutrons, croutons. And those ordinary matter is dwarfed, it turns out, by something called dark matter. Dark matter simply means stuff that it weighs something, but has no other interaction.

It doesn't heat up. It doesn't cool down. It doesn't bump in and interact in an ordinary way as ordinary baseball does or an apple pie. No, it doesn't behave that way. And yet it keeps our universe together, sort of the glue, this invisible glue that was only discovered about 60 years ago. And yet outnumbers ordinary matter like you and I are made of. to one. So we measured in using not a scale, but we used these very distant galaxies, very far away

galaxies. And we used them, and they were sort of in the foreground. And we used them as kind of like lenses. It's called gravitational lensing. So these galaxies are made of matter, ordinary protons and neutrons, plus dark matter, much more dark matter, five times a much dark matter. And then they act to bend the path of light as life light travels from the early universe, this cosmic microwave background, the most ancient light in the universe, as it travels towards my telescopes, it got bent a tiny amount, just like a lens. If I put a lens between you and me, I would look distorted. And we reconstructed that. And my colleagues and I were able to effectively weigh how much dark matter there was in these galaxies at this enormous distance. And we were doing that,

you know, also in an effort alongside the effort to measure the earliest moments in the universe's history. So that's like the farthest away thing. But again, you don't see it. You know, you put it, you take data. It's in the form of radio waves. It gets collected by sensors. And then, you know, it's just like you don't see Wi-Fi in your, you know, flying through your house that's there. You can make an image of it. You could make a picture of how the Wi-Fi is hotter near your your router and less hot near the, you know, less bright near the window or something like that. We do that, but using the whole sky. And then we look and drill down into where these different galaxies are.

And we measured how much dark matter there was towards those galaxies. It was quite an amazing discovery. Wow. 2.6% cleverer now. I still didn't fully understand what you were saying, but I got some of it. So the question that I'm sure you get all the time, that is unprovable. as we stand here now, but I have to ask it, are we alone? I'm in a minority of scientists that I believe we are alone.

And I should make it very clear that I am a minority. Most scientists think not only is their life, there's intelligent life, there's technological life, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm a simple person in some ways. and I like to say, I want to see the evidence. I want to see the data before. And that's when they'll admit. There is no data.

There is no proof. There is no evidence for any other life form from the most, you know, enormous kind of city building, you know, intelligent technological life, broadcasting laser beams throughout the galaxy or, you know, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock traveling around on the enterprise. There's no evidence of that. But more than that, there's no evidence of either. in some slime mold, you know, something that you might find on the piece of a cheese or something.

There's no evidence of that, let alone, you know, things with huge prosthetic foreheads. Now, lack of evidence doesn't mean lack of existence. It could be that there are no other life forms. Or it could be the universe is so big. As I said, traveling at the speed of light, it will take you four years to get to our nearest neighbor solar system, which has some planets in it. We've stared at those planets. We don't believe there's any technology signals coming from it.

We will know soon from something like the James Webb Space Telescope launched on Christmas 2021. We'll know maybe if there's some evidence for like atmospheric gas like carbon dioxide because maybe they're burning fuel to make energy. Or maybe they had trees like living life systems that produce oxygen. So we can see oxygen. We can use that as a indicator. a marker, a fingerprint of simple cellular life. Again, there's no evidence that they're watching Netflix or having podcast or whatever, right? But instead, there is, you know, a lot of belief that there is life.

And I say as a scientist, I don't believe in gravity, Leon. I don't believe in evolution. I don't believe the earth is round. You know, I have evidence for it. You know, you can say you believe in God. You believe in love. like you were saying earlier, but you don't have evidence. So by necessity, you don't have to believe in things that you have evidence for. You have proof of them. But in contradistinction, you can't say

that you have evidence for the existence of God or proof of God or proof of love or even what that means. And yet you kind of know it when you see it. So as a scientist, I get very concerned when I hear my fellow scientist speaking because of the vast space of probability that there must be life. look, the ocean is vast. The Pacific Ocean, we can have it, we have it here in San Diego as well as there in L.A. It's vast. It's not only vast. It's liquid water.

It has tons of nutrients. It has, it has an abundance of single-celled life all the way up to the largest living creatures on the planet's oceans, these great blue whales. And yet, there's no, you know, technology. There's no. And this is like a proven place where life exists. Life didn't evolve to have technology underwater. So just having a vast space for it.

You can say, well, all you need is to look at how big our galaxy is. I mean, I'm a professor. I just convinced you how big our galaxy is the closest star to us. Our closest neighbor is four years away traveling at the speed of light, which will never be able to do. And yet, you'll say to me, well, 70% of the earth is covered by water. and I'll say, well, there's no life in it. There's no technology in it, rather.

There's plenty of life, but there's no technology. And worse than that, when we do find life in the ocean, we just continue to dump our sewage into it. In other words, if we discovered life and it's some single-celled organism, that will be very important, very interesting. But I don't think it would really change who we are as a civilization, as much as people think it is. I think if we found another technological civilization,

communicating with radio waves and watching TikTok and what have you, that would be amazing. And that would transform us and probably in ways we can't even envision right now. But the probability of that is so astronomically small that I claim it's not impossible, but it's as close to impossible as you could possibly imagine. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises.

It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Which is pretty bad odds, if you want. That is. Do you ever, do you ever, I mean, I guess I know the answer to this as well, but do you ever look up at the sky and think to yourself, well, clearly you do. So I don't even know I'm asking this question, but I'm going to ask you anyway. Do you ever look up at the sky and look up and think like what on earth is going on?

What is happening? I guess, I guess, I don't know. I would assume yes, right, because this is what you've dedicated your whole life to. Yeah. Yeah, I love to think about that. In science, we don't typically think about the purpose of something, you know, why it's there. And I don't think it's a non-relevant question. I think it's incredibly important question.

We typically don't ask why questions in science. We ask how, you know, how, how fast is the universe expanding? You know, what is that galaxy made of over there? You know, why can't I ever remember, you know, somebody's phone number anymore? We ask these questions, but we don't really look for purpose-based questions from science. The word science, remember earlier I said sapien means knowledge or wisdom, homo sapient, in Latin. Well, the word science in Latin, cientia, means knowledge. It doesn't mean wisdom.

And so I think wisdom gives you the whys and knowledge gives you the what's house, where's, you know, who all the journalistic Ws except for the Y. And for that reason, I think we shouldn't look to science for wisdom or for purpose, teleology. You know, as I said, people say that if they saw a slime mold on, you know, the planet Proximus and Turi B, it would be revolutionary radical, et cetera. I see no evidence for that. Again, the way that not only that humans treat the ocean or treat, you know, the white rhinoceros or whatever, but the way that human beings treat other human beings, you know, we're talking in a. in a time, you know, for the archives, if this is viewed years from now or listen to years from now, it's during the, you know, Russian invasion of Ukraine of 2022. Well, it's not the first time Russia and

Ukraine, you know, suffered tremendous bloodshed caused primarily by the Soviet Union at the time, but the Ukrainian genocide, the 8 million Ukrainians. These are human beings like you and me, exactly like you and me, murdered, killed by other human beings. The Holocaust. another six million people targeted systematically that's not like oh well we you know we we we burned down a rainforest you know living organ that as evil you know as that could be perceived no this is the true paragon of evil that we kill each other we kill the only known you know sentient beings of conscious pure consciousness again homo sapient we know that we know we know that we know that we're the only ones that know our cats don't know a cow doesn't know

you know, a Brazilian hardwood tree doesn't know. We're unique. And yeah, we destroy each other. It's awful. And so, yeah, I think it's important to look at it as in context. It's incredibly important to do it. And I'm inspired by my colleagues who studied the search for life in the universe. I don't see any evidence for its current existence. And even in the most primitive state, I don't see further evidence for it being technological, obviously. And three, I wonder about how we would treat the inhabitants or other entities that would exist in the universe simply based on, you know, as they say, past performance is not a guarantee of future returns, but I think in a human being's case, it's where a mixed back.

You know, it's interesting you say that there's no evidence. prior to Columbus leaving in 1492, there was no evidence that North and South America existed, but it did. True, true. I mean, you know, people say, oh, there's no evidence. I thought, I was afraid you're going to say that the earth was round, but there was plenty of evidence for the earth being around.

But, no, you're right. And, you know, people say, oh, Columbus discovered America. But of course, there were like natives watching him discover them, right? So they existed. Now, it's true. And Arctica has no inhabitants on it. So it truly was discovered in the heroic age of discovery of the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was spotted only 120 years ago by ship. And the South Pole where my telescopes are located that I built originally a bicep telescope. That wasn't reached until 110 years ago. It was reached in like my great-grandparents lifetime. It wasn't like Columbus or something like that.

So it is true, there are places on the globe that are, you know, kind of unexplored, unreached, and that's wonderful. But, you know, again, just mere space. Here, that actually brings up a good point that I maybe neglected to make or amplify. We didn't know one seventh of the continents existed. And yet there's almost no life on that continent. In other words, you say, like, imagine like you say, oh, we're going to discover seventh of the, of the inhabitable land on earth.

And there are people right now that live on it. Guess how many people are in Antarctica, the whole continent as we speak? 158. Very close. Yeah. That's very close. Under 200.

Okay. And we're speaking in the middle of their winter, the beginning of their winter. In March 21st is the beginning of fall. And then the sun sets on that day at the South Pole and doesn't come up again until the first day of spring, which down there is September 21st. So there's like 200 people on an entire continent larger than the size of Europe. And yet, if you said, well, well, what if I just told you you're some intelligent alien? We just discovered a new continent. Oh, so would you think,

how much do you think the population of Earth just goes up? Well, by, you know, 14%. No, it went up by zero, almost nothing. So just having the capacity, even on that inhabitable planet, you know, where there is, you know, some liquid water down there and so forth. There's life, but it's not like human beings, not like naturally evolving technological life. So again, potential existence isn't actual existence and lack of evidence isn't lack of existence, but they can sometimes be interrelated. Yeah. Clearly the producers put you and me in touch because I love space and I love astronomy and all this

kind of stuff. We could be here forever, but I'm going to ask you, One final question. What do you think that looking at space can teach us on Earth? What are the lessons? Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Levato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric

church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. You in? Must be 21 to enter. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. I think that looking into space can teach us about the the fragility and the beauty

of life and that it doesn't have to be this way. And you could either take that as a, you you know, kind of maybe a motivation. Again, it can't be perceived as evidence for God, but if you are spiritually inclined, you could say, look, we could be as many of the, you know, the preponderance of animal life form. Again, I don't like that word, but when it applies to human beings, but let's just use it. The preponderance of animal life form of life on Earth didn't have color vision. Now, I have color vision. I'm thankful to say, you know, I hope many people do. I know some friends are colorblind, whatever. But the potential for color vision is, is, some sense superfluous. There are plenty of animals. My pet dog doesn't need color vision and it gets

around just fine. And he seems to live a happy life, although he's ignorant that he's going to die someday. And I aim to keep him alive as long as possible. So now, when we look at that, we could say, well, it's kind of an accident. It's evolution. It's done for survival of the fittest, those that had color visions, you know, exceeded, but at night, our color vision is basically useless. The naked eye can't really perceive very many colors at night, and that's why we have these rod cells, which are older, and those are shared by dogs and other animals, and those to see intensity black and white. The fact that we can see other things, and that we can see using our minds eye, when we

connected to a telescope, we can see these other worlds like the moon. And I'm not talking about seeing Proxima Centauri B. And as an astronomer, even in L.A., you, Leon, should get a telescope. if you don't have one, because you can see the exact same craters on the moon, the same rings around Saturn, the same four bright moons of Jupiter with a telescope from downtown L.A. Any night of the year that's clear and those objects are out. And those three or four objects, they revolutionized our concept of humanity more than any other aspect or branch of science, I claim.

Because it's so visceral. You can't reproduce what it felt like to discover the Higgs boson, unless you happen to have like 12 billion euros lying around and you could have weight seven years. Because that, and it didn't take place in one instant. But you can replicate exactly identically viscerally the way that Galileo felt when he discovered those objects for the first time in human history. You'll feel as he did. You didn't make the discovery first. He did. But you're feeling what he felt.

There's no other science to my knowledge where you get that experience. Oh, I discovered superconductivity. Yeah, well, you need liquid helium that operates at 454 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. I hope you have some of that lying right. No, you can't do it. But astronomy is unique. So I tell parents, please get your kid a cheap telescope. Go on Amazon.

One day, Leon, I'm going to make Keating brand telescopes. And I have a video called The Gift on my YouTube channel where I talk about what it's like. And I give a buyer's guide for cheap telescopes. Nowadays, they have telescopes. I would have had my mind blown as a 12-year-old when I got my first telescope with GPS and smartphone adapters and you can post it to Instagram. It's incredible. But those discoveries that you might give to your children or grandchildren can change

our life. It did for me. Just looking up and realizing your mind is connected to your eye and you become a scientist, whether you like it or not. And you feel what it's like to make discoveries. because you don't care that someone else saw it before you. You're just looking at this magnificent set of rings around Saturn and these little points of light surrounding Jupiter and these huge mountains and deep craters on the moon,

some of which contain shadows starker and darker than anything you've ever seen on Earth. And again, you can see that from L.A. I saw it from outside New York City as a 12-year-old. I changed my life forever. So I'm asking people, go to my website, Brian Keating.com. I have a buyer's guide, search on buyer's guide on my blog for a telescope, and you'll be able to get some tips on how to get a telescope for you or someone you love. Brian, I'm going to go and buy a telescope.

I actually had a telescope in my old house, and I would use it, and I would look at the sky, and it would really, you know, inspire me and make me even more curious. I was in Arizona a couple of years back, and it was a bigger telescope. I was in the middle of nowhere, and we were kind of like on a stargazing tour. And they showed us, they said, look through the telescope and you can see the rings of Saturn. And it is quite extraordinary. You can see the rings of Saturn. They're there.

And it's just pretty amazing. Unbelievable. It's so visceral when you feel it. And when you show it to somebody after you do a little bit of research, just stay one page ahead of that. It's an old professor's trick. No, no. You'll change your life, even if you don't become, or they don't. become an astronomer. I mean, how many people can do it? There's more professional NBA players

than there are professional astronomers that do what I do in America. And yet, it can change your life because it changed the way they think about humanity and our place in the literal cosmos in which we live. Beautiful. Well, thank you very, very much. It was a true pleasure to chat with you. And if you ever find your way up to Los Angeles, please let me know. And I'll ask you more questions. That would be a treat. Then, thank you so much. Thank you. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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