Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Searching for ALIENS with Sarah Rugheimer (#381)

Episode Date: December 26, 2023

Remastered from our interview in October 2021.  In this otherworldly edition of Into the Impossible, I talk to renowned astrophysicist and astrobiologist Dr. Sarah Rugheimer about microscopic aliens, the Fermi paradox, the origin of life, the Drake equation, and much more! Dr. Rugheimer is a Glasstone Research Fellow and a Hugh Price Fellow at Jesus College Oxford. Her research interests are modeling the atmosphere and climate of extrasolar planets with a particular focus on atmospheric biosignatures in Earth-like planets as well as modeling early Earth conditions. Her Audible Exclusive book Searching for Extraterrestrial Life reveals through 10 amazing lectures what we know about detecting life on other planets.  Tune in!  Key Takeaways:  Intro (00:00) 00:00:46 Sarah’s thoughts on the private sector space race 00:04:18 Should we look for intelligent ET or microbial life in the Universe?  00:05:56 How did you get interested in astrobiology?  00:11:28 What would be the impact of finding microbial ET? 00:15:49 What do we do about the risk of error in science?  00:20:12 What is the possibility of alternative forms of life? (not carbon-based)  00:27:34 The future and Sarah's career 00:30:14 What do you think of Avi Loeb's theories about Oumuamua?  00:40:41 The Drake Equation (Happy 60th anniversary)  00:44:45 Outro — Additional resources:  📢 Ownership of your health starts with AG1. Try AG1 and get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 FREE AG1 Travel Packs with your first purchase 👉 https://drinkag1.com/impossible ➡️ Follow me on your favorite platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating  🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1  📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list  ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php  🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast  — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I would be really surprised if life in the universe uses DNA, but I wouldn't be surprised if it uses carbon, because that's a more fundamental molecule that's very common. It's a lot more common in the universe than silicon. Water is likewise a very common solvent, and it has some unique properties. Water and carbon, to me, are more fundamental units than, say, DNA, which is a lot more complicated

and probably wasn't even in Earth's earliest life. Any sufficiently advanced technology is in to start. distinguishable from magic. Open the pod bay doors. Dr. Soon-to-be professor, Sarah Ruckheimer, welcome to the Into the Impossible podcast. How are you today? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. So great to have you.

I just absolutely devoured your book, audiobook, which is an audible exclusive. We're going to talk a lot about that. And I want to just read a brief bio. If I read the whole bio, you're so impressive, Sarah, that it will take the whole hour that you have generously and graciously and a lot of. lot of me. But currently, Sarah Ruggheimer is an astrophysicist at Oxford, working on how to detect life on an exoplanet by look exoplanet, atmospheric biosignatures. In 2020, she was selected as a TED fellow, and she has a wonderful TED talk. We've been seen by almost a million people in just a

couple of weeks, and you can find that. It's called Searching for Microscopic Aliens. I'll put a link to that here. Maybe we'll put some highlight. They do a great job. And your wonderful audio book is an Amazon Audible Original, searching for extraterrestrial life. And I wanted to start there with Amazon, because as you know, today was the first voyage of the New Shepherd spacecraft, piloted by the proprietor of Amazon, Mr. Jeff Bezos, and his brother and an astronaut named Wally Funk, who was one of the original Mercury 13, I think. And so there was life in space for a little bit today. And actually, I want to get your impression about where we should be going.

If you looked at aliens looking at us, today they would have seen, you know, four people heading towards them. That's an interesting question. I kind of view them as separate and in some ways a bit contradictory. So I'm really excited about Wally Funk. You know, she's the oldest astronaut now, 82 years old, part of the Mercury 13 program. Really excited for her to have lived out that lifelong dream. And then there's this tension, though, because we have, you know, people from the private sector who can just put whatever they want into space, say, you know, like satellites and, you know, the, is it the Starlink from Elon Musk and whatnot. And I would say there's some tension then between the scientific community and how that would influence our observations.

Or what I'm worried about as an astrobiologist is I really, I'm pro-human exploration of space. Absolutely. We're explorers. I do, I climb mountains. I climb mountains just because they're there. I am definitely pro-human space exploration on the long term, but I'm really worried that we're going to screw up our ability to study the red planet, especially Mars, if we send humans there prematurely. So if we go there before we can actually explore it to see if there was life or if there is current life under the subsurface, if we instead contaminate it with us and all the hardy microbes we bring from Earth. So this month we've had several different scientists from around the planet talking about life, entropy, the origin of life, and even the definition of life. I mean, I go back to NASA's working definition because it is just very convenient. Of course, we don't really know because we're still hampered by the one example of life that we have on Earth, which is Earth life. So, you know, this idea of a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution, there's a few very broad things I like about that definition.

One of them being that it is chemical, that it can evolve, and, you know, that those things, I think, are interesting. However, what if we come across, you know, artificial intelligence that's quote-unquote past might be alive, that life would not be included under that definition? And when we think about, you know, the, as Max Tegmar calls, Life 3.0, artificial intelligence, what do you make of the fact that we've been very much focused literally and figuratively in some cases, my colleague, Professor Shelley Wright here, searching for optical signals from SETI, from advanced extraterrestrial intelligence?

What about this predilection that mostly SETI has been about looking for technology or techno signatures? Is that just because that you kind of look for your keys under the, lamp post as the old joke goes? Or should we pay more attention to the kinds of signals, signatures that you look on from the tiniest aliens in the universe? Well, and the short answer is we should do both. I don't think that's at odds with each other. Certainly, I think we have, if you look at the history of life on Earth, life has been on Earth, basically as soon as Earth was habitable. We have signs of life dating back, very, dating back very far in Earth's history. And then it was single cellular for most of Earth's history.

And it's really only in the last, you know, billion years that it's been more than one-celled type of life. And then even just in the last 100 years that it's been technological us. And so, you know, when we think of Earth as a, if it is a representative planet, for most time, we would have seen the microbial biosphere. So I think that is our best chance for finding life in the universe, sorry, not the solar system. Also in the solar system, I think we might find microbial life. but in the universe and other planets. However, we should also search for intelligence signals because that is definitely a clearer signal

if someone waves at you and says, hello, we are here. I want to first take a step back in your past world line, where you come from, where you've been, you're from Montana, you make no secret of that. You mention it with a great deal of Montana pride. I know most of what I know about Montana

from the TV show Yellowstone. And I hope that's not represented, That's kind of like Sopranos move from New Jersey and go to Montana. But if you haven't seen it. But the other thing I think about Montana a lot is like looking for fossils and dinosaurs and so forth. And I want to ask, you know, was that part of what's in your intellectual DNA, this search for ancient signals?

Did that arise in part because of your unique, the unique place that you came from, Bozeman, Montana town of what, 50,000 people? I don't think it did, though one in hindsight, one could see how. you might describe that. So my dad was a physics professor at Montana State University. And in fact, we did, he would do talks for the local museum. And then they would send us on dinosaur digs in the summer for free. Like that was his exchange with, with the museum. And so, you know, as a kid, I did go out into eastern Montana and just, you know, try to use like little brushes and and chisels to see if I could find dinosaur bones, found a few. It was exciting.

I didn't become a paleontologist, you know, and then in the end, I didn't even want to be a physicist. So my dad was a physics professor. My brother is also a physics professor. All of his children have a degree in physics of some sort. And so I really told my dad, I was like, I'm never, ever going to take a physics class as long as I live. I hope you're okay with that. And my dad was always supportive. He was like, you got a major and what you want a major in.

And so I don't know. I think I was going in thinking about robotic engineering. in my first year at a community college in Montana. And then I looked back, well, I mean, I guess it's first before that. I didn't even want to take physics. I took accounting instead, and that was really boring in high school. Long story short, I switched out of accounting. The only class that would take me that late in the semester was physics.

I loved it. And then here I am. That's the short story of it. But I realized at some point it was stupid not to go into physics just because a lot of my family had gone into physics and kind of rediscovered it for myself. And then I made the same sort of declarative. statements against astronomy while I was in undergrad. I was like, oh, no, I'm never going to become an astronomer.

And here I am. Yeah, you went from accounting. The next major alphabetically was astronomy. So here you are. So on the cover of searching for extraterrestrial life in the audible bookstore, there is a picture of an unidentified flying object, a flying saucer, shall we say. It looks to be pretty well identified, a very clear techno signature. In the last month alone, I've had, you know, several different guests on from Michael Shermer to

Seth Shostack. Earlier in the year, I had Jill Tarter, Sarah Seeger. What is this fascination with UFOs as alien craft? I mean, that seems to be a pretty big leap in a lot of ways. And then there are a lot of my listeners right now are screaming at me. No, that's the most likely explanation. So we have a very erudite audience, very diverse. But tell me, what is it about?

about this topic that immediately conjures up flying saucers so much so that you have this very clickable, not clickable, a head cover picture on your audiobook of a UFO when you really spend a lot of your time looking for microscopic things. Yeah, I mean, great question. Certainly, I have no input into what Amazon puts on the cover of these things. But when we think about these recent Pentagon videos, I watched some of your podcasts on that, some of the podcasts, for example, with McWest, you know, debating the origin of some of these features. And I think there's a couple things that I think capture us. So one is we really want to not be alone. And so even if we find life on another planet and it's microbial life, that to me is amazing. And that would be

just the discovery of the human kind. However, we might still feel lonely. You know, if we just find other microbes on another rock, it's not like we can really communicate with that. It's Similarly, if we find even a crow or something like a bird, we can't talk to that about our, you know, sort of our esoteric and big questions about why are we here and how, you know, how did the universe begin and all these things? We can't like test our theories against them. So I think we really want to find life that we can communicate with. And so there is this push to try to validate and believe.

I would say we have this biased. It's a bias stronger than the confirmation bias. Of course, we see what we want to see. That's a very well-known bias. We really have to pay attention to that. But then there's also the bias of just believing what we want to believe to be true. And so that's also a very strong bias. And I think we see that play out in these trying to identify these aerial phenomenon, because all of them really have shown to be relatively boring Earth phenomenon, as far as we know. And I think it's also, I would just say, like, we hold these unidentified objects at a higher level of evidence threshold than we do for murders. You know, we don't solve all murders on Earth, but we expect to solve every single unknown sky. I mean, that seems a little bit ridiculous to start pinning aliens on it. Yeah, I view that as a tribute to science and our power of science, as you point out, you know, in the book, if you ask the average American, how much does NASA's, you know, budget, what fraction of it of the U.S. budget? I'll say, yeah, it's 50%, 20%. And it's like less than 1% as you accurately point out.

But so it's a tribute that they think that we can answer all these questions. I always say, you know, science means knowledge. It doesn't mean wisdom. And there's a big difference between the two. And I think part of the wisdom is knowing the impact of the science that we do. And I want to take us back to the 1990s when you described in the book, you know, Bill Clinton had a press conference following the discovery of possible tentative signs of microcontinent. microbial life on a meteorite from Mars that landed in Antarctica. And I just feel, you know, regret that the times I've been in Antarctica, I've never picked up the meteorite, Martian,

or otherwise. But nevertheless, this particular artifact made headlines around the world. In fact, there's a scene in the wonderful movie Contact, based in part by one of my past guest, Andrewian, and her late husband, Carl Sagan, where they have in the movie version, they have a press conference where President Clinton's talking about the discovery of these aliens that Ellie Arroway found, right? And it's so prominent than people's minds, these discoveries. First of all, I want to take two aspects of this question to you, pose two questions to you. One is, if we discover that these were definitively real microbial life forms from Mars, it seems to me the impact would be pretty short-lived because most people don't know that they've

never been confirmed or refuted, right? So as far as most of the American public knows, the same public that believes 20% of our budget goes to NASA, they probably believe that there was Martian DNA or some microbial life found, right? So 30 years later, 20 plus years later. So what do you think would be the long-term impact if we found microbes versus finding, you know, a techno signature in terms of a spacecraft or, you know, or radio signal? What's the differential impact between various gradations of life? Yeah, I mean, it's excellent question. It's something, you know, as someone who really wants to find evidence of life on another planet, whether it be microbial or complex or intelligent, you know, I'm staking my whole career on this. This is what I, you know,

get up, you know, it gets what gets me out of bed, so to speak. And, and one of the sad things about this is I think that people will be underwhelmed when we actually come up with a discovery because they're like, oh, didn't we already discover microbes on Mars or didn't we already discover microbes in Venus or didn't we already discover, you know, wasn't it clear that those aliens signals and alien UFOs are real. And so I think that people tend to already believe there is life. And so despite the fact that we have no robust evidence for life, we just don't. None of the evidence that we have really crosses that threshold to be considered robust scientifically. So then we should be excited if we do detect life, but I think a lot of people will have thought that we already

detected that. And there's a couple reasons for that. Some of its bias in media reporting, how scientists talk about things, kind of a misunderstanding of scientific evidence and the scientific process. But yeah, so I think that's one fear I have is that when we do find evidence of life, it won't be met with the appropriate awe that it should be for being one of the most fascinating and profound discoveries we could have in our life. And then, of course, Yeah, if we can actually have any sort of technological signal that we receive, that would be even more fascinating. Hey there, fellow Voyagers into the Impossible Tiz Eye, your fearful host, Professor Brian Keating here with a tiny little homework assignment before we get back to the episode. And that's to make sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, either following it or subscribing to it, depending on your podcast, catcher of choice.

I did some research of my own and found out that only about half of you. you are actually following or subscribing to the podcast. So please do that. And for some extra credit, if you're looking to boost your position on the grading curve, please leave a rating or review. It really helps us out tremendously. Do it. Do it now. Before you forget, let's go back to the episode. Right. Yeah, I always say if you want to know what it would be like, right, the day after the discovery is confirmed, announced, and, you know, at the White House, just, you know, go down to the beach and scoop up some water and there'll be chilly. of microbes in there. And pretty much people will kind of move on with their day. There are people

that say this would be the most profound thing to discover microbes. I tend to think not. And the reason is just look at the history of how awfully we treat life on earth, both animals and humans, right? It's just human history is replete with the denigration of human life as a value. And I think that's one of the worst aspects of technology is the cheapening of human life. But anyway, finding microbes, you know, would be interesting. I think to many people, but what would be the impact the next day. It's hard to say. But you did bring up something very important, which is the way the media cover things.

And I always have this, you know, probably based on my experience with Bicep 2 and other things that I talk about in my book, is this issue of, you know, the lead story is always above the fold. Like literally above the fold, New York Times, San Diego Union Tribune, you know, Toronto Star Herald, whatever. And then the retraction, if it ever comes, if it ever comes, is on. the Saturday edition, page B-17, nobody knows about it, nobody reasons. So I claim that scientists should keep a budget, and that some of that budget should be for PR, and some of that budget should be held in reserve as a hedge against the risk of retractions. And I think we owe it to the public to not only trumpet what we think are our theories and successes. But you brought this up, and I want to get your take on it. It's so sensational. You go through very accurately and very

delightfully in the book, the history of that Martian, claimed Martian find. And I didn't know half this stuff. I mean, I knew almost nothing. I just knew that it hadn't been confirmed, really, and that it was probably premature. On the other hand, you go through it meticulously.

And I also remember there was an announcement of alien type life that eats sulfur and whatever found in Mono Lake here in California. Again, these are peer-reviewed things. These aren't just like, you know, they're just, you know, one-off things like some scientists. They're good scientists.

You go through their findings. And yet, so what do we do about that? What do we do about the kind of type 1 versus type 2 error risk to the credibility of science that tends to proliferate both in my field and in your field? There's a number of things that we should do. And this is certainly relevant as we even go right now through our age of misinformation, alternative facts and false facts and all of this too, because there's a flood of information on the Internet and how to tease out.

what is real and what's not is one hurdle. And then a separate hurdle is even in these prominent publications, like you said, they publish the main finding, but they don't necessarily publish the alternative, you know, updated view once the scientific community has looked at it. Because with any of these claims, I guess for your audience, they probably know that you're going to have a huge press release because it is an exciting discovery. It's going to be embargoed, which means a lot of scientists haven't yet been able to look at this discovery. And then once you put it out, you're going to have a whole bunch of people think about other things that you forgot to think about. And then it's going to go through that process of vetting and maybe it'll be

proved to be true, such as the pulsar planets, you know, the very first exoplanets, we kind of forget about them. And I feel sad because they didn't win the Nobel Prize, even though they were the first exoplanets discovered. You know, so we, those were eventually confirmed to be true, even though they weren't believed at the time. You know, and then you have other things like the Martian Meteor, which hasn't proved to be true, but you don't see the same level of media attention paid to the other parts along that story. So, you know, I think the Venus, we'll get to the Venus discovery, but actually a lot of the follow-up studies on Venus have been published, and I've seen them more prominently in the

news, so I'm excited about that. I think it allows the general public to see the process of science and kind of understand it a little bit more, because I don't want people to come away with thinking, We don't know how to, like nothing's true. No study you ever read is true. Scientists don't know what they're doing. But I do want them to have, you know, some skepticism while also having that excitement at new discoveries and retaining both of those things at the same time. You talked earlier about, you know, kind of a working definition of life. You didn't actually make reference to DNA or even carbon-based life. You talk in the book about these things that have a delightful name as an acronym, but are almost unpronounceable, poly aromatic cyclic hydrocarbon, P-A-H is also known as PAS.

Yeah, let's just call them POS. You speculate delightfully about, you know, work that's been done that maybe there could be some version of DNA, as Schrodinger himself thought, some crystal or something like that later found to be not accurate, but DNA instead. But talk about that. The alternative life, not alternative facts,

but alternative life modalities that don't use DNA, RNA, as you discuss in the book, you talk about the RNA world, hypothesis, origin of life. Talk about alternative. That was fascinating to me. How could PAHs, PAHs be candidates for encrypting and coding genetic information? Like any molecule that can link together and contain information. So you could think of, you know, in DNA we have four molecules. RNA also has four molecules.

But you could imagine just like in computers a zero. and a one, that's kind of the basic level of information. And so even if you have just molecules that can link together and encode an on-off sort of switch, it would take maybe more of them to convey the same amount of information as, say, if you had four switches that you can relay information through, but you can imagine information being propagated. So I think when we look at various origins scenarios of life, or indeed, when we're trying to find life in our solar system, this is definitely more applicable to solar system

exploration than exoplanets where we're more limited by trying to look for something we can understand. But in the solar system, we want to be relatively agnostic as to the type of biochemistry it could be. And so we want to look for any type of complex biochemistry. It could not be based in the molecules that we know. So this is going away from pause, but if we look in Titan and the liquid ethane and methane lakes there, what if you had similar sorts of, like in a totally different biochemistry

there than what we're used to, but if it can transmit information and support life, then that would be fascinating. But we just don't know yet. So I think we don't yet know if the phase space of life is open. I would be really surprised if life in the universe uses DNA, I think probably not. But I wouldn't be surprised if it uses carbon, because that's a more fundamental molecule. It's very common. It's a lot more common in the universe than silicon, for example.

example, water is likewise a very common solvent, and it has some unique properties, more common than liquid methane. So I feel like, you know, water and carbon, to me, are more fundamental units than, say, DNA, which is a lot more complicated and probably wasn't even in Earth's earliest life where you maybe had RNA or precursors to DNA, like PNA or TNA or other information-carrying system. So when we think about, yeah, the sort of propensity to do, to be biased and prejudiced as scientists, not just the invidious prejudice of sexism and racism that does still persist in some corners of academia and science and astronomy itself. And you are a fierce advocate for women in STEM. You also have the honor of holding to Carolyn Herschel. She is one of the

most titanic astronomers of any gender in human history. And here at UC San Diego, we had Margaret Burbage, who also was, I believe, overshadowed for a Nobel Prize in favor of really Fowler and other people. And she, of course, made the fundamental contribution to the observations that led to our model of stellar nucleosynthesis beyond, you know, sort of the lightest elements on the periodic table. But when we think about looking elsewhere and kind of the bias that we have towards what looks like us, as I say, not just in terms of our sociology, but in terms of what life could be. Could phosphine potentially fall into that because, you know, the paper and so forth, the work by Professor Jane Greaves and Cardiff and her collaborator, Sarah Seeger and others at MIT, they are sort of looking, you know, where the light is. In other words, they know that phosphine was a sighingi-bio signature of life on Earth, and so why not look elsewhere.

So what is that? What is that the danger of these different biases, confirmation bias, look elsewhere effect? you know, the file drawer effect, you know, that we suffer from as astronomers, as physicists. Absolutely. I mean, first I would say is in some ways we are for exoplanets, again, not for our solar system. We are necessarily hamstrung to look for things that we can recognize. So it could be that life exists in the clouds of Jupiter, for example. But if we can't tell if that's true in our own solar system and we've taken high resolution images of Jupiter with Juno, how are we going to see on an exoplanet?

We just can't even really comprehend what that biosignature would be. Or similarly, there very well might be life under the ice cap, the ice ocean on Europa, yet that doesn't have an atmosphere. And so as an exoplanet, it's relatively useless to us. So I think we need to look first for global biospheres that we could detect. And so I think this is a really common misconception, actually, in the public as well as within the scientific community. is when we say habitable planets, it's kind of a short term for something that we could detect from light years away. It doesn't mean that that's the only place that life could exist. And we know

that, you know, life could exist in many other places within our own solar system. But it's just saying where could we actually have a hope to detect this from light years away? Now, all bets are off when we look at our own solar system because we can actually go there. We can send landers. We can send rovers. We can look for this other type of life. And so I think that's where we should really test out some of these alternative biochemistries, Venus is a great place to look if such weird life exists. You know, same with Titan, same with Mars, Europa, all of these other places. We should look there because alternative biochemistries are kind of, if we can't prove them sort of in situ here in Earth or on planets around us, it's going to be really hard to detect

them on another planet. And maybe we'll eventually get there. And I think we should keep our mind open. So I really appreciate the work of Sarah Seeger and other colleagues. who are trying to be more open to any type of molecule we can find. But Clarissa Silva, who came up with the lines for phosphine, for example, you know, she's trying to go through and create spectra for more of these molecules, but we don't even have the spectra to detect them. Right now, there's like 16,000 molecules that Earth Life could produce. And we only have spectra of even

poor quality for 0.04% of them. So in some ways, we only are looking for phosphine because Dr. Clara Sousa Silva made the lines for phosphine, for example. And then we could suddenly look for it. We couldn't look for other molecules that we don't have the lines for. And when you look at the number of high-resolution line lists that exist, there's just not that many yet. So this is part of the fundamental science that needs to be done for us to even detect these molecules in other planet atmospheres or in the solar system. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless.

My connection stays strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Let's go deep into what you actually do because my audience is the brightest in the known multiverse. And just a reminder, we're talking to Dr. Sarah Ruggheimer, who's got.

a list of awards. That would take me two or three podcasts to note. Someday I'd love to talk to you about the awards that you won for public understanding and for leadership, the Rosalind Franklin lectureship prize in 2019. That was the same one that my kids' favorite astronomer named Brian, Brian Cox. He won, you won these phenomenal accolades. But tell me what they're for. Is it just for, you know, doing something cool? What do you do on a daily basis? Do you use a telescope, are you looking at spectrographs, or you're doing calibration? Are you building? What are you doing? And how can other people expect to follow in your footstep? How would they go about following in your footsteps or doing the type of day-to-day work that you do? So what I do is theory.

So there are people who are interested in observations, say finding observations of these exoplanets. And I am also excited about that. However, we are not yet to the point of being able to detect biosignatures. And what really grifted my interest as a scientist is could we detect life on another planet. And when I entered grad school, the answer was, this detection is really decades away. And even still, like, we're just approaching the technological horizon where we might be able to see the atmospheres of three habitable exoplanets with JWST. So we're really just pushing that observational threshold. And so what I do is theory to try to understand how can we be sure of the detection? How can we think of false positive mechanisms? How, how clear

would the signal be? Would it overlap with other features? What kind of resolution do you need? How big of a telescope do you need so that we can create future missions, these kind of horizon missions beyond JWST, that are really tailored for making these measurements. So as part of that, I'm part of this life mission concept in Europe called Large Interphometer for Exoplanets, L-I-F-E, Life. And this would be something that could actually detect hundreds, you know, or maybe we're hoping for like 30, 50, maybe 100, Earth-like planets and characterize their atmospheres. And it's also in the infrared where more of these molecules absorb. So I'm interested in both pushing forward this sort of mission concept, which I'm a part of the team for. But then on my research side, I look at how

does the star influence our observations, how does stellar activity influence our observations? So I do more theoretical computational modeling that hopefully will feed into and make our telescopes more robust for what we want to detect. If you haven't read Andy Weir's most recent book, Project Hail Mary, you will love it. Yeah, it's actually, yeah, and you could get it like your book, Audible is actually better than any other way to get it because it's actually acted out by a phenomenal actor with sound effects, etc. Andy Weir, I'll put a link to the episode

that he was on into The Impossible Podcast. I thank him for going very deep, and we even got into like mental health issues. I watched that one. Yeah, and when he dropped out of UC San Diego without a degree. And, you know, he went out to some success, I guess you could say. But he talks about, you know, obviously he's most well known for the Martian for now, although I think this is even a better book. But when we think about these places that people tend to look for life,

it's typically been Mars. And so lately I want to ask you about two items in the news in your cricket pitch. I don't know. We'd say ballpark when you're back in the U.S. But a cricket pitch, I don't know. But anyway, the point is there's been a lot of interest in extraterrestrial, you know, findings, including on Venus and potentially on Venus and potentially from this techno signature that your former, you know, Harvard mate Avi Loeb talks about in Omuamua as a techno

signature in his new book that we also did an interview. with not too long ago. So I want to ask you, first of what is the step, what is your opinion of Umuamua? And as a techno signature, do you agree with Avi and his 80 papers on the subject? It's not like he just wrote one paper and, you know, and then he wrote a book and went on Joe Rogan show. And then afterwards, he worked his way up to the Into the Impossible podcast. But tell me, what is, as a professional, what do you make of this? Right. So for Amuilua, I haven't followed all of the recent articles that have been written on alternative explanations. I'll be honest. I know that many papers have been published that are more critical of the finding. And I think more importantly

is there is this phenomenon when we have low resolution data. What is it called? Is it like the Cornelia effect or something like this? We should, we could figure it out. But basically, when there's this famous crater on Mars and it looks like a happy face. And then when you, And then when you get a better image of it, the happy face disappears. And humans do this all the time. We see things when we have low-resolution data, and the data for a mua-mua is just low-resolution. It's not, it's just, the error bars are high. It only had one pass.

We just couldn't get enough information for it. So while I agree with Avi that we should look for more of these, and definitely we should spend some of our astronomical budget looking for more of these, because if he's correct in the number of these, then we should see more of them. And we should be able to do better follow-up observations on them with more time and actually see what they are. I disagree that it's a strong evidence of life. I think it's more likely to be some of these other explanations that, and it's kind of like looking with the lamp post under the lamp post, I think, you know, like all scientists, we can fall prey to our favorite hypothesis and then kind of discount evidence that believes that.

So my personal scientific view on that is that there's enough kind of holes in that theory to not claim aliens. It doesn't reach the robustness of, say, aliens. And then I would say the same is true for Venus. So we don't even think it might be phosphine. Maybe it is. These papers are still coming out back and forth. And the teams are analyzing data and new teams are reanalyzing it and saying, no, it's SO2. and then people are like, no, but you have an error in your pipeline.

And so you have this back and forth, which is why science is awesome, because it is prone to falsification. You have to repeat the experiment. And I think that if we do find, you know, first off, we'll have to see if it is phosphine. It looks less and less likely. It is phosphine. There was a recent paper that shows that water activity in those clouds is very low. And water activity basically means could life do the chemistry

with water, you know, is there enough water there for it to be functional and it's 100 times lower than any known extremophile life that we know on Earth? So there's a number of kind of holes that are getting poked into the Venus hypothesis or even just whereas if it is phosphine, maybe it's coming from a different part of the atmosphere. All of these things matter. And so to me, it's kind of like looking at these UFO videos. You can't just like look at something fuzzy and be like, oh, that looks like a UFO. You have to get the follow-up data. Or if it is a UFO, you don't necessarily claim aliens. I mean, I've seen some weird night skylights. And then in the end, it just happened to be that it was a military plane taking off near me, and it flew over eventually. And I was like,

oh, it's a plane. But from a distance, it was doing all sorts of weird, like, geometrical, right angle stuff. And if I, you know, if I wasn't being skeptical, I might have claimed that I was seeing something odd. And so I think the criteria, you know, the same old, like the age old expression that Carl Sagan popularized, you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And none of these so far have met that hurdle. Yeah, I always say a new reference, Michael Shermer in the book, and he's been on the show many times, a good friend of mine. And yeah, this kind of a believing brain phenomenon that you fill in gaps when there is this, there is this noise and very low signal to noise environment where there's very high stakes.

You know, it's one thing if you're like looking for a seagull or as you talk about looking for a fly in front of a spotlight, you know, it's not going to probably kill you. You might not be able to see it. But oh, if you see it, if it's a bat, you know, I encountered a bat the other day and really freaked out my kids and my wife. But anyway, I was kind of intrigued by it because they're so interesting these flying rats. And you don't see him so much in California. you. But anyway, but yeah, there's a much bigger consequence, I suppose, for that to happen. But yeah, I wanted to bring up this recent, very provocative tweet and, of course, Sabina Hasenfelder, who's a good friend of mine and past guest, many-time guest on the show, she tweeted out,

you know, it's almost a sense of glee that the Max Planck Institute in Germany for solar system research in Göttingen tweeted out phosphine in Venus's clouds, no trace. It's pretty rare, like even with the Bicep 2 affair, you might be familiar, might not be, but for my listeners, you know, we didn't like make a blunder. We didn't leave the lens cap on or like somebody has we detected extremely high levels of signal to noise of B mode polarization. And it's no one's disagreeing with that. It's just how we attributed it, what was the source of it. This is now saying it seems to be quite different. It seems to be saying more in the camp of almost like the opera faster than light neutrinos or something. Like there was, there's actually something

wrong with the original analysis. These people are so, erreda, I'm going to have Jane on, I hope Jane Greaves, Professor Greaves on, maybe Sarasiga back for a part two or something as well. What do you make of this? It's pretty astounding to see this huge, basic flip-flop from, you know, scientific community. We need more data to now. We don't need any more data. And we probably should focus more effort on, you know, other planets, go back to Mars, you know,

as our focus. So what do you think of it? This extreme 180-degree flip in the scientific. community, not in the public. For any of these claims that are extraordinary, you will get people trying different explanations and trying to redo the data, and that's what you want. I think you have the same sort of sensationalized journal article titles after the Allen Hills Meteorite claim as well, and after some of these other controversies. You know, I think one of them was like Tempest in a teapot. So scientists can come up with, you know, very sensational headlines on our own without the media.

But I think no matter what, Venus is a story that we should pay attention to because it's certainly a humbling lesson as we think about exoplanets, just given the amount of back and forth on this detection. Exoplanets are much further way. Venus is next door. If we have trouble understanding it, how are we going to understand? understand these planets orbiting distant stars. But then also, you know, there are this, I would be curious to see what Jane has to say, as well as I'd recommend inviting Dr. Klaus Svis Silva, who is the theorist and who's the main person who came up with phosphine as a biosignature in her from her Ph.D. work. So, you know, because there are different ways and polynomial fits to this data, and depending on your assumptions, you can get different results. And so I think that we have to see how this plays out. We know one thing is that the

Reeves team has taken their abundance estimate down a notch from the 20 parts per was a billion to, I think, one part per billion. So we'll just have to see, but they still think they're seeing phosphine. And so, you know, it's going to go back and forth. And whether or not it's phosphine or SO2 is interesting. And if it is, even if it's a little bit of phosphine, that is unusual. And that would indicate some atmospheric chemistry that we're not really understanding or some geological process we're not understanding because I don't think it's life. Venus is a very hellish world. Like just complex chemistry is going to have a hard time surviving there. So then the question is, what is it? If it is just SO2, I still think we should go back to Venus because we don't understand

Venus. Just as a kind of a side note to this, Colin Wilson here at Oxford said that at a conference of Venus conference, they had eight groups take the same boundary conditions in their climate models for Venus. and with eight different climate models and every group had a different atmosphere for Venus come out. So we just can't model Venus's atmosphere very well, yet we don't understand the dynamics. We don't understand these more thicker atmospheres

yet very well, and we're going to need to as we start looking for exoplanets. So I think Venus is interesting for us on our way to understanding other planets, no matter what the story ends up being. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. The book's most juicy and delightful passages that you wrote. Again, I'm talking with Dr. soon-to-be professor Sarah Ruggheimer, about her research and her wonderful book, searching for extraterrestrial life, Audible, exclusive. And you'll see a review there among 70 other reviews from yours truly, with an asterism of five stars. We are celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Drake equation

this year in 2021. And I tried to get Frank Drake on. He's pushing 90. He had such a polite, you know, declination, a declining rejection, I should say, of my invitation. It was so polite, so classy. I love him so much. But I'm not a huge fan of his equation for the following reason that you actually point out in your wonderful audiobook, which is that, you know, we present the Drake equation in a way that if one of our undergraduates, my undergraduates, your future undergraduates, if they were ever to submit a result and it had no error analysis associated with it, we would give it back to them with an F, right? But the Drake equation is always presented as if, you know, it's just an equation out pops a number and then you just go on, but you point out

as, you know, in the book, as I pointed out, I gave a talk of the SETI Institute, that we have to do error analysis, and that's the hard part of being a scientist, right? You talk about just the phosphine life a minute ago. So, but talk about that, the lack of kind of attention that's paid to the real meat of what you and I do, which is really in the, in the deep, of how we look at what, as you described, systematic errors in particular and statistical errors. So first of all, what's a systematic error and how can it play results such as, you know, estimates based on the Drake equation? With the Drake equation, just in general when we think about the errors, we really only

know the first few terms with any sort of certainty, and then we're so limited in our understanding of Earth-type life. In fact, the equation itself is very astronomy-focused. If a biologist we're writing this equation, it would probably be different, you know, and they might think of different steps that would be more interesting to put in the equation. So we could just be wrong in where we're looking for life. We could have, you know, this bias of G stars, for example. We're around a sunlight star, but most of the stars in the universe are M stars. Is that a statistical fluke that we just happen to be around a star type that's only 6% of the stars? Or is it, is there something there? Is it that M stars have some, these cooler red stars have some intrinsic flaw as

habital planet hosts? So we don't know a lot of these things. And until we get more observations of planets, it's kind of like, it seems to me beyond my imaginative scientific horizon to be able to pin down the terms of the Drake equation. Because especially like the last term, the lifetime of an intelligent civilization. I mean, you could put whatever number you want in there. How are we going to have some statistical answer? Unless we have meet a being that has traveled the full universe, maybe even the multiverse, and we can say, give us the answers to this equation, I don't think we're going to be able to come up with that for the foreseeable future. But it's still interesting. I think it's interesting as a concept. It's interesting as a, well, how do we try to narrow down with, you know,

astronomers love back of the order of calculations. Could we do something useful from that? And I guess it's these same sorts of back of the envelope calculations that turned me away from astronomy. When I was a physics undergraduate student, I'm like, they don't know anything to within like factors of, you know, 100 or more. And so, but at the same time now as an astronomer, I do see some use for it. It's just not the, I think what people might think, oh, we can say that there must be

millions of intelligent civilizations in the galaxy. No, we have no idea because we have no idea how common life is, how common conflict life is, how common intelligent life is, technological life, and how long it lasts. I mean, we just have no idea. Yeah, and I do want to conclude with sort of a statement that I think, you know, your job is made harder in many ways by the media as, you know, kind of this machine. But sometimes it's even our professional colleagues who who also take liberty and make posters of Gleas or Gleasa, whatever, however you pronounce, you talk about in the book, these posters, they're very whimsical. But then, you know, people start to think, well, like, that looks really, you know,

photorealistic. Is that a real picture of the planet? And my colleague Adam Burgaster, I'm sure you know here, and he worked on the Trappist results. And, you know, you get these posters outside their office. I'm like, yeah, that might be kind of cool to take a vacation there. But I think it does make things pretty hard, especially when you're, you're doing, realize that there are so, you know, few pieces of tangible physical evidence. And when we get a little

bit, we just pour over it. And I want to ask you about kind of the answer to the ultimate mystery in all of your field, which is the Fermi paradox. You know, where is everybody? But to hear Sarah's answers, you're going to have to subscribe to her podcast and my podcast. And I'm going to send out your answers to these questions and more to my mailing list. So you have to subscribe to to Brian Keating.com, my mailing list. You'll get the answers to the thrilling three questions in which I'm going to ask Sarah about her answer to the Fermi Paradox. And also, you can get it by subscribing to her podcast and leaving a review wherever podcasts are sold. And that is called self-care with doctors, Sarah, because you do that with your friend and Sarah B. Remind me from

remind me, Sarah's the last name again. I keep forgetting. Professor Sarah Ballard. She's at Florida. Yes, I want to have her on too. She's coming to the UK in a week, so we could do, you know, double Sarah as well she's here for two weeks. So for now, if you want to hear the answers to the thrilling three final questions, including where is everybody in the universe?

You're going to have to subscribe to Dr. Sarah's podcast, plural professors, now Sarah podcast. And subscribe to Brian Keating.com by mailing us. So for now, thank you for joining us going into the environment. with Professor Sarah Rugghomber. Thank you, Sarah. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.