Lex Fridman Podcast - #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets

Episode Date: June 28, 2021

Clara Sousa-Silva is a quantum astrochemist at Harvard. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off - Grammarly: https://grammarly.com/lex to get 20% off premium - Blinkist: https://blinkist.com/lex and use code LEX to get 25% off premium - Indeed: https://indeed.com/lex to get $75 credit EPISODE LINKS: Clara's Twitter: https://twitter.com/drphosphine Clara's Website: https://clarasousasilva.com PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (07:57) - Discovery of phosphine on Venus (20:34) - Phosphine gas (30:47) - Searching for molecular fingerprints (41:44) - What does a quantum astrochemist do? (56:48) - Spectroscopic networks (1:01:13) - Biosignature gases (1:04:06) - UFOs and aliens (1:17:24) - Alien civilizations (1:34:59) - Programming (1:42:15) - Why science is beautiful (1:46:07) - How to be productive (1:56:27) - Books (1:57:59) - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with Clara Suza Silva, a quantum master chemist at Harvard, specializing in spectroscopy of gases that serve as possible signs of life on other planets. Most especially the gas phosphine. She was a co-author of the paper that in 2020 found that there is phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, and thus possible extraterrestrial life that lives in its atmosphere. The detection of phosphine was challenged, reaffirmed, and is now still under active research. Quick mention of our sponsors. On it, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I think the search for life on other planets is one of the most important endeavors in science. If we find extraterrestrial life and study it, we may find insights into the mechanisms that originated life here on earth, and more than life, the mechanisms that originated intelligence and consciousness. If we understand these mechanisms, we can build them. But more than this, the discovery of life on other planets means that our galaxy and our universe is teaming with life. This is humbling and terrifying, but it is also exciting.

We humans and natural explorers. For most our history, we explored the surface of the earth and the contents of our minds. But now, with space-faring vessels, we have a chance to explore life beyond Earth, their physics, their biology, and perhaps the contents of their minds. Now is the part of the program where I do a few minutes of ads, and never any ads in the middle, I think those are annoying and really get in the way of the conversation. I try to make these ads interesting, but I give you time stamps, so if you skip, and I hope you don't, but if you do, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support

this podcast. I'm fortunate to be able to be very selective with the sponsor we take on, so hopefully if you buy their stuff, you'll find value in it just as I have. This episode is sponsored by Onit, Nutrition, Supplement and Fitness Company. They make Alpha Brain which is a Neutropic that helps support memory, mental speed and focus. I've recently been using it on occasion to be a kind of super boost when I'm thinking through a difficult problem. It clears the mind, helps me maintain focus. It's really important for me to not rely on anything like that. So I don't take it as a regular part of my productive life.

I take it as a way to boost my mind through difficult deep work sessions. Plus I really like the brand on it. I get to pass their gym quite often while I'm here in Austin. Obviously, Joe Rogan is involved with it since I've been a long time fan of his podcast. The on-it brand is kind of implanted in my head at this point. Anyway, go to lexfreedman.com slash on it to get up to 10% off alpha brain. That's lexfreedman.com slash on it. This show is sponsored by Grammarly, a writing assistant tool that checks spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. Grammarly Premium, that's the one you pay for, offers a bunch of extra features.

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I wonder if it can help me mumble less. Maybe there's a company called mumberly.com. And maybe they can be a sponsor too. This episode is also sponsored by Blinkist. My favorite app for learning new things, Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. There's a huge number of really popular books on there, many of which I would recommend, like Sapiens and Homo Deus, by Yvall Harari. I've been thinking of doing a project where I read a book a day for maybe like a month.

Since I've been really slacking on the amount of reading I'm doing per day, it's really been in like 10 minutes, 20 minute periods, it's supposed to hour, two hour, three hour, four hour. I want to get back into sort of serious reading, note taking and thinking through stuff. I think it makes me a better person. I think it makes me a better friend. It makes me a better conversationalist than a podcast certainly. It makes me a better mind that thinks about this world Reading is like the most efficient and cheap way to travel both through space and time so I

Definitely want to do that kind of project and Blinkist helps me guide which books I want to read or which books I want to reread it also reminds reminds me of the key ideas from books I've already read. It's just a great companion to the full reading experience. Go to blinkist.com slash lex to start your free seven day trial and get 25% off of a blinkist premium membership that's blinkist.com slash lex spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T blinkist.com slashlex. This episode is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them as part of many hiring efforts I've done for the teams I've led. They have tools like Indeed Instant Match giving you quality candidates whose resumes on Indeed fit your job description immediately.

Actually as we speak I've been doing interviews of video editors today, and I'm going to do some more tomorrow. It's really incredible how many people apply to work with me and how cool they are, and just how fortunate I am to be surrounded by cool people, but also for more cool people to reach out to me, and just want to connect with me. I don't know.

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indeed.com slash flex, get it at indeed.com slash flex terms and conditions apply all for valid through June 30th. the Since you're the world expert, and well, in many things, but one of them is phosphine would it technically be correct to call you the queen of phosphine? I go for doctor phosphine queen is an inherited title. I feel but you still rule by Love and power so but while while having the doctor title I got kindness kindness while having the doctor title. I got kindness kindness. In September 2020, you call author to paper announcing possible presence of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. And that it may be a signature of extra terrestrial life.

Big maybe big maybe there was some pushback. of course, from the scientific community that followed friendly, loving pushback. Then in January, another paper from University of Wisconsin, I believe, confirmed the finding. So where do we stand in this saga, in this mystery of what the heck is going on on Venus in terms of phosphine in terms of aliens? Let's try to break it down. going on on Venus in terms of phosphine in terms of aliens. Let's try to break it down. Okay.

The short answer is we don't know. I think you and the rest of the public are now witnessing pretty exciting discovery, but as it evolves, as it unfolds, we did not wait until we had, you know had years of data from 10 different instruments across several layers the atmosphere. We waited until we had two telescopes with independent data months apart. But still, the data is weak, it's noisy, it's delicate, it's very much a the edge of instrument sensibility, sensitivity. And so we still don't even know if it is phosphine. We don't even really know if the signal is real, people still disagree about that.

And I think it, the most morphological end of how this happened, I think it is a distinction, and myself, another co-authors were talking about this. It's a distinction between hypotheses generation and hypotheses testing. Now, hypothesis testing is something that I think is the backbone of the scientific method, but it has a problem, which is if you're looking through very noisy data and you want to test the hypotheses, you may by mistake create a spurious signal. The safest, more conservative approach is hypothesis generation.

You see some data and you go, what's in there? With no bias. Now, this is much safer, much more conservative. And when there's a lot of data, that's great. When there isn't, you can clean the noise and take out the signal with it. The signal with a bath water, whatever the equivalent of the analogy would be. And so I think the healthy discourse that you describe is exactly this. There are ways of processing the data, completely legitimate ways, checked by multiple people and experts where the signal shows up and then

phosphine isn't the atmosphere of Venus and somewhere it doesn't, and then we disagree what that signal means. If it's real and it is an ambasely phosphine, it is very exciting because we don't know how to explain it without life. But going from there to the nuisance is still a huge jump. And so- The nuisance. So that would be the title for the civilization, if it is a living and thriving on Venus' nuisance. Until we know what they call themselves, that's the name, yes. So this is the early analysis of data or analysis of early data. It was nevertheless, you waited until the actual peer reviewed publication.

Of course. And analysis of the two different instruments apart. So that's Alma and JCMT, the two telescopes. I mean, still, I mean, it's really exciting. What did it feel like sort of sitting on this data, like kind of anticipating the publication and wondering, and still wondering, is it true? How does it make you feel that a planet in our solar system might have phosphine in the atmosphere? It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts. In a way. I mean, in the best possible way. I've been working on phosphine for over a decade. Before it was cool. Before it was cool. Before anyone could spell it or hurt of it. And at the time, people either didn't know what fast-fing was or only knew it for being just possibly the most

horrendous molecule that ever graced the earth. And so no one was a fan. And I'd been considering looking for it because I did think it was an unusual and disgusting, but very promising sign of life. I've been looking for it everywhere. I really didn't think to look in the solar system. I thought it was all pretty rough around here for life. And so I wasn't even considering the solstice

at all never mind extort Venus. It was only the lead author of the study, Jane Greaves, who thought to look in the clouds of Venus and then reached out to me to say, I don't know phosphine, but I know it's weird, how weird is it? And the answer is very weird. And so the telescopes were looking at this as visual data.

So we mean by visual, you wouldn't see the phosphine. Well, but I mean it's, well, it's a telescope. It's remote. It's remote. You're observing what's zooming in on this particular planet. I mean, what does this sensor actually look like? How many pixels are there? What does the data kind of look like? It'd be nice to kind of build up intuition of how little data we have based on which.

I mean, if you look at like, I've just been reading a lot about gravitational waves and it's kind of incredible how from just very little, like probably the world's most precise instrument, we can derive some very foundational ideas about our early universe. And in that same way, it's kind of incredible how much information you can get from just a few pixels.

So what are we talking about here? In terms of based on which this paper saw possible signs of phosphine in the atmosphere So phosphine like every other molecule has a unique spectroscopic fingerprint meaning it rotates and vibrates in special ways I calculated how many of those ways it can rotate my right to the 16.8 billion ways how many of those ways it can rotate my right to the 16.8 billion ways. What this means is that if you look at the spectrum of light and that light has gone through phosphine gas on the other end, there should be 16.8 billion tiny marks left indentations left in that spectrum. We found one of those on Venus, one of those 16.8 billion. So now the game is, can we find any of the other ones?

Yeah. But they're really hard to spot. They're all in terrible places in the electromagnetic spectrum. And the instruments we use to find this one can't really find any other one. There's another one of the 16.8 billion we could find, but it would take many, another one of the 16.8 billion we could find, but it would take many, many days of continuous observations, and that's not really in the cards right now. I mean, how do you... there's all kinds of noise, first of all. There's all kinds of other

signal. So how do you separate all of that out to pull out just this particular signature separate all of that out to pull out just this particular signature that's associated with phosphine. So the data kind of looks somewhat like a wave and a lot of that is noise and it's a baseline. And so if you can figure out the exact shape of the wave, you can cancel that shape out and you should be left with a straight line and if there's something there, an absorption so a signal. So that's what we did. We tried to find out, what was this baseline shape, cleaned it out and got the signal.

That's part of the problem. If you do this wrong, you can create a signal. But that signal is at 8.904 wave numbers. And we actually have more digits than that, but I don't remember my heart. And an alma in particular is a very, very good telescope, array of telescopes, and it can focus on exactly that frequency. And in that frequency, there are only two known molecules that absorb it all. So that's how we do it. We look at that exact spot where we know fossa absorbs the other molecules. So too, if there is extra trust through a life, whether it's on Venus or on exoplanets,

where you look before, how does that make you feel? How should it make us feel? Should we be scared? Should we be excited? Let's say it's not intelligent life. Let's say it's my core-bale life. Is there a threat to us? Are we a threat to it? Or is it only, not only, but mostly, possibly, to understand something fundamental, something beautiful about life in the universe? Hard to know. You would have to bring on a poet or a philosopher on the show. I...

You don't feel... I feel those things. I just don't know if those are the right things to feel. I don't... Certainly don't feel scared. I think it's rather silly to feel scared. Definitely don't touch them. You know, sometimes in the movies, you...

Don't go near it. Don't interfere. I think one of the things with Venus is because of Fossil, now there is a chance that Venus is inhabited. In that case, we shouldn't go there. We should be very careful with messing with them, bringing our own stuff there that contaminates it. And Venus has suffered enough. If there's life there,

it's probably the remains of a living planet, the very last survivors of what once was potentially a thriving world. And so I don't want our first interaction with alien life to be massacre. So I definitely wouldn't want to go near out of a, let's say galactic responsibility, galactic ethics. And I often think of alien astronomers watching us and how disappointed they would be if we messed this up. So I really, I really

want to be very careful with anything that could be life. But certainly, I wouldn't be scared. Humans are plenty capable of killing one another. We don't need extra-terrestrial help to destroy ourselves. It's scared mostly of other humans. Exactly. But this life, if there is life there, it does seem just like you said, it would be pretty rugged. It's like the cockroaches or Chuck Norris, I don't know.

It's the some kind of. It's something that survived through some very difficult conditions. That doesn't mean it would handle us. It could be like war the walls. You come just because you're resilient in your own planet. It doesn't mean you can survive another. Even our extremophiles, which are very impressive, we should all be very proud of our extremophiles. They won't really make it in the Venetian clouds. So I wouldn't expect, because you're tough, even Chuck Norris tough, that you would survive

on an alien planet. And from the scientific perspective, you don't want to pollute the data gathering process, but I sure was showing up there. The observer can can affect the observed. How heartbreaking would it be if we found life on another planet? And then we're like, Oh, we brought it with us. So it was my sandwich. But that's, but that's always the problem, right? And certainly a problem with Mars because we visited the,

if there is life on Mars or like remains of life on Mars, it's always going to be a question of like, well, maybe we planted it there. Let's not do the same with Venus. It's harder because when we try to go to Venus, things melt very quickly. Yeah, it's a pretty, yeah. It's a little harder to pollute Venus. It's very good at destroying foreigners. Yeah, well, in terms of Elon Musk and terraforming planets,

Mars is stop number one, and Venus may be after that. So can we talk about phosphine a little bit? So you mentioned it's a pretty. Love phosphine. What's your Twitter handle? It's like Dr. Phosphine. It's Dr. Phosphine, yes. You'll be surprised here.

It wasn't taken already. I can just, I just grabbed it. Didn't have to buy it off anyone. Yeah. So what is it? What's Fossine? You already mentioned it's pretty toxic and troublesome. And outside troublesome. No, I love it. I'm going to start calling it troublesome. Outside, I'm sorry. No, I love it. I'm gonna start calling it troubles. That is so maybe What are some things that make it interesting chemically and why is it a good sign of life One is present in the atmosphere like you've described in your paper Apply titled the phosphine as a biosignature gas and exet Appens fierce. I suppose you wrote that paper before Venus.

I did, yes. And no one cared, you know, in that paper, I said something like, if we find fosfin on any terrestrial planet can only mean life. And everyone's like, yeah, that sounds about right. Let's go. And then Venus shows up and I was like, are you sure? I'm like, I was sure before I was sure. Now that it's right here, I'm less sure. Now than my claims are being tested. So phosphine, phosphine is a fascinating molecule. So it's shaped like a pyramid with a phosphorus up top and then

three hydrogens. It's actually quite a simple molecule in many ways. You know, it's the most popular elements in the universe. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur. When you add hydrogen to them, it makes quite simple, quite famous molecules. You do it to oxygen, you get water, you do it to carbon, you get methane, you do it to nitrogen, you get ammonia. These are all molecules people have heard of. But you do it to nitrogen, you get ammonia. These are all molecules people have heard of. But you do it to phosphorus, you get phosphine. People haven't heard of phosphine because it's not really popular on earth. We really shouldn't find it anywhere on earth because

it is extremely toxic to life. It interacts with oxymetabolism and everything you know and love interacts with oxer metabolism and everything you know and love uses oxer metabolism. And it interacts fatally, so it kills in several very imaginative and very macabre ways. So, it was used as a chemical warfare agent in the First World War and most recently by ISIS. So, really bad. Most life avoids it. Even life that might not avoid it. So life that doesn't use oxygen metabolism and aerobic life still has to put crazy amounts of effort into making it. It's a really difficult molecule to make thermodynamically

speaking. It's really difficult to make that phosphorus want to be together with a hydrogen. So it's horrible. Everyone avoids it when they're not avoiding it. It's extremely difficult to make. You would have to put energy in sacrifice energy to make it. And if you did go through all that trouble and made it, it gets reacted with the radicals in the atmosphere and get destroyed. So we shouldn't find it anywhere and yet we do. It's kind of weird, molecular seems to find it anywhere and yet we do. It's kind of weird molecule that seems to be made by life and we don't even know why. Life clearly finds a use for it. It's not the only molecule the life is willing to sacrifice energy to make, but we don't know how or why life is even making it. So absolutely mysterious. Absolutely deadly. Smells horrifically when it's made, it produces other kind of diphosphines

and it's been reported as smelling like garlicky fishy death. Once someone referred to it as smelling like the, let me see if I remember, the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan. Oh, they're nice. Yeah, very, very vivid. And so-

See, you're a poet after all. I didn't call that, someone else said. And so it's a poet after all. I didn't call that someone else said. And so it's just this horrific molecule, but it is produced by life. We don't know why. And when it is produced by life is done with an almost sacrifice. And the universe does not sacrifice. Life sacrifices.

And so it's this strange contradictory molecule that we should all be avoiding and yet seems to be an almost an ambiguous sign of life on rocky planets. Okay. Can we dig into that a little bit? So on rocky planets, is there biological mechanisms that can produce it? You said that why is unclear? Why life might produce it, but is there an understanding of

what kind of mechanisms might be able to produce it? This is very difficult to produce molecule. We don't know yet. The enzymatic pathways of fostering production by life are not yet known. This is not actually a surprising as it might sound. I think something like 80% of all the natural products that we know of, so we know biology makes them. We don't know how. It is much easier to know life produces something because you can put bacteria in a petri dish and then watch and then that gas is produced,

you go, oh, life made it. That actually happened with phosphine. But that's much easier to do, of course, than figuring out what is the exact metabolic pathway within that life form that created this molecule. So we don't know yet. Phosphine was really understudied. No one had really heard of it until now. So now I wish. What you were presenting is the fact that life produces phosphine, not the process by

wish it produces phosphine, not the process by which it produces phosphine. Is there an urgency now? Like, if you were to try to understand the mechanisms, the, what did you call them, and thematic pathways that produce phosphine. How difficult is that of a problem to crack? It's really difficult. I'm not mistaken, even, you know, the scent of truffles, obviously a billion dollar industry, huge deal. Until quite recently, it wasn't known exactly how those scents, those molecules that create this incredible smell were produced. This is a billion dollar industry.

As you can imagine, there is no such pressure. There's no phosphine lobby or anything that would push for this research. But I hope someone picks it up and does it. And it isn't crazy because we know that fosvin is really hard to make. We know it's really hard for her to happen accidentally, even lightning and volcanoes that can produce small amounts of fosvin.

It's extremely difficult for even these extreme processes to make it. So it's not really surprising that only life can do it, because life is willing to make it. So it's not really surprising that only life can do it because life is willing to make things at a cost. So maybe on the topic of phosphine, what, again, you've gotten yourself into trouble that I'm going to ask all these like high level poetic questions I apologize. No, I would love it. Okay. When did you first fall in love with phosphine? It wasn't love of her sight.

It was somewhere between a long relationship and Stockholm syndrome. Yeah. When I first started my PhD, I knew I wanted to learn about molecular spectra and how to simulate it. I thought it was really outrageous. Our radius that we as a species couldn't detect molecules remotely. We didn't have this perfect catalog ready of the molecular fingerprint of every molecule we may want to find in the universe.

And something as basic as phosphine, the fact that we didn't really know how it interacted with light. And so we couldn't detect it properly, you know, in the galaxy. Just, I was so indignant. And so initially, I just started working on Phospheme because people hadn't before, and I thought we should know what Phospheme looks like. And that was it. And then I read every paper that's ever been published about Phospheme. It was quite easy, because there aren't that many. And that's when I started learning about where we had already found it in the universe. And what it meant, I started finding out quite how little we know about it and why. And it was only when I joined MIT and I

started talking to biochemists that it became clear that Phasin wasn't just weird and special and understudied and disgusting. It was all these things for oxygen-loving life, and it was the anaerobic world that would welcome Phasin, and that's when the idea of looking for it on other planets became crystallized, because oxygen is very powerful and very important on Earth, but that's not necessarily going to be the case on other exoplanets. Most planets are oxygen pole, overwhelmingly, most planets are oxygen pole. And so finding the sign of life that would live without oxygen on earth seemed so cool. But ultimately the project that first was born out of the idea that you want to find that molecular fingerprint of any of a molecule. And this is just one example. And that's connected

This is just one example. And that's connected to then looking at for looking for that fingerprint elsewhere in a remote way. And obviously that then, at that time, where exoplanets are ready, when you were doing your PhD, and by those you say your PhD thesis was on Vosin. It was all on phosphine, 100% on phosphine. With a little bit of pneumonia, I have a chapter

that I did it where I talked about phosphine and ammonia. But no, it phosphine was very much my thesis. But at that time, when you're writing it, there's already a sense that exoplanets are out there and we might be able to be looking for biosignatures for on those exoplanets? Pretty much. So I finished my PhD in 2015. We found the first exoplanets in the mid to late 90s. So exoplanets were known. It was known that some had atmospheres. And from there, it's not a big jump to think, well, if some have atmospheres, some of those might be habitable. And some of those may be inhabited.

So how do you detect, you started to talk about it, but can we mingle on it? How do you detect phosphine on a far away thing, rocky thing, rocky planet? What is spectroscopy, what is this molecular fingerprint? What does it look like? You've kind of mentioned a wave, but what are we supposed to think about? What are the tools? What are the uncertainties?

All those kinds of things. So the path can go this way. You've got light, kind of pure light. You can crack that light open with a prism or a spectroscope or a washer and make a rainbow. That rainbow is all the colors and all the invisible colors, the ultraviolet, the infrared. And if that light was truly pure, you

could consider that rainbow to just cover continuously all of these colors. But if that light goes through a gas, we may not see that gas, we certainly cannot see the molecules within that gas. But those molecules will steal, absorb some of that light, some, but not all. Each molecule absorbs only very specific colors of that rainbow. And so if you know, for example, that shade of green

can only be absorbed by methane. Then you can watch, as a planet passes in front of a star, the planet is too far away, you can't see it. And it has an atmosphere, that atmosphere is far too small, you definitely can't see it. But the sunlight will go through that atmosphere, and if that atmosphere is methane, then on the other side, that shade of blue, I can't write if I said blue or green, but that color will be missing because methane took it. And so with phosphine, it's the same thing. It has

specific colors, 16.8 billion colors, that it absorbs it and nothing else does. And so if you can find them and notice them missing from the light of a star that went through a planet's atmosphere, then you'll know that atmosphere contains them all, how cool is that? This is incredible. So you can have this fingerprint within the space of colors and there's a lot of molecules. I wonder, that's a question of how much overlap there is, how close can you get to the actual thing compared, like, conphosphine unlocked the iPhone with its lights on. He said 16.8 billion. So presumably this rainbow discretized into a little segment somehow. How many total are there? How a lot is 16.8 billion? How a lot is 16.8 billion? It's a lot.

We don't have the instruments to break any light into this many tiny segments. With the instruments we do have, there's huge amounts of overlap. Methane is an example. A lot of the ways it's detectable is because the carbon and the hydrogens, they vibrate with one another, they move, they interact, but every other hydrocarbon, a settling, isoprene, has carbon and hydrogens, also vibrating and rotating. And so it's actually very hard to tell them apart at low resolutions, and our instruments can't really cope with distinguishing between molecules particularly well.

But in an ideal world, if we had infinite resolution, then yes, every molecule's spectral features will be unique. Yeah, like almost to like it would be too trivial. At our level. At our level, level. There's huge overlap. Yeah, but then you can start to then. What try to disambiguate like what the miss the fact that certain colors are missing. What does that mean? And hopefully they're missing in a certain kind of pattern where you can say, with some kind of probability that this gas, not this gas, you're solving that gaseous puzzle. I got it. Okay. We can go back to Venus actually and show that. So with this, I mentioned there was two molecules that could be responsible for that signal, the resolution that we have. It was phosphine and SO2 sulfur dioxide. And that resolution could really be one of the other, but in that same bandwidth,

so in the kind in the same observations, there was another region where phosphine does not absorb. We know that, but SO2 does. So we just went and checked, and there was no signal. So we thought, oh, then it must be phosphine. And then we submitted the paper. The rest is history. I got. Well, yeah, that's beautifully told is there. So the

telescopes we're talking about are sitting on earth. What can it help solving this fingerprint molecular fingerprint problem if we do a flyby? Does it help if you get closer and closer? Or arthlasic is pretty damn good for this kind of puzzle solving. Phelpscups are pretty good, but the Earth's atmosphere is a pain. I mean, I'm very thankful for it, but it doesn't interrupt a lot of measurements and a lot of regions where

fosking would be active. They are not available. The earth is not transparent in those wavelengths. So being above the atmosphere would make a huge difference. Then proximity matters a lot less, but just escaping the Earth's atmosphere would be wonderful. But then it's really hard to stay very stable. And if there is phosphononvenous, there's very little of it in the clouds. And so the signal is very weak and the telescopes we can use on our are much bigger and much more stable. So it's a bit of a trade-off. So is it, are you comfortable with this kind of remote observation? Is it at all helpful to strive for going over to Venus and like grabbing a scoop of the atmosphere or is remote observation really a powerful tool for this kind of job?

Like the scoop is not necessary. Well, a lot of people want to scoop. I get it. I get it. My natural inclination, yeah. I don't want to scoop specifically because get it. I get it. That's my natural inclination yet. I don't want to scoop specifically because if it is life, I want to know everything I can remotely before I interfere. So that's my, I've got ethical reasons against the scoop more than engineering reasons against the scoop. But I have some engineering reasons against the scoop. Scoop is not a technical term, but I feel like. Thank you for going along with this. It's too late to take it back. I appreciate it. We don't understand the clouds well enough

to plan the scoop very well. Because it's not that saturated. Like there's not that much of it present. No, and the place is nasty. It's not going to be easy to build something that can do the task reliably and can be trusted. The measurements can be trusted and then pass that message on. So, actually, I'm for an orbiter.

I think we should have orbitors around every solar system body whose job is just to learn about these places. I'm disappointed we haven't already got an orbiter. Around every single one of them. A small, it can be a small satellite. It's a gliding data figuring out, you know, how do the clouds move, what's in them, how often is there lightning and volcanic activity, where's the epigraphy, is it changing? Is there a biosphere actively doing things we should be monitoring this from afar? And so I'm for over the atmosphere, hopefully around

Venus, that would be that would be my choice. Okay, so now recently Venus is all exciting about phosphine and everything. Is there is there other stuff maybe before we were looking at Venus or now looking out into other solar systems? Is there other promising exoplanets or other planets within the solar system that might have phosphine or might have other strong biosignatures that we should be looking for like phosphine? There's a few, but outside the solar system all are kind of promising candidates. We know so little

about them. For most of them, we barely know their density. Most of them, we don't even know if they have an atmosphere, never mind what that atmosphere might contain. So we're still very much at the stage where we have detected promising planets, but they're promising in that they're about the right size, about the right density, they could have an atmosphere, and they're about the right distance from their hosta. But that's really all we know. New future telescopes will tell us much more, but for now, we're just guessing. So you said near future, so there's hope that there will be telescopes that can see that far enough to determine if there's an atmosphere and perhaps even the contents of that atmosphere. Absolutely.

J.W.S.D. launching later this year will be able to get a very rough sense of the main atmospheric constituents of planets that could potentially be habitable. And that's this year, you know. What's the name of that? J.W.S.D. the James Webb Space Telescope. Okay, and that's going to be out in space past the atmosphere. Yes. Is there something interesting to be said

about the engineering aspect of the telescope? It's an incredible beast, but it's a beast of many burdens. So it's going to do... It's good. See, you are a poet. Yeah, I love it. This is very eloquent. You're speaking to the audience, which I appreciate.

So yes, this is a giant engineering project. And is it orbiting something? So it's going to be above the atmosphere. And it will be doing lots of different astrophysics. And so some of its time will be dedicated to exoplanets, but there's an entire astronomy field fighting for time before the cryogenic lifetime of the instrument. And so when I was looking for the possibility

of finding phosphine on distant exoplanets, I used AWSD as a way of checking with this instrument that we will launch later this year. Could we detect phosphine on an oxygen-poor planet? And there I put very much a hard stop where some of my simulations said, yes, you can totally do it, but it will take a little under the cryogenic lifetime

of this machine. So then I had to go, well, that's not going to, no one's going to dedicate all of J. Douglas D to look for my molecule that no one cared about. So we're very much at that edge, but there'll be many other telescopes in the coming decades that will be able to tell us quite a lot about the atmosphere

as of potentially haptical planets. So you mentioned simulation. This is super interesting to me. And this perhaps could be a super dumb question, but I'm going to prove you wrong in that one. You simulate molecules to understand how they look from a distance is what I understand. Like what does that simulation look like?

So it's talking about which colors of the rainbow will be missing. Is that the goal of the simulation? That's a goal, but it's really just a very, very nasty Schrodinger's equation. So it's a quantum simulation. It's simulating at the quantum level. Yes. So I'm a quantum master chemist. Hi, I'm Clara. I'm a quantum astrochemist. Do you use this? How we should have started this conversation? Can you describe the three components of that quantum astrochemist and how they interplay together? So I study the quantum behavior of molecules, hence the quantum and the chemist, specifically so I can detect them in space and see Astro. So what I do is I figure out the probability of a molecule being in a particular state.

There's no deterministic nature to the work I do, so it's every transition is just a likelihood. But if you get a population of that molecule, it will always happen. And so this is all of the quantum level. It's a Schrodinger equation on, I think, 27 dimensions. I don't remember it by heart. And what this means is I'm solving these giant quantum matrices. And that's why you need a lot of computer power, giant computers, to diagonalize these enormous matrices, each of whom describes a single vibrational behavior of a molecule. So I think phosphine has 17.5 million possible states it can exist in. And transitions can occur between pairs of these states.

And there's a certain likelihood that they'll happen. This is the quantum world, nothing is deterministic. There's just a likelihood that it'll jump from one state to another. And these jumps, they're transitions. And there's 16.8 billion of them. When energy is absorbed, they're corresponds to this transition. we see it in the spectrum. This is more quantum chemistry than you had asked for, I'm sorry. No, no, I'm sorry, brain is broken. So when the transition happens in the different states, somehow the energy maps the spectrum. Exactly. Energy corresponds to a frequency and a frequency corresponds to a wavelength,

which corresponds to a color. So there is some probability assigned to each color then? Exactly. And that probability determines how intense that transition will be, how strong. And so you run this kind of simulation for particular, so that's 17.5 square or something like that. Exactly. 17.5 million energies, each one of whom involves

diagonalizing a giant matrix with a supercomputer. She wanted what the most efficient algorithm for diagonalization is, but there's some kind of... There's many. It depends on kind of the shape of the matrix, so they're not random matrices, so some are more diagonal than others, and so some need more treatment than others. Most of the work ends up going in describing this system, this quantum system in different ways until you have a matrix that is close to being diagonal and then it's much easier to clean it up. So how how many how hard is this puzzle? So you're solving this puzzle for philosophy, right?

is this puzzle? So you're solving this puzzle for phosphine, right? Is this supposed to solve this puzzle for every single molecule? Oh boy. Yes, I calculated if I if I did the work I did for phosphine, again, for all the molecules for which we don't have spectra for which we don't have a fingerprint, it would take me 62,000 years a little over. 62,000 years. What time flies when you're having fun? Okay. But you write that there are about 16,000 molecules we care about when looking for a new Earth or when we try to detect alien biosignatures.

If we want to detect any molecules from here, we need to know their spectra and We currently don't solving this particular problem That's my job. Well, that's that. I mean, that's absolutely correct. Yeah, I couldn't this could have not said a better myself Did you take that from my website? Yeah, I think it's still it and your website is excellent So it's worthy place to steal stuff from how do you solve this problem of for the 16,000 molecules we care about Of which foscene is one. Yes, and so So taking a step a little bit out of foscene Is there But we were having so much fun. We have so much fun. No, we're not saying bye. It's taking around

I'm just saying we're joining more friends coming to the party. How do you choose other friends to come to the party that are interesting to study as we solve one puzzle at a time through the space of 16,000? So we've already started out of those 16,000, we understand water quite well, methane quite well, ammonia quite well, carbon dioxide. I could keep going. And then we understand molecules like acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, more or less. And that takes us to about 4% of those 16,000. We have the sound about 4% of them, more or less. Phosphine is one of them. But the other 96%, we just really have barely any idea at all of where in the spectrum of light

they would leave a mark. I can't spend the next 62,000 years doing this work and I don't want to, even if you know somehow half a day old that's not that that wouldn't feel good. So one of the things that I try to do now is move away from how I did phosphine. So I did phosphine really the best that I could, the best that could be done with a computer power that we have, trying to get each one of those 16.8 billion transitions mapped accurately, calculated. And then I thought, what if I do a worst job? What if I just

do a much worse job? And can I just make it much faster? And then it's still worth it? Like how bad can I get before it's worthless? And then could I do this for all the other molecules? So I created exactly this terrible, terrible system. How bad is it? So how was the answer to that question that fundamental question asked myself all the time in other domains? How crappy can I be from useless? Before somebody notices. Turns out pretty crappy because no one has any idea what these molecules look like. Anything is better than nothing. And so I thought, how long will it take me to create

better than nothing spectra for all of these molecules? And so I created a rascal, rapid, approximate spectral calculations for all. And what I do is I use organic chemistry and quantum chemistry and kind of cheat of them both. I just tried to figure out what is the fastest way I could run this. And I simulate rough spectra for all of those 16,000. So I've managed to get it to work.

It's really shocking how well it works considering how bad it is. Is there insights you could give to like the the tricks involved in making it fast? Like what are the maybe some insightful shortcuts taken that still result in some useful information about the spectra? The insights came from organic chemistry from decades ago when organic chemists wanted to know what a compound might be. They will look at a spectrum and see a feature and they would go, I've seen that feature before. That's usually what happens when you have a carbon triple bonded to another carbon. And they were mostly right. Almost

every molecule that has a carbon triple bonded to another one looks like that. Has other features different from that distinguish them from one another, but they have that that feature in common. We call these functional groups. And so most of that work ended up being abandoned because now we have mass spectrometry, we've got nucleomagnetic resin spectroscopy, so people don't really need to do that anymore. But these ancient textbooks still exist, and I've collected them all as many as I could and there are hundreds of these descriptions where people have said oh whenever you have a iodine atom connected to this one there's always a feature here and it's usually quite sharp and it's quite strong and Some people go, oh, yeah, that's a really broad feature every time that

combination of atoms and bonds so I've collected them all and I've created this dry and dictionary of all these kind of puzzle pieces, these Lego parts of molecules. And I've written a code that then puts them all together and some kind of like Frankenstein's monster of molecules. So you ask me for any molecule and I go, well, it has these bonds and this atom dangling off this atom and this cluster here and I tell you what it should look like. And it kind of works. So this creates a whole portfolio of just kind of signatures that we could look for very rough structures, but still useful enough to analyze the atmospheres, the telescope generated images of other planets. Close. Right now it is so complete. So it has all of these molecules that I can tell you say you look at an alien atmosphere and there's a feature there. It can tell you, oh, that feature,

that's familiar. It could be one of these 816 molecules. And there's the best of luck. Yes. So I think the next step, which is what I'm working on, is telling you something more useful than it could be one of those 816 molecules. That's still true. I wouldn't say it's useful. So it can tell you, but only 12% of them also have a feature in this region. So go look there. And if there's nothing there, it can't be those. And so on. It can also tell you things like, you will need this much accuracy to distinguish between those 816. So that's what I'm marking on. But it's a lot of work. So this is really interesting, the role of computing in this whole picture, Emission Code.

So you as a quantum astrochemist, there is some role for programming in your life, in your past life, in your current life, in your group. Oh yeah, almost entirely. I'm a computational quantum astrochemist, but that doesn't roll off the tongue very easily. So this is fundamentally computational. Like if you want to be successful in the 21st century in doing quantum astrochemistry, you want to be computational. Absolutely.

All quantum chemistry is computational at this point. Okay. What does machine learning play a role at all? Is there some extra shortcuts that can be discovered through like you see all that success with protein folding, right? A problem that thought to be extremely difficult to plan a machine learning to because it's, I mean, mostly because there's not a lot of already solved puzzles to train on. I suppose the same exact thing is true with this particular problem, but is

there hope for machine learning to help out? Absolutely. Currently you've laid out exactly the problem. The training set is awful. And because there's so, a lot of the state that I'm basing it on is literally many decades old. The people who worked on it and they did that I get, often they're dead. The files that I've used, some of them were hand drawn by someone tired in the 70s. I can of course have a program training on these, but I'll just be perpetuating these mistakes without hope of actually verifying them. My next step is to improve this training set by hand and then try to see if I can apply machine learning on the full code and the full 16,000 molecules and improve them all.

But really, I need to be able to test the outcomes with experimental data, which means convincing someone in a lab to spend a lot of money putting very dangerous gases in chambers and measuring them at outrageous temperatures. So, it's a working progress. And so collecting huge amounts of data about the actual gases. So, you're up for doing that kind of thing too. So, actually, like, doing the full end-to-end thing, which is like having a gas collecting data about it and then doing the kind of analysis that creates the fingerprint, and then also analyzing using that library, the data that comes from other planets. So you do the full. Full from birth to death.

Interesting. Yes, I worked in an industrial chemistry laboratory when I was much younger in Slovenia, and there I worked in the lab actually collecting spectrum and predicting spectrum. What's it like to work with a bunch of gases that are like not so human-friendly? It's so fine. It's horrific. It's so scary. And I love my job. I'm willing to clearly sacrifice a lot for it, you know job stability money Yes, sanity But I only work there for a few months it it was really terrifying

There's just so many ways to die, you know Usually you only have a handful of ways to die every day, you know But if you work in a lab, there's so many more, like, or there's a magnitude more. And I was very bad at it. I'm not a good hands-on scientist. I want a laptop connected to a remote supercomputer, or a laptop connected to a telescope.

I don't need to be there to believe it. And I am not good in the lab. Yeah, when there's a bunch of things that can poison you, a bunch of things that could explode and they're gaseous and they're often maybe they might not even have a smell or they might not be visible. It's like, it's so many of them give you cancer. It's just so cruel. And some people love this work, but I've never enjoyed experimental work. It's so ungrateful, so lonely. Well, most, I mean, so much work is lonely, if you find the joy in it, but you enjoy the results of it. Yes.

I'm very thankful for all the experimentalists in my life, but I'll do the theory. They do the experiment and then we talked one another, make sure it matches. Okay, beautiful. What are spectroscopic networks? Those look super cool. Are they related to what we were talking about? The picture looked pretty. Oh, and yes, slightly. So remember when I mentioned the 17.5 million energy levels? Yes. There are rules for each molecule on which energy levels they can jump from and to and how likely it is to make that jump. And so if you plot all the roots it can take, you get this energy network for which is like a ball. So these are the constraints of the

transitions that could be taken. Exactly for each molecule. Interesting. And they're not, so it's not a fully connected. It's like, it's sparse somehow. Yes, you get islands sometimes. You get a molecule can only jump from one set of states to another and it's trapped now in this network. It can never go to another network

that could have been available to other siblings. These are some things insights to be drawn from these networks, like something cool that you can understand about a particular molecule because of it? Yes, some molecules have what we call forbidden transitions, which aren't really forbidden because it's quantum. There are no rules. No, there are rules. The rules are very often broken in the quantum world. And so forbidden transitions doesn't actually mean they're forbidden. Low probability. Exactly. They just become deeply unlikely.

Yeah. Cool. And so you could do all the same. Like I'm coming from a computer science world, you know, I love graph theory. So you could do all the same, like graph theory, or had a kind of analysis of like clusters or something like that. Exactly. All those kinds of things.

And draw and say, cool. And they're unique for each molecule. So these are the networks that you mentioned. That's actually not too difficult, a layer of quantum physics by then all the energies are mapped. So we've had high school children work on those networks. And the trick is to not tell them they're doing quantum physics until like three months in, when it's too late for them

to back out. And then you're like, you're doing quantum physics until like three months in when it's too late for them to back out and then you're like your quantum physicist now and it's really nice. Yeah, okay, but like the promise of this even though it's 16,000 even just a subset of them that's really exciting because then you can do as the telescope day to get better and better especially for exoplanets but also for Venus. You can then start like getting your full, you know how you get blood work done, or you get your genetic test, you can get the same kind of high resolution information, but interesting things going on, a particular planet, based on the atmosphere. Exactly how cool would that be if we could scan and alien planet and go, oh, this is what

the clouds are made of, this is what's in the surface. These are the molecules that are mixing. Here are probably oceans because you can see these types of molecules above it and here are the Hadley cells. Here are how the biosphere works. We could map this whole thing. Wouldn't it be cool if the aliens are aware of these techniques and with spoof, the wrong gases, just pretend that's how they can be, it's like an invisibility cloak. They can generate gases that would throw you off or do the opposite.

They pretend they would artificially generate phosphine so the dumb apes on Earth again might go out like flying in different places because it's just fun It's like some teenager alien somewhere just pranking yeah I was asked that exact question this last day by a by a seven-year-old boy in Canada. Oh, seven seven. Yes But it was the first time I'd be not that question this the second in a week But it was the first time I'd be asked that question, the second in a week. What kind of spirit, Sim and I? We can.

They can prank us to some extent, but this work of interpreting an alien atmosphere means you're reading the atmosphere as a message and it's very hard to hide signs of life in an atmosphere because you can try to prancus, but you're still going to fart and breathe and somehow metabolize the environment around you and call that, whatever you call that, and release molecules. And so that's really hard to hide. You know, you can go very quiet. You can throw out some weird molecule to confuse us further, but we can still see all your

other metabolites. It's hard to fake. Is there, you kind of mentioned water, what other gases are there that we know about that are like high likelihood as biosignatures in terms of life? I mean, what are your other favorites? So we got a fast meme, but like, what else is a damn good signal to be that you think about, that we should be looking for if we're looking at another atmosphere? Is there gases that come to mind? Are there all sort of possible biospoonsures that we should love equally?

There's many, so there's water. We know that's important for life as we know it. There's molecular oxygen on Earth. That's probably the most robust sign of life, particularly combined with small amounts of methane. And it's true that the majority of the oxygen in our atmosphere is a product of life. And so if I was an alien astronomer

and I saw that's atmosphere, I would get a Nobel, I think, on, you know, what would you notice? I mean, this is really, I would be very excited about this. About the oxygen. About finding 20%, 21% of oxygen atmosphere. That's very unusual. So would that be the most exciting thing to you from an alien perspective about Earth in terms of the tech like analyzing the atmosphere like what are the biosignatures of life on earth would you say in terms of the contents of the atmosphere is oxygen high amount of oxygen pretty damn good sign. I mean it's not as good as the TV signals we've been sending out those those are slightly more robust at the oxygen oxygen on its own has false positives for life, so there's still ways of making it.

But it's a pretty robust sign of life in the context of atmosphere, with the radiation that the sun produces, our position in relation to the sun, the other components of our atmosphere, the volcanic activity we have, all of that together makes the 20% of oxygen extremely robust sign of life. But outside that context, you could still produce oxygen without life. But phosphine, although better in the sense of it is much harder to make, it has lower false positives, still has some. So I'm actually against looking for specific molecules, unless we're looking for like CFCs. If we find CFCs, that's definitely aliens. I feel confident. Chloro-flore carbons. And so, you know, if aliens have been watching

us, they wouldn't go, oh no, CFCs, I mean, they're not going to last long. Let's, you know, everyone's writing their thesis on the end of the Earth. And then we got together, we stopped using them. I like to think they're really proud of us. You know, they literally saw our ozone hole shrinking. They've been watching it and they saw it happen. I'm not. I think, yeah, they're more paying attention

to the whole nuclear thing. That's just. I think they care. It's not gonna bother them. Oh, I mean, worried about us. Oh, yes. Oh, no, worried about us. Oh, I mean, worried about us. Oh, yes. No, worried about us. They, I mean, this is why the aliens have been showing up recently. It's like, if you, if you look at, I mean, there are, I mean, it's probably, there's a correlation

with a lot of things. But what the uofologist, quote, unquote, often talk about is that there seems to be a much higher level of UFO sighting since like in the nuclear age. So like if aliens were indeed worried about us, like if you were aliens you would start showing up when the living organisms have first discovered a way to destroy the entire colony. Could the increase in sightings not have to do with the fact that people now have more cameras. It's an interesting thing about science, like with UFO sightings, it's like either 99.9% of them are false or 100% of them are false. The interesting thing to me is in that point, 0.1%.

There's a lot of things in science that are like these weird outliers. They're difficult to replicate. You have like, there's even physical phenomena, ball lightning. There's difficult things to artificially create in large amounts or observe in nature in large amounts in such a way that you can do to apply the scientific method. There could be just things that like what happened like a few times like or once and you're like what the hell is that? And that that's very difficult for science to know what to do with. I'm a huge proponent of just being open-minded because when you open-minded about aliens, for example, is it allows you to think outside of the box in other domains as well

and somehow that will result like if you open mind about aliens and You don't you know don't laugh it off immediately what happens is somehow that that's going to lead to a solution to a p equals on p or p Not equals on p like in ways that you can't predict the open-mindedness has tertiary effects that will result in progress I believe which is why I'm a huge fan of aliens because it's like too many scientists roll their eyes at the idea of aliens, alien life. And to me, it's one of the most exciting possibilities in the biggest, most exciting questions before all of human civilization. So to roll your eyes is

not the right answer. To roll your eyes, it presumes that you know anything about this world, as opposed to just knowing 0.001% of this world. And so being humble in the face of that, being open to the possibility of visiting Earth is a good idea. Not everything though, I'm not so open-minded to the flat Earth hypothesis, there's a growing number of people believing in, but even then. Or the inner Earth, I've got shouted at at a public talk about it. So it's like the Earth is hollow? Yeah, my understanding is that there's this conspiracy theory that as far as I can tell has no grounding in my understanding is that there's this conspiracy theory that as far as I can tell has no grounding in reality is that there's a slightly smaller earth inside this one,

which is just too cute as a concept. Oh, that's awful. And you can access it, I think, from Antarctica. And that's where we keep, and I quote, the mammoths and the Nazis. That's it. Yeah, I mean, that one is ridiculous. But I do like... Hey, I thought you were keeping an open mind.

I genuinely think that's more likely than aliens visiting the Earth. And I say this as someone who has dedicated her life to finding like alien life. And so that's how improbable, I think, the visitations are. Because interstellar distances are so huge that it's just not really worth it. See, I have a different view on this whole thing. I think the aliens that look like little green men are like extremely low probability event. Like my mates and Nazis. Yeah, yeah, that's the best. But other kind of ideas, like the sad thing to me, and I think, in my view, if there's

other alien civilizations out there and they visited Earth, neither them or perhaps just us would be even able to detect them. Like we wouldn't be open-minded enough to see it. Like if, if, because our understanding of what is life, and I just talked to Sarah Walker, who's, you know, Sarah. Yeah, we talked for three hours about the question of what is life. Sarah's a good person to talk about what is life?

But like the whole point is we don't really we have a very narrow-minded view of what is life and when it shows up and it might be already here trees and dolphins and so on Or or or or or mountains or I don't know or or the molecules in the atmosphere, or like I, people make fun of me. But I do think that ideas are kind of aliens themselves, or consciousness could be the aliens, or it could be the method by which they communicate. We don't know shit about the way our human mind works. And the fact that this thing is- To be a quantum process. Please don't.

I understand this. It's not woo-woo. But it very well could be. There could be something at the physics level, right? It could be at the chemical or the biological level. Things that are happening that we're just too close-minded because our conception of life is at the level of like us, like at the jungle level of mammals. And on the time scale,

that's the human time scale, we may not be able to perceive what alien life is actually like. The scale at which their intelligence realizes itself, we may not able to perceive. And the other thing that's really important about alien visitations, whether it happened or not, is especially after COVID in 2020, I'm losing a little bit of faith of our government being able to handle that well, not our government, but us as a society, as a collective, being able to deal with new things in an effective way that's inspiring, that's

efficient, that, like, whether it's, if it's a dangerous thing to deal with it, to alleviate the danger, whether it's the possibility of new discoveries and something inspiring to ride that wave and make it inspiring, all those kinds of things. I honestly think if aliens showed up, they would look around, everybody would ignore them, and the government might like hide it, try to like see, to keep it from the Chinese and the Russians, if it's the United States, call it a military secret in a very close-minded way. And then the bureaucracy would drown it away to where, through paperwork, the poor aliens would just

like waste away in a cell cell. Like there's a certain... That would never happen. Part of the reason that I feel so confident that Ali's have no visited, because they would have had to visit just to have a look remotely, you know, from Neptune or something, which makes no sense because interstellar travel is so difficult that it would be quite a ridiculous proposition, but that's the bit that I think is technically possible. If they did come here and they were visible by anyone, detectable by anyone, the thought that any government,

no matter or any military, could just contain them. These beings are capable of traveling interstellar distances when we can barely go to the moon, like barely go to the moon. These things will be way, way, way, way. And the fact that we think our puny military, even if all the military in the world got together, and the fact that they could somehow contain it, it's that's trying to contain it. Exactly. You would never visited them. Exactly. But That's the answer I'm trying to contain. You wouldn't have visited them. Exactly.

And scientists, you would have to bring scientists on board. You've met a lot of scientists. How good are they keeping secrets? Because in my experience, they're absolutely appalling and keeping secrets. Yeah, that's terrible. Even the Fosminon Venus thing, which was a pretty well kept secret. Oh, this is true. You had a bunch of people that were...

I told my dad. Yeah. You know, this is true. You had a bunch of people that were. I told my dad, you know, my dad knew. And hopefully, didn't tell anyone, but if it had been an alien visiting, he probably would have told the mate, you know. And so these secrets could not be kept by any scientist that I know, and certainly not collaborative scientists, which would be needed. You would need all sorts of scientific teams. So between the pathetic power of any world's military compared to any civilization, a capable of traveling, and our absolute inability

to keep secrets, I absolutely not, I will bet everything. We have not been visited because we are too pathetic to hold that. Well, let me hold that truth. If we're making like a $10 bet, the possibility here that the main... Say there exists one alien, other intelligent alien civilization in the galaxy. To me, if they visit Earth, what's going to visit Earth is the crappy, the really crappy road structure. Short straw, yeah. Like this really dumb thing that's, I don't know, the early game boys or something.

I mean, there's a cartoon about this. There's an alien that gets sent to Earth, a commander's spiff or something, and it's kind of a punishment or something. But that's not possible. That's the thing because interstellar distances are so hard to cross. You have to do it on purpose. You have to do it on purpose. It has to be a big, big deal. And we know this because, yes, you're right. We don't know enough about galactic biology. We don't know what the universal rules of biology or biochemistry are because we only have the earth. But we do know that the laws of physics are universal.

We can predict behavior in the universe and then see it happen based on these laws of physics. We know that the laws of chemistry are universal. We know the periodic table is all they have to choose from. So yes, they may be some sort of unimaginable intelligence, but they still have to use the same periodic table that we have access to. They still have a finite number of molecules they can do things with. So they still have to use the resources around them, the stars around them, the universe around them,

and we know how much energy is in these places. And so yes, they may be very capable, capable beyond our wildest dreams, but they're still in the same universe and we know a lot of those rules were not completely blind. But there's a colleague of yours at Harvard, Kamar and Vafa, he's a theoretical physicist, I don't know if you know him. I've only joined Harvard about physical physicist. I don't know if you know him. I've only joined Harvard about six months ago. Okay. It's time to meet all the theoretical physicists. So he's a string theorist, but his idea is that aliens that are sophisticated enough to travel into cells, like those kinds of distances, will figure out actually ways to hack the fabric of the universe enough to have fun in other ways

like this universe is too boring Like you would figure out ways to create other universes or like you go outside the physics as we know it So the reason we don't see aliens visiting us all over the place is they're having fun elsewhere This is like way too boring. We humans think this is fun But it's actually mostly empty space that not no fun is happening. There's no fun in visiting Earth for a super advanced civilization. So he thinks that if alien civilizations are out there, they found outside of our current standard models of physics ways of having fun that don't involve us. That's probably true, but even the notion of visiting fun that don't involve us. But that's probably true.

But even the notion of visiting, that's so literally pedestrian. Of course, we want to go there because going there is the only thing we know. We see a thing we want, we want to go there and get it. But that is probably something they've no longer got need for. I specifically don't particularly want to go to space. Sounds awful. You know, none of the things I like are going to be there. And my whole work is my whole career is finding life and understanding the universe. So I care a lot. But I care about knowing about it. And I feel no need to go there to learn about it. And I think as we develop better tools, hopefully people will feel less and less

in need to go everywhere that we know about. And I would expect any alien civilization worth assault have developed observation tools and tools that allow them to understand the universe around them and beyond without having to go there. This going is so wasteful. Yeah, so more focus on the knowledge and learning versus the colonization, like the conquering and all those kinds of things. That's, you know, beneath them. That's beneath them. I mean, that's, I said, do you think there's any hopeful search for life through phosphine and other gases? Do you, do you think there's other alien civilizations out there? First, do you think there's other life out there? First, do you think there's life in the solar system?

Second, do you think there's life in the galaxy? And third, do you think there's intelligent life in the solar system or the galaxy outside of Earth? So intelligent life, I have no idea. It seems deeply unlikely, possible, but I'm not even sure if it's plausible. So that's a special thing to you about Earth is somehow intelligent life can be. Yes. And it's only, you know, very briefly, probably extremely briefly. Uh-oh. You mean like, it's always going to, like, we're going to destroy ourselves? Exactly. Oh,oh. You mean like it's always going to be like we're going to destroy ourselves? Exactly. Oh, boy. And life will continue on Earth happily, probably more happily. So, trees in the dolphins will be here. I'm telling you. And the cockroaches and the incredible fungi, you know, they'll be fine. So life on Earth will be fine, was fine before us and will

be fine after us. So I'm not that worried about intelligent life, but I think it is unlikely. Even on earth is unlikely. Out of what is it? Five billion species across the history of the earth. There's been one, an intelligent one, and for a blink of an eye, possibly not much longer than that. So I wouldn't bet on that at all. Though I would love it, of course. I wanted to find aliens, this I was a little girl. And so, of course, I initially wanted to find ones that I could be friends with. And I've had to let go of that dream because it's so deeply implausible. But see, the nice, and sorry to interrupt, but the nice thing about intelligent alien civilizations, they may have more biosegnatures than non-intelligent ones. So they might be easier to detect that that would be the hope. On Earth, that's not the case, but it could be the

case elsewhere. Oh, it's not the case on Earth. We most of the biosegnatures we have on Earth are created by quite simple life. If you don't count pollution, pollution is all, all less babies. All less babies. So you don't see polluting gases as a possible, like, I look for polluting gases. I would love to find polluting gases. Well, you know, I'll be worried for them, of course,

the same way I think about my alien colleagues all the time, looking at us and I'm sure they worry about our pollutions. But it would be a really good, robust, unambiguous sign of life if we found complex pollutants. So I look for those two. I just don't have any hope of finding them. I think intelligent life in the galaxy, at the same time that we're looking is deeply implausible. But life, I think, is inevitable. And if it is inevitable, it is common. So I think there will be life

everywhere in the galaxy. Now how common that life is, I think will depend a lot on whether there's life in the solar system beyond Earth. So I'll adjust my expectations very much based on their being life in the solar system. If there's life in the Venetian clouds, if there's life in the, if there are by signatures coming out of the plumes of Enceladus, if there's life on Titan. That's right. Yeah, plumes of Enceladus, that's right. And so yeah, yeah, plumes of insolid. That's the, that's the saddened one. It's the moon that has the geysers that come out. And so you can't see the under the subterranean oceans, but it's supposed to, so it would be an atmosphere. I was going to ask you about that one. Have you looked at that? Have you? Is that a hope for you to use the tools you're using with RASCO and other ways for detecting the 16,000 molecules

that might be bioscientist to look at Enceladus. Yes, that's absolutely the plan. What's the limiting factor currently? Is it the quality of the telescopes, what's the quality of the data? Yeah, the quality of the data, the observational data, and also the quality of Rascal and other associated things. So we're missing a lot of fundamental data to interpret the data that we get, and we don't have good enough data. But hopefully we will in the coming decades

we'll get some information on Titan, we have Dragonfly going over, we'll get the plumes of Enceladus, we will look at the clouds of Venus, and there's other places, and so if we find any life or any sign of life ever, like on Mars, then I'll adjust my calculations, and I'll say life is not just inevitable and common, but extremely common. Because all of these places we've mentioned, the subterranean oceans on Enceladus, the methane oceans of Titan, the clouds of Venus, the acidic clouds of Venus, these are places that are very different from the places where we find life on Earth,

even the most extreme places. And so, life can originate in all of these completely different habitats, then life is even more resourceful than we thought. Yeah, that's really everywhere. That's really exciting if it's everywhere. If there's life on just one of the moons of it's on Mars. Anywhere. Anywhere in the solar system, and I will bet everything I own that every solar system, every planetary system has potential for habitability,

because even if they don't have a habitable planet, they'll have moons around other giant planets. And there will be so much life. So for me, that's the only thing to figure out now where the life is inevitable and quite common throughout the galaxy or everywhere, but it's somewhere between those two. where the life is inevitable and quite common throughout the galaxy or Everywhere, but it's somewhere between those two intelligent life. I make no bets And if I had to bet I would be against

See, yeah, to me like two discoveries in the 21st century would change everything one is And maybe I'm biased, but one is a discovery of life in the solar system. I feel like that would change our whole conception of how unique we are in the universe. I think I'm much more eager than you are to jump from basic life to intelligent life. I feel like if there's life everywhere, like the odds are there has like we cannot like you have. Oh, I see. You're you're saying there could have been many intelligence positions out there, but they just keep dying out. It's like the little yeah, I was detecting them, you know, ships in the night. Ships in the night. Now that's that's ultra sad. Is it sad? Graveyard is not better for having us.

It doesn't always anything. Would you be sad to find alien giraffes? Would you be disappointed if you found alien giraffes? Because I would not. What giraffes? First of all, they look goofy with their necks and everything. But we do not shit on giraffes. Okay.

Giraffes are wondrous animals are deeply understudied we still know so little about them because no one does PhDs and giraffes I am the point I made a PhD in phosphine when people are doing PhDs and giraffes we do not know enough about giraffes I think it was like wicked your vase that did a whole like a long thing but just freaky your vase to talk about gir rafts that is not as expertise. Yeah, but it's a stupid next. It's in a way. Why? In your sense, I mean, that's fine. Jeroves are very resourceful animals who do incredible things and can kick a lion.

Why don't you climb the tree? Why don't you climb the tree? You don't need to grow through the lengthy evolutionary process. You're just shitting on Jeroves. I don't know. Okay. Jeroves are wondrous animals. I would very appreciate it.

I take it back. I apologize. I trustarroths. Okay. Jarroths aren't wondrous animals. I would very appreciate it. I take it back, I apologize. I trust your expertise on this. The thing that makes humans really fascinating, and I think the earth, but I'm a human, is we create things that are, yes, there's all the ugliness in the world, there's all the on the biological and the chemical level, there's a pollution.

But we create beauty. If you, even from a physics perspective, look at symmetry as somehow capturing beauty, the breaking of symmetries, stuff grounded in all the different definitions of cemeteries, were good at like creating things. So as spiders. But not your house. Okay. Yes, this is a spider. Yes, there are spiders that create little bubbles of air so they can breathe in the

water. They can literally scuba dive. There are spiders that can create parachute so they can glide. And talk about symmetry. Look what spiders can do. And I just thought of spiders. But if I was an alien species coming to Earth, they'll be plenty to wonder. And we would just be one. One other thing. Yeah, clunky. Yeah.

Make it monkey. Yeah, the ants might be even more fascinating. The ants can figure out exactly through some emergent consciousness, what the maximum distance between their trash, their babies, and their food is just from without any of them knowing how to do this. And collectively, they've learned how to do this. If I was an alien species, I'll be looking at that. Well, so that was the other thing I was going to mention. The second thing is I tend to believe we

can engineer consciousness, but at the basic level understand the source of consciousness. Because if consciousness is unique to humans, and if we can engineer it, that gives me hope that it can be present elsewhere in the universe. That's the other thing that makes, it's an open question that makes humans perhaps special is not maybe the presence of consciousness but somehow a presence of like elevated consciousness. It does, again, maybe human-centric but it feels like we're more conscious

than giraffes, for example, and spiders. Yes, I want to deny that. There is something special about humans. I, you know, they're my favorite species. They are. They are, you know, some of my best friends are humans. I, I think Kylie of humans, it's great. I just don't have great hope for our longevity. And specifically,

I don't have great hope given that we're the only species that are five billion that did this call consciousness trick. I just, I don't want to bet on finding a kinship elsewhere. That's quite interesting to think about. I don't think I've even considered that possibility interesting to think about, I don't think I've even considered that possibility that there would be life in the solar system. So that indicates that very possibly life is like literally everywhere. Yeah, everywhere can happen it does. Yeah. And especially what we're discovering with the exoplanets now, they're how numerous they are, or Earth-like, habitable, quote-unquote, planets. They're everywhere. The most common type of planet is rocky, it seems. Yes, but I didn't consider the possibility that life is literally everywhere, and yet, intelligent

life is nowhere long enough to communicate with each other, to form a little clusters of civilizations that expand beyond the solar system and so on. Man, maybe becoming a multi-planetary species is a less likely pursuit than we imagine. But one of the things that makes humans beautiful is we hope. But I hope for humanity. And one of the things I hope for is that we become less obsessed with conquering. And we become less obsessed with spreading ourselves. I hope that we transcend that.

That we're happy with the universe without having to go and take it. So you can hope for the species without hoping for a multi-planetary existence. That is only, I think, the drive of our most primitive instincts to go and take, to go on planet flags somewhere. We love planting a flag somewhere. And maybe we could overcome that minor drive. And once we do, the AI systems we build will destroy us because we're too peaceful and they will go on conquer and plant the flags.

Best of luck to them. The cockroaches will be happy to keep to the business and they always have. I tend to believe that robots can have the same elegance and consciousness and all the qualities of kindness and love and hope and fear that humans have. In principle, they could. Yes. I don't really trust the people who make them. This is about the giraffe comment, isn't it? Okay. I haven't figured for you. Just sitting on your ass.

What are they done to you? You just as a small tangent, your master's thesis is also fascinating. Maybe we could talk about it for just a little bit. It's titled Influence of a star's evolution on this planetary system. So this interplay between a star and a planet, is there something interesting you could say about what you've learned about this journey that a star takes and the planet is around it? Well, when I was younger and I was told what would happen ultimately to the earth, as the sun expands towards a red giant and, you know, Mercury would just like fall in and then, you know, Venus fall in and the sun doesn't care. And it just seemed so, I felt so small. I felt

like the earth and everything on it, it's just the universe doesn't care. Even our sun doesn't care. And I think I felt like our sun should feel some sort of responsibility for its planets, you know? And it just felt like such a violent and neglectful parent. It's like a parent eating its own children. It's horrible.

It's a horrible notion. But it made me think, what if there's some sort of generation? And so at the time when I was doing my masters, there was a notion of the White Wolf cemetery, which is this idea that when stars become White Wolves, that death is so horrible that planets, potentially habitable planets that could have been habitable before, they're now gone. There's no chance for life. But then I thought, what if life returns? You know, now it's a white dwarf, it's calm down, it's not going to go anywhere, white dwarfs are very stable across like universal time scales.

And so could you have planets around the white dwarf that could themselves get life again, you know, life doesn't care. And so my work was basically killing dozens of planets, thousands of times. I just ran thousands and thousands of end-body simulations. What are you simulated this? Yeah, so I simulated the star, growing and just eating all these planets up and just absolute chaos. The orbits of the planets would change as the Starlose is mass. So you would have like jupeder planets, just crashing into the other planets, throwing them into the sun early. It was terrifying to watch these simulations.

It was absolute carnage. But if you're on thousands of these simulations, some systems find new balance ways of staying alive. Some systems post star death find stable orbits again for billions of years, more than enough for life to originate again. And so that was my idea during that time that thesis was trying to explore this notion of life coming back and this idea of the universe doesn't care if you're here or not and it will go about its business.

You know, Andromeda will crash into us and doesn't care. No one cares if you're alive in the universe. And so letting go of that preciousness of life, I found very useful in that stage of my career. And instead, I just thought, what if life is inevitable, it doesn't matter that it came by four billion years ago. It can start again four billion years later. And maybe that is nice. Maybe that's where hope lies. The phoenix rising everywhere. Plan is being destroyed and created and we're here now. And others will be more or less here-ish

billions of years later. So accepting the cycle of death and life and... Oh yeah. I'm not taking it personally. Not taking it personally. The sun doesn't know of anything. It's not a bad parent. It's not a parent at all. Yeah. I was looking at the work of Freeman Dyson and seeing how the

universe eventually will just be a bunch of super massive black holes before they also evaporate. A bunch of tiny black holes too. Yeah. Absolutely quiet. Everyone, all the black holes, a little too far away from one another to even interact until it's just silence forever. But until then, many, many cycles, death and destruction and rebirth. And rebirth. You kept bringing up sort of coding stuff up.

I wanted to ask two things. First of all, like what programming language do you like? And also, what is your as a computational quantum astrochemist? No, yes. That's correct. That's right. You're kind of, you could say you're, you're actually understanding some exceptionally complicated things with one of the things you're using is the tools of computation of programming. Is there a device you can give to people? Because I know quite a few that have not practiced that tool and have fallen in love with a particular science or whatever it's biology, chemistry, and physics and so on. And if they were

interested in learning to program and learning to use computations of the tool in their particular science, is there advice you can give on programming and also just maybe a comment on your own journey and the use of programming in your own life. Well, I'm a terrible programmer. A lot of scientists, the programming is bad because we never learned formal programming. We learned science, physics, chemistry, and then we were told, oh, you have to get these equations modeled and run through a simulation. And you're like, oh, okay, so I'm going to learn how to code to do this. And you learn just as much as you need to run these simulations and no more.

So they're rarely optimized. They're really clunky. Six months later, you can't read your own code. My variable names are extremely embarrassing. I still have error messages for different compilation errors that say things like, at least your dad loves you Clara. You know, it doesn't help me at all. It's like humor.

Yeah. Just like you suck at coding, buddy. There's other things in your life. So I'm a bad programmer. And so, you know, if that will give hope to anyone else who's a bad programmer, I can still do pretty impressive science. Yes.

But I learned, I think I started learning MATLAB and Java when I was in college. It didn't mean no good at all. I was not being particularly useful. I learned some Fortran that was very useful, even though it's really not a fun language, because so much of legacy code is in Fortran. And so if you want to use other people's code who have now retired, Fortran will be nice. And then I used ideal to visualize. So that simulation and body simulation, those all four trend and ideal.

But thankfully, since I've left college, I've just learned Python like a normal person. And that has been much nicer. So most of my code now is in Python. I should also make a few quick comments. Well, so one is, you say, you're a sort of bad at programming. Of working with a lot of excellent scientists that are quote unquote bad at programming, they're not. It gets the job done.

In fact, there's a downside to sort of especially getting a software engineering education. If I were to give advice, especially if you're doing a computer science degree and you're doing software engineering, is not to get lost in the, in the, like optimization of the correct, there's an obsession, you can see it in like stack overflow, of the correct way to do things. And I think you can too easily get lost

in constantly trying to optimize and do things the correct way when you actually never get done. The same thing happens, you have like communities of people obsessed with productivity. And they keep researching productivity hacks. And then they spend like 90% plus of their time figuring out how to do things productively. And they never actually do anything. So there's a certain sense if you focus on the task needs to be done, that's what programming is for. So not over optimizing, not not focus, not thinking about variable names in the in the following

sense. Sometimes you think, okay, I'm going to write code that's going to last for decades. In reality, your code, if it's well written or poorly written, will be very likely, absolutely, very quickly. And the point is to get the job done really well. So there's a trade off there that you have to make sure to strike. I should also comment as a public service announcement or a request. If there's any world-class, for-chair and a co-bought program is out there, I'm looking for them. I want to talk to you. That will not be me. I'm a terrible for-trend program. But it's fascinating because so much of the world in the past and

still runs as programming languages. And there's like no experts on it. So they're all retiring. Yeah. I I disagree slightly in that I think because I can get the job done, I'm programmer, but because no one else can look at my code and know how I got my job done, I'm a bad programmer. That's how I'm defining it. Yes, including yourself. Including myself six months later. I'm working with a new student right now and she sent me some messages on Slack being like, what is this file that you've got with some functions around? And I was like, I, I, this was from 2018.

It wasn't that long ago. And I can no longer remember what that code does. I'm gonna spend now two days reading through my own code and trying to improve it. And I do think that's frustrating. And so I think my advice to any young people who want to get into astronomy or astrobiology or quantum chemistry is that I certainly find it much easier

to teach the science concepts to a programmer than the programming to a scientist. And so I would much, much faster, hire someone who knows programming, but barely knows where spaces, than teach programming to an astronomer. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. Okay. This is true. I mean, yeah, there's some basics. I'm focusing too much on the silver lining because the people that were like matlab code,

single-letter variable names, those kinds of things. It has accessibility. I want my code to be open source, and it is. It's on GitHub, I don't know how anyone can download it, but is it really open source? If it's written so cryptically, so poorly, the no one can really use it to his full functionality. Have I really published my work and that weighs on me? I feel guilty for my own inadequacies as a programmer. You can only do so much.

So I've already learned quantum chemistry and astrophysics. So, you know. Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of ways to contribute to the world one of them is publication But publishing code is is a fast anyway to contribute to the world even if it's very small very basic element great code I guess I was also kind of criticizing the software engineering process versus Like which is a good thing to do is code That's readable almost like without

documentation is readable it's understandable the variable names the structure all those kinds of things and that's the dream that's the dream dumb question what do you all right tell me your dumb question I want to hear it okay I. I mean, okay, this is the question about beauty. It's way too general. It's very impossible. It's like asking, what's your favorite band? What's your favorite music band? Oh, I thought you meant wavelength band.

I was like, I definitely have a favorite wavelength band. That's absolutely. Well, it's hard to narrow down. Okay. What to use the most beautiful idea in science? It's not a dumb question. Do you want to try the beautiful idea in science? It's not a dumb question. Do you want to try that question again, proudly?

Okay. I have a really good question to ask you. Okay, don't over sell it. I've got an okay question to ask, you know? Yeah. What do you, is the most beautiful idea in science, something you just find inspiring, or just maybe the reason you got into science, or the reason you think science is cool. My favorite thing about science is kind of the connection between the scales.

So, when I was little and I wanted to know about space, I really felt that it would make me feel powerful to be able to predict the heavens, something so much larger than myself that felt really powerful. It was almost a selfish desire. And that's what I wanted. There was some control to being able to know exactly what the sky would do. And then as I got older and I got more into astronomy and I didn't just want to know how the stars moved, I wanted to know how the planets around the moved and then as I got deeper into that feel, I really didn't care that much about the planets. I wanted to know about the atmospheres around the planets and then the molecules within those atmospheres and what that might mean.

So I ended up shrinking my scale until it was literally the quantum scale. And now all my work, the majority of my work is on this insane quantum scale. And yet I'm using these literal, tiny, tiny tools to try and answer the greatest questions that we've ever been able to ask. And this crossing of scales from the quantum to the astronomical. That's so cool, isn't it? Yeah. It spans the entirety, the tiny and the huge. That's the cool thing about, I guess, being a quadromancer chemist, is you're using the tools of the tiny to look at the heavenly bodies, the giant stuff. And the potential life out there, that this is the thing that connects us, that you can't escape

the rules of the quantum world and how universal they themselves are, despite being probabilistic. world and how universal they themselves are, despite being probabilistic. And that makes me feel really pleased to be in science, but in a really humbling way. It's no longer this thirst for power. I feel less special, the more work I do, less exceptional, the more work I do. I feel like humans in the earth and are placed in the universe is less and less exceptional. And yet I feel so much less lonely. And so it's been a really good trade off that I've lost power, but I've gained company. Wow, that's a beautiful answer. I don't think there's a better way to actually end it. You're right.

I asked a mediocre question and you came through, you made the question good by brilliant answer. You're the Michael Jordan and I'm the, who's the Dennis Rodman? I'll be the Dennis Rodman. This is a goal. I don't know enough about basketball. I mean, literally, you've reached the peak of my bestful knowledge because I know though those people are basketball, but that's it. Pros, I believe, but only because I watch Space Jam, I think. Are there books or movies in your life long ago or recently, do you have any time for books and movies?

Had an impact on you? What ideas did you take away? I absolutely have time for books and movies. I try as best I can to not work very hard. I mostly fail. I should point out. But I think I'm a better scientist when I don't work evenings and weekends. If I get four good hours in a day, I often don't. I often get eight crappy hours, you know, emails, meetings, bad cold, data processing. But if I can get four high quality scientific hours, I just stop working for the day because I know it's diminishing returns after that. So I have

a lot of time. I try to make as much time as I can. Can you kind of dig into the what it takes to be one productive to be happy in as a researcher because I think it's too easy in that world to basic because you have so many hats you have to wear so many jobs you have to be a mentor teacher head of a research group to research yourself you have to do service all the kinds of stuff you're doing now with education and interviews. Yeah, yeah. So as a public science like being a public communicator, that's a job. Yeah, the whole thing. It's very poorly. I'll pay you on Bitcoin, okay? I'll take the coin. So is there some advice you can give to the process of being productive and happy as a researcher? I think sadly it's very hard to feel happy as a scientist if you're not productive. It's a bit of a trap, but I certainly find it very difficult to feel happy when I'm not being productive.

It's become slightly better if I know my students are being productive, I can be happy. But I think a lot of senior scientists, once they get into that mindset, they start thinking that their student science is theirs. And I think this happens a lot of senior scientists. They have so many hats, as you mentioned, they have to do so much service and so much admin that they have a little time for their own science. And so they end up feeling ownership over the junior people in their labs and their groups. And that's really heartbreaking. I see it all the time and

that I think I've escaped that trap. I feel so happy even when I'm not productive when my students are productive. I think that sensation I was describing earlier of they only need to be half as productive as me for me to feel like I've done my job for humanity. So that has been the dynamic I've had to worry about. But to be productive is not clear to me what you have to do. You have to not be miserable otherwise. I find it extremely hard when I'm having conflicts with collaborators, for example. I'm very hard to enjoy the work we do. Even if the work is this, you know, fantastical phosphine or things that I know I love.

Still very difficult. So I think choosing your collaborators based on how well you get along with them is a really sound scientific choice. Having a miserable collaborator ruins your whole life, it's horrible. It makes you not want to do the science. It probably makes you do clumsy science because you don't focus on it. You don't go over it several times. You just want it to be over. And so I think in general just not being a douchebag can get so much good science done. Just find the good people in your community

and collaborate with them. Even if they're not as good scientists as others, you'll get better science out. Yeah, don't be a douchebag yourself and surround yourself by other cool people. Exactly. And then you'll get better science than if you had tried to work with three geniuses who are just hell to be around. Yeah, I mean, there's parallel things like that. I'm very fortunate. Now, I was very fortunate on my tea to have friends and colleagues there. They were incredible to work with. But I'm currently sort of, I'm doing a lot of fun stuff on the side, like this little podcast thing, and I mentioned to you, I think robotics related stuff. It was just a Boston Dynamics yesterday checking out their robots.

And I'm currently, I guess, hiring people to help me with a very fun little project around those robots. I'm going to put an ad in. No, I have more applications that can possibly deal with. There's thousands. So it's not an, it's the opposite. We need to put an ad out for someone to help you go through the applications. Well, that too is already there.

That's over 10,000 people applied for that. An infinite Master Yashandall of application management. But the point is, it's not exactly... The point is what I'm very distinctly aware of is life is short. And productivity is not the right goal to optimize for, at least for me. The right goal to optimize for is how happy you are to wake up in the day and to work with the people that you do because the productivity will take care of itself.

Great. And so it's so important to select the people well. And I think one of the challenges with academia, as opposed to sort of the thing I'm currently doing, is like saying goodbye sometimes a little bit tougher One of the challenges with academia, as opposed to sort of the thing I'm currently doing, is saying goodbyes sometimes a little bit tougher, because your colleagues are there. I mean, their goodby hurts, and then if you have to spend the rest, you know, for many years to come, still surrounded by them in the community, it's tougher.

It kind of adds extra pressure to stay in that relationship, in that collaboration. And in some sense, that makes it much more difficult, but it's still worth it. It's still worth it to break ties. If you're not happy, if there's not that magic that dance. I talked to this guy named Daniel Coniman. Oh, I know. Danny Coniman. Danny, yeah. Boy, did that guy make me realize, like, what a great collaborator is. Well, he had Tversky, right? Yeah, but so they had obviously, they had a really deep collaboration there, but like I collaborated with him on a conversation, like just like talking about, I don't know what we're talking about.

I think cars, autonomous vehicles, but the brainstorming session, I'm like a nobody. And the fact that he would with a child like curiosity and that dance of thoughts and ideas and the push and pull and the like and the lack of ego but then enough ego to have a little bit of a stubbornness over an idea and a little bit of humor and all those things it's like holy shit that person also the ability to truly listen to another human it's like okay that's what it takes to be a good collaborator if that make me realize that I haven't been I've been very fortunate to have cool people in my life,

but there's like levels even to the cool. Yeah, I don't think you can compete with Danny Canemar and I'm cool, he's just incredible. But it was like, okay, I guess what I'm trying to say is that collaboration is an art form, but perhaps it's actually a skill, it's allowing yourself to develop that skill, because that's one of the fruitful skills.

And praise it in students, you know, and I think it is something you can really improve on. I've become a veteran collaborator as the years have gone on. I don't have some innate collaborative skills. I think their skills I've developed. And I think in science, there's this skills, I think their skills I've developed. And I think in science, there's this really destructive notion of the lone wolf, the scientists who see things where others don't, you know, then that's really appealing. And people really like either fulfilling that or

pretending to be fulfilling that. And first of all, it's mostly a lie. Any modern scientist, particularly in astronomy, which is so interdisciplinary, any modern scientist that is doing it on their own, is doing a crappy job most likely. Because you need an independent set of eyes to help you do things. You need experts in the subfields that you're working on to check your work. But most importantly, it's just a bad idea. It's not, it doesn't lead to good science, and it leaves you miserable. I was recently had some work that I was avoiding, and I thought, maybe I shouldn't pursue

this scientific project because I don't care enough about the outcome, and it's going to be a lot of hard work. And I was trying to balance these two things. And we're really difficult. And the outcome is that maybe 10 people will cite me in the next decade because it's not. No one's asking for this question to be answered. And then I found myself working with this collaborative Jason Dittman.

And I spent a whole afternoon hours with him working on this and time flew by. And I just felt taller and like I could breathe better. I was happier. I was a better person when it was done and that's because he's a great collaborator. He's just a wonderful person that brings out joy out of science that you're doing with him. And that's really the trick. You find the people that make you feel that way about the science you're doing with him. And that's really the trick. You find the people that make you feel that way about the science you're doing and you stop worrying about being the lone wolf. That's just a terrible dream that will

leave you miserable and your science will be shit. And since I'm Russian, just murder anybody who doesn't fall into that beautiful collaborative relationship. We were talking about books. Books, yes. Is there books, movies? Why was I talking about my productivity? Oh, you said I you maybe don't have time for books and movies. And you said you must yes. Make time for books and movies. Make time to not work. make time to not work whatever that looks like to you. But there's plenty. I, when I was younger, I found a lot of kind of my scientific fulfillment in books and movies. Now as I got older, I have plenty of that in my work. And I try to read outside my field. I read about Danny Kanman's work instead.

But when I was little, it was contact the book, the Carl Sagan book. I really thought I was just like Ellie, and I was going to become Ellie. I really resonated with me, their character, and the notions of life and space and the universe, even the idea of then the movie came out and I got to put, you know, what, Jodie Foster and that, which helped. But, you know, even the notion of, if it is just us, what an awful waste of space, I find extremely useful as a concept to think, you know,

maybe we are special, but that would suck is a really nice way of thinking of the search for life that it's much better to not be special and have company. I got that from Carl Sagan, so that's what I always recommend. Let me ask one other ridiculous question. We talked about the death and life cycle that is ever present in the universe until it's not until it's super massive and little black holes too at the end of the universe. What do you think is the why the meaning of it all? What do you think is the meaning of life here on earth and the meaning of that life that you look for? Whether it's on Venus or other exoplanets?

I think there's none. I find enormous relief in the absence of meaning. I think chasing for meaning is a human desire that the universe doesn't give two shits about. But you still enjoy. I enjoy finding meaning in my life. I enjoy finding where the morality lies. I enjoy the complication of that desire. And I feel that is deeply human. But I don't feel that it's universal. It's somehow absolutely like we conjure it up. We bring it to life through our own minds, but it's not any kind of fundamental way real.

No. And the same way the Sun is not to be blamed for destroying its own planets. The universe doesn't care because it has no meaning. It owes us nothing. And looking for meaning in the universe is demanding answers. Who are we? We're nothing. We don't get to demand anything. And that includes meaning. And I find it very reassuring because once there is no meaning, I don't have to find it. Yeah. Once there's no meaning, it's a kind of freedom in a way. You sound a bit like, I'm happy about it. This isn't a depressing outlook as far as I'm concerned.

It's happiness, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, there's, I don't know if you know who Sam Harris is, but he despite the pushbacks from the entirety of the world really argues hard that there's that free will is an illusion that, you know, the deterministic universe and it's all already been predetermined and and he's okay with it and he's happy with it that that he's distinctly aware of it and that's okay. The quantum world will disagree with him on the deterministic nature of nature. Well, he's not he's not saying it's deterministic but he's saying that the randomness doesn't help either. Like randomness does not help in the experience of feeling like you're the

decider of your own actions, that he kind of is okay with being a leaf flowing on the river, like, or being the river, right, as opposed to having or being like a fish or something they can decide is swimming direction. He's okay just embracing the flow of life. I mean, in that same way, it kind of sounds like your conception of meaning. I mean, it just is. It doesn't, the universe doesn't care. It just is what it is and we experience certain things and some feel good and some don't. and that's life. But I don't feel like that about life. I think life does have meaning.

And there's, and it's lot of all to look for that meaning in life. I just don't think you can apply that beyond life and certainly not beyond earth, that this notion of meaning is a human construct. And so it only applies within us and the other life forms and planet types that suffer from our intrusions or rejoice from our interactions. But this meaning is ours to do as we please.

We've created it, we've created a need for it, and so that's our problem to solve. I don't apply it beyond us. I think we as humans have a lot of responsibilities, but then moral responsibilities, and a lot of the responsibilities are much more easily fulfilled if you find meaning in them. So I think there's value to meaning, whether it's real or not. I just think we gain nothing from trying to anthropomorphize the entire universe. And also, that's the height of hubris.

That's not for us to do. Yeah, it also could be just like duality and quantum mechanics. It could be both that there is meaning and then there isn't. And we're somehow depending on the observer, depending on the perspective you take on the thing. I mean, even on Earth, that's true. But the things that meaning or not depends a lot on who's looking.

Whether it's us humans, the aliens, or the giraffes. Clara, this was an incredible conversation. I, I mean, I learned so much, but I also am just inspired by the passion you have in the, not finding meaning in the universe. In my, yeah, for someone, I'm very passionate about not finding meaning in the universe. You're the most inspiring nihilist I've ever met. I'm just kidding. You're I mean, you are truly an inspiring communicator of everything from phosphine to life to quantum astral chemistry. I can't wait to see what other cool things you do in your career and your in your scientific life. Thank you so much for wasting your valuable time with me to

the air really appreciate it. It was my pleasure. I had already got my four hours of productivity before I got here and so it's not waste. It's all downhill from there. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversational cleris who's at Silva and thank you to Onit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you a Thank you.