Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - MIT Professor Sara Seager: Love, Loss, & Life in the Cosmos (#144)

Starting point is 00:00:04 Hi, everybody. I am just coming off of a box of Kleenex that I used in the recording of this episode with Sarah Seeger. On the occasion of her magnificent memoir known as the smallest lights in the universe, this is a very emotional episode for me, dealing with some painful issues that she and I share and so I don't share with her that she's managed to get through and just really left me emotionally drained, but in a good way. She's a lovely human being. She's an incredible astronomer, a phenomenal mentor, and scientist. I know you're going to love this episode. You may want to keep a box of Kleenex in all serious news nearby, especially if you have read this book.

Starting point is 00:00:47 Because it is a work of art. It's a gift to those of us who suffer, who deal with loss at the deepest levels. And there's no one I'd rather go into the impossible with than Professor Sarah Seeger of MIT. she did humor me and go into the impossible with my final three questions. You won't want to miss those. You will miss them if you don't subscribe to this channel via YouTube and via iTunes

Starting point is 00:01:16 or wherever else you follow or get podcasts. But to get her answers in the special thrilling three final questions that I ask all my guests who agree to go into the impossible, the only way to get those is to subscribe at Brian Keating.com to my mailing list, and then you will get them. So I hope you'll do that, and you won't regret it because this is one of the deepest, most moving interviews I've ever done, and it just further solidifies my mission and bringing these magnificent minds to you, my beloved listeners, viewers out there in the world who have soul and spirit and indomitable ability to journey along with real human beings. That's what I want to do. I want a human,

Starting point is 00:01:59 scientists, including sometimes myself, because I could be robotic with the best of them. But I want to humanize people, and really it was such a delight and honor and a thrill to talk to Sarah. Today, I know you will enjoy it, and I know you'll help me in this mission by just coming along. That's all you need to do. On a ride into the impossible today, journeying to the smallest lights in the universe with Professor Sarah Seeger of MIT and joy. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I have a copy of today's guest's spectacular book. It's called The Smallest Lights in the Universe.

Starting point is 00:02:44 It's Professor Sarah Seeger. I've been a fanboy for many years, actually, of Sarah's work. Even long before she wrote this really monumental book, which I can't really talk too much about, unfortunately, Sarah, because I'll get very emotional. I'm being completely honest with you. I've never read a book like this before. I'm sure you've heard praise and encomia from all others around the world, including all the wonderful reviews you got on the back of the book, Temple Grandin, publishers weekly, Kirkus Reviews. I want to go deep, but I'm afraid. I'm afraid, sir. I don't want to

Starting point is 00:03:20 get too emotional because it really resonated a lot with me. But I want to first congratulate you, and thank you for this gift that you've given to the world, this book. called the smallest lights in the universe, in addition to all the gifts you've given in terms of other worlds that you've helped to discover. We'll talk about that. First, I want to ask you, thank you, and ask you, how are you doing today? Doing well, thanks. It's the spring here, springtime here, and it's warming up, and it's good. Yeah, life is good in the springtime. So, you know, I followed your career. We're about, you know, kind of contemporaries and age, and I've always found with you that I was never, I was never jealous of your success.

Starting point is 00:04:01 I just saw it and I was just astounded. I felt, as they said, when Stephen Hawking met Yaakov Zaldovich, who is a mentor of one of my close mentors, Alex Polmarum, Stephen Hawking said, I didn't think you really existed. I thought you were a collective, like Borbaki. And I thought that about you until, you know, very recently when I discovered you were an individual. So the first thing I want to ask is I do with all my guests, it kind of gets us into the flow of the conversation, is this book has a title and a very small subtitle. The subtitle is a memoir. I want to ask you as I ask people, which is the advice that you're never supposed to judge a book by its cover. I always judge books by its cover. And I assume a lot of effort went into choosing not only the cover, but the title. And I want to ask you, where did you come up with it? What's the origin story of the title on the cover design of this book? Well, the title actually has two different meanings. And you're supposed to get it yourself from reading the book, but I'll give the spoiler.

Starting point is 00:05:04 The smallest lights of the universe, the small slites in the universe, it refers to the other Earths. We're trying to find out, are we alone? Are there planets like our own Earth out there? Now, our Earth is very faint. It's, you know, as seen from afar, our own Earth, it shines in reflected light from the star from our sun. And our Earth, believe it or not, it's 10 billion times fainter than our sun. So when we're looking for these other Earths, they are the smallest lights in the universe. And of course, it sort of has a double entendre, if I'm not mistaken. Because the book,

Starting point is 00:05:40 it describes both my professional journey through space and also my personal journey. Think of it like the journey of outer space and the journey of inner space. And in the journey of inner space, it has a more lonely meaning, even. And if you think those earth's just out there floating through the vastness of space, it seems a bit lonely. But this other sense, it's about grief and depression. And when you're like fall off a cliff into the deep abyss, what kind of pulls you out of that are the little tiny glimmers of hope?

Starting point is 00:06:17 You have to hold on to those. And those I also call the smallest lights in the universe. And it's a story of multiple, I'm already getting emotional. This is no good. It's never happened. When I talk to Sir Roger Penrose, I don't choke up like this. But it's a, yeah, he didn't write, I guess he didn't write that personal. No, he doesn't. And most of the other, including your colleague down the hall, as I remember, Frank Wilczek, who's been on the show four times like you. I should point out, it's your fourth appearance, at least your third appearance. I think it might be your third appearance. But this is the first one-on-one. where we haven't been talking with a group, a true collective of astronomers, as we have in the past. I'll put links somewhere here, there, for people to find your previous appearances on the end to The Impossible Podcast. But it's a love story. It's a series of love stories. It's a story of self-love and kind of discovery as well. It's very unusual. And, you know, you point out that, you know, a lot of the things that you go through in this book, there's no manual.

Starting point is 00:07:18 My own father passed away when I was about the same age your father was when he passed away of a similar kind of malady. And, you know, I remember the experience I had after it of I felt scared for my own life. Not that I was going to die of the exact same thing, which, you know, obviously there's some probability if your parents have cancer. And we should take this opportunity for people to get screened and so forth as a service. But actually that I was kind of lost and without an anchor or mooring and floating through space. I wonder, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't married at that time. I didn't have any children. When you were going through these episodes, what was, you know, kind of your solace, or at least the first time? Because I don't think there's anything that can prepare. It's not that much of a spoiler to say also your husband.

Starting point is 00:08:06 Michael passed away your first husband. And I should say, first of all, I want to thank your husband Charles Darrow, who put us in touch many months ago when news of phosphine discovery on Venus took place, We'll talk about that later. So shout out to Charles, who's a fellow amateur astronomer, but also, you know, semi-professional in some ways, too. But you went through this series of tragedies that no one should really experience for many, until they're much older. But there's no handbook. There's no instruction manual.

Starting point is 00:08:35 As complicated as the instruction manual that you wrote for NASA for a star shade, at least it exists when you have a child, when you lose a parent. There's no instruction manual on how to write a book like this. How did you do it? Well, there's a lot of questions in there, but you were first going to ask me if I had an anchor. And I suppose I did, actually. And one of my anchors was my children, because as you know, anyone who's had children, if they're really little, like two years old, you know, you can't ignore them and just go off on your own little universe of grief.

Starting point is 00:09:08 And the other was my work. I just love my work and being able to focus on it, everything goes away. And my work was my solace, actually. Does it happen to you, Brian, like you start programming or whatever your thing is and you just get so absorbed in it? And the other stuff just goes away for a while. It does. It does. And certainly, you know, as I think MIT alum, Richard Feynman once said, you know, at least as a professor, you have your teaching. Because if you fall, you know, into disarray with your research, you can always say, I'm doing something productive. and in fact that's one of the highest callings there is.

Starting point is 00:09:49 One thing I learned from this professor, Alex Polnarev, my mentor who was communicated to him by his mentor, Jakov Zeldovich, was that the word scientist in Russian means someone who is taught. It probably means a man who is taught, but be that as it may, it means someone who was taught. And it made me think we have an obligation because we were taught. And you talk about the roles of your father and of kind of the stars and your work as a type of teacher as a mentor and guiding you. But you strike me as someone who's always been incredibly independent and not necessarily, you know, to prove other people wrong. I think sometimes people use this like their rejections and failure as like rocket fuel to propel them to do better and

Starting point is 00:10:33 I'll show you, your high school girlfriend or boyfriend or rejected me. No, I don't, I don't get that sense at all. I think it is true that our work can can do that. For me, also, I have to say it is my burgeoning faith or curiosity about existential questions. And I do want to talk to you about that. Obviously, you know, I'm Jewish. My religion precludes me from proselytize. I never proselytize in case you're just joining this channel. You know, it seems much more emotional than it normally is. And that's okay. We have a diversity of different topics on this show. But yeah, it's true. You can lose yourself in your work. But not having children, not being my older brother, was married and had children. And I remember wondering, was it easier for him? Was it harder when we lost our father

Starting point is 00:11:19 to have children or not? And, you know, I wonder, I only had my teaching, in other words, and it's not the same. Yeah, I don't think there's, I don't think any one case is easier than another, honestly. So I want to talk about the other thing that I communicated with MIT alum. There's going to be a lot. MIT has had, next to maybe UCSD has had the most representation on the Into the Impossible podcast. I've had Michael Saylor. I've had Andrew Baturby. I've had Jim Simons, all these MIT alumni. One of my favorite is, of course, Jan 11, MIT alum.

Starting point is 00:11:52 And I also had Katie Frees, who is an MIT, who was a professor at MIT as well. So I want to ask you, when I talked to Jana, her first book was sort of a memoir, too, called How the Universe Got It Spots, a delightful book. a book of science, as your book is, a memoir. But I said to her, you know, was it risky to write a memoir? First of all, you were so young. She was so young when she wrote, she didn't even have a faculty job. At least, you know, you were already tenured, you know, full professor when you wrote this book. You came into MIT as one of the rare people that they actually tenure ahead of time. And that's well deserved. And of course, you've had tremendous accomplishments. We'll put those in the bio somewhere. I don't think that's the reason I'm talking to you today.

Starting point is 00:12:34 this magical book is really just, it's impossible to not be overwhelmed by it in a good way. What gave you the confidence to write a memoir, as a, A, an astronomer, you know, B, or a scientist, a woman in science, you know, at one of the most prestigious places on Earth and Earth's history to be a scientist, is this not a risky maneuver for someone like yourself? Well, I never actually thought about that question, to be honest. What was going through my mind was when I was widowed, it was a crazy journey. Honestly, it was so bizarre and unreal, and it was incredibly, everything was magnified. Like imagine being happy or sad or frustrated. All of those are like a million times more. And I remember when I met my widow friends, which we might

Starting point is 00:13:25 get to, but I just asked them like, wow, are you writing a book on this? Someone, one of us, we have to tell the world about this. It's so crazy. And that was my main motivation. was to just share that journey. And it wasn't enough for a book, and the book sort of morphed into this whole life story thing. But another reason I wrote it, and I don't know if this speaks to every single person who reads it, is I was trying to give people a wake-up call.

Starting point is 00:13:50 You know, like life can change in the blink of an eye. And we have to try to make the most, you know, of what we have or what we can do and try to make that change that allows us to have purpose. And we'll certainly talk more about that in specific details over further reader. I hate when I would go on podcast and say, you know, can you tell us the exact contents of your book, chapter by chapter summary? You know, so my audience can save $19 in the audiobook. I have the audiobook. I have the printed copy. And it is a sort of how-to guide, how to cope with grief.

Starting point is 00:14:27 Of course, everyone is different, as you say. there is no manual, just like in a near drunken, only thing I can analogize it to is a drunken stupor when your first child is born. There's nothing that can prepare you for when your first child is born. As you know, especially doing most of the work, you know, men are limited to a few minutes at best. But nevertheless, that first night, my son is home and like he's crying. I'm like, I'm getting twice as much sleep as my wife. I don't know how she survived. But then I'm like, get the instruction manual.

Starting point is 00:14:55 Like, you know, where's the instruction? Like, there is no freaking instruction. manual. And there is, because every kid is different. And I was talking to a very good friend, a rabbinical figure in my life last night. And he was saying, like, it's just amazing because the fact that we survive, especially like you and I are like really curious. We love doing stuff. And you had all these adventures you talk about in the book. Like, we, it's a miracle that we survived. And like, I have all my fingers. Like, I'm grateful to my mom and my, you know, my father of blessed memory, you know, for at least allowing me to come into adulthood with all my extremities,

Starting point is 00:15:30 but kids never really appreciate that. And I wonder if you resonate with this. You know, Aristotle said many things, most of which in physics were wrong, you know, heavy bodies fall faster than lighter ones. There are four elements instead of 114. But one thing he said is that, you know, parents love their children more than children love their parents. And the reason he says was the sacrifice that parents do. And I actually think the children love their mothers more than their father. You know, spoiler alert for me maybe or other fathers out there because the mother's sacrifice is even more. How much of your career were you willing to sacrifice to ease the pain?

Starting point is 00:16:10 Of course, you couldn't completely. You could never erase the pain of the memory. How much explore that a little bit that you seem to me, you seem that you sacrificed a tremendous or you were willing to. And things work out, obviously. you know, well enough in some ways, but, but how did you come to that conclusion that you were going to sacrifice whatever it took for your kids? The thing is, I don't know that I really thought it through. Like, if you look back, it might look that way, but I wasn't like, okay, let me make my pie chart

Starting point is 00:16:42 of how much time I have for this or that and a weighted function about where I should be spending my time and how. I just sort of, just like you described when the first born is born, you don't really have a plan. You just kind of go with it. And when, um, you had these opportunities, I like it, because now, you know, you explored a lot more, obviously, as a woman in science, which I think would be good to talk about, you were dealing with sometimes a lot of men in science and sometimes even women or men that didn't have children. And I find this quite frequently. I get a lot of complaints. I hear a lot of complaints. Why are parents getting so much free time during COVID or relief, et cetera, et cetera. And you talk about in great detail how you had an arranger, like,

Starting point is 00:17:24 to get a prize, the Sackler Award, which you want the most prestigious prize in a strong. You had a like, like you went to Israel for like two days, right? I mean, like, who does that? Well, there's a lot of different factors. And certainly I'm just trying to remember now because I'm in this wonderful phase where my children are almost grown up. You know, my oldest will be 18 soon. And they can cook and they're very responsible. They can shop and cook.

Starting point is 00:17:47 They've had a job. They can manage money. The older one has been driving for over a year. So like we're kind of almost there. But when they were little, it's a lot because, yeah, it's really tough. The one you're talking about was I was a single mom. And as you know, like in academia, we tend to move around so we don't have family nearby. And many of us are somewhat estranged from our family, let's say.

Starting point is 00:18:08 Also, as people have kids older and older, the grandparents are old, too old to, you know, effectively take care of the kids. So I don't have anybody. And then I got this wonderful award. And the one thing about this Sackler Prize is you actually have to physically go to Israel to participate in the talks. and to receive the award. And I was just like, wow, I'm going to be half a world away from my kids. And at that time, I didn't have anyone else. I was widowed.

Starting point is 00:18:36 I didn't have anyone I could trust, like, to take care of them overnight. What if something went wrong? This is what's going through my head. What if they break their leg or they don't get hit by car? Like, that's just parenting anxiousness. How can I be that far away? Because you can't just get on the bus and come home. Like, even if you plan by the next flight, it might be a day later.

Starting point is 00:18:53 And then it takes a day to get back. As you know, you've got to change planes in New York. And the lines were really long, or they were. Oh, that's going through my head. Like, I just don't know. And then I just thought of the one person who I could trust, which was the children's aunt, Aunt Rachel. And I just explained it to her.

Starting point is 00:19:09 Like, I really, can you please come here for a few days? And she did. And so that, yeah, really highlighted to me that, you know, if the world's... You might not have thought about that, right? Right. That's a thing. A lot of people just wouldn't have... The funny thing is the other thing women would stress about it.

Starting point is 00:19:26 like, what could, what should I wear? Oh, my God, if it was. But, okay, that's not equal to moving the kids like a continental way. No, that's right. You talk. And then there's other things, too. Like, I just remember one time, um, I waited till I had a permanent job and I had a cash flow so I could hire a nanny. Like, it all worked out. I tried to have kids young, but I got a job so that I could just have my life a bit easier. But anyway, the nanny showed up at a certain time. And then there was a meeting in town for one of my collaborations, but that meeting started slightly before. You know, I'd have time to get ready and drive and park at this meeting.

Starting point is 00:20:02 And I just remember how hard it was I'd wake up the two little little kids. And, you know, it's like breastfeeding one kid, like getting them dressed, whatever they need, getting them somehow keeping the morning going, getting myself, like looking half decent, you know, even getting a shower is like nearly impossible. And then getting to the meeting. I remember all I had to do. And I got to that meeting on time, which was probably like 8 a.m. or 8.30. I got into my seat and I was like,

Starting point is 00:20:27 no one has any idea what I did up until this point, like how an uphill battle I had to just get to that meeting on time, like awake, caffeinated, dressed. Yeah. Yeah, it's like that. And so that happened a lot. And now, of course, I don't have that now. And I've forgotten until these questions, how hard it was.

Starting point is 00:20:46 But there's definitely a lot and a lot of that. Yeah. And it's conferences. You know, before COVID, we were always traveling all the time. And, you know, just how to handle the content. conferences when, even when I was married to my first husband, it's a real burden to leave the kids behind with him. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:21:05 Yeah. For my part, I think about things in terms of, you know, Shabbats, like the Friday night dinner, you get a thousand of them with each kid, you know, 18 years, times 52 weeks a year. And I ask myself, and I've given up a lot, you know, in terms of, you know, not the level of prestige that you would have been if you turned down the Sackler Award, but nevertheless, you know, meetings and just professional kind of relations and playing a different role. And I try to rekindle some of that through these podcasts where I get to, you know, have all the fun of meeting brilliant colleagues without gaining, you know, the 10 pounds that I typically do, you know, from all

Starting point is 00:21:42 the muffins and sedentary activity. So this, this podcast is my attempt at dieting and, but also mental, feeding my mind. But I couldn't help think when I read this book, something I thought about a little bit, which is that this is the only time I'm ever going to be able to write these words in that it's not like a journal where I've made erotum,

Starting point is 00:22:09 I've had to submit corrections and you might know of a certain event that led to this thing behind me. You know, it was very... I've read the book, so yes. Yeah. But you can retract, right? You can recant, you can, but a memory you can't retract.

Starting point is 00:22:23 Although Charles Barclay, the famous NBA basketball player, said he was misquoted in his autobiography. And that, that takes a lot. But I want to ask you, you know, putting this in amber, in a freezing this time, A, I couldn't help but be impressed because I know, like I say, as a man, I can only know a fraction of what a woman in science must go through, but I have great respect. I have, you know, sympathy if I can't empathize or empathy if I can't sympathize. I don't know which one is which. But the point being.

Starting point is 00:22:51 that and I kept thinking like I don't care about these prizes and I actually have come to a sense of being settled with the Nobel Prize with any prize but I want to live to impress myself and I and I kept reading your book and I said like you must be impressed with yourself not like I don't mean it at all it arrogantly but you've done so much um was that kind of liberating to put it on paper and like did it clarify as Soron Kirkregard said you know life must be lived forward but can only be understood looking backwards. And I would see that as a metaphor for the telescope. Like, did these things make sense in retrospect or, or were they worth it? Obviously, not the death of somebody, but like the challenges, the struggles that you went through. You're very candid about your,

Starting point is 00:23:34 you know, the different, you know, kind of challenges you had, learning issues and what have you that you overcame and so forth. Was this kind of liberating to put it in Amber? Well, you know, yes and no. I think from the science side, I don't really dwell too much on the past. I'm always like fixated on the next thing, the next journey. And let's get up, let me make sure we talk about Venus at some point. Yeah, of course. I'm really more looking forward than looking back. But sometimes when I look back, it's only to remind myself that I can, like the Venus thing is somewhat complex because we have a mission we want to send more than one mission to Venus. And so if I need to look back, it's only say, look, I did that stuff before. I can definitely do this. other more ambitious stuff now. But the book was liberating just from the personal

Starting point is 00:24:27 viewpoint to get all that out. It was incredibly cathartic. It's almost like do you ever have, I don't know if men do this, but for women, girl talk. You always talk to your friends and you dump stuff. And then all of a sudden you feel better, but your friend just feels a lot worse. And so it's sort of like that with a book, I just feel so good. But I know every time people read it like you, especially it strikes a course. or strikes a nerve with some people, and then they feel bad. So I feel a bit bad about that, but I just feel liberated for just getting it all together and making sense of all the personal stuff, I think.

Starting point is 00:25:01 Yeah. Carl Sagan had his widow, Andrewian on my podcast, as well as his daughter, Sasha Sagan, who's an amazing author. They were the first mother-daughter team. Soon I'm going to have Jim Gates, another MIT alum, who's been on the show three times, but I'm going to have him and his daughter, Delilah. who's getting a PhD at your alma mater at Harvard with Andy Strominger. But thinking back, you know, in kind of this way that you handled, you know,

Starting point is 00:25:32 these setbacks and challenges, I think I look at you and I see potentially, correct me if I'm wrong, you were kind of hooked as a kid astronomy and really the sky in some sense became a form of therapy. And you just talked about like this conversation you have with your girlfriends. And yeah, I do it too. It's called it my therapist. No, I don't have a therapist. I'm actually going to be, but I am going to start advertising a therapy company at some point as has reached out to me to do advertising. And first I was like, you know, I don't need that, you know, whatever. And they're like, you get a free session with our psychologist. And I'm like, is that enough? You know, do I get any drugs in this? No, I'm just kidding. I'm not going to get any drugs. But I started thinking like I used to have a personal trainer, you know, years ago or I do martial arts. I have a coach. I have a flight instructor when I do my little putting around the sky.

Starting point is 00:26:22 And so what's wrong with having a therapist? You know, what's wrong with having? And if people don't have it in their family or their spouse or their partner, they don't have partners, there's no stigma in my mind to doing it because it's really trying to perfect yourself, right, and coach yourself and make yourself better. By the way, just one second because I just realized my computer's not plugged in. So I'm just going to just before I have.

Starting point is 00:26:43 Sorry, Sarah. Let me just start. Pause it for a second. Okay. So we're back. Go ahead. Yeah, so I actually did go to therapy for about two years. Before I had my own children, I thought my childhood was, it was so destructively traumatic.

Starting point is 00:26:57 I had to sort through all that because I wanted to be healed before I had my own children. So I'm not sure where this thread was going, but I really supported it if you find the right person. Yeah. No, I agree. And one of my rabbis has said to me something like, you know, and the rabbis or ministers, priests, whatever, they can serve a similar role, but they've said things like, you know, and rabbis or ministers, like, you know, our job as parents is to pass along only half of our neuroses to our kids.

Starting point is 00:27:22 You know, if we all do that after, you know, 10 generations, there'll be almost no trace of our original starting point. But I want to talk about, as in physics, we often talk about differential equations and, of course, these need to be solved, applying both boundary conditions and initial conditions. I want to talk about your initial conditions. We've got you into astronomy. And you talk candidly about high school. And it's just so funny. because I'm like visualizing you like you're probably very, you know, appealing to the opposite sex or I don't know, the same side. Who knows? But, but you were probably attractive and you didn't realize it and you were talking about that. And like, you never really realized it. And then, but it's like

Starting point is 00:27:59 your telescope became this, this magical device. And how ironic is it that your, your avocation became your vocation. Who can you talk about that? My, my kick lately is that it's a crime. It's a moral crime. If parents don't buy their kid at least this $10 Keating brand, telescope because even from MIT, even from Cambridge, Massachusetts, even from San Diego, you can see all the craters on the moon. You can see all the planets, that Galileo, that Newton, that all these greatest... You see the bands of Jupiter and the moons of Jupiter and the moons change and Saturn's rings of Saturn's oriented favorably. It's amazing what you can see. So I see that as a gateway drug that if not applied, if not injected into their minds,

Starting point is 00:28:41 could prevent another Sarah Seeger. So can you say something to parents out there? I get this all the time. what's the best way to get my kids into a straw boys and girls of course you know we're seeing a large development since you were young i'm speaking from the office of jeff burbage the late great jeff burbage whose wife margaret was one of the founders of uh of you know base a tremendous amount of astronomical entities including the department sub department that i'm in here which you will be speaking at next week by the way i can't wait for that that zoom event i cannot wait by the time this is out it'll probably be over uh but i'm looking forward in in in retrospect too I want to talk about that. How do you tell a parent, what would you advise a parent to experiment or to encourage a nascent andcipient love of science or maybe astronomy specifically?

Starting point is 00:29:27 Save now at Whole Foods Market. It's the summer splash event with great everyday prices on 365 brand ground beef for the grill and ice cream for dessert. They have yellow sales signs on ready to cook beef or chicken kebabs too. Level up with savory marinate, spices and rubs. your cookout with a crowd-pleasing cherry pie and their balsamic chicken salad, available at the prepared foods counter. Get Summer Splash Savings Now at Whole Foods Market. Well, in general, I think it's great to expose your kids to all kinds of things, not just science. But speaking of science and astronomy specifically, and Brian, maybe you know of a,

Starting point is 00:30:08 well, people are listening to this from all over, but I really recommend once we're back to normal, let's call it, finding a local astronomy club that holds a public star party night. And so then you don't have to buy anything. You don't have to do anything complicated. You can go to the star party, look through the telescopes, the astronomers, the amateur astronomers will know, they'll be pointing to interesting things. And I think that's a really great way to get started. And whatever the equivalent of that is for other sciences as well, it's so important to expose your kids to things. Otherwise, all they find is what's on TV. Yeah, or YouTube. Well, I don't want them to

Starting point is 00:30:44 turn off the end to the impossible channel. Please do not do that. Ladies and gentlemen, I need the ad revenue. No, I'm just kidding. I don't make that much. But speaking about high school and kind of not fitting in, that's where I discovered astronomy. I fell in love with the heavens. I found it sheltering. I felt it welcoming to kind of engage with these minds. As Carl Sagan used to say, you know, book is proof that humans can work magic because you can talk to somebody or listen to somebody who's dead for hundreds of years, and they're speaking inside your head, and they're sort of visualizing their voice or oral, whatever it is called. And for, you know, for this book and kind of thinking back in my high school experience, I didn't fit in. And I wonder, is that a

Starting point is 00:31:25 bad thing? You know, in other words, yeah, of course, bullying is horrible and horrendous and should not be countenance. But, but, you know, I was sort of out of place. I didn't, like a jock. I wasn't like, I was into astronomy. That was kind of weird in the 80s, right? To be at least comet. Oh, You seem so friendly and outgoing and popular now, so it's hard to reconcile that image of you in high school. Oh, I've had a lot of makeovers. No, no, I haven't. I actually haven't. I feel like it in some sense, I once heard from a friend who went to school in the Berkshires,

Starting point is 00:31:56 not far from where you live and hike and do stuff. And he said their motto was like, it's good for a college to be at the bottom of a hill. Like when you get to a place like MIT, you might be tempted to think, I really made it. Whereas you were kind of, you told me before we start recording, you actually got rejected, you know, before every other step, before you became a 10-year-old. People know how rare that's like getting into the major leagues, you know, on your, whatever, first draft pick that Sarah did it. And it's well-deserved. But I think not fitting in in high school kind of gave me that armor a little bit of the toughness that I would need to survive some of the slings in error that I think, I mean, you've experienced a lot of that in your career. Do you think that that high school experience was formative in any sense in terms of your mental? toughness? Absolutely. And it's not just about mental toughness. It's about being able to not fit in in science as well. So if I have an idea or something I want to pursue and the rest of the world, scientific world or astronomy world is telling me that's ridiculous. That's dumb. Don't do that. That's impossible. And I could ignore that because I was comfortable not being someone who fit in and

Starting point is 00:33:01 did mainstream. So it was incredibly beneficial, I'd say. Do you feel that there is, sort of this lovely, delightful, delicious aspect of escapism in the work that you do, somewhat of the work that I do, where, you know, I'm looking for origins of maybe multiple universes, and you're looking for life and habitable worlds. You say in the book, stars are magic. You say things like these other worlds, just the thought of them is magical, is delightful, as I say, delicious, mentally delicious, and that there's probably life. And you were called in front of Congress and you were asked, you know, to do the, math for them because, you know, our congressional, you know, great, great fathers. They can't do the math themselves. And they wear that with like a badge of pride. It's like no one would say,

Starting point is 00:33:47 hmm, I can't read English, you know, like, I'm so cool. Like, I'm not good at those words and sticks. I think he was kind of teasing in a way, though. I think, you know, if we just sort of wrote out all the zeros on the blackboard, he'd get it. Yeah. So when you look at what's become known as Seeger's law and you think about these, the Fermi paradox in that context, Do you feel ever that there is sort of an escapism? I actually talk to somebody. You'll probably ridicule me. I hope you won't.

Starting point is 00:34:13 But I talked to somebody who's a proponent of what's called intelligent design. He's actually a well-known. He wrote two number one bestselling New York Times books. His name is Stephen Meyer. He's a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge in England, not the Cambridge. You're in the OG Cambridge, England. And he was saying that most of the kind of criticism that he gets is like, well, life originated on some other planet and then came here in what's called panspermia, I guess. It sounds dirty, but it's not.

Starting point is 00:34:42 But anyway, that explains the origin of life on Earth. But I was saying, that seems like it pushes it farther and farther back. And I'm wondering, is it escapist, you know, when we fantasize about other planets, harboring life, those posters that you have outside your office that you talk about, is there an escapist element? Or, you know, is it because we're not satisfied with planet Earth, or is it something else? I think it is definitely some kind of escapism. We love science fiction movies. People love reading science fiction.

Starting point is 00:35:15 It's, I think, along those lines in many ways, dreaming about the possibilities out there. What are your thoughts on that? I think that I find it a fun game, you know, kind of to speculate on, intellectually speaking. I think that people don't really appreciate how hard it is If you really go through Seeger's Law, which is kind of a modern-day version of the Drake equation, and I've had on the Drake professor, Jill Tarter on my show many times as well.

Starting point is 00:35:45 And it's kind of an encapsulation of our ignorance. And what I always point out is what you would probably do the same at MIT, if one of your students' undergraduates hands in a paper and it has all these numbers on it, but no uncertainties. And I say the uncertainties are the hard part about science. It's actually not so hard to calculate the expectation value. but the sigma, the statistical, the systematic errors, and they could be as large as 100%, and I start thinking, well, you know, what's wrong with Earth? You know, not that, like, I often feel like this, and I heard this actually in the context of Venus life, which we're going to get to, and it was like,

Starting point is 00:36:19 it wouldn't be amazing, you know, if we found evidence for life. It would mean that we're not alone in some cosmic sense, you know, and that would mean that there's high probability. Okay, that's true, but like right now, you and I are 99.7% similar to chimpanzees and bonobos. And yet, we never go around and say, oh, like, isn't amazing. Like, we're not alone on planet Earth. Like, we already take it for granted. I feel like the day after you are successful, and I pray to God that you will be successful in all that you do, but I feel like the next day we're gone as life with life as usual, and I actually have a proof for that, but let's keep going. What do you think, I mean, this, this notion that we,

Starting point is 00:36:57 there has to be other life. I think, like, why don't we look on earth and say how magical and wonderful it is to be on earth and kind of say, we should be satisfied. Not that we shouldn't look, but isn't that enough? It's funny thing how you say that, because it's an and, not an or. It doesn't have to be, oh, life is amazing on earth, or it's so great to try to find life elsewhere. We can do all those things.

Starting point is 00:37:23 And I often find, you know, Feynman again, MIT alum. I should look up what year he graduated, but he said, like, why is it okay to wax poetically about Jupiter if he's a Greek god, but it's not okay if he's just a ball of methane? And I started thinking, well, you know, I don't know how much, like people say, oh, we're just like cosmic pollution and we're cosmic, you know, star stuff, as many people have said. I don't know that that makes me feel bigger in a sense. I feel like we are the only known form of life. We're certainly the own technological life.

Starting point is 00:37:57 That doesn't preclude it. Yeah, as you say, and statements are powerful. But I kind of feel like we don't appreciate how good we are or how unique and magical we are on Earth. And I'm all forward-looking and hopefully finding even. And maybe we'd be able to do that with technology, my colleagues and I are building on the Simon's Observatory. But do you think people would react differently?

Starting point is 00:38:19 Let's say tomorrow unequivocal evidence, proof positive, whatever that means and signs, there is some life form on Venus producing phosphine. Do you think that humanity would react differently three weeks later? Would it make us like feel less lonely, perhaps, or that were, you know, less significant or more significant? I can't tell what it would do. But I'm always told that it's a really good thing, you know, that we describe. Right, right. I honestly think it depends on each individual. There's plenty of people out there. They're not the ones listening to your podcast who would just be meeting. meaningless. You know, it doesn't change your life on a day-to-day basis.

Starting point is 00:38:54 That's true. Right. And there's others who, it would be huge. Because having life on another planet, it somehow, it conflicts with the creation story. And there's another group who, you know, in their free time might wonder, wow, that's great. And then three weeks later, they'll may go back to just, okay, their everyday life. But, you know, there's, but back to your point about Earth, let's switch topics for a second. Yeah. There are so many amazing things on Earth.

Starting point is 00:39:20 I agree. Like, think about the life. I was just, I don't know what Twitter feed or what social media I get, but someone was going on about life at the bottom of the ocean. You know, these hydrothermal vents, it's amazing. When people first discovered the complex life deep down at the bottom of our ocean, made possible by the energy coming off of these vents, they just couldn't believe it.

Starting point is 00:39:40 That was like discovering life on another world in that sense. And I feel like there's so many chances for that here on Earth, whether you're learning it for the first time. like recently on Twitter too, someone went on and on and it got quite a following about this type of bacteria that does photosynthesis off of heat, like not UV light, but the bottom of the ocean it uses heat energy. We've already known about this for a long time. It just sort of got recycled. And so you see that re-excitement the first time you learned about something or just how intelligent octopuses are. There's so many wonderful things on our planet, I agree. Yeah. So thinking about going out further into the universe will come to Venus in a little bit. A large portion of the book is kind of the, the quotidian struggle to get, to take care of business as a professor, as an astronomer. And most people think that we sit around and we, you know, we just gaze up at the heavens and we were waxing rapsodically about it and so forth. But actually it's a lot about like, well, why didn't that graduate student, you know, finish, you know, her pre-level. in time so that she could deploy to Chile to take data for this, you know, or it's like the concrete's not there or I've got this 198 page, you know, L-O-I.

Starting point is 00:40:54 People don't realize, yeah, there's a large part of your job and my job that is like any other manager's job, really. You have to have the strategy, the staffing, the budget plan, the project management, and you've got to make sure everything happens when it's supposed to, so the whole project can move forward. It's so true. And they don't, I don't know, do they at MIT? Is there any training on like how to be a professor, how to run a lab,

Starting point is 00:41:14 how to be a manager. In fact, the problem is that when I see all of my peers in industry, so much training. Oh, my gosh. One of my friends works at a financial company, and she got trained on how to give a better talk, a two-day, very intensive, very expensive workshop. And I was like, huh, like, Brian, have you ever been asked by your work to take a class on how to give a better talk? No.

Starting point is 00:41:38 I was thinking if she's taking that, I should take that. And I actually later signed up for that class. And they're constantly, one of my other colleagues got a class on how to deliver bad news. And that's about firing people. So the thing is that we really do need to be more aware of that and self-train or watch free videos or use money, ask your department head. If you have discretionary money, use that and take it on yourself to train. It's very unusual to be in an industry where there's no training but huge responsibility and expectations. Yeah, I would say we're kind of like small business people, except we don't really make a profit.

Starting point is 00:42:15 We just get citations. That's what I say. That's what I say. You're like an entrepreneur and you have to constantly keep stuff moving and figure new things out and solve really hard frontiers problems all all wrapped together. I always say the same thing. Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, it'd be great to kind of take a master class from maybe from you and we can riff on these things.

Starting point is 00:42:35 But I always say, you know, that and also Sarah, with public speaking, those two, things combined together in outreach. I feel like it's sort of a moral obligation in the sense that I'm a professor at a state university. I'm being paid by the taxpayers. If we've gotten NSF or NASA grants, we're paid by the taxpayer. And yet we never like really exchange the information with the public. The public has left with this impression that, well, Sarah and Brian are kind of like specialist and they work on specialized things. And I would go down to the hospital and just start using the MRI machine. So why do I think? But it's a little bit different, you know, because we We are public servants in a certain sense.

Starting point is 00:43:11 And then I hear from my colleagues, I'm not good at that. And I say, oh, yeah, well, were you good at quantum field theory when you were, you know, 13 years old? I bet you weren't. You know, these are most brilliant people in the world. And, oh, of course not. So how did you get good at it? I studied it. Well, you made it a priority.

Starting point is 00:43:28 You dedicated resources. You put in the effort and a sweat equity. And you became good at it, right? What makes you think you can't do that as a manager, as a public speaker, as an outreacher? And it's just, they just don't prioritize it. So I no longer have sympathy for my colleagues anymore because it's like anything else. If you want to be better at it, like you said, you took this class. I think that's so cool.

Starting point is 00:43:50 Actually, my students that are foreign students, I had students from China, from Thailand, from Uganda over the past decade. That's one of the best things about being a professor, right? We get to meet people. We would never meet, and our kids get to meet somebody, you know, completely different. Religion looks different, acts different, whatever. And they come into our house or we go to their house. It's one of the best parts about being an academic.

Starting point is 00:44:11 But one of the things I did is I paid for my students to go to like a toastmasters. My graduate. Yes, yes. I'm so glad you did that. And it was great. And I'm like, why am I only doing it for my students from other countries? Like my American-born students, they need to know it. And so I've tried to do that.

Starting point is 00:44:30 It is a little bit more challenged. But as you say, they're online resources or videos. you just have to make it a priority. So take it from these two doctors, Brian and Sarah, that this is something that technically minded people should do because I always say there's no skill, there's no job description, Sarah, and you can agree or not, but like the scientist. It's a series of like a trillion, you know, microskills that we synthesize together if we're successful into a macro skill. It's true. I like how you've parsed that. I want to ask you about this, the hiring situation in academia. We're used to being graded and judged and, and, and,

Starting point is 00:45:06 We have this, I call it the academic hunger games, where we're like, first you have to get into a good college, you know, and get a letter in high school, get into good college and college to graduate school, graduate school, postdoc, postdoc to faculty. But in between postdoc and faculty, a tremendous phase transition occurs where it's almost trivial to get a postdoc nowadays if you're halfway competent. I mean, and all my students are 100% competent, but they've never been unemployed ever after graduating from graduate school. And that doesn't mean academic. but then it becomes impossible and it's like I'm into the impossible but you went into the impossible by getting tenured on your you know on the start opening day of being a person but what do you make of this situation and I use a terrible analogy I'm sure you can find a better one it's kind of like imagine the baseball league in America where triple A which is the step below being in the major leagues imagine that was easy to get into like anybody I could get into it and but then getting into the majors is just as hard as it is now what what do you

Starting point is 00:46:06 attribute that too, that, you know, kind of there's this abundance of postdoc opportunities. Is it moral to do to postdocs to set them up for almost certain failure? It's almost impossible to be a professor nowadays, I would say. I think we've really ruined the system. We've done a real disservice by, yeah, as you said, making a bloated postdoc level. And I think, and Brian, you may know the answer to this, but there is some point along the way where funding agencies, private and government, for some reason they just wanted to have more and postdoc programs. It's easier to get money to create a postdoc program than a new faculty slot. And so that's how it happened. We ended up having way too many postdocs where people are

Starting point is 00:46:46 essentially dedicating the prime of their lives and not necessarily getting to where they want to go. And then it continues, you know, the hunger games continue for seven years or so until tenure can take place. And a lot of faculty don't get their first independent research grant until they're in their 40s. And I'll let you. You were grad students, too, because it's starting there, I think. On the other hand, I heard from the president, not personally, but from the president of MIT, it said something like, we could admit 100% more students and not dilute the quality of MIT one bit, meaning that they reject so many people, and there's so many qualified people out there.

Starting point is 00:47:25 Undergraduate, yeah. And it made me think, well, like, why aren't we training? Like, imagine a society where there was, you know, twice as many MIT educated. student or whatever, or UCSD educate, we reject a lot of people too. What would the world look like? Do we need more scientists if we're going to get to the stars and, you know, live on Mars or the cloud surfing on Venus or whatever? He'll tell us about our go to Trappist, like my friend Adam Bergaster, former MIT colleague of yours probably, says, you know, go to Trappist and have a vacation there. If we're going to do that, it seems like we do need more STEM, you know, scientists in that pipeline.

Starting point is 00:48:04 And so in one hand, we need a young, you know, cadre of people willing to put in the work and do the training. We need people to train them, I suppose, until AI takes over, like your colleague Max Tagmark and I chatted about. But then finally, so, yeah, I mean, I'm not asking for a solution, but, but, I mean, do we need more STEM people? I mean, we're always hearing that. We need more STEM. We need more STEM. We do. It's not so they'll go in exoplanets or any other kind of astronomy, but it's we live in an increasing technological society. I mean, think about even your car now. They all have computers, and you know when something goes wrong, you actually have to either you have a device or you take it to the garage and they plug something into it to tell them what went wrong where.

Starting point is 00:48:47 So just to have people keep things going, invent new things, yes, we need a lot more people in STEM. Yeah. And I think you had a lot of hands-on experience with telescopes, et cetera. I want to talk a little bit about graduate students and postdocs, et cetera. and being a mentor, because again, it's one of these things like being a parent. There's no manual. There's no how to guide. There's no what to expect.

Starting point is 00:49:09 You probably ruin your first one. Like, you know, my older brother was ruined. I'm convinced. But I'm just kidding, Kevin, if he's out there. But I, you know, we don't get trained how to do it. And I wonder, you know, how do you approach the job of mentorship? It's like a biathlon being a professional. Like, you have to be really good technically, you know, and like, and then you have to

Starting point is 00:49:30 like, ski like hell sometimes. and then sometimes you have to like hold your breath and focus and hold the gun or that bone hour. What is your philosophy as a mentor? You've had so many great, you know, protegees, I don't even know, mentees, mentors. I don't know what you call them. But the point is you've done a lot of teachers. What is your philosophy in terms of mentorship, not teaching, but in terms of mentorship, where I think it's more important to have wisdom than knowledge in some sense.

Starting point is 00:49:55 Yes, well, I always try to get to know the student and find the right project for the right person. Because everyone has a different skill set and a different kind of thing that they're going to resonate with. So that's the number one. And number two is that, and this is true, I only know the students at MIT, the graduate students, but they're typically very good technically. And they may not need to be taught programming or, but they need to be taught a whole other set of skills, like how to think creatively. They need room to grow in that area.

Starting point is 00:50:30 how to think like a scientist, how to think big and not just like when you're an undergrad and you're going from problem set to problem set, like predefined set of tasks. And yeah, those are, and how to choose a problem, how to identify something that they're going to love doing that is actually going to be able to make change. And then there's another set of skills we just touched on that they often don't have like communicating, writing. Those ones usually are pretty poor. And so I try to work hard to help the individual with what they need. It's usually not programming. Sometimes it is. Usually these other surrounding things that they'll need to succeed.

Starting point is 00:51:10 And that's kind of the overview. You say a beautiful line in the book. You say mentors show you where to look, not only where to look, but how to see. And I think you had the benefit of some great mentors, and now your protegees are very fortunate to have you as their mentor. And it's sort of like never ends. It's almost like family. I mean, sometimes you spend more time with our students and postdocs and professor colleagues than we do with our families. I'm trying to, you know, coronavirus has been a time for me to a little bit reevaluate that and kind of, you know, they're young for only so long.

Starting point is 00:51:45 And, you know, we were blessed to have children and, you know, wanting to feel like, well, how do you stop time? And I'll ask you that. Maybe we could switch another gear again, go back to the sections that made me. tear up. But it seemed like a lot of time in the book, you wanted time to kind of speed up because of that old time heals all wounds. But on the other hand, like we also want to pause time when kids are only young once. And I heard, you know, Sam Harris, who's a famous, you know, kind of philosopher, et cetera, podcaster. And he said, you know, the most precious commodity there is is not even time because we all waste time watching cat videos or into the impossible podcast with Brian Keating.

Starting point is 00:52:26 No, I wish he said that, but he didn't say that. We all waste enough time. but it's attention. He claims attention is the most precious commodity. I say no. I say innocence is the most precious commodity. Because like once you, I've interviewed people that are like war veterans and stuff, Sarah, and they've killed people. And they're like, I can never unsee it. I can never undo it. And they needed to do it. They would have died. And it gives me chills, you know, to think about that. But, but, you know, in a sense, like, if they didn't do it, they wouldn't be talking to me. But on the other hand, they can never get it back. And so I feel, how do I apply those lessons.

Starting point is 00:53:00 Like, wisdom is benefiting from the failures and experiences of others, so you don't have to make them yourself. And for me, I wonder, like, would you stop time? Or are you comfortable? Or would you speed up time? I mean, they're the two different things. Like, waiting is the hardest part. And then, like, I wish I could turn back the clock.

Starting point is 00:53:17 Which do you cleave more towards? Well, I love the concept of stopping time for special or poignant moments. I remember when my second born was six months old. and I realized I wasn't going to be having more children at two, which I love dearly. I really wanted five. I know you have, I think, five, but it just wasn't going to happen emotionally, financially, like having the nanny, sending them to the Montessori school, just the time and my energy level wasn't happening.

Starting point is 00:53:45 And I remember, wow, I remember six months to 12 months being like an amazing time with the firstborn. So I'm like, I got to pause time. If I could, pause time, I would. But instead of pausing time, because of course we have no control over that, I just took extra time to enjoy to pay attention, spend more time in that. I don't know if you remember that phase. It's so great. They're so funny.

Starting point is 00:54:08 Like, they just have smiles and they're happy and they're not necessarily mobile yet. So they won't just kind of go off and do stuff. You can take them anywhere. So I pause time in my own way. So I think I'd go for that pausing time. Yeah, I think so too. You know, I always say there's multiple scales of time where time becomes important. and, you know, the two or three hours of clock elapsed proper time, you know, between dinner and bedtime can feel like an eternity, you know, because I need water, I need a graham cracker, I need to go to the bathroom, I need to go to the bathroom again.

Starting point is 00:54:41 They're trying to pause time. They're trying to stop. And they're better than we are. And of course, they want to grow up really fast. And, you know, I've actually explored maybe not mysticism, but, you know, at least in Judaism, there is, you know, there's prayer. And I start to think, oh, like prayer, I feel kind of corny. Like, I'm asking God if God exists, which I don't even know if I believe 100% in either. But I'm asking God to suspend the laws of the universe just for Brian Keating's benefit, you know, like when you see a house on, you know, that's on smoking or a car.

Starting point is 00:55:11 that's on fire and praying, oh, it's not mine. That means you're praying. It's happening to somebody else. So I don't know how I feel about prayer, but I see a meditative value. And I think about, well, like, meditation might be, and I had Deepak Chopra on the podcast a couple weeks ago. Wow. And he talked a little bit about like his, like, you know, splitting life into four quadrants, basically, like birth and growth, accumulation of resources, expending resources, and then he calls it preparing for death. And I was like, would you pause any of those? He's like, I pause each one of those by meditation. In other words, just like thinking and contemplating.

Starting point is 00:55:46 I wonder, do you have any like daily habits or rich, now that your kids are a little bit older and it's not like, hmm, well, they need to go to the hospital today. And they're really young. The one broke his, apparently he broke his hand the other day. Oh, no. He's hard. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:00 It's okay. He's old enough to figure it out on his own. So he came back from a soccer game and his hand was really hurting a lot. And he's like, well, I'm not going to go to the doctor because they're not going to do anything. And then a week later, he's like, huh, my hand still hurts just as much. I think I should probably go to the doctor. Do you have any like daily rituals or weekly rituals? Do you have any, you know, signpost to mark times passage other than the seasons, obviously, on a daily basis or a seasonal basis or the quarter system or semester? I mean, I wish I had a really great philosophical

Starting point is 00:56:33 deep answer for you, but I don't really. I mean, I try to take some time each day to reflect. just on that day or the week. And I do think about my goals, like personal and professional and ask, can I do better? What's not getting my attention? You know, what's my main thing I want to move forward?

Starting point is 00:56:53 So I have that kind of level. And I'm also Jewish, as you may or may not know. Yeah, I know. Not very observant, but we do try to catch the important holidays, like Passover. I'm not sure if you want a timestamp on this, but Passover is coming up soon.

Starting point is 00:57:08 and we usually have a brisket or something in a special meal, and we used to go through the whole sater. But lately, I think we're just going to tell the Passover story, you know, not go through every element. And just so we're going to have turkey this year because we accidentally got two turkeys at Thanksgiving, and one of them has been keeping up so much space in the freezer. We have to have a special occasion.

Starting point is 00:57:31 Not the same freezer that took up a cat. Is it, Sarah? No, no. Different freezer. Okay, thank God. Thank God. You still have that same freezer, but that's not where the turkey is right now. So I do, but not as contemplative as you.

Starting point is 00:57:46 Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a development. I mean, nothing can, like I said, nothing can prepare you for a kid. Nothing can prepare you for the loss of a parent, you know, and the other other challenges. But I think, you know, history as a sum total, I think we'd be fools to ignore, even if you don't believe, like I had Freeman Dyson on many times in the podcast. and he would say, look, God's existence can't be really proven wrong. It can't be proven right. So it's a mystery. And a mystery is different than a puzzle. He said, I love solving puzzles because there's a solution. I might not be able to solve it, Brian Keating, but Freeman could solve it or Sarah can solve it. But a mystery is something like very delicious because nobody can solve it. And maybe nobody can solve it. And maybe that's the point. And I just love kind of thinking about these traditions as a conservative small C. that, you know, you're thinking about these things that have been handed out for thousands of years in most cases, or it could be something new. I mean, I've spoken for atheist churches

Starting point is 00:58:43 called the Sunday Assembly, the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago, is one of the oldest ones I spoke there. I love it because they get together. They give charity. They sing hymns. You know, they do reading. Of course, it's, you know, it's from like Philip Roth or, you know, Carl Sagan or something. That's fine. I don't care. I don't care. Because my belief is that people have religions, you know, whether they know it or not, whether they admit it or not. I mean, MIT is a religion, you know, there's so much lore associated with where you are and people just like do anything to get in there. And it becomes like this, this idle, you know, and it could be a good thing. That's for sure. But, you know, some people's pinnacle of their

Starting point is 00:59:20 lives is going there, or getting in there. And for good reason. It is a wonderful institution. But I think it's important to have rituals, you know, kind of outside of your work and have at least one day, I command my graduate sins, I'm not God, but I say, you can't work six days, seven days a week. Otherwise, you are, like, enslaved. You may love your work. You may be a total nerd and love it so much. But you need time to relax. You need time to breathe. And that comes through in the book, because you take time out, and one of the greatest triumphs of your life had nothing to do with the lab, nothing at all. And it's out in nature. It's closer to me than you in the Grand Canyon. I'll save that for the reader. But the importance of nature comes through. And was that always something,

Starting point is 00:59:59 Is that just built into you as a Canadian by birth? It's built in, but it goes back to your previous point about any meditation or deep contemplative thought. And that's what nature does for me. That's like my meditation and a lot of people, I think. So I always love going out and spending the day outside doing hiking or in the past canoeing or what have you. But yes, definitely. Yeah, it does seem to reach that state of. what people call flow. I'm having Stephen Kotler, who's written a lot of books with Peter Diamandes,

Starting point is 01:00:35 who is a MIT alum. You may know Peter Diamandis. It writes a lot of books about exponential growth and so forth, but he has a book called The Art of the Impossible, I think, and he's coming on to talk about flow states and how you get into them and how they're very much drug-like. But it's kind of like a healthy drug because you make it yourself. And of course, you can go too much and do too much adrenaline junkying. But, okay, so next, I want to go to this very important topic, how we met the first time with your wonderful, handsome husband, brilliant husband, Charles Darrow, put me in touch with you. I thank Charles so much for doing that. And that was on the occasion of an announcement made back in September, I believe it was, of a discovery of a molecule on Venus known as

Starting point is 01:01:17 phosphine, which my crude attempt to think about is kind of like ammonia, but with a night with a phosphorus molecule. Is that right, Sarah? You can think of it that way. So talk about what that discovery was all about and what is the status of that discovery now. Well, in looking for signs of life elsewhere, we're trying to find gases that don't belong. And believe it or not, it was nearly 100 years ago, James Jeans and a famous astronomer thought about this. He acknowledged that in our atmosphere here on Earth, oxygen fills our atmosphere to 20% by volume. But without photosynthetic life, plants and photosynthetic backsliphytic bacteria, there'd be virtually no oxygen.

Starting point is 01:01:58 Right. And so even you wrote about, wow, you could look for a gas somewhere else and that doesn't belong. Like oxygen here on Earth, it's highly reactive. It wouldn't be in our atmosphere unless it's continually replenished. Well, my team studies a lot of different gases that we might look for on other planets far away. And one of the gases we became enamored with is phosphine, because on Earth it's only associated with life. No other way. And little did we know that a real thing that a real thing is that a real thing that we can't be able to be

Starting point is 01:02:25 know that a radio astronomer in the UK, Professor Jane Greaves, was also thinking about phosphine. And she purposely went out on a limb and decided to search for signs of life on Venus. And she dug through the literature and came across some of the same papers we found in biology, explaining that phosphine is, it's very, very strongly associated with life on Earth. And she pointed the radio telescope, James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. She pointed Alma at Venus and a mutual contact connected us because our teams were each working on phosphine. And we joined Professor Jane Greaves's team to work on phosphine. Last September, the team made a big announcement about finding a signal of phosphine on Venus.

Starting point is 01:03:13 And we explained that no matter what kind of chemistry process you think about, whether it's lightning or volcanoes or meteorite delivery or surface minerals being upswept, from the surface, there's no way that we know of to make phosphine on Venus in the amounts required. And these amounts are tiny, just like parts per billion. So we speculated, perhaps, I mean, we have no way to know, of course, but maybe it's life-producing phosphine. So that was a big announcement. The world loved it.

Starting point is 01:03:45 The chemists hated it, by the way. On social media and email chains, they went negatively wild in a very angry way. And now we're about six months later. I just wanted you to know there's no that I know of. There's no published paper coming up with a chemical process that can produce phosphine on Venus. Yeah, despite all that. What's not as rosy of a picture is astronomers looked at the data. And for one of the data sets, Alma, so far, no other group who's looked at this data has found a signal of phosphine.

Starting point is 01:04:21 We stand by our data analysis. With the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope data, people have revisited that as well. That's the great thing about astronomy today is we always make our data public, pretty much always. And when people look at the JCP data, they do find a signal. And those groups who find that signal, they work hard to say it's not phosphine. That instead it is another gas, there's a gas sulfur dioxide. And right at the moment where we're at is that we're finding that sulfur dioxide might explain a tiny amount of the signal, but so far we can't see a way that it explains the whole signal because you'd need far more sulfur dioxide than has ever been seen on Venus.

Starting point is 01:05:05 So we're still waiting for this to unfold, actually. And this is something that might take a long time. Think about methane on Mars, if you've interviewed anyone on that one. It's 15 years later. I think most people believe there's methane on Mars, but it's still somewhat controversial. Yeah. I mean, of course, there have been a lot of great discoveries that kind of attract a lot of attention, including discoveries I've participated in. And, you know, one thing I, and I'm not, this is not a criticism of the current description that you made, but maybe preceding events, including maybe my own even, is that, you know, the public will find out and it will always be on page one, you know, the New York Times. the Boston Globe or whatever you guys have over there,

Starting point is 01:05:49 the San Diego Union Tribune over here for my friends over there. But then if there is a question or there is even, God forbid, a retraction, a recantation, then it's on page B, 52 of the Saturday edition. That's the least read of all seven a day. So I feel like my controversial proposals that experiments should keep in reserve a budget equal to 25% of their PR, for retractions. And I also think it goes along with what we said commentantly with the fact we never get taught how to teach, how to be mentors, how to be parents, whatever, but we also

Starting point is 01:06:26 never get taught like, what are the ethics of being a professor, you know, making this announcement, like if a professor needs to get tenure and then, or here, our graduate student needs to graduate, you know, and they might have questions and maybe they don't go ahead with their concerns because there's, so there's no ethical training. I mean, there is, formally, yes, You don't copy research, you quote services, you don't plagiarism, but very different from the kind of unique events that go on. So anyway, that's just kind of... Right, I know, but back to this phosphine for a moment. I mean, I think the good thing about modern day practices is we make our scripts public, the data's public,

Starting point is 01:07:04 and people have a chance to work through it all, actually. And I think actually in the case of phosphine, I don't know if it's been front page news, but it's been pretty front and center. The controversy is quite well out there being discussed. Yeah. There's this really interesting thing about phosphine. So let's, fosping aside, this debate, this controversy, this discussion, it has shone, like reshined a light on Venus.

Starting point is 01:07:33 And it's helped people see, I mean, you have a lot of kids. Isn't it true? There's always the ignored sibling. It's usually the one sibling who gets all the attention. and at the opposite end, there's one who's always ignored. And so I always see Venus is that ignored. Right. Mars gets all the... Yeah, Mars is getting all the attention.

Starting point is 01:07:52 So this amazing thing is happening now. We're working really hard on a mission concept, small, medium, and large, three different ones or repeated small ones, to go to Venus and to search for not just phosphine, but other gases that are out of equilibrium that don't belong. We're going to search for signs of life. and maybe even life itself. Independent of my work, there's other people.

Starting point is 01:08:16 There's a young person on the team, a postdoc, who actually, he wrote a photochemistry code to help explain the presence of phosphine. And he decided to apply it to Venus in general, now not talking about phosphine. And he's actually seems like he's been able to explain a couple of longstanding chemical anomalies in the Venus atmosphere. And this sort of in a roundabout lay could, like imagine if this, imagine a universe, where, okay, the phosphine debate kind of goes on, but it enabled us to find signs of life or life itself through a totally different pathway, but just because the phosphine debate

Starting point is 01:08:51 brought Venus back to the forefront. Yeah, that's kind of the ultimate and extremophiles that you were talking about earlier. And you mentioned in the book that there were, you know, you have this theory. And what I love is the candor in the book. Like, you had this theory with some postdocs that, like, maybe every gas is produced by life in an atmosphere. And then, like, you went to someone at Harvard, name escapes me right now, but he said, no, there's plenty, here's like three of them. And you say, as an aside,

Starting point is 01:09:19 only he named multiple, are there multiple ones that aren't produced by life? And as an aside, only one would have been sufficient. You know, it kind of reminded me of, there was a book in 1929 written, it was titled 100 scientists against Albert Einstein. And it was all these German Nazi scientists

Starting point is 01:09:36 that were dismay that he had left Germany and gone to America, was besmirching and several of them were Nobel laureates, but Einstein is reported to have quipped. If I was really wrong, it would have only required one person. I was thinking about that with you. I want to talk a little bit, and so I'll have links to the Venus Life website. Is that still one of the premier places for people to go?

Starting point is 01:09:58 Yes, okay, great. We can get updates there about, we put news articles there, so yes. And I'm still hoping to get Jane on the podcast at some point. And I do follow it. And I do so. Wait, one more thing about that. that I forgot to do. So for Professor Dean Greaves right now,

Starting point is 01:10:13 it's a full-time job just responding to all of these, all the articles coming out saying phosphine, either the signal's not there or the signal is there, but it's not phosphine. It's literally a full-time job for her. I believe it. And I want to explore that dark side, if you will,

Starting point is 01:10:29 indulge me with some forbearance, Sarah. So you may know your cross-town neighbor, Avi Loeb, came out with a controversial book, which at the end of which mentions your discoveries of potential discovery of phosphine produced potentially by life on Venus. And that's that towards the end of the book. But in the meantime, he's gotten a tremendous amount, not for that, but a tremendous amount of criticism for this discovery that he claims,

Starting point is 01:10:58 Omuamua, this was this interstellar interloper that was not naturally made, that it was made not by man or woman, but by some sensual. and technology, some civilization, the direction of which is completely unknown to him, but nevertheless that the preponderance of evidence, of course, he's a good scientist, a great scientist, I would never say it's 100% sure that it is. I wanted to get your reaction to a couple of things. One is the back reaction that he got from people in his own department, which I had seen emails and confidential things from, and also from the whole astronomical community, accusing him of various things from, you know, sexism to, to, you know, basically self-aggrandizement, arrogance. And I said,

Starting point is 01:11:45 look, you know, the guy's Israeli, and the nickname for Israelis is the cactus. So you got to, expect he's going to be a little bit prickly and he's going to fight back. But I felt, and I sense, even to this day, some of the attention is caused by Avi. I think he displayed a poor lack of respect and collegiality for Jill Tarter in a well-known video. He's apologized to her, as I understand it. But so there's some self-inflicted wounds. But I sensed another sort of amount of heat that came down. And that was not scientific, even though it was perpetrated by other scientists. Can you say something about that? It's not like you've discovered a new type of, you know, type two superconductor. You know, it's not going to cause, you know, A, the same headlines,

Starting point is 01:12:28 but B, the same hostility. And I wonder, you know, if it's true that some of the negative attention is coming because the stakes are so high, jealousy, envy, or what your reaction is and how you handle it? Are you talking about phosphine now? Yeah, phosphine. Yeah, first phosphine, and then you want to comment on what's going on with Avi. Okay, here. Maybe you have more insight into this. I have no idea why people were so hostile.

Starting point is 01:12:54 The chemists, especially, unbelievably hostile. And like I said, they didn't follow up. We welcome. Please write a paper. You know, you can exclude us from, you know, how you get to suggest who not to review, exclude us. We just haven't seen that. And even the observers, you know, some of them would send us a note saying, you know, you can, or they in the abstract said, okay, you can retract now. We're not going to retract now. Like it's, we're not, like, why would we? We still find a signal in the way we analyze the data. But that level of anger was just, I've never seen that before. And I don't know, I don't know what it is, actually. And, you know, phosphine or not, I don't know if this will sound arrogant, but we, like I or we, we were influencers. You know that word?

Starting point is 01:13:37 They use influencers for like dog items or fashion. Right. Now, Bruce is popular now. Yeah. That's just a fact, actually. Yeah. So don't know. So what do you think it is?

Starting point is 01:13:51 I think there's a combination. I think I did sense sort of a patronizing, you know, kind of malice in some sense that, that, you know, yes, the chemist or the astrochemist or the astrobiologist, you know, you're out of your depth, you're out of your lane, whatever you want to say. And I don't know Jane at all, you know, personally, Professor Jane Greaves, but I'm hoping, as I say, to have her on the podcast talk about her work as well. But I feel like there is a certain amount of, it's almost impossible not to get attention. You know, all the press conferences, those were very rare until the 1980s. There was never like a press conference.

Starting point is 01:14:28 Right. Yeah. And I think it's dangerous. You know, it turns it into this celebrity and fashion and so forth. when, you know, that's not really what science is about. And I had this conversation. I think is you've got to drill down then. Then you've got to work with nature and science and the other prominent journals and say,

Starting point is 01:14:43 look, please don't do this. Just let people talk about it all along. Let them get feedback. You know, don't hold it there. But I just want to give you one example of hostily. The reason why I, like, I didn't take any of this personally. And I didn't think that, oh, we don't know what we're doing. Like, I never thought that.

Starting point is 01:14:59 Because one of the very first things that happened was a prominent planetary scientists who led one of the big missions. immediately like email blasted this list that has like a few hundred people and said, we all know, well, I don't know what the tone was, but it factually just said, look, we all know that Jupiter and Saturn have phosphine, as if to dismiss phosphine is even ever being able to be associated by life. But Jupiter and Saturn have a lot of hydrogen. Venus has almost no hydrogen.

Starting point is 01:15:26 Jupiter and Saturn have high temperatures and pressures beneath their atmosphere. Phosphorus wants to be with hydrogen in that case. And so on Venus, it's really totally opposite. So we saw some stuff that just made no sense right off the bat. And that's how I knew people were being hostile, not that they were being righteous, they were factually correct even. So that's part of it.

Starting point is 01:15:47 Yeah, I mean, I had a little taste of that with Bicep 2 and people coming out of the woodwork and the announcement and saying, oh, it's definitely, it's definitely from this foreground synchotron radiation, and it can explain everything by magnetic fields. and in our galaxy alone. And so, and then in the end, they're saying, see, I was right, because I said it was foregrounds all along.

Starting point is 01:16:10 But it wasn't from synchotron. Or somebody said it was from, you know, anomalous, systematic effect that we had actually published a paper on to rule that out as a source. But because we were clear that we didn't understand the underlying cause of it, but we limited it and excluded it from being a cause of the B-Mode signal, potentially from inflation that we were claiming putatively to have detected, oh, we were right. It was a systematic. And so, yeah, there is unavoidably, there's this phenomenon that, you know, Italians have some term for it and it means like you get shot the most when you're over the target. And I think it's a sign you're right. You know, these things, it's impossible for them not to affect you at all. But on the same token, the fact that you're getting attention for it means that other scientists are taking you seriously. I think that's where Avi is a little bit, you know, kind of distracted by. a lot of the criticism. I mean, he will point out, you know, so-and-so, you know, that's criticizing

Starting point is 01:17:08 me, hasn't written a single paper, and here's 76 papers that I've written just about a muamua. But I also think that there's, you know, there's a risk when you talk about alien life. I mean, it's just impossible not to conjure up, you know, science fiction movies and, you know, bad forehead, prosthetic foreheads and on camera. And I think, you know, that doesn't mean it's not, it's not worth doing, but I think it lends itself. And we've had, you know, we have Professor Shelly Wright here who's a good friend of mine, a colleague at UCSD, and, you know, she struggles all, she's one of the few people who, you know, can confer degrees in the search for extraterrestrial technology. I mean, Charlie's sitting there, there's only a couple of handful of groups,

Starting point is 01:17:46 and Avi claims, you know, there's only, you know, there's fewer than one hand, one alien hand, which only has four fingers, as we know. But I do think there's kind of that a little bit of envy that can take place in the profession. I think it can be amplified by secrecy, so it's good to be open as open as possible. I think that was one thing we could have done a little bit better back then. But I want to ask you, you know, in the closing moments that we have, if you have a little bit more time, I want to talk about, well, there is one, you know,

Starting point is 01:18:17 it's funny because you do say in the book, like as an offhand company say, Venus is too hot for life. You do say that in one more in the book. So that's the only typo I can find in the news. entire book because we don't know if Venus is too hot for life, right? I'm hoping that you're right. I want to ask about collaboration. So I did a study when I was writing my book of a bunch of studies on Nobel Prize winning collaborations. So these are most successful collaborations. And they tended to dissolve soon after the Nobel Prize was awarded, soon after the discovery

Starting point is 01:18:47 was confirmed. And there was just a lot of like jealousy and rivalry. Is there a danger in some of the work that you're doing, you might be victim of your own success. Like, you've accomplished so much so quickly and you're paving the way forward. But do you ever worry about the health of a collaboration and how best to maintain it under these stressful circumstances? Because you never get trained in like, here's how to speak to the media, A, we never get trained on, here's how to react when people are speaking in the media about you. So how do you nucleate, cultivate, and, you know, kind of inculcate these values in your collaboration to fellow team members. That's a tough one. I don't, that's really a hard question.

Starting point is 01:19:28 Right now, my mind actually went to a slightly different topic right now, and that is that, you know, when any kind of young astronomer working in exoplanet, exoplanet, atmospheres, thinks they're going to find signs of life on an exoplanet atmosphere, and they might. Yeah. And it's the problem of the field growing too big for the resources we have at hand. I mean, the real heroes, when you want to think about it, are the ones who built the James Webb Space Telescope. But now there's any number of an end user.

Starting point is 01:19:56 So it's different from your work where you had to get the money, get the strategy, build everything from scratch, deploy it, get the data. Here we are using, like, we hope to use the James Webb Space Telescope, I'm a giant facility. But it's almost like a lottery who's going to be the one to get to observe the planet that if it does end up having a sign of life. So we have a lot of competition, not in a collaboration, but kind of in the whole community. I think there's a lot of, I mean, there's collaboration, but there's also a lot of angst, I think. Yeah, it's another one of these, you know, kind of tortured analogies that I, it's like, in minor league baseball, you can imagine the pitcher who's like trying to get in the major leagues, you know, himself, you know, but like also trying to help younger people get into the major leagues by giving them good balls to hit out of the park. It's like we train our competition, right? And my postdoc is going to go and compete for the same resources.

Starting point is 01:20:49 And the late great Andrew Lang, my very close friend, father figure to me, mentor. He used to kind of jokingly say, like, I'm in the only profession where I'm trying to like reduce my chances of success at winning NSF grants by producing good postdocs. But it's just another kind of weird aspect of being a professor. But would you have it any other way? Would you do any other job? What would you be doing if you weren't MIT? famous professor, genius grant recipient, Sarah C. What are you in the multiverse if it's true? I mean, if I wasn't in science, I really, I don't know, I feel like I could have done a great

Starting point is 01:21:23 job in industry, being, you know, founding and being CEO of a giant company that hopefully did something beneficial and impactful for society. I think about that, but it's more like maybe I'd be a rabbi who is not really sure if he believes in God, but we'll take that up some other time. What are the most exciting things that you're working on now with your team. You talk a lot about the Star Shade, what's the status of that? And obviously, you already talked about JWST, but other missions and especially the coronagraphs. I don't know if we can even say that since COVID, but how are coronagraphs faring in this age? Well, coronagraph and Star Shade alike.

Starting point is 01:22:05 We're for our big mission in space that would be like the next James Webb Space Telescope, we're actually waiting on the astronomy and the U.S. astronomy and astrophysics to Cato survey to come out with their every decade. You know, they meet and make a rank-ordered priority list. And so we're all waiting to see if we got in the number one slot there. So that kind of

Starting point is 01:22:27 is a bit on hold. People are reluctant to spend a lot of money or make a lot of effort until that report comes out, which I think should be soon, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's funny because you mentioned in the book. You talk a lot about Lyman Spitzer, who was who was at Princeton for many years where you were a postdoc. And his son is one of my colleagues here at Nick Spitzer. Yeah, he's a neuroscientist here at UCSD, a member of the National Academy, one of the most lovely.

Starting point is 01:22:53 Sorry, I knew that because ironically, my former neighbor across the street, her name's Lydia Spitzer. Oh, really? And Nick, I believe, is her uncle. I want to say Nick is her uncle. Could be, yeah. And I think I met him once. Yeah, he's got a big handlebar mustache. Yeah, that's right.

Starting point is 01:23:09 Yeah. Lydia, her maiden name was Spitzer. Lydia Spitzer, my former neighbor. Yeah, you would love Nick. I can't hear that with her name, but yeah, that's right. I remember that. You would love Nick. I hope you guys can make because he's an ice climber.

Starting point is 01:23:21 He goes and climbs his mountains with an ice pick and climb so that and you're just so much more adventurous than I am. Okay, Sarah, well, we're reaching the end when I ask questions of a more kind of metaphysical rather than physics level. I hope you're willing to do that. That's called Going Into the Impossible. Sarah, are you willing to go into the impossible and answer my final three thrilling questions? I'm willing to go there. I'm not quite sure if my answer will satisfy.

Starting point is 01:23:48 Okay. Well, they won't be too, they hopefully won't be too onerous for you. Okay, the first question relates around what is known as an ethical will, not a material will, but an ethical will. And I was kind of inspired to look into this both by its prominence in Judaism. It features very largely in Judaism. It's known as a Zavaha. And it's sort of the end of the Old Testament, the book of Duneronomy is not about Duteron's, but about the second naming and so forth. It's really Moses's ethical will. What does he want the children of Israel, which he won't get into his promised land, but they will? And what does he want them to know in terms of wisdom, not in terms of money? So what I want to ask you, what would you leave to members of your ideological errors?

Starting point is 01:24:38 which, you know, I might count myself as one of them, not necessarily your biological errors. What piece of wisdom when you hit the age that Moses was, 120 years old, and you depart this mortal coil? What wisdom or learning would you like to impart to people that come after you? In terms of ethics or anything? Well, one of the ethics popped into my head was, you know how sometimes you're faced within a dilemma, and you don't really know what the right choice is? but actually you do know. Because deep inside, you know, if you feel like it's wrong, it's wrong.

Starting point is 01:25:14 And so that wisdom is to listen to your inner voice. Wow. And just kind of just don't overanalyze. Don't overthink. Just ask yourself, what is this right? Is this wrong? And you'll know the right answer. That's really lovely.

Starting point is 01:25:28 Thank you very much. We're also going on now, the second question takes us deeper into the future than ever before. I don't know if you ever saw the movie. 2001 a space odyssey. By the way, that's what Charles is, I want to say that's probably Charles's favorite movie. Really? Wonderful. Well, we resonate very much together. Mine is Moana, but still. But so in that movie, there features very prominently a structure known as a monolith. It's sort of this object that is kind of menacing. We don't know what it's for. There are hominids in Africa

Starting point is 01:26:03 two million years ago and they hit it with a bone. Nothing happens to it. Later on, it goes into outer space and it's on the surface of the moon, or there's another one there. It seems to be put by an ancient alien civilization, maybe coming from Mars, or from Venus, rather. And that civilization has put this monolith there as sort of a time capsule. And I want to ask you, if you had a time capsule that could last, as this thing did, for hundreds of millions of years, what information, what knowledge would you put on it in it, around? it, you know, don't make it a USB, because I don't think they'll have readers and I'm billionaires, but what would you inscribe on it as a summary of maybe the knowledge that you've gleaned

Starting point is 01:26:46 or the wisdom of humanity as a whole? Wow, that's a big question. How much space do you imagine on this? Well, you can write in zero point font. And I'll give you a little guide to how Richard Feynman answered the question, if you like, but he's only virtually on my show. I guess I'd want to capture both like our biggest disasters as humanity and also our biggest achievements. I'd have to go away and think about what those actually are.

Starting point is 01:27:18 Like you think of the World Wars, you think of overpopulation as being the bad things. And some of the great ones we've solved, like the ozone hole, you know, we actually figured out that chemistry. Not me, but you know, Mario Milino and others. It was here at UCSD. Yeah, he was at UCSD. And he was at MIT, of course. That's true. He was the UCSD.

Starting point is 01:27:40 You know, just, sorry. Sorry, just, you know, solving that problem and changing coolants so that we could not have that problem. So I would kind of want to capture like the biggest horrendous disasters we had. And then also the ones that that we overcame and the good things that we did is humanity. Wow. You know, lessons learned time capsule. Yeah, that's right. Not just we were here, but we mattered.

Starting point is 01:28:05 Yeah, I asked Andurion. It was Carl Sagan's widow. I asked her, you know, what would you put on it or in it? And she's like, I already did that. What are you talking about? She was, her brainwaves were recorded on the Voyager 1 Golden Disc right after she fell in love with Carl Sagan. So it's very pointed to to hear that from her. Okay, Sarah, last question before you go back to ordering Canada. So what does it mean that you're a member, you're the order of Canada, you're an officer. I have to salute you. What does that mean? Well, Officer of the Order of Canada is, it's like an honorary position, like one of the medals of achievement the United States will give to its citizens. Ah, wonderful. Okay. Last question. Now we're going to go backwards in time, Sarah. We went forwards in time, a billion years just a second ago.

Starting point is 01:28:55 Now we're going to go backwards in time. But by the way, to hear all of Sarah's answers, you're going to have to subscribe to the newsletter that I put out. and many of our guests are co-subscribers, and that you can get at Brian Keating.com. You'll get Sarah's answers to the thrilling three and maybe a giveaway or two. We're talking about some fun giveaways before we started recording, but to hear Sarah's answers, you're going to have to go subscribe to the mailing list. But the final question for Professor Sarah Seeger, an inspiration to many, including me, is going backwards in time, Sarah.

Starting point is 01:29:27 So Sir Arthur C. Clark, again, so I'm the co-director here at you. UCSD of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination. And as part of that, we run the Into the Impossible Podcast, the name of which derives from one of Arthur's famous three laws, one of which is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And the voice you hear saying that at the beginning of each one of my recordings is Sir Arthur C. Clark saying that famous phrase. His second law, which I use around the faculty meetings, is for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And his third law is the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And I want to ask you, Sarah,

Starting point is 01:30:12 I have my suspicions, but I want to ask you as a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old, advice to your former self, what advice would you give to give younger version of Sarah the courage to go as you did into the impossible? Well, I think I would tell the younger version and to tell, all those people out there who are different in some way that you can take advantage of that difference. If you're really different in some way from everyone around you, you can actually use that to your advantage in the future. That's really lovely, Sarah. And I want to thank you so much, not only for your time today, but for this gift to astronomers, to lay people, it's really as close as you could get to maybe not a how-to guy, not in a manual on how to do all these things

Starting point is 01:31:00 that you've accomplished in your life, but to really serve as a guiding point that you're not alone and that there are fellow small lights in the universe. And I kind of very poignant, extremely emotional. I'm very proud of myself. I may not be a member of an officer of some order of Canada, of some maple leaf or whatever, but I made it through without crying. I did choke up. I promised you I would get for clumped, but I didn't lose it. And I'm very proud of myself, Sarah, because you are a spectacular writer, an amazing individual. I'm honored to that you spent your time with me today.

Starting point is 01:31:40 Thank you so much, Brian. It was a pleasure. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thanks for listening to End of the Impossible with Professor Brian Keating. Please support the show by rating, commenting, sharing, and leaving reviews. We appreciate hearing from you, and it really helps keep our universe expanding. Watch our YouTube channel at Dr. Brian Keating. That's DR. Brian Keating and join our premieres Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Pacific Time.

Starting point is 01:32:10 Follow Brian on Twitter and Medium and support us on Patreon at Dr. Brian Keating. For exclusive content, visit Brian Keating's website and sign up for his informative newsletter at Brian Keating.com. Into the Impossible is produced with the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination in the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of Keeinging. California, San Diego. Produced by Stuart Volko and Brian Keating.

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