Lex Fridman Podcast - #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Custin Teen Batigian, planetary astrophysicist at Caltech, interested in, among other things, the search for the distant, the mysterious planet 9, in the outer regions of our solar system. Quick mention of our sponsors, Squarespace, Literati, Onit, and N.I. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that our little sun is orbited by not just a few planets in the planetary region, but trillions of objects in the kuiper belt and the ord cloud that extends over three light years out. This to me is amazing. Since proximal centauri, the closest star to our son is only 4.2 light years away, and all of it is mostly covered in darkness. When I get a chance to go out swimming in

Starting point is 00:00:51 the ocean far from the shore, I'm sometimes overcome by the terrifying and the exciting feeling of not knowing what's there in the deep darkness. That's how I feel about the edge of our solar system. One day, I hope humans will travel there. Or at the very least, AI systems that carry the flame of human consciousness. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now, no ads in the middle, I find those get in the way of the conversation. I try to make these interesting, but I give you time stamps, so if you skip, 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 very picky about the sponsors we take on. So hopefully if you buy their stuff, you'll

Starting point is 00:01:33 find value in it just as I have this show sponsored by Squarespace. A new sponsor for the podcast, but I've been using this stuff for many years now. They make it easy for you to make your own website. In fact, for the 4x4x48 challenge with David Goggins, which happened in the spring of 2021, I was talking to David on the phone and I suggested that I can make a website for the challenge very easily using Squarespace. And that's how Gogginschallenge.com was born. Now, that particular website was used only for a few months and then we set it back to private. So it was mostly used to give information about the challenge and to let people submit

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Starting point is 00:02:37 Go to lexfreedman.com slash squarespace for free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code Lex to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's LexFreedman.com, that's Squarespace, and that should forward you to the right place. This shows also sponsored by Literati Book Clubs. During book clubs hosted by people like Richard Branson and Stephen Curry, but there are many other ones. They deliver their monthly book picks straight to your door. I personally am part of the Joseph Campbell's book club called Myth and Meaning.

Starting point is 00:03:10 One book I read in that club is the Spell of the Sensuous, Perception and Language in a More Than Human World. David Abram, the author, describes beautifully how we have become disconnected from nature and how we can reconnect whilst the remaining in the modern world. I think there's a lot of people that write books like this in an almost naive dismissal of all the amazing things that technology brings. David doesn't do that but it does highlight that there is things to be discovered in the other than human if we were sort of open our senses to them.

Starting point is 00:03:49 That's what nature is, life all around us that isn't human. Anyway, imagine what a book club can be. Redeem your 30-day trial for only 99 cents at literati.com slash lex. Head to literati.com slash lex to learn more. That's literati.com slash Lex head to literati.com slash Lex to learn more. That's literati.com slash Lex. This episode is sponsored by Onnet Nutrition Supplement and Fitness Company. They make Alpha Brain which is a Neutropic that helps support memory, mental speed and focus.

Starting point is 00:04:20 I use it as a kind of a boost for my mind when I'm thinking about a difficult problem. So if a particular deep work session requires just like sitting there and thinking with a sheet of paper, usually that's kind of like the design stage for the idea when it's purely thinking. That's usually when I for prolonged period of time have to turn my mind to 11. So it's it's focused but it's also like actively digging deep. That's how I think about thinking. It's like digging a hole, searching for gold, and most of the times you come up with nothing. Speaking of digging, there will be blood as an incredible movie.

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Starting point is 00:05:21 Go to lexfreedman.com slash on it to get up to 10% off alpha brain. That's 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 N.I, formerly known as National Instruments. N.I. is a company that has been helping engineers solve the world's toughest challenges for 40 years. Their motto is, Engineer Ambitiously. I love listening to podcast So I'm excited that and I has a new podcast called testing 1 2 3 I Love that name. They bring on engineers and innovators to discuss unexpected challenges and explore the world through the lens of testing In the parts of my work that involved software engineering. I love the process of testing. I mean, you can think even just the debugging process is a kind of process of testing. And that first few moments when you run into problems, into warnings, into errors, that's

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Starting point is 00:06:52 This is the Lex Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation with Constantine Batigian. What is Planet 9? Planet 9 is an object that we believe lives in the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. It orbits the Sun with a period of about 10,000 years and is about five earth masses. So that's a hypothesized object. There's some evidence for this kind of object. There's a bunch of different explanations. Can you give an overview of the planets in our solar system? How many are there?

Starting point is 00:07:48 What do we know and not know about them at a high level? All right, that sounds like a good plan. So look, the solar system basically is comprised of two parts, the inner and the outer solar system. The inner solar system has the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Now Mercury is about 40% of the orbital separation of where the Earth is. As close as the Sun, Venus is about 70%, then Mars is about 160%, oh, further away from the sun than is the earth

Starting point is 00:08:27 these planets that we One of them we occupy right are pretty small. Okay there To leading order sort of heavily overgrown asteroids if you will And this is this becomes evident when you move out Further in the solar system and encountered Jupiter, which is 316 earth masses, right? 10 times the size. You know, Saturn is another huge one. 90 earth masses at about 10 times the separation from the Sun is the Earth, and then you have Uranus and Neptune at 20 and 30 respectively. For a long time, that is where the kind of massive part of the solar system ended. But what we've learned in the last 30 years is that beyond Neptune, there is this expansive field of icy debris, a second icy asteroid belt in the solar system.

Starting point is 00:09:26 A lot of people have heard of the asteroid belt, which lives between Mars and Jupiter, right? Like that's a pretty common thing that people like to imagine and draw on lunch boxes and stuff. Beyond Neptune, there's a much more massive and much more radially expansive field of debris. Pluto, by the way, it belongs to that second, you know, I see asteroid belt, which we call the Kuiper belt. It's just a big object within that population of bodies. Oh, Pluto, the planet. Pluto, the dwarf planet, the former planet, you know. Why is Pluto not a planet anymore?

Starting point is 00:10:06 I mean, it's tiny. We used to... It's a size-matter when it comes to planets. 100%. 100%. It's actually a fascinating story. When Pluto was discovered in 1930, the reason it was discovered in the first place, because astronomers at the time were looking for

Starting point is 00:10:22 a seven-earth mass planet somewhere beyond Neptune. It was hypothesized that such an object exists. When they found something, they interpreted that as a seven earth mass planet and immediately revised its mass downward because they couldn't resolve the object with the telescope. So it looked like just a point mass, you know, star, rather than a physical disc. And they said, well, maybe it's not seven, maybe it's one, right? And then sort of over the next, you know, I guess 40 years, Pluto's mass kept getting revised downwards, downwards, downwards, downwards, until it was realized that's like 500 times less massive than the earth. I mean, like Pluto's surface area is almost perfectly equal

Starting point is 00:11:09 to the surface area of Russia, actually. And Russia is big, but it's not a planet. Well, I mean actually we can touch more of that. That's another discussion. So in some sense, early in the century, Pluto represented kind of our ignorance about the edges of the solar system. And perhaps Planet Nine is the thing that represents our ignorance about now the modern set of ignorances about the edges of our solar system. That's a good way to put it.

Starting point is 00:11:41 By the way, just imagining this belt of Astro of debris at the edge of our solar system was incredible. Can you talk about it a little bit? What is the Kuiper belt and what is the ort cloud? Yeah, okay. So look, the simple way to think about it is that if you imagine, you know, Neptune's orbit like a circle, right? Kind of maybe a factor of 1.5, 1.3 times bigger, on a radius of 1.3 times bigger, you've got a whole collection of icy objects. Most of these objects are sort of the size of Austin, you know, maybe a little bit smaller. If you then zoom out and explore the orbits of the most long period, the Kuiper belt object, these are the things that have the biggest orbits and take the longest time to go around the sun, then what you find is that beyond a critical orbit size, beyond a critical

Starting point is 00:12:47 orbit period, which is about 4,000 years, you start to see weird structure, like all the orbits sort of point into one direction. And all the orbits are kind of tilted in the same way, by about 20 degrees with respect to, son, this is particularly pronounced in orbits that are not heavily affected by Neptune. So there you start to see this weird dichotomy where their objects which are stable, which Neptune does not mess with gravitationally

Starting point is 00:13:19 and unstable objects. The unstable objects are basically all over the place because they're being kicked around by Neptune. The stable orbits show this remarkable pattern of clustering. We, back I guess, five years ago, interpreted this pattern of clustering as a gravitational one-way sign, the existence of a planet in a distant planet, right? Something that is shepherding and confining these orbits together. Of course, right, you have to have some skepticism

Starting point is 00:13:52 when you're talking about these things. You have to ask the question of, okay, how statistically significant is this clustering? And there are many authors that have indeed called that into question, we have done our own analyses. And basically, just like with all statistics where there's multiple ways to do the exercise, you can either ask the question of if I have a telescope that has surveyed this part

Starting point is 00:14:23 of the sky, what are the chances that I would discover this clustering? That basically tells you that you have zero confidence. That does not give you a confident answer one way or another. Another way to do this statistics, which is what we prefer to do is to say, we have a whole night sky of discoveries in the Kuiper belt, right? And if we have some object over there, which has right, sentient and declination, which is a way to say it's there on the sky, and it has some brightness that means somebody

Starting point is 00:15:00 looked over there and discovered an object, was able to discover an object of that brightness or brighter. Through that analysis, you can construct a whole map on the sky of kind of where all of the surveys that have ever been done have collectively looked. So if you do the exercise this way, the false alarm probability of the clustering on which the planet-9 hypothesis is built is about 0.4%. Wow. Okay, so there's a million questions here. One, when you say bright objects, why are they bright? Are we talking about actual objects within the Kuiper Belt or the stuff we see

Starting point is 00:15:37 through the Kuiper Belt? This is the actual stuff we see in the Kuiper Belt. The way you go about discovering Kuiper Belt objects, it's pretty easy. I mean, it's easy in theory, right? Hard in practice. All you do is you take snapshots of the sky, right? Choose that direction and say and take, you know, the high exposure snapshot. Then you wait a night and you do it again. And then you wait another night and you do it again. Objects that are just random stars in the galaxy don't move on the sky, whereas objects in the solar system will slowly move. This is no different than if you're driving down the freeway,

Starting point is 00:16:14 it looks like trees are going by you faster than the clouds. This is parallax. That's it. It's just they're reflecting light off of the sun and it's going back and hitting this. There's a little bit of a glimmer from the different objects that you can see based on the reflection from the sun. So like, there's actual light. It's not darkness. That's right. These are just big icicles basically that are just reflecting sunlight back

Starting point is 00:16:39 at you. It's then easy to understand why it's so hard to discover them because light has to travel to, you know, something like 40 times the distance between the earth and the sun and then get reflected back. Was it like an hour travel? Yeah, that's right. That's something like that because the earth to the sun is eight minutes, I believe. And so something, you know, in that order magazine. So that's interesting. So you have to like account for all of that. And then there's a huge amount of data, pixels that are coming from the pictures.

Starting point is 00:17:16 And you have to integrate all of that together to paint a sort of like a high estimate of the different objects. Can you track them? Can you be like, that's Bob? Like, can you like... Yes, exactly. In fact, one of them is named Joe Biden.

Starting point is 00:17:32 I mean, I'm not like, this is not even a joke. Right. Is there a Trump one or no? No, no. I don't know. I haven't checked for it for that. But like, the way it works is if you discover one, you right away get a license plate for it. So the first four numbers is the first year

Starting point is 00:17:52 that this object has appeared on in the data set, if you will, and then there's this code that follows it, which basically tells you where in the sky it is. Right. So one of the really interesting Kuiper belt objects, which is very much part of the Planet Nine stories called VP113, because Joe Biden was vice president at the time. You know, got nicknamed Biden. VP113 said.

Starting point is 00:18:23 Yeah. He got nicknamed Biden. VP113 said. Yeah. You got nickname Biden. Beautiful. What's the fingerprint for any particular object? Like, how do you know it's the same one? Or you're just kind of like, yeah, from night to night, you take a picture. How do you know it's the same object? Yeah. So the way you know is it appears in almost exactly the same part of the sky, except for a, but moves. And this is why actually you need at least three nights, because oftentimes asteroids, which are much closer to the, like, will appear to move only slightly, but then on the third night will move away.

Starting point is 00:19:02 So the third night is really there to detect acceleration. Now, the thing that I didn't really realize until I started observing together with my partner and crime and all this, Mike Brown, is just the fact that for the first year when you make these detections, the only thing you really know with confidence is where it is on the night sky and how far away it is. That's it. You don't know anything about the orbit because over three days, the object just moves so

Starting point is 00:19:35 little. That whole motion on the sky is entirely coming from motion of the Earth. The Earth is the kind of the car. The object is the tree and you see it. Yeah. So then to get some confident information about what it's orbit looks like, you have to come back a year later and then measure it again. I'll interest you. So do three nights and come back a year later and do another three nights. Yeah. So you get the velocity, the acceleration from the three nights and then you have the maybe the additional

Starting point is 00:20:05 information. The additional information. The orbit is basically described by six parameters. So you at least need six independent points, but in reality, you need many more observations to really pin down the orbit well. And from that, you're able to construct for that one particular object and orbit. And then there's of course, like how many objects are there? There's like four ish thousand now. But like the in the future that could be like millions. Oh, sure. Oh, sure. So in fact, these things are hard to predict. But there's a new observatory called the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is coming online maybe next year. I mean, with COVID, these things are a little bit more uncertain,

Starting point is 00:20:50 but they've actually been making great progress with construction. And so that telescope is just going to sort of scan the night sky every day automatically. And it's just such an efficient survey that it might increase the census of the distant Kuiper belt, the things that I'm interested in by a factor of a hundred. I mean, that would be, that would be really cool. And yeah, that's an incredible, they may, I mean, they might just find planet nine. I mean, that's like almost like literally pictures, like visually. I mean, sure, yeah, like the first detection you make, all you know is where it is in the sky and how far away it is.

Starting point is 00:21:34 If something is, you know, 500 times away from the sun, as far away from the sun as is the earth, you know that's planet nine. That's when the story concludes. Now you can study it. Now you can study it, yeah. By the way, I'm gonna use that as like, I don't know, pick up line or dating strategy, like see the person for three days, and then don't see them at all

Starting point is 00:21:53 and then see them again in a year to determine the orbit and over time you figure out if sort of from a cosmic perspective, this whole thing Worked out. I have no dating advice to give I was gonna use this as a matter forward to it somehow Map it onto the human condition. Okay. You mentioned the Kipa boat. What's the or cloud? If you look at the Neptune orbit is One then the Kipa Bell is like 1.3 out there And then we get farther and farther into

Starting point is 00:22:26 the darkness. So, okay, you've got the kind of main kipre belt, which is about say 1.3, 1.5, then you have something called the scattered disc, which is kind of an extension of the kipre belt. It's a bunch of these long, very elliptical orbits that hug the orbit of Neptune would come out very far. So that, the scatter disc so half the orbit length, roughly speaking, of about 1,000, 1,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Now, if you keep moving out, okay, eventually,

Starting point is 00:23:14 once you're at sort of, you know, 10,000 to 100,000, roughly, that's where the Oort Cloud is. Now, the Oort Cloud is a distinct population of icy bodies and is distinct from the Kuiwa buildings. In fact, it's so expansive that it ends roughly halfway between us and the next star. Its edge is just dictated by, to what extent, does the solar gravity reach? Solar gravity reaches that far. Yeah, so it has to, wow. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:49 So, in fact, imagining this is a little bit overwhelming. So there's gonna get giant, like vast icy rock thingy. It's like a sphere. It's like, you know, it's like it's almost spherical structure that engulfs, that encircles the sun. And all the long period comets come from the earth cloud. They come the way that they appear. I mean, for already, I don't know, hundreds of years, we've been detecting it occasionally, like a comet will come in, and it seemingly comes out of nowhere. The reason these long period comets appear that vary, on very, very long timescales,

Starting point is 00:24:33 right? These orde-cloud objects that are sitting, you know, 30,000 times as far away from the sun, as is the Earth, actually interact with the gravity of the galaxy, the tide, effectively the tide that the galaxy exerts upon them and their orbits slowly change and they elongate, to the point where once they, their closest approach to the sun starts to reach a critical distance where ice starts to sublimate, then we discover them as comments because then the ice comes off of them. They look beautiful on the night sky, etc. But they're all coming from, you know, really, really far away. So, is there, are any of them coming our way from collisions, like how many collisions are there? Or is there a bunch of space for them to move around?

Starting point is 00:25:21 Yeah, that's, that's, that's completely collisionless. Out there, the physical radii of objects are so small compared to the distance between them, right? It's just, it is truly a collisionless environment. I don't know. I think that probably in the age of the solar system, there have literally been zero collisions in the word cloud. of the solar system have literally been zero collisions in the word cloud. Wow.

Starting point is 00:25:47 When you like draw a picture of the solar system, everything's really close together. So everything I guess here's spaced far apart. Do rogue planets like flying every once in a while and join not rogue planets, but rogue objects from out there. Oh, sure. Yeah, join the party. Yeah, absolutely.

Starting point is 00:26:06 We've seen a couple of them in the last three or so years, maybe four years now. The first one was the one called Uomuomuwa. It's been all over the news. The second one was Comet Borosov, discovered by a guy named Borisov. Yeah, so the way you know they're coming from elsewhere is unlike solar system objects which travel on elliptical paths around the sun, these guys travel on hyperbolic paths.

Starting point is 00:26:40 So they come in, say hello, and then they're gone. And the fact that they exist is totally not surprising. The Neptune is constantly ejecting Kuiper belt objects into interstellar space. Our solar system itself is sort of leaking icy debris and ejecting it. So presumably every planetary systems around other stars do exactly the same thing. Let me ask you about the millions of objects that are part of the Kriper Ball and the part of the Orklaude. Do you think some of them have primitive life?

Starting point is 00:27:18 It kind of makes you sad. If there's like primitive life there and they're just kind of like lonely out there in space. Like how many of them do you think have life, like bacterial life? Probably a negligible amount. Zero, you know, like zero with like a plus on top. Right? Zero plus plus. Yeah. So, you know, if you and I took a little trip to the interstellar medium, I think we would develop cancer and die real fast. That's rough. Yeah, it's a pretty hostile radiation environment.

Starting point is 00:27:53 You don't actually have to go to the interstellar medium. You just have to leave the Earth's magnetic field too. And then you're not doing so well suddenly. So this idea of life kind of traveling between places, it's not entirely implausible, but you really have to twist, I think, a lot of parameters. One of the problems we have is we don't actually know how life originates. Right? So, it's kind of a second order question of survival in the interstellar medium and how resilient it is because we think you require water, and that's certainly the case for the

Starting point is 00:28:36 earth, but we really don't know for sure. That said, I will argue that the question of like, are there aliens out there is very boring question? Because the answer is, of course, there are. I mean, like, we know that there are planets around almost every star. Of course, there are other life form. Life is not some specific thing that happened on the earth, and that's it, right? That's a statistical impossibility. Yeah. Yeah, but the difficult question is, before even the fact that we don't know how life originates, I don't think we even know what life is like, definitionally, formalizing a kind of picture of, in terms of the mechanism

Starting point is 00:29:27 we would use to search for life out there, or even when we're in a planet to say, is this life? Is this rock that just moved from where it was yesterday, life, or maybe not even rock, something else? I got to tell you, I want to know what life is. Okay, and I want you to show me. I think there's a song to basically accompany every single thing we talk about today and probably half of them are love songs. And somehow we'll integrate George Michael into the whole thing. Okay, so your intuition is life everywhere in our universe. Do you think there's intelligent life out there?

Starting point is 00:30:09 I think it's entirely plausible. I mean, it's entirely plausible. I think I think there's intelligent life on earth. And so yeah, taking that, like say, whatever this thing we got on earth, well, there's dolphins or humans, say that's intelligent. Definitely dolphins. I mean, have you seen the dolphins? Well, they do some cruel stuff to each other. So if cruelty is a definition of intelligence, they're pretty good.

Starting point is 00:30:40 And then humans are pretty good on that regard. And then there's like pigs are very intelligent. I got a cat actually a chance to hang out with pigs recently and they're outside from the fact they were trying to eat me. They're very, they love food. They love food but there's an intelligence to their eyes that was kind of like haunts me because I also love to eat meat and to to meet the thing I later ate and that was very intelligent and almost charismatic with the way it was expressing itself, herself, itself, was quite

Starting point is 00:31:18 incredible. So all that to say is if we have intelligent life here on earth, if we take dolphins, pigs, humans, from the perspective of planetary science, how unique is earth? Okay, so earth is not a common outcome of the planet formation process. It's probably something on the order of maybe a 1% effect. And by Earth, I mean not just an Earth mass planet. I mean the architecture of the solar system that allows the Earth to exist in its very temperate way.

Starting point is 00:32:04 One thing to understand, and this is pretty crucial, right, is that the earth itself formed well after the gas disk that formed the giant planets had already dissipated. You see, stars start out with, you know, the star and then a disc of gas and dust that encircles it. Okay. From this disc of gas and dust, big planets can emerge. And we have over the last, you know, two, three decades discovered thousands of extra solar planets. That's an orbit of other stars. What we see is that many of them are, you know, have these expansive hydrogen helium atmospheres. The fact that the earth doesn't is deeply connected to the fact that an earth took about 100 million years to form. So we miss

Starting point is 00:33:00 that, you know, train, so to speak, to get that hydrogen helium atmosphere. That's why actually we can see the sky, right? That's why the sky is, well, at least in most places, that's why the atmosphere is not completely opaque. With that kind of thinking in mind, I would argue that we're getting the kind of emergent pictures that the Earth is not, you know, everywhere, right? We, there's sort of the sci-fi view of things where we go to some other star and we just

Starting point is 00:33:35 land on random planets and they're all Earth-like. That's totally not true. But the even a low probability event, even if you imagine that Earth is a one in a million or one in a You know one in 10 million occurrence There are 10 to the 12 stars in the galaxy Right, so you just you always win by by large numbers. That's right by supply. They say well you've hypothesized that there our solar system once possessed a population of short

Starting point is 00:34:08 period planets that were destroyed by the evil Jupiter migrating through the solar and Nabilite. Can you explain? If I was to say, what was the kind of the key outcome of searches for exor solar planets, it is that most stars are encircled by short period planets that are, you know, a few earth masses, right? So a few times bigger than the earth, and have orbital periods that kind of range from days to weeks. Now, if you go and ask the solar system, what's in our region, right, in that region, it's completely empty, right? It's just astonishingly hollow.

Starting point is 00:34:52 And think, you know, from the sun is not some, you know, special star that decided that it was going to form the solar system. So I think, you know, the natural thing to assume is that the same processes of planet formation that occurred everywhere else also occurred in the solar system. Following this logic, it's not implausible to imagine that the solar system once possessed a system of intra-mercurian, like, you know, compact system of planet. So then we asked ourselves, would such a system survive to this day, and the answer is no. At least our calculations suggested highly unlikely because of the formation of Jupiter. And Jupiter's primordial kind of wandering through the solar system would have sent this collisional field of debris that would have pushed that system of planets onto the sun.

Starting point is 00:35:49 So was Jupiter this primordial wandering? What did Jupiter look like? Like why was it wandering? It didn't have the orbit it has today. We're pretty certain that giant planets like Jupiter, when they form, they migrate. The reason they migrate is, you know, on a detailed level, perhaps difficult to explain, but, you know, if just in a qualitative sense, they form in this fluid disc of gas and dust. So it's kind of like, then, okay, if I pull up down or raft somewhere into ocean,

Starting point is 00:36:23 will it stay, where you plop it down or will it kind of get carried around? It's not really a good analogy because it's not like Jupiter is being advected by the currents of gas and dust, but the way it migrates is it carves out a hole in the disc and then through by interacting with the disk gravitationally, it can change its orbit. The fact that the solar system has both Jupiter and Saturn, here complicates things a lot, because you have to solve the problem of the evolution of the gas disk, the evolution of Jupiter's orbit in the gas disk, plus evolution of Saturn's and their mutual interaction. The common outcome of solving that problem, though, is pretty easy to explain.

Starting point is 00:37:14 Jupiter forms its orbit shrinks and then one Saturn forms its orbit catches up basically to the orbit of Jupiter and then both come out. So there's this inward outward pattern of Jupiter's early motion that happens within the last million years of the lifetime of the solar systems, primordial disk. So while this is happening, if our calculations are correct, which I think they are, you can destroy this inner system of, you know, few Earth-mass planets. And then, in the aftermath of all this violence, you form the terrestrial planets. Where would they come from in that case? So you put a clear out the space, and then there's

Starting point is 00:38:02 a few terrestrial planets that come in and those come in from the from the gisk somewhere like one of the larger objects. What actually happens in these calculations, you leave behind a rather mass depleted, like remnant, remnant disk, only a couple earth masses. So then from that remnant population, I mean, panulous of material, over 100, over 100 million years, by just collisions, you grow the earth and the moon and everything else. You said amulus?

Starting point is 00:38:37 Anulus. Anulus. Anulus. That's a beautiful world, what does that mean? Well, it's like a disc that's kind of thin. It's like a, yeah, it's something that is, you know, a disc that's so thin, it's almost flirting with being a ring.

Starting point is 00:38:51 Like, I was gonna say this reminds me of Lord of the Rings. So like, the word just feels like it belongs and I've told him that. Okay, so that's incredible. And so that, in your senses, you say like 1%, that's the rare, the way Jupiter and Saturn danced and cleared out and, you know, cleared out the, the, the short period debris and then changed the gravitational landscape. That's a pretty rare thing to.

Starting point is 00:39:18 It's rare and moreover, like, you don't even have to go to our calculations, you can just ask the night sky how many stars have Jupiter and Saturn analogs? The answer is Jupiter and Saturn analogs are found around only 10% of sunlight stars. They themselves, like you kind of have to score in a minus or better on the planet formation test to become a solar system analog analog even in that basic sense. And moreover, lower mass stars,

Starting point is 00:39:50 which are very numerous in the galaxy, so-called M-dwarves, think like 0% of them. Well, maybe like a negligible fraction of them have giant planets. Giant planets are a rare outcome of planet formation. One of the really big problems that remain unanswered is why. We don't actually understand why they're so rare. How hard is it to simulate all of the things that we've been talking about, each of the

Starting point is 00:40:20 things we've been talking about, and maybe one day, all of the things we've been talking about and beyond, meaning from the initial primordial solar system, you know, a bunch of discs with, I don't know, billions, trillions of objects in them, like simulate that such that you eventually get a Jupiter and a Saturn, and then eventually you get the Jupiter and the Saturn that clear out a disk, change the gravitational landscape, then Earth pops up like that whole thing, and then be able to do that for every other system in the, every other star in the galaxy,

Starting point is 00:40:58 and then be able to do that for other galaxies as well. Yeah, so look, maybe start from the smallest simulation, like what is actually being done today? I mean, even the smallest simulation is probably super, super difficult. Even just like one object in the Kuiper Bell is probably super difficult to simulate. I mean, I think it's super easy.

Starting point is 00:41:18 I mean, like, it's just not that hard. But, you know, let's ask the most basic problem. The problem of having a star and something in orbit of it, you don't need a simulation for it. You can just write that down on a piece of paper. This gravity, I guess it's important to try to one way know, one way to simulate objects in our solar system is to build a universe from scratch. Okay.

Starting point is 00:41:49 We'll get to building the universe from scratch in the sec. But let me just kind of go through the hierarchy of what, you know, what we do. Two objects, analytically solvable. Like we can figure it out very easily. If you just, you don't, I don't think you. I don't think you need to know calculus. It helps to know calculus, but you don't necessarily need to know calculus. Three objects that are gravitationally interacting, the solution is chaotic. It doesn't matter how many simulations you do.

Starting point is 00:42:20 The answer loses meaning after some time. I feel like that is a metaphor for dating as well, but gone. Now, look, the fact that you go from analytically solvable to unpredictable, when your simulation goes from two up bodies to three bodies should immediately tell you that the exercise of trying to engineer a calculation where you form the entire solar system from scratch and hope to have some predictive answer is a few title one, right? We will never succeed at such a simulation. I feel like excited to clarify.

Starting point is 00:43:03 I mean, like, explicitly having a clear equation that generalizes the whole process enough to be able to make a prediction? Or do you mean actually like literally simulating the objects as a hopeless pursuit, once they get a place beyond three? The simulating them is not a hopeless pursuit, but the outcome becomes a statistical one. What's actually quite interesting is I think we have all the equations figured out, in order to really understand this, the formation of the solace system, it suffices to know gravity and magnetohydrodynamics. I mean, the combination of Maxwell's equations and, you know,

Starting point is 00:43:46 Navier-Stokes equations for the fluids, you need to know quantum mechanics to understand the opacities and so on. But we have those equations in hand. It's not that we don't have that understanding. It's that putting it all together is A very, very difficult and B, if you were to run the same evolution twice, changing the initial conditions by some infinitesimal amounts, some minor change in your calculation to start with, you would get a different answer. This is one, there's this part of the reason why planetary systems are so diverse. You don't have like a very predictive path for you start with a disc of this mass

Starting point is 00:44:35 and it's around the star. Therefore, you're going to form the solar system. You start with this and therefore, you will perform this huge outcome, a huge set of outcomes and some percentage of it will resemble the solar system. You mentioned quantum mechanics. We're talking about cosmic scale objects. You've talked about that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with Schrodinger's equation. I sure did. Why? Like how does quantum mechanics become relevant when you consider the evolution of objects

Starting point is 00:45:13 in the solar system? Yeah. Well, let me take a step back and just say it. I remember being utterly confused by quantum mechanics when I first learned it. And the Schrodinger equation, which is kind of the parent equation of that whole field, seems to come out of nowhere, right? The way that I was sort of explaining, I remember asking, you know, my professor

Starting point is 00:45:39 is like, but where does it come from? Is it like, well, it's just like, don't worry about it. And just like calculate the hydrogen, you know, energy levels. Right? So it's like, I could do all the problems. I just did not have any intuition for, for where this parent, you know, super important equation came from. Now down the line, I was, remember, I was preparing for my own lecture, and I was trying to understand how waves travel in self-gravitating discs. So, you know, again, there's a very broad theory that's already developed, but looking for some simpler way to explain it really for the purposes of teaching class. And so I thought, okay, what if I just imagine a disc as an infinite number of concentric

Starting point is 00:46:28 circles that interact with each other gravitationally? That's a problem in some sense that I can solve using methods from like the late 1700s. I can write down Hamiltonian, well I can write down the energy function basically over their interactions. And what I found is that when you take the continuum limit, when you go from discrete circles that are talking to each other gravitationally to a continuum disk, suddenly, this gravitational interaction among them, right? The governing equation becomes the Schrodinger equation. I had to think about that for a little bit. Did you just unify quantum mechanics and gravity? No, this is not the same thing as like fusing relativity and quantum mechanics. But it did get me thinking a little bit.

Starting point is 00:47:27 So the fact that waves in astrophysical discs behave just like wave functions of particles, kind of like an interesting analogy, because for me it's easier to imagine waves traveling through astrophysical discs, or really just sheets of paper. And the reason this is, that analogy exists is because there's actually nothing quantum about the Schrodinger equation. The Schrodinger equation is just a wave equation and all of the interpretation that comes from it is quantum, but the equation itself is not a quantum being. So you can use it to model waves.

Starting point is 00:48:11 It's not turtles, it's waves all the way down. You can pick which level you pick the way that, so it could be at the solar system level that you can use. Right. And also it actually provides a pretty neat calculational tool because it's difficult so we just talked about simulations, but it's difficult to simulate the behavior of astrophysical discs on time scales that are in between a few orbits and their

Starting point is 00:48:39 entire evolution. So it's over a time scale of a few orbits. You do a hydrodynamic simulation, right? You do that. Basically that's something that you can do on a modern computer, on a time scale of say a week. When it comes to their evolution over their entire lifetime, you don't hope to resolve the orbits. You just kind of hope to understand how the system behaves in between, right? To get access to that, as it turns out, it's pretty cute.

Starting point is 00:49:10 You can use a shorting equation to get the answer rapidly, since it's a calculational tool. That's fascinating. By the way, astrophysical disks, what are they? How broad is this definition? Okay. what are they, how broad is this definition? Okay, so astrophysical discs span a huge amount of ranges. They start maybe at the smallest scale, they start with actually Kuiper belt objects.

Starting point is 00:49:34 Some Kuiper belt objects have rings. So that's maybe the smallest example of an astrophysical disc. We've got this little potato-shaped asteroid, which is sort of the size of L.A. or something and around it are some rings of icy matter. That object is a small astrophysical disc. Then you have Saturn, the rings of Saturn. You have the next set of scale. You have the solar system itself. When it was forming, you have a disk. Then you have black hole disks, you have galaxies, disks are super common in the universe.

Starting point is 00:50:10 The reason is that stuff rotates. Right. I mean, that's... That's... Yeah. So those rings could be the material that composes those rings could be... It could be gas, it could be solid. It could be anything. That's right. So the disc that made

Starting point is 00:50:30 From which the planets emerged was predominantly hydrogen helium gas on the other hand the rings of Saturn are Made up of you know icicle ice little like Ice cubes this big about a centimeter across That sounds refreshing. So that's incredible hydrogen helium gas like ice cubes this big about a centimeter across. That sounds refreshing. So that's incredible. Hydrogen helium gas. So in the beginning, it was just hydrogen and helium

Starting point is 00:50:53 around the sun. How does that lead to the first formations of solid objects in terms of simulation? Okay, here's the story. So have you ever been to the desert? Yes, I've been to the Death Valley and actually was terrifying, just as the control tangent, I'm distracting you.

Starting point is 00:51:11 But I was driving through it and I was really surprised because it was at first hot and then as it was getting into the evening, there's this huge thunderstorm, it was raining and it got freezing cold. Like what the hell was the apocalypse? Yeah, I still like just sit there listening to Bruce Springsteen I remember and just thinking I'm probably going to die and I was okay with it because Bruce Springsteen was on the radio

Starting point is 00:51:36 Look when you've got the boss, you know, you're ready. You're ready to meet the boss. Yeah So am I sorry, it's a good one. So sorry, the desk. Yes. Yeah. By the way, like to continue on this tangent, I absolutely love the Southwest for this reason, just, you know, during the pandemic, I drove from LA to New Mexico a bunch of times. The madness of weather. Yeah, the chaos of weather, the fact that it will be blazing hot one minute and then it's just like we'll decide to have a little thunderstorm, maybe we'll decide to go back momentarily to like a thousand degrees and then go back to the thunderstorm. It's amazing. That by the way is chaos theory and action, right? But let's get back to talking about the desert. So in the desert, tumbleweeds have a tendency to roll because the wind rolls them. And if you're careful,

Starting point is 00:52:34 you'll occasionally see this family of tumbleweeds where there's like a big one, and then there's a bunch of little ones that hide in its wake, and are all rolling together, and almost look like, you know, a family of ducks crossing a street or something. Or, for example, you know, if you watch Tour de France, right, you've got a whole bunch of cyclists and they're like cycling, you know, within 10 centimeters of a show,

Starting point is 00:53:00 they're not BFFs, right? But they're not trying to be trying to write together. They are writing together to minimize the collective air resistance, if you will, that they experience. Turns out solids in the protoplanetary disk do just this. There's an instability wherein solid particles, right, things that are a centimeter across, will start to hide behind one another

Starting point is 00:53:30 and form these clouds. Why? Because cumulatively, that minimizes the solid component of this aerodynamic interaction with the gas. Now, these clouds, because they're kind of a favorable energetic condition for the dust to live in. They grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, until they become so massive that they collapse under their own weight. That's how the first building blocks of planets form. That's how the big asteroids got there.

Starting point is 00:54:00 That's incredible. So that is that simulatable or is it not useful to simulate? No, that's simulatable. And people do these types of calculations. It's really cool. That's actually, that's one of the many fields of planet formation theory that is really, really active right now. People are trying to understand all kinds of aspects of that process Because of course, I've explained it, you know, like as if there's one thing that happens, turns out it's a beautifully rich dynamic, but qualitatively, formation of the first building blocks actually follows the same sequence as formation of stars. Stars are just clouds of gas, hydrogen helium gas that sit in space and slowly cool, and at some point they contract to a point where their gravity overtakes the thermal pressure support,

Starting point is 00:54:58 if you will, and they collapse under their own weight, and you get a little baby solar system. That's amazing. So, do you think one day will be possible to simulate the full history that took our solar system to what it is today? Yes, and it will be useless. Okay, so you don't think your story many of the ideas that you have about Jupiter clear in the space like retelling that story in high resolution is not that important. I actually think it's important, but at every stage, you have to design your experiments,

Starting point is 00:55:34 your numerical computer experiments, so that they test some specific aspect of that evolution. of that evolution. I am not a proponent of doing huge simulations because even if we forget the information theory aspect of not being able to simulate in full detail the universe because if you do, then you have made an actual universe, it's not the simulation, right? Simulation is in some sense a compression of information, so therefore you must lose detail. But that point aside, if we are able to simulate the entire history of the solar system in excruciating detail,

Starting point is 00:56:22 I mean, it'll be cool, but it's not gonna be any different from observing it, right? Because theoretical understanding, which is what ultimately I'm interested in, comes from taking complex things and reducing them down to something that, some mechanism that you can actually quantify. That's the fun part of Astrophysics.

Starting point is 00:56:49 Just kind of simulating things in extreme detail is we'll make cool visualizations, but that doesn't get you to any better understanding than you had before you did the simulation. If you ask very specific questions, then you'll be able to create very highly compressed, nice, beautiful theories about how things evolved. And then you can use those to then generalize to other solar systems, to other stars and other galaxies and say something generalizable about the entire universe.

Starting point is 00:57:23 How difficult would it be to simulate our solar system such that we would not know the difference, meaning, if we are living in a simulation, is there a nice, think about as a video game? Is there a nice compressible way of doing that? Or just kind of like you, intuitive with a three-body situation, is just a giant mess that you cannot

Starting point is 00:57:46 create a video game that will seem realistic without actually building our schedule. I'm speculating, but yeah, I know, I know you have a deep understanding of this, but like for me, I'm just going to like speculate that for at least in the types of simulations that we can do today, inevitably you run into the problem of resolution, right? You're, it doesn't matter what you're doing, it is discreet. Now the way you would go about asking, you know, what we're observing is that a simulation or is that some real continuous thing, is you zoom in and try and find the grid scale, if you will. Yeah, I mean, it's a really interesting question.

Starting point is 00:58:47 And because the solar system itself, and really, you know, the double pendulum is chaotic, right? Pendulum sitting on another pendulum moves unpredictably once you let them go. You really don't need to like inject any randomness into a simulation for it to give you stochastic and unpredictable answers. Whether is a great example of this. Whether has a lapen of time of typical weather systems have a lapen of time of a few days. And there's a fundamental reason why the forecast always sucks, two weeks in advance. It's not that we don't know the equations that govern the atmosphere.

Starting point is 00:59:36 We know that, well, their solutions are meaningless though after a few days. The zooming in thing is very interesting. I think about this a lot, whether there'll be a time soon where we would want to stay in video game worlds, whether it's virtual reality or just playing video games. I mean, I think that time came in the 90s and it's been that time. Well, it's not just, it's not just game is, I mean, it's accelerated. I just recently saw the wow and Fortnite were played 140 billion hours. And those are just video games.

Starting point is 01:00:11 Yeah. And that's like increasing very, very quickly, especially with the people coming up now, being born now and becoming, you know, becoming teenagers and so on. Let's have a thought experiment where it's just you and the video game character inside a room where you remove the simulation They need to simulate sort of A lot of objects if it's just you and that character How far do you need to simulate in terms of zooming in for it to be very real to you?

Starting point is 01:00:40 Oh, I was really So like first of all you kind of mentioned zooming in, which is fascinating because we have these tools of science that allow us to zoom in, quote unquote, in all kinds of ways in the world around us, but our cognitive abilities, like our perception system as humans, is very limited in terms of zoom. So we might be very easily fooled. Some of the video games, like on the PS4, like look pretty real to me, right? I think you would really have to interrogate. I mean, I think even with what we have today,

Starting point is 01:01:16 like, I don't know, Ace Combat 7, which is a great example, right? Like, I mean, the way that the clouds are rendered, it's, I mean, it way that the clouds are rendered, it's, I mean, it looks just like when you're flying, you know, on a real airplane, the, the kind of transparency, I think that the, you know, our perception is limited enough already to not be able to tell some of the, you know, some of the differences. There's a game called Skyrim. It's an Elder Scrolls role-playing game.

Starting point is 01:01:49 And I just, I played it for quite a bit. I think I played it very different than others. There'll be long searches of time where I would just walk around and look at nature in the game. It's incredible. Oh, sure. It's just like the graphics is like, wow. I want to stay there. It was better.

Starting point is 01:02:09 I went hiking recently. It was as good as hiking. So look, I know what you mean. Not to go on a huge video game. Let's go. It's tangent, but like the third like Witcher game was astonishingly beautiful, right? Especially like laying on a good hardware machine.

Starting point is 01:02:27 And it's like, this is pretty legit. That said, I don't resonate with the I want to stay here. One of the things that I love to do is to go to my boxing gym and box for the guy. Like, there's nothing quite like that physical experience. That's fascinating. That might be simply an artifact of the year you were born. Maybe.

Starting point is 01:02:59 Because if you're born today, it almost seems like stupid to go to a gym. Yeah. Like, you go to a gym to box with a guy. Why not box with Mike Tyson? When you yourself is like in his prime, when you yourself are also an incredible boxer in the video game world.

Starting point is 01:03:14 For me, there's a multitude of reasons why I don't want a box with Mike Tyson. Right? No, no, no, no, I enjoy it. And I want to have an ear. No, but your skills in this meat space and this physical realm is very limited and takes a lot of work and your musician, your incredible scientist, you only have so much time in the day, but in the video game world, you can expand your capabilities and all kinds of

Starting point is 01:03:42 dimensions that you can never have possibly have time in the physical world And so that it doesn't make sense like to to be existing to be working your ass off in the physical world when you can just be super successful In the video game world, but I still you enjoy talking and stuff Yeah, I really struggling to get better. I sure do. I mean, I think like these days, music, music is a great example, right? We just started practicing live with my band again, after not playing for a year. And it was terrible.

Starting point is 01:04:21 Right? We just kind of a lot of the nuance, a lot of the detail that takes years of collective practice to develop, it's just lost, but it was just an incredible amount of fun. Way more fun than all the studio sitting around and playing that I did throughout the entire year. So there's something intangible, or maybe tangible about being in person. I sure hope you're wrong. And that's not something that will get lost,

Starting point is 01:04:57 because I think there's such a large part of the human condition is to hang out. If we were doing this interview on Zoom, right? I mean, I'd already be bored out of my mind. Exactly. I mean, there's something to that. I mean, I'm almost playing devil's advocate, but at the same time, you know, I'm sure people talk about the same way at the beginning of the 20th century about horses, where they are much more efficient, they're much easier to maintain than cars. It doesn't make sense that all the ways that cars break down, there's not enough infrastructure

Starting point is 01:05:37 in terms of roads for cars. It doesn't make any sense. Like horses and nature, you can do the nature like where you should be living be live more natural life those are real you don't want machines in your life they're going to put your mind and the minds of young people but then eventually just cars took over so in that same way it just seems going back to horses. I'm just you know well you can be you can play was it red dead red dead redemption redemption and you can ride horses in the video game more. can play Red Dead Redemption. Red Dead Redemption, and you can write horses in the video game. So let me return us back to Planet 9.

Starting point is 01:06:12 Always a good place to come back to. So now that we did a big historical overview of our solar system, what is Planet 9? OK. Planet 9 is a hypothetical object that orbits the solar system, right, at an orbital period of about 10,000 years, and an orbit which is slightly tilted with respect to the plane of the solar system, slightly eccentric, and the object itself, we think, is five times more massive than the Earth. We have never seen planet nine in a telescope,

Starting point is 01:06:48 but we have gravitational evidence for it. And so this is where all the stuff we've been talking about, this clustering ideas, maybe you can speak to the approximate location that we suspect. And also, the question I wanted to ask is, what are we supposed to be imagining here? Because you said there are certain objects in the type of belt that are kind of have a direction to them that they're all like flocking in some kind of way. So that's the sense that there's some kind of gravitational object not changing their orbit

Starting point is 01:07:19 but kind of confining them, right? Confining, like grouping their orbits together. See, what would happen if Planet 9 were not there? Is these orbits that roughly share a common orientation, they would just disperse. They would just become as a mytho-least symmetric point everywhere. Planet 9's gravity makes it such that these objects stay in a state that's basically anti-aligned with respect to the orbit of planet 9, and sort of hang out there and kind of oscillate on timescale of about a billion years.

Starting point is 01:07:57 That's one of the lines of evidence for the existence of planet 9. There are others. That's the one that's easiest to maybe visualize just because it's fun to think about orbits that are all point into the same direction. But I should emphasize that, for example, the existence of objects, again, kuiper belt objects, that are heavily out of the plane of the solar system, things that are tilted by, say, 90 degrees. That's not, we don't expect that as an outcome of planet formation. Indeed, planet formation simulations have never produced such objects without some extrinsic gravitational force.

Starting point is 01:08:37 And at nine, on the other hand, generates them very readily. So that provides kind of an alternative, population of small bodies in the solar system that also get produced by planet nine through an independent kind of gravitational effect. So they're kind of, there's basically five different things that the that planet nine does individually that are like kind of maybe a one sigma effect where you'd say, yeah, okay,

Starting point is 01:09:06 if that's all it was, maybe it's not no reason to jump up and down, but because it's a multitude of these puzzles that all are explained by one hypothesis. That's really the magnetism, the attraction of the planet nine model. So can you just clarify? So most orbit, most planets in the solar system orbit and approximately the same. So it's flat. Yeah, it's like one degree. They, the difference between them is about one degree.

Starting point is 01:09:39 So, but nevertheless, if we looked at our solar system, it would look and I could see every single object, it would look like a sphere. The inner part where the planets are would look flat, right? The kuiper belt and the asteroid belt have a larger... It gets fatter and fatter and fatter.

Starting point is 01:10:00 It's like the atmosphere. That's right. If you look at the very outside, it's polluted by this quasi-sferoidal thing. Nobody's, of course, ever seen the ord cloud. Right. We've only seen comments that come from the ord cloud. So the ord cloud, which is this, right, population of distant debris, its existence is also inferred. You could say alternatively there is a big cosmic creature that occasionally, sitting at 20,000 AU and occasionally throws an ICU, rocked holes, something like that. Forgetting monster, I think, it's called.

Starting point is 01:10:40 So it's a mystery in many ways, but you can kind of infer about the things about it. By the way, both terrifying and exciting that there's this vast darkness all around us that's full of objects that are just throwing. Just there, yeah. It's actually kind of astonishing, right, that we have only explored a small fraction of the solar system, right? That really kind of baffles me because, remember as a student studying physics,

Starting point is 01:11:10 you do the problem where you put the earth around the sun, you solve that and like it's one line of math, and you say, okay, well, that surely was figured out by Newton. So like, all the interesting stuff is not in the solar system, but that it's just plainly not true. There are there are mysteries in the solar system that are remarkable that we are only now starting to just kind of scratch the surface of. And some of those objects probably have some information about the history of our solar system.

Starting point is 01:11:43 Absolutely. Absolutely. A great example is small meteorites, right? Small meteorites are melted. They have their differentiated meaning some of the iron sinks to corn. Say, how can that be? Because they're so small that they wouldn't have melted just from the heat of their accretion. Turns out, the fact that the solar nebula,

Starting point is 01:12:06 the disk that made the planets was polluted by aluminum 26 is an itself a remarkable thing. It means the solar system did not form an isolation. It formed in a giant cloud of thousands of other stars that were also forming, some of which were undergoing, you know, going through supernova explosions, some of, and releasing these unstable isotopes, that, of which we now see kind of the traces of, it's so cool. Do you think it's possible that life from other solar systems was injected and that was, was, was the origin of life on earth.

Starting point is 01:12:46 Yeah, the panseperomy idea. That scene is a low probability of them by people who studied the origin of life, but that's because then they would be out of a job. Well, I don't think they'd be out of the job because you just then have to figure out how life started there. But then you have to go there. We can study life on earth much easier. We can study it in the lab much easier because we can replicate conditions that are from

Starting point is 01:13:11 an early earth much easier, from a chemistry perspective, from a biology perspective. You can intuit a bunch of stuff. You can look at different parts of earth and just to an extent, I mean, the early earth was completely unlike the current earth, the early earth was completely unlike the current earth, right? There was no oxygen. So one of my colleagues at Caltech, Joe Kirchnik is certain, right?

Starting point is 01:13:37 Something like 100% certainty that life started on Mars and came to earth in on Martian media rights. This is not a problem that I like to kind of think about too much, like the origin of life. It's a fascinating problem, but you know, it's not physics and I just like, I just don't love it. It's the same reason you don't love, I thought you musician. music is not physics either so why are you so into 100% physics?

Starting point is 01:14:11 Yeah, okay, no look in all seriousness though. I There are a few things that I really really enjoy I genuinely enjoy physics and genuinely enjoy music I genuinely, you know enjoy Marshall earths and I genuinely enjoy physics and genuinely enjoy music. I genuinely, you know, enjoy martial arts and I genuinely enjoy my family. I should have said that all in a reverse order or something, but I like to focus on these things and not worry too much about everything else, you know what I mean? Yes.

Starting point is 01:14:39 Just because there is a, like you said earlier, there's a time constraint. You can't do it all. There's many mysteries all around us. And they're all beautiful in different ways. To me, that thing I love is artificial intelligence that perhaps I love it because eventually I'm trying to suck up to our future overlords. The question of you said there's a lot of kind of little pieces of evidence for this thing that's planet nine If we were to try to collect more evidence or be certain Like a paper that says like you drop it clear or done

Starting point is 01:15:20 What what is that required is that require a sending probes out or do you think we can do it from telescopes here on earth? What what are the different ideas for conclusive evidence for planet nine the moment planet nine gets Imaged from a telescope on earth. It's done. I mean it's just there. Can you clarify it because you mentioned that before from an image Would you be able to tell yes? So from an image? the moment you see something, something that is reflecting sunlight back at you, and you know that it's hundreds of times as far away from the sun as it's the earth, you're done. So you're thinking, so basically if you have a really far away thing that's big, You're done. So you're thinking so basically if you have a really far away thing that's big. Yeah, five times a size worth

Starting point is 01:16:10 that means That is planet that is planet. Could there be multiple objects like that? I guess in principle. Yeah, I mean there's no There's no law of physics that that doesn't allow you to have multiple There's also no evidence at present for there being multiple. I wonder if there is possible, so it's like just like we're finding exoplanets, whether given the size of the orc lot, there's basically it's rare and rare, but there's sprinkled planet nine, 10, 11, 12, like these, some 13. There goes that for that. I can just keep counting. So like just something about the dynamic system, like it becomes lower and lower probability event, but they gather up, like they become, well, would they become larger and larger, maybe something like that.

Starting point is 01:16:55 I wonder, I wonder if like discovering Planet Nine will just like be almost like a spring board. It's like, well, what's beyond that? It's entirely plausible. The Orte Cloud itself probably holds about five earth masses or seven earth masses of material. Right, so it's not nothing. And it all ultimately comes down to, at what point will the observational surveys sample enough of the solar system to reveal interesting things?

Starting point is 01:17:32 There's a great analogy here with Neptune, and the story of how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was not discovered by looking at the sky. It was discovered by, it was discovered mathematically. Right, so yeah, the orbit of Uranus, when Uranus was found, this was 1781, it's the kind of tracking, both the tracking of the orbit of Uranus, as well as the reconstruction of the orbit of Uranus immediately revealed that it was not following the orbit that it was supposed to, right? The predicted orbit deviated away from where it actually was. So in the mid 1800s, right? A French mathematician by name of Orbán Leverier did a beautifully sophisticated calculation which said if this is due to gravity of a more distant planet, then that planet is there. And then they found it. But the point is the understanding

Starting point is 01:18:36 of where to look for Neptune came entirely out of celestial mechanics. This case with planet 9 is a little bit different because what we can do, I think, relatively well, is predict the orbit and mass of Planet Nine, we cannot tell you where it is on its orbit. The reason is we haven't seen the Kuiper Belt object complete an orbit, their own orbit, even once, because it takes 4,000 years.

Starting point is 01:19:03 But, I plan to live on as an AI being, and I'll be tracking those orbits as well. So it takes 4,000, 5,000 years. I mean, it doesn't have to be AI. I could be longevity. There's a lot of really exciting genetic engineering research. So you'll just be a brain waiting for the, for the, you're brain waiting for the orbit

Starting point is 01:19:23 to complete for the basic hyperbilt objects. That's right. That's like kind of the worst reason to want to live a long time. Right. Just like in the brain like smoke a cigarette. Can you just like, like, one up while you're waiting or? But you're making me actually realize that the one way to explore the galaxy is by just sitting here on earth and waiting. So if we can just get really good at waiting, it's like a more and more or these interstellar objects that fly in. You can just wait for them to come to you.

Starting point is 01:20:01 Same with the aliens. You can wait for them to come to you. If you get really good at waiting, then that's one way to do the exploration because eventually the thing will come to you. Maybe that's the entire, maybe the intelligent alien civilizations get much better at waiting. And so they all decide, so they game theoretically to start waiting. And it's just a bunch of like ancient intelligent civilizations of aliens all throughout the universe who are just sitting there waiting for each other. Look, you can't just be good at waiting.

Starting point is 01:20:30 You gotta know how to chill. You can't just sit around and do nothing. You gotta know how to chill. I honestly think that as we progress, if the aliens are anything like us, we enjoy loving things we do. And it's very possible that we just figure out mechanisms here on Earth to enjoy our life. And we just stay here forever, that exploration becomes less and less of an interesting thing to do. And so you basically, yes, wait and chill.

Starting point is 01:21:01 You get really optimally good at chilling. And thereby exploring is not that interesting. So in terms of 4,000 years, there will be nothing for scientists. We'll be chilling and just all kinds of scientific explorations will become possible, because we'll just be garriners. It's so chill.

Starting point is 01:21:18 It's so chill. It's so chill. You have a paper out recently, because you already mentioned some of these ideas. But I'd love it if you could dig into it a little bit. Yeah, of course the injection of inner or cloud objects into the distant Kuiper belt by planet nine What is this idea of Planet nine injecting objects into the Kuiper belt. Okay, let me take a

Starting point is 01:21:40 Brief step back and when we do calculations of planet nine, when we do the simulations, as far as our simulations are concerned, sort of the Neptune, like kind of the trans-Neptunian solar system, is entirely sourced from the inside. Namely, the Kuiper belt gets scattered scattered by Neptune and then planet nine does things to it and aligns the orbits and so on. Then we calculate what happens on the lifetime, the solar system, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Starting point is 01:22:17 During the pandemic, one of the kind of questions we asked ourselves, and this is indeed something we, Mike and I, Mike Brown, his partner in crime on this. And I do regularly is we say, how can we a, disprove ourselves and be, how can we improve our simulations? Like, what's missing? And one idea we, but maybe it should have been obvious and retrospect is that all of our simulations treated the solar system as some isolated creature, right? But the solar system did not form an isolation, right? It formed in this cluster of stars and during that phase forming together with thousands of other stars, we believe the solar system formed this almost spherical population of icy debris that sits maybe at a few thousand times the separation between the earth and the sun, maybe even a

Starting point is 01:23:16 little bit closer. If planet 9 is not there, that population is completely dormant. And these objects just slowly orbit the sun, nothing interesting happens to them ever. But when we realize that if planet 9 is there, planet 9 can actually grab some of those objects and gravitationally re-inject them into the distant solar system. So we thought, okay, let's look into this with numerical experiments. Do our simulations, does this process work? solar system. So we thought, okay, let's look into this with numerical experiments. Do

Starting point is 01:23:45 our simulations. Does this process work? And if it works, what are its consequences? So it turns out, indeed, not only does Planet 9 inject these distant inner or cloud objects into the Kuiper belt, they follow roughly the same pathway as the objects that are being scattered out. So there's this two-way river of material. Some of it is coming out by Neptune scattering, some of it is moving in. And if you work through the numbers, you kind of, at the end of the day, that it has an effect on the best fit orbit for Planet 9 itself. So if you realize that the data set that we're

Starting point is 01:24:31 observing is not entirely composed of things that came out of the solar system, but also things that got re-injected back in, then turns out the best fit Planet 9 slightly more eccentric, that's kind of getting into the weeds. The point here is that the existence of planet nine self provides this natural bridge that connects an otherwise dormant population of icy debris of the solar system with things that we're starting to directly observe. It's taken flow back, so it's not just the river flowing one way, so maybe a smaller stream go back and you want to backwash, you want to incorporate that into the simulations, into your understanding of those distant objects, when you're trying to make sense of the various observations

Starting point is 01:25:13 and so on. That's fascinating. I got to ask you, some people think that many of the observations you're describing could be described by a primordial black hole. First, what is a primordial black hole, and what do you think about this idea? Yeah. So a primordial black hole is a black hole which is made not through the usual pathway of making a black hole, which is that you have a star, which is a more massive than you know 1.4 or so solar masses. And basically when it runs out of fuel, runs out of its nuclear fusion fuel, it can't hold itself up anymore. And just a whole thing collapses on itself, right? And you create a, I mean, one, I guess, simple way to think about it is you create an object

Starting point is 01:26:07 with zero radius. That has mass but zero radius, singularity. Now, that's such black holes exist all over the place. In the galaxy, there's in fact a really big one at the center of the galaxy that's like a fact. That one's always looking at you when you're not looking. Okay. And it's always talking about you. And when you turn off the lights, it wakes up. That's right. But you know, so such black holes are all over the place.

Starting point is 01:26:38 When they merge, we get to see incredible gravitational waves that they emit, et cetera, et cetera. One kind of plausible scenario, however, is that when the universe was forming, basically during the Big Bang, you created a whole spectrum of black holes, some with masses of five earth masses, some with masses of ten earth masses, like the entire mass spectrum size, some of the mass of asteroids. Now, on the smaller end, over the lifetime of the universe, the smaller ones kind of evaporate, and they're not there anymore, at least this is what the calculations tell us. But five Earth masses is big enough to not have evaporated. So one idea is that planet nine is not a planet, and instead it is a five earth mass black hole.

Starting point is 01:27:32 And that's why it's hard to find. Now can we right away, from our calculations, say that's definitely true or that's not true, absolutely not. We can't, in fact, our calculations tell you nothing other than the orbit and the mass. And that means the black hole, I mean, it could be a five-earth mass, you know, cup. It could be a five-earth mass hedgehog or a black hole or really anything that's five-earth masses will do because the gravity of a black hole is No different than the gravity of a planet, right? If the Sun became a black hole tomorrow It would be dark, but or the Earth would keep orbiting it in like this notion that oh black holes suck everything in

Starting point is 01:28:20 It's it's not that's like a sci-fi notion. I just mass. What would be the difference between a black hole and a planet in terms of observationally? Observationally, the difference would be that you will never find the black hole, right? The truth is, I'm actually not, I never looked into this very carefully, but there are some constraints that you can get just statistically to say, okay, if the sun has a binary companion, which is a five-erith

Starting point is 01:28:52 mass black hole, then that means black holes would be extremely common. And you can sort of look for lensing events and then you say, okay, maybe that's not so likely. But that said, I want to emphasize that there's a limit to what our calculations can tell you. That's the orbit in the mass. So I think there's a bunch like Ed Witten, I think, wishes, it's a black hole because I think one exciting thing about black holes in our solar system is that we can go there and we can maybe study the singularity somehow because that allows us to understand some other things about physics.

Starting point is 01:29:31 If it's a planet, so planet nine, we may not, you know, and we go there, we may not discover anything profoundly new. The interesting thing, perhaps you can correct me about Planet Nine is like the big picture of it, the whole big story of the Kuiper Belt and all those kinds of things. It's not that Planet Nine would be somehow fundamentally different from, I don't know, Neptune in terms of in terms of the kind of things we can learn from it. So I think that there's kind of a hope that it's a black hole because it's an entirely new kind of object. Maybe you can correct me. I mean, of course, here my own biases creep in

Starting point is 01:30:13 because I'm interested in planets around other stars. And I would say, I would disagree that we wouldn't find things that would be truly fundamentally new, because as it turns out, the galaxy is really good at making five or three Earth-mass objects. The most common type of planet that we see, that we discover orbiting around other stars, is a few Earth masses. In the solar stars, there's a few earth masses. In the solar system, there's no analog for that. We go from one earth mass object, which is this one,

Starting point is 01:30:51 to skipping to Neptune and Uranus, which themselves are actually relatively poorly understood, especially Uranus from the interior structure. Point of view, if planet nine is a planet, going there will give us the closest window and to understanding what other planets look like. And I will, you know, I'll say this, that, you know, planets kind of in terms of their complexity on some logarithmic scale fall somewhere between a star and an insect, right? An insect is way more complicated than a star, right?

Starting point is 01:31:28 Just all kinds of physical processes and really biochemical processes that occur inside of an insect that Just make a star look like, you know somebody is like playing with the spring or something, right? So the I think you know, it would be you know, somebody who is like playing with the spring or something. Right? So the, I think, you know, it would be, you know, arguably, you know, more interesting to go to, you know, to go to Planet 9 if it's a planet, because black holes are simple. They're just kind of, they're basically macroscopic like particles. Yeah. Right? And. And so just like a starly you mentioned in terms of complexity. So it's possible that Planet 9 is supposed to be like homogeneous, it's like super, like heterogeneous is a bunch of cool stuff going on.

Starting point is 01:32:14 Absolutely. That could give us an intuition. I never thought about that. That it's basically Earth number two in terms of size and starts giving us intuition that could be generalizable to Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy. Yeah, Pluto is also in the sense like, you know, Pluto is a tiny, tiny thing, right? Just like you would imagine that it's just a tiny ball of ice like who cares. But the new horizons, images of Pluto reveal so much remarkable structure, right?

Starting point is 01:32:45 They reveal glaciers flowing and these are glaciers not made out of water ice, but, you know, CO ice turns out at those temperatures, right, of like 40 or so Kelvin, water ice looks like metal, right? It just doesn't flow at all, but then ice made up of carbon monoxide starts to flow. I mean, there's just like all kinds of really cool phenomena that you otherwise just wouldn't really even imagine that occur. So yeah, I mean, there's a reason why I like planets. Well, let me ask you, I find as I read the idea that Ed Witten was thinking about this kind of stuff fascinating.

Starting point is 01:33:28 So he's a mathematical physicist who's a very interesting strength theory, one of the fields, metal, the four-worker mathematics. So I read that he proposed a fleet of probes accelerated by radiation pressure that could discover a planet 9 primordial black holes location. What do you think about this idea of sending a bunch of probes out there? Yeah, look, the way the idea is a cool one, right? You go and you say, you know, launch them basically isotropically, you track where they go. And if I understand the idea correctly, you basically measure the deflection, and you

Starting point is 01:34:13 say, okay, that must be something there since the probe trajectories are being altered. Oh, so the measurement, the basic sensory mechanism is the, it's not like you have senses on the probes, It's more like you're Because you're very precisely able to capture to measure the trajectory of the probes You can then infer the gravitational fields and I think I think that's the basic idea You know back a few years ago we had conversations like these with You know engineers from JPL. They more or less convinced me that this is much more difficult than it seems, because

Starting point is 01:34:53 you don't at that level of precision, right? Things like solar flares matter, right? Solar flares are completely chaotic. You can't predict which where a solar flare will happen, that will drive radiation, where I show gradients. You don't know where every single asteroid is. So like, actually doing that problem, I think it's possible, but it's, it's not a trivial matter, right? Well, I wonder, not just about planet nine, I wonder if that's

Starting point is 01:35:24 kind of the future of doing science and our solar system is to just launch a huge number of probes. So that can hold order of magnitude, many orders of magnitude larger numbers of probes and then start in for a bunch of different stuff, not just gravity, but everything else. So in this regard, I actually think there is a huge revolution that's to some extent already started, right? The standard kind of like timescale for a NASA mission is that you like propose it and it launches, I don't know, like 150 years after you propose, I'm over exaggerating, but you know,

Starting point is 01:36:02 it's just like some huge development cycle. And it gets delayed 55 times. Like that is not going away, right? The really cutting edge things, you have to do it this way because you don't know what you're building, so to speak. But the CubeSat kind of world is starting to, you starting to provide an avenue for launching something that costs a few million dollars and has a turnaround timescale of a couple of years. You can imagine doing PhD thesis where you design the mission, the mission goes to where

Starting point is 01:36:42 you're going and you do the science all within a time span of five, six years. That has not been fully executed on yet, but I absolutely think that's on the horizon, and we're not talking a decade. I think we're talking like this decade. Yeah, and the companies accelerating all this with Blue Origin and SpaceX. There's a bunch of more cubes that oriented companies that are pushing this forward. Well, let me ask you on that topic, what do you think about either one,

Starting point is 01:37:16 Elon Musk with SpaceX going to Mars, I think he wants SpaceX to be the first to put a first human on Mars. And then Jeff Bezos, got a given props, wants to be the first to fly his own rocket on into space. So, who wasn't there a guy who like built his rocket out of garbage?

Starting point is 01:37:40 Yeah. This was like a couple years ago and somewhere in the desert, he launched himself. I'm not tracking this closely But I think I am familiar with folks who built their own rocket to try to prove the earth is flat. Yes, that's the guy I'm talking about. Yeah, he was also like he also jumped some limousine Truly revolutionary mind Greater men than either you or I. But what do you. So look, it's been astonishing to watch how really over the last like a decade, the commercial sector took over this, you

Starting point is 01:38:18 know, this industry that traditionally has really been like, you know, a government thing to do. that traditionally has really been like a government thing to do. Motivated primarily by the competition between nations, like the Cold War. And now it's motivated more and more by the natural forces of capitalism. Yes, that's right. So, okay, here I have many ideas about it. I think on the one hand, like what SpaceX has been able to do, for example, phenomenal.

Starting point is 01:38:50 If that brings down the price of SpaceX within that turnaround timescale for space exploration, which I think it inevitably will, that's a huge boost to the human condition. The same time, if we're talking astronomy, it comes at a huge cost. The Starling satellites is a great example of that cost. At one point, in fact, I was just camping in the Mojave with a friend of mine.

Starting point is 01:39:22 They saw this string of satellites just kind of like appear and then disappear into nowhere. So that is beginning to interfere with earth-based observations. So I think there's tremendous potential there. It's also important to be responsible of how it's executed. important to be responsible of how it's executed. Now, with Mars and the whole idea of exploring Mars, I don't have like strong opinions on whether a man's mission is required or not required, but I do think we need to focus. The thing to keep in mind is that I generally kind of, I'm not signed on, if you will, to the idea that Mars is some kind of a safe haven that we can, you know, escape to, right?

Starting point is 01:40:16 Mars sucks, right? Like, living on Mars, if you want to live on Mars, like, you can have that experience by going to the Mojave Desert and camping and it's just like, it's just not a great. What's interesting, but there's something captivating about that kind of mission of us striving out into space and by making Mars in some ways habitable for at least like months at a time, I think would lead to engineering breakthroughs that would make life like in many ways much better on earth.

Starting point is 01:40:50 Like it would come up with ideas we totally don't expect yet both on the robotic side, on the food engineering side, on the, you know, maybe like we'll switch from, we'll like, there'll be huge breakthroughs in an insect farming, as exciting as I find that idea to be. In the ways we consume protein, maybe it'll revolutionize, we do factory farming, which is full of cruelty, and torture of animals will revolutionize that completely.

Starting point is 01:41:22 Because of our, we shouldn't need to go to Mars to revolutionize life here on Earth But at the same time I shouldn't need a deadline to get shit done But I do need it and then same way I think we need Mars There's something about the human spirit that loves that longing for I agree with you thesis They're going to the moon right and the end of that whole endeavor has, you know, has captivated the imagination of so many. And it has, it has led to incredible, kind of incredible ideas, really. And probably in non-linear ways, right? Not like, okay, we went to the moon

Starting point is 01:42:01 therefore, some person here has thought of this. In that similar sense, I think, you know, space exploration is there's something, there's some real magnetism about it. And it's on a genetic level, right? Like we have this need to keep exploring, right? When we're done with a certain frontier, we move on to the next frontier. All that I'm saying is that I'm not moving to Mars to live there permanently, ever. I'm glad you noted the degradation of the earth. I think that is a true leading order challenge of our time. Yeah, great engineering. That's a bunch of engineering problems.

Starting point is 01:42:46 I'm most interested in this space because as I've read extensively, it's apparently very difficult to have sex and space. And so I just want that problem to be solved because I think once we solve the sex and space problem we'll revolutionize sex here on Earth, thereby increasing the fun on Earth and the consequences of that can only be good.

Starting point is 01:43:07 I mean, you've got a clear plan, right? And it sounds like, uh, you know, I'm submitting proposals to NASA as we speak. That's right. I keep getting rejected. I don't know why. Okay. You need better diagrams. Better pictures. That should have thought of that. You a while ago mentioned that there's certain aspects in the history of the solar system and Earth that resulted, that it could have resulted in an opaque atmosphere, but it didn't. We can see the stars.

Starting point is 01:43:42 Somebody mentioned to me a little bit ago, it's almost like a philosophical question for you. Do you think humans, like human society would develop as it did or at all if we couldn't see the stars? It would be drastically different. Just if it ever did develop. So I think some of the early developments right of like fire and you know fire You know first of all that atmosphere would be so hot because you know if you have no peak atmosphere The temperature at the bottom is is huge

Starting point is 01:44:20 So we would be very different beings to start with we'd have could be cloudy in certain kinds of ways that you could still get. Okay, think about like a greenhouse. A greenhouse is cloudy effectively, but it's super hot. Yeah, it's hard to avoid having an atmosphere. If you have an opaque atmosphere, it's hard to... Venus is a great example. Venus is, I don't remember exactly how many degrees, but it's hundreds in Celsius. Right, it's not a hundred, it's hundreds.

Starting point is 01:44:53 Even though it's only a little bit closer to the Sun, that temperature is entirely coming from the fact that the atmosphere is thick. So it's a sauna of sorts. Yeah, yeah, you go there, you know, you feel refreshed after you come back, you know. But if you stay there, I mean, it's a sauna of sorts. Yeah, you go there, you know, you feel refreshed after you come back, you know. But if you stay there, I mean, it's so okay, take that as an assumption. This is a philosophical question, not a biological one. So you have a life that develops under these extremely hot conditions. Yeah, so let's see, so much of the early evolution of mankind was driven by exploration. And the kind of interest in stars originated in part as a tool to guide that exploration. That in itself, I think would know, huge differential in the way that we, you know, are evolution on this

Starting point is 01:45:46 planet. Yeah, I mean, stars, that's brilliant. So even in that aspect, but even in further aspects, astronomy just shows up in basically every single development in the history of science up until the 20th century, it shows up. So I wonder without that, if we would have, if we would even get like calculus. Yeah, look, that's a great, I mean, that's a great point. Newton in part developed calculus

Starting point is 01:46:15 because he was interested in understanding, explaining couplers laws, right? In general, that whole mechanistic understanding of the night sky, replacing a religious understanding where you interpret this as whatever fire god writing his little chariot across the sky as opposed to this is some mechanistic set of laws, that transformed humanity and arguably put us on the course that we're on today, right? The entirety of the last 400 years and the development of our technological world that we live in today was sparked by that, right? Abandoning an effectively, you know, a non-secular view of the natural world and kind of thing. Okay, this can be understood, and if it can be understood, it can be utilized, we can create our own variants of this. Absolutely, we would be a very, very different species without astronomy.

Starting point is 01:47:28 without astronomy. This I think extends beyond just astronomy, right? There are questions like, why do we need to spend money on X? Where X can be anything like paleontology, like the mating patterns of penguins. Yeah, that's like essential. That's right. I think, you know, there's a tremendous under appreciation for the usefulness of useless knowledge. Right? I mean, that's brilliant. I didn't come up with this. This was this is a little book by the guy who started the Institute for Advanced Studies. But, you know but it's so true, so much of the electronics that are on this table, work on Maxwell's equations, Maxwell wasn't sitting around in the 1800s saying, I hope one day, we'll make a couple of mics, so a couple of guys can have this conversation. That was at no point was that the motivation. And yet, it gave us the world that we have today. And the answer

Starting point is 01:48:38 is, if you are a purely pragmatic person, if you don't care at all about kind of the human condition, none of this. The answer is, you can tax it. Right? Like, useless things have created way more capital than useful things. And the satin, first of all, it's really important to think about and it's brilliant in the following context. Like Neil DeGrasse Tyson is this book about the role of military-based funding in the development of science. And then so much of technological breakthroughs in the 20th century had to do with humans

Starting point is 01:49:24 working at different military things. And then the outcome of that had had to do with humans working on different military things. And then the outcome of that had nothing to do with military. It had some military application, but their impact was much, much bigger than military. The splitting of the atom is kind of a canonical example of this. We all know that tragedy that arises from splitting

Starting point is 01:49:43 of the atom. And yet, so much, I mean, the atom itself does not care for what purpose it is being split. So I wonder if we took the same amount of funding as we used for war and poured it into like totally seemingly useless things, like the mating patterns of penguins. We would get the internet anyway I think so I think so and you know perhaps more of the internet would have would have penguins You know when I said we're both joking, but in some sense like I wonder it's not the this in the penguins

Starting point is 01:50:21 Because penguins is more about sort of biology, but all uses this kind of tinkering and all kinds of, in all kinds of avenues. And also because military applications are often burdened by the secrecy required. So it's often like so much, the openness is lacking. And if we learned anything for the last few decades, is that when there's openness and science, that accelerates the development of science. That's right. That's true. The openness of science truly, you know, it benefits everybody, the notion that if, you know, I share my science with you, then you're going to catch up and know the same thing. That is a short-sighted viewpoint because if you catch up and you discover something,

Starting point is 01:51:15 that puts me in a position to do the next step. So I absolutely agree with all of this. I mean, the kind of question of like military funding versus non-military funding is obviously a complicated one. But at the end of the day, I think we have to get over the notion as a society that we are going to pay for this and then we will get that. That's true if you're buying toilet paper or something. It's just not true in the intellectual pursuit.

Starting point is 01:51:53 That's not how it works. And sometimes it'll fail. It's like sometimes a huge fraction of what I do. I come up with an idea. I think it's great and then I work it out. It's totally not great, right? It's a fail's immediately. Failure is not a sign that the initial pursuit was worthless.

Starting point is 01:52:13 Right. Failure is just part of this kind of this whole exploration thing, and we should fund more and more of this exploration, the variety of the exploration. That's right. I think there's a line of spalling or somebody from that generation of scientists, a good way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas. Yeah. So I think that's true.

Starting point is 01:52:35 If you are conservative in your thinking, if you worry about proposing something that's going to fail and all what if, you know, like, I, there's no science police that's going to fail and oh, what if, you know, like, I, there's no science police that's going to come and arrest you for proposing the wrong thing. And, you know, it's also just like, why would you, what would you do science if you're afraid of, you know, taking that step? It would be so much better to propose things that are plausible, they're interesting, and then for a fraction of them to be wrong, then to just kind of, you know, making incremental progress all your life, right? Speaking of wild ideas, let me ask you about the thing we mentioned previously, which is

Starting point is 01:53:17 this interstellar object, a more and more. Could it be space junk from a distant alien civilization? You can't immediately discount that by saying absolutely it cannot. Anything can be space junk. I mean, from that point of view, can any of the Kuiper belt objects we see be space junk? Anything on the night sky can in principle be space junk. And Kuiper belt would, interstellar objects potentially, and like force them into an orbit,

Starting point is 01:53:48 if they're like small enough? Not the Kipe about itself, but you can imagine like Jupiter family comments being captured, you know. So you can actually capture things. It's even easier to do this very early in the solar system, like early in the solar system's life, while it's still in a cluster of stars,

Starting point is 01:54:07 it's unavoidable that you capture debris, whether it be natural debris or unnatural debris, or it's debris of some kind from other stars. That, it's like a daycare center, right? Like everybody passes their infections on to other kids. Yeah. And, you know, one more and more, there's been a lot of discussion about, and it's been a lot of interest in this

Starting point is 01:54:30 over, not, is it, is it aliens or is it not? But let's like, if you just kind of look at the facts, like what we know about it is it's kind of like a weird shape. And it also accelerated. Right, like that's the two interesting things about it. There are puzzles about it and perhaps the most daring resolution to this puzzle is that it's not aliens or it's not like a rock, it's actually a piece of hydrogen ice. So this is a friend of mine, Darryl Seligman and Greg Loughlin came up with this idea where that in giant molecular clouds that are just clouds of hydrogen, helium, gas that live in,

Starting point is 01:55:23 live throughout the galaxy at their cores, you can condense ice to become these hydrogen icebergs, if you will. And then that explains many of the aspects of, in fact, I think that explains all of the oral mystery, how it becomes elongated, because basically the hydrogen isoblimates and a bar of soap that slowly elongates as you strip away the surface layers, how it was able to accelerate because of a jet that is produced from the hydrogen coming off of it, but you can't see it because it's hydrogen gas. All of this stuff kind of falls together nicely. I'm intrigued by that idea truly because it's, if that's true, that's a new type of astrophysical object.

Starting point is 01:56:19 And it would be produced by what's the monster that produced the initially that kind of object is. So this is giant molecular clouds. They are everywhere. I mean, they are, the fact that they exist is not. Are they rogue clouds or are they part of like an orc cloud? No, no, they're the sole clouds. Yeah, there's just floating about.

Starting point is 01:56:39 Yeah, so if you go, like a lot of people imagine the galaxy as being a, you know, a bunch of stars, right? And they're just orbiting, right? But the truth is if you fly between stars, you run into clouds. They don't have any large object that creates orbits. They're just floating about. Just floating? But why are they floating together?

Starting point is 01:57:00 Are they just floating together for a time and not? Well, so these are the, these eventually become the nurseries of stars. So as they, as they cool, they contract and, you know, then collapse into stars or into groups of stars. But some of them, the, the starless molecular clouds, according to the calculations that Darryl and Greg did can, can create these like icicles of hydrogen ice. I wonder why they would be flying so fast. Does it seem to be moving pretty fast at a good pace?

Starting point is 01:57:35 You mean, a more and more? A more and more. That's just because of the acceleration due to the sun. If you step, I mean, it's like, take something really far away, let it go, and the sun is here. By the time it comes close to the sun, it's moving pretty fast. That's an attractive explanation, I think, not so much because it's cool, but it makes a clear prediction of when the urban observatory comes online next year or so we will discover many many more of these objects, right and they have So I like I like theories that are falsifiable and not just testable but falsifiable

Starting point is 01:58:17 It's good to have a falsifiable theory where you can say that's not true Aliens is it is one that's fundamentally difficult to say no, that's not true. Aliens is one that's fundamentally difficult to say, no, that's not aliens. The interesting thing to me, if we look at one alien civilization, and then we look at the things it produces, in terms of before to try to detect the alien civilization, there's like, say, there's 10 billion aliens that would probably be Trillions of dumb drone type things produced by the aliens and then be many many many more orders and magnitude of junk

Starting point is 01:59:02 So like if you were to look for an alien civilization in my mind, you would be looking for the junk. That's the more efficient thing to look for. So I'm not saying more and more as any characteristics of space junk, but it kind of opened my eyes like to the idea that we shouldn't necessarily be looking to the queen of the ant colony, we should be looking at, I don't know. I don't know, like the traces of alien life that doesn't look intelligent in any way may not even look like life. It could be just garbage. We should be looking for garbage.

Starting point is 01:59:38 Just generically. Garbage that's producible by unnatural forces. I mean, for me at least that was kind of interesting because if you have a successful alien civilization that we will be producing many more orders and magnitude of junk and that would be easier potentially to detect. Well, so you have to produce the junk but you have to also launch it.

Starting point is 02:00:00 So this is where, let's imagine. Carpenter disposal. Yeah, but let's imagine a disposal. Yeah. Well, but let's imagine we are a successful civilization that, you know, has made it to space. We clearly have, right? And yes, we're in the infancy of that pursuit, but, you know, we've launched, I don't know how many satellites. Probably if you count GPS satellites, it must be at least thousands. It's certainly thousands, I don't know if it's over 10,000, but it's on that order.

Starting point is 02:00:30 But it's on that, like a large order of magnitude. How many of the things that we've launched will ever leave the solar system, I think, too? It's just a few. Well, maybe the Voyager, the Voyager one, Voyager two, I don't know if the Pioneer. So maybe three, like this is also a Tesla Roster out there. That one, it will never leave the solar system.

Starting point is 02:00:52 It'll just, I think that one will eventually collide with Mars. That can be SpaceX's first Mars, you know, but look, so there is an energetic cost to interstellar travel, which is really hard to overcome. And when we think about, you know, generically, what do we look for in an alien civilization? Oftentimes, we tend to imagine that the thing you look for is a thing that we're doing right now. Yeah. Right. So I think that, you know, if I look at the future, and for a while, like, okay, aliens are out there, they must be broadcasting in radio, right?

Starting point is 02:01:31 That radio, you know, the amount that we broadcast in radio has diminished tremendously in the last 50 years, but we're doing a lot more computation, right? What are the signs of computation? Like, that's a good, that's an interesting question to ask, right? We're, I don't know, I think something on the order of a few percent of the entire electrical grid last year went to mining Bitcoin, right? Yeah, there could be a lot lot of in the future, different consequences of the computation, which I mean, I'm biased, but it could be robotics. It could be artificial

Starting point is 02:02:12 intelligence. So we may be looking for intelligent looking objects. Like that's what I meant by probes, like things that move in kind of artificial ways. But the emergence of AI is not an if, right? It's happening right in front of our eyes, and the energetic costs associated with that are becoming, you know, a tangible problem. So I think, you know, if you imagine kind of extrapolating that into the future, right? What are the, you know, what becomes the bottleneck, right? The bottleneck might be powering, you know, powering the AI, broadly speaking, not one AI, but powering that entire AI ecosystem, right? So, I don't

Starting point is 02:03:00 know, I think, you know, space junk is kind of, it's an interesting idea, but it's heavily influenced by like, sci-fi of 1950s, where by 2020 we're all like flying to the moon. And so we produce a lot of space junk. I'm not sure if that's the pathway that alien civilizations take. I've also never seen an alien civilization. That's true. But if your theory of chill turns out to be true and then we don't necessarily explore, we seize the exploration phase of alien civilizations quickly sees the exploration phase of their efforts, then perhaps they'll just be chilling

Starting point is 02:03:48 in a particular space, expanding slowly, but then using up a lot of resources and then have to have a lot of garbage disposal that sends stuff out. And the other idea was that it could be a relay that you almost have like these GPS like markers, these sent throughout, which I think is kind of interesting. It's similar to this probe idea of sending a large number of probes out to measure gravitational

Starting point is 02:04:22 to measure basically, yeah, the gravitational field essentially. I mean, a lot of people at Caltech and MIT are trying to measure gravitational fields. And there's a lot of ideas of sending stuff out there that accurately measures those gravitational fields to have a greater understanding of the early universe, but then you might realize that communication through gravitation, through gravity is actually much more effective than radio waste, for example, something like that. And then you send out, I mean, okay, if you're an alien civilization that's able to have gigantic masses, like basically...

Starting point is 02:05:04 We're getting there as a civilization. No, we're not nearly close. have gigantic masses, like basically. We're getting there as a civilization. No, we're not many, close. Well, I mean, I mean. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. I mean, like, be able to sort of play with black holes, that kind of thing.

Starting point is 02:05:17 So we're talking about the whole another different order of magnitude of masses. Then it may be very effective to send signals, via gravitational waves. I actually, in my sense, is that all of these things are genuinely difficult to predict, you know, and I don't mean like to kind of shy away. I just, I really mean, if you think, if you take imagination of what the future looked like from, you ago. It is so hard to conceive of the impossible. It's almost limiting to try and imagine things that are an order of magnitude,

Starting point is 02:06:00 two orders of magnitude ahead in terms of progress, just because you mentioned cars before, if you were to ask people what they wanted in 1870s, faster buggies. Right? So I think the whole alien conversation inevitably gets limited by our entire collective astrophysical lack of imagination. To push back a little bit, I find that it's really interesting to talk about these wild ideas about the future, whether it's aliens, whether it's AI, with brilliant people like yourself who are focused on very particular tools of science we have today to solve very particular like rigorous scientific questions And it's almost like putting on this wild dreamy hat like some percent of the time and say like what are

Starting point is 02:06:56 Like what would alien civilizations look like what would alien trash look like? What would our own civilization that sends out trillions of AI systems out there, like how 9,000, but 10,000 out there? What would that look like? And you're right, and you want prediction is probably going to be horrendously wrong, but there's something about creating these kind of wild predictions that kind of opens up. there's a huge magnetism to it, right? And some of it, you know, I mean, some of the Jules Verne novels did a phenomenal job predicting the future, right?

Starting point is 02:07:36 That actually was a great example of what you're talking about, like allowing your imagination to run free. I mean, I just hope, I just hope there's dragons. That's what I can do. I love dragons. Yeah, dragons are the best. But see, the cool thing about science fiction and these kinds of conversation, it doesn't just predict the future, I think. Some of these things will create the future. Planting the idea, the humans are amazing. Like fake it till you make it.

Starting point is 02:08:10 Humans are really good at taking an idea that seems impossible at the time. And for any one individual human, that idea is like planting a seed. And eventually materialize itself. It's weird. It's weird. Science fiction can create science drive some of the... It drives the science.

Starting point is 02:08:31 I agree with you. And I think in this regard, I'm like a sucker for sci-fi. It's all I listen to like now when I run. And some of it is completely implausible, right? And it's just like I don't care. It's so, it's both entertaining and it's just like, it's imagination. You know about the Black Clouds book,

Starting point is 02:09:02 I think this by Fred Hoyle. This has great connections with sort with a lot of the advancements that are happening in NLP right now, with transformer models and so on. But it's this Black Cloud shows up in the solar system. And then people try to send radio. And then it learns to talk back at you. So anyway, we don't have to talk at all about it,

Starting point is 02:09:27 but it's just something worth checking out. With that on the alien front, with the black cloud to me, and the exact on the LLP front, and also just explainability of AI, it's fascinating, just a very question, Stephen Wolfram looked at this with a movie arrival. It's like, what would be the common language that we would discover?

Starting point is 02:09:46 The reason that's really interesting to me is we have aliens here on Earth. Japanese. Japanese, well yeah. Japanese is the obvious answer. Japanese, yeah, that would be the common, maybe it would be music actually. That's more likely. It wouldn't be a language, it would be art that they would communicate. But, you know, I do believe that we have,

Starting point is 02:10:08 I'm with Stephen Wolfram on this a little bit, that to me, computation, like programs we write, that, you know, that they're kind of intelligent creatures, and I feel like we haven't found the common language to talk with them, like our little creations that are artificial are not born with whatever that innate thing that produces language with us. And like coming up with mechanisms for communicating with them is an effort that feels like it will produce some incredible discoveries. You can even think of if you think that math has discovered mathematics in itself is a kind of... Oh yeah, it's an innate construction of the world

Starting point is 02:10:50 we live in. I think we are part of the way there that would carry out arithmetic, right? And I think it was Ulam who worked in Los Alamos at the time, like towards the end of Second World War, wrote something about how, you know, in the future, right? Computers will not be just arithmetic tool, but will be truly an interactive, you know, thing with which you could do experiments, right? At the time, the notion of doing an experiment not like in the lab with some beakers, but an experiment on a computer experiment was a new one. That's like, you know, 70% of what I do is I design, you know, I write code, terrible code to be clear, like,

Starting point is 02:11:56 but, you know, I write code that creates an experiment, which is a simulation. So in that sense, I think we're beginning to interact with the computer in a way that you're saying, not as just a fancy calculator, not as just a call and request type of thing, but something that can generate insights that are otherwise completely unattainable, right there, unattainable by doing analytical mathematics. Yeah, and there's with the alpha-fault two, we're now starting to crack open biology, so being able to simulate at first trivial biological systems and hopefully down the line

Starting point is 02:12:39 complex biological systems, my hope is to be able to simulate psychological, like sociological systems, like humans. A large part of my work at MIT was on autonomous vehicles, and the fascinating thing to me was about pedestrians. Human pedestrians interacting with autonomous vehicles, and simulating those systems without murdering humans will be very useful, but nevertheless is exceptionally difficult. Yeah, I would say so. When is my Mustang going to drive itself? Right. I'm not even joking. It looks like. Yeah. Yeah. It turns out it's much more difficult than we imagined. Yeah. And I suppose that's the kind of the progress of science is just like, you know, going to Mars. It's probably going to turn out to be way more difficult to imagine.

Starting point is 02:13:33 Sending out props to investigate planet nine at the edge of our solar system might turn out to be way more difficult to imagine, but we do it anyway. We figured out in the end. It's actually more of the great. I mean, going, sending humans to Mars way more complicated than sending humans to the moon. You'd think just like naively, but in space, who cares? Like, if you go there, why don't you go there? You know, this life support is an extremely expensive thing, yeah. There's a bunch of extra challenges, but I disagree with you.

Starting point is 02:14:06 I would be one of the early people to go. I used to think not. Yeah. I used to think I'd be one of the first maybe million to go. Once you have a little bit of a society, I think I'm upgrading myself to the first like 10,000. That's right. Front of the cabin.

Starting point is 02:14:20 Not completely front, but like it would be interesting to die. I'm okay with death front, but like it would be interesting to die. I'm okay with death sucks, but I kind of like the idea of dying on Mars of all the places to die. I got to say in this regard like I Don't want down Mars. I don't know. No, no. I would much rather die on earth. I mean death is fundamentally boring, right? Like death is a very boring experience. I mean, I've never died before, so I don't know from firsthand experience. As far as you know, yeah, you could be a nation on those kinds of things. So you mean, uh, where would you die? If you had to choose, oh man. Okay, so I would definitely, you know, there's a question of who I'd want to die with, you know, prefer not to die alone. Like, you know, surrounded by family would be

Starting point is 02:15:17 preferable. Where? I think northern New Mexico, and I'm not even joking. Like this is not a random place. It's just like, would that be your favorite place on Earth? Not necessarily. Like, favorite place on Earth to reside, you know, indefinitely, but it is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to. So there's something attractive about going, you know. Returning to nature in a beautiful place. Let me ask you about another aspect of your life

Starting point is 02:15:56 that is full of beauty, music. Okay. Your musician. The absurd question I have to ask, what is the greatest song of all time? Objectively what is the greatest song of all time? Objectively speaking. The greatest song of all time. I suppose that could change moment to moment day to day, but if you were forced to answer

Starting point is 02:16:14 for this particular moment in your life, that's something that pops to mind, this could be both philosophical, this could be technically as a musician, like what you enjoy, maybe lyrics. Like for me. It's lyrics is very important. So I would probably it would be my choice would be lyrics based. I don't want to answer in terms of just technical, you know, technical prowess. I think technical prowess is impressive, right? It's just like, it's impressive. what can be done. I wouldn't place that into the category of the greatest music ever written.

Starting point is 02:16:47 Some classical music that's written is undeniably beautiful, but I don't want to consider that category of music either, just because, so if I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I've I don't know if you're joking better. I am joking. It's a good one, but it's yeah, I mean, I'm back as a close second. What's my age again? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, it would probably, you know, songwriting wise, I think the Beatles came pretty close to. They influential to you. I was like, the Beatles. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:17:46 Love the Beatles. I love the Beatles. But it be yesterday. Yeah. Like strong. I think strawberry feels forever is one of, you know what? One of my favorite Beatles songs is, it's, you know, in my life, right? That's not, it's hard to imagine how whatever 24-year-old

Starting point is 02:18:05 wrote that is it is one of the most introspective pieces of music ever you know I'm a huge pink Floyd fan and so I think you know if you were to you can sort of look at the entire dark side of the moon album and as you know getting pretty close up there to the pinnacle of what can be created. So, you know, time's a great song. Yeah. It's a great song. Just the entirety of just the instruments, the lyrics, the feeling created by a song, like Pink Floyd can create feelings, the entire experience. I mean, you have that with the wall of just transporting you into another place.

Starting point is 02:18:52 Songs don't, not many songs could do that as well. Not many artists can do that as well as Pink Floyd did. There are a lot of bands that you can kind of say, oh yeah, like if you take Blink 182, right? If you have no idea, like if you are listening to sort of that type of pop punk for the first time, it's difficult to differentiate between Blink 182 and like some 41 and the thousand of other like lesser-known bands that all sound in the hell. They all had that sparkling production known bands that all sound, they all had that sparkling production feel, they all kind of sounded the same, right? When it was Pink Floyd, it's hard to find another band that you're like, well, is this

Starting point is 02:19:35 one Pink Floyd or like you know when you're listening to the band? That's fascinating. When you're listening to. That the uniqueness that's fascinating, you fascinating. In the calculation of the greatest song and the greatest band of all time, you could probably actually quantify this, like scientifically, is like how unique, if you play a different song,

Starting point is 02:19:58 how well are people able to recognize whether it's this band or not? And that, that's probably a huge component to greatness. Like, if the world would miss it if it was gone. Yes. Yes. So, but there's also the human story of things like, I would say I'll put Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt

Starting point is 02:20:17 as one of the greatest songs of all time. And that has less to do with the song. But your interaction with it. Your interaction with it, but also the human, the full story of the human. So like, it's not just that if I just heard the song, I'd be like, okay, that, but if it's the full story of it, also the video component for that particular song. So like that, you can't discount the full experience of it. Absolutely.

Starting point is 02:20:43 You know, I have no confusion about, anywhere in that league, but I just like sometimes think about music that is being produced today feels, oftentimes feels like kind of close that you buy at like H&M and you wear three times before they rip and you throw away. So, like, so much of it is not bad. It's just kind of forgettable, right? Like, the fact that we're talking about Pink Floyd in 2021 is in itself an interesting question. Why are we talking about Pink Floyd? There's something unforgettable about them,

Starting point is 02:21:28 and unforgettable about the art that they created. That could be the markets that like, so Spotify's created this kind of market where the incentives for creating music that last is much lower, because there's so much more music. You just want something that shines bright for a short amount of time, makes a lot of money and moves on. I mean, the same thing you see with the news and all those kind of things.

Starting point is 02:21:53 We're just living in a shorter and shorter, shorter time scale in terms of our attention spans. And that nevertheless, when we look at the long arc of history of music, perhaps there will be some songs from today that will last as much as Pink Floyd. We're just unable to see it. Yeah, just the collected works of Nickelback. Exactly. You never know, you never know, Justin Bieber.

Starting point is 02:22:18 It could have, it could be a content. I've recently started listening to Justin Bieber just to understand what people are talking about. And I'll just keep my comments to myself on that one. It's too good to explain it and the word's cannot capture the greatness that is the bebes. You're a musician. So you you write your own music, you play guitar, you sing, maybe can you give an overview of the role music is played in your life? You're one of the your world class scientists and so it's kind of fascinating to see somebody in your position who's also a great musician and still loves playing music.

Starting point is 02:23:02 Yeah well I wouldn't call myself a great musician. One of the best of all time. That's right. Who we're saying offline confidence is the most essential thing about rock stuff. Exactly. It's the confidence and kind of like moodiness, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:23:20 Yeah, look, I mean, music plays an absolutely essential role in everything I do because I lose... If I stop playing for one reason or another, say I'm traveling, I notably lose creativity in every other aspect of my life, right? There's something I don't view, you know, playing music as a separate endeavor from doing science or doing whatever, it's all part of that same creative thing, which is distinct from, I don't know, pressing a button or like, you know, it's not a break from science. Yeah. It's part of your science. It's absolutely, it's a part of,

Starting point is 02:24:06 it's, I would say, you know, it's a thing that enables the science, right? The science would, you know, suck even more than it does already without the music. And that means like the creating of the writing of the music or is it just even playing other people's stuff? Is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, is, is it, is it or is it just even playing other people's stuff? Is it 12? Yeah, it's definitely both. Yeah, and also just, I love to play guitar, I love to sing. My wife tolerates my screeching singing, and even kind of likes it.

Starting point is 02:24:43 Yeah, so people should check out your stuff. You have a great voice. So I love your stuff. Is there something you're super busy? Is there something you can say about practicing for musicians, for guitar, for you're also in a band? So like that whole, how you can manage that? Is there some tricks?

Starting point is 02:25:03 Is there some hacks to being a lifelong musician while being like super busy? So I would say, you know, the way that I optimize my life is I try to, I try to do, you know, the thing that I'm passionate about in a moment and put that at the top of the priority list. There are moments when, you know, you moments when you feel inspired to play music, and if you're in the middle of something, if you can avoid,

Starting point is 02:25:31 if that can be put on hold, just do it. There are times when you get inspired about something scientific. I do my best to drop everything, go into that, you know, mode of, or that isolated mode, and, and execute upon that. So it's a chaotic, you know, I think I have a pretty chaotic lifestyle where I'm always doing kind of multiple things and jumping between, between what I'm doing. But at the end of the day, it's not like, those moments of inspiration are actually kind of rare, like most of the time, all of us are just doing kind of, doing the stuff that needs to get done.

Starting point is 02:26:21 If you do the disservice to yourself of saying, I'm inspired to do this calculation, figure this out, but I've got to answer email or just do something silly. That is nothing more than disservice. Also, I have some social media presence, but I mostly stay off of social media to, you know, just frankly, it's like, I don't kind of enjoy the mental cycles that it takes. Yeah, it robs you of that. Yeah, those precious moments that could be filled with inspiration

Starting point is 02:27:03 in your other pursuits. But there's something to maybe unite a different this. I try to play at least 10 minutes of guitar every day, almost on a technical side, like keeping that base of basic competence going. And I mean, the same way, like writers will get in front of a paper no matter what, that kind of thing. It just feels like that for my life has been essential to the daily ritual of it.

Starting point is 02:27:38 Otherwise, days turn into weeks, weeks, turn into months and you haven't played guitar for months. No, no, I understand. For me, I think it's been like, if we have a gig coming up, we'll double. You need deadlines. Yeah, that's right. No, we will sharpen up definitely, especially co-coming up to a gig. It's like, you know, we're not trying to make money with this. This is like just for the, for that satisfaction of doing something and doing something well, right? But overall, I would say most, I play guitar most days, most days. And you know, when I those days and when I put kids to sleep, I play guitar with them and we just make up random songs about a cat or something. We just do random stuff, but music is always involved in that

Starting point is 02:28:39 process. You have Russian roots? I sure do. Were you born in Russia? I was. Yeah. When did you come here? So I came to the US in the very end of 99, but so I was like almost 14 years old. But along the way, we spent six years in Japan. So like we moved from Russia to Japan in 94 and then to the US in 99 So did like elementary school. Oh, interesting school in Japan. So so elementary school in Japan. Yeah So that's interesting. Yeah, do you still speak Russian? Sure Okay, the part of the Swedish okay, maybe I'll let me ask you in Russian. Что ты помнишь о России?

Starting point is 02:29:29 Обеинчастен, ты here is speaking. Ну, да, в общем, в целом, я помню, то есть мне было восемь, когда мы уехали. И, конечно, как сказать, помню, в первом приближении все, включая вот переход, там, 91-92 год, вот этот вот этот трубонятный период, еще естественно, 93, то есть, и все, я очень хорошо помню, как в какой-то момент сначала привел из Пепсикола, а потом привел из Коккол, я потом... Я помню, я был лет, не знаю, в шесть, я потом...

Starting point is 02:30:11 Как так может быть, Коккол украла продукт и сделал то же сам... То есть я никогда долго думал, что и Пепсик и Кокколы изобрели, типа 1992 году. I think that Pepsi is a brillier to be honest with that one. So for people who don't speak Russian, Konstantin was talking about basically his first in 1992 interaction with capitalism, which is Pepsi. And at first he discovered Pepsi and then he discovered Coke and it was confused how such theft could occur. And like an intellectual property theft. And remember, Pepsi arrived to the Soviet Union first and there was some complicated story which I don't quite understand the details of.

Starting point is 02:30:59 For a while, Pepsi commanded submarines or something. There was, yeah, Pepsi had a fleet of Soviet submarines. It was sponsoring tanks and this fasting. And I remember, there's certain things that trickled in like McDonald's. I remember that was a big deal. Oh, yeah, it's a certain number. I remember the West. Absolutely.

Starting point is 02:31:19 So we went to McDonald's and we stood on, I mean, this is absurd right from kind of looking at it from today's perspective, but we stood in line for like six hours to get into this McDonald's. And I remember inside it was just like a billion people and I'm just taking a bite out of that big Mac. I'm like, wow. What was it? Incredible experience for you. So like, what is the taste of the West like? You can enjoy it. I enjoyed the fact that, I mean, this is like,

Starting point is 02:31:55 this is getting into the Wii's, but I really enjoyed the fact that the top of the bun had those seeds, you know, like, and I remember how on the commercials, the Big Mac would kind of bounce. I was like the seeds, how do they inject the seeds into the bread? Amazing, right? So I think it was artistry. Yeah, it was just joy, the artistry that called it. Exactly. It was the food art that is the big back. Actually, I still don't know the answer to that. How do they get this? Have some seeds on the board. Better to not know the answer.

Starting point is 02:32:28 You just wander the mystery of it all. Yeah, I remember being exceptionally delicious, but I'm with you. I don't know. You didn't mention how transformative Pepsi was, but to me, basically, sugar based stuff, like Pepsi was a Coke. I don't remember which one we partook in but that was an incredible experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. You know, I think it's, you know, it was an important and formative period. I sometimes I guess rely on that a little bit, you know, in my daily life, because I remember like the the early 90s were real rough, you know, like my parents were kind of

Starting point is 02:33:16 on the on the bottom of the spectrum in terms of, you know, in terms of financial well-being. So, kind of like just when I run into trouble, not like money trouble, just any kind of trouble these days, it just kind of is not particularly meaningful when you compare it to that turbulent time of the early 90s. And the other thing is, I think there's like an advantage to being an immigrant, which is that you go through

Starting point is 02:33:52 the mental exercise of changing your environment completely early in your life. You go, it's by no means pleasant in the moment, but going into Japanese elementary school, I didn't go to a private thing. I just went to a regular Japanese public elementary school and that was the non-Japanese person in my class. It's just like the learning Japanese and just kind of...

Starting point is 02:34:24 So that's a super humbling experience in many ways was when you like made fun of all that kind of stuff. Yeah, being the outsider. Oh, absolutely. But you know, you kind of do, you kind of do that. And then you kind of then you just kind of are okay with with stuff. You know what I mean? And so like doing that again in middle school in the US, it was arguably easy because I was like, yeah, well, I've already done this before. So I think it kind of prepares you mentally

Starting point is 02:34:54 a little bit for switching up, or for whatever changes that will come up for the rest of your life. So I wouldn't trade that experience really for anything. So huge aspect of who I am and I'm sure you can relate to a lot of this. Yes. Is there advice from your life that you can give to young people today, high school, college, you know, about their career or maybe about life in general? I'm not like a career coach by life coach. knowledge about their career or maybe about life in general?

Starting point is 02:35:29 I'm not like a career coach by life coach. I'm definitely not a life coach, I don't have it all figured out. But I think there's a perpetual cycle of, thinking that there is a, there's kind of like a template for success, right? Maybe there is, but in my experience, I haven't seen it, right? You know, I would say people in high school, right? So much of their focus is on getting straight A's, filling their CV with this and this and this,

Starting point is 02:36:06 so that it looks impressive. Right? That is not, I think, a good way to optimize your life. Do the thing that fills your life with passion, do the thing that fills your life with interest, and do that perpetually. A straight-a student is really impressive, but also somewhat boring. I think the injection of more of that interest into the lives of young people would go a long way and just both uping their level of happiness and then just kind of

Starting point is 02:36:50 ensuring that looking forward, they are not suffering from a perpetual condition of, oh, I have to satisfy these like, you know, check boxes to do well, right? Because you can lose yourself in that whole process for the rest of your life. But it's nice if it's possible, like Max Tagmark was exceptionally good at this at MIT, figure out how you can spend a small part of your, percent of your efforts that such that your CV looks

Starting point is 02:37:19 really impressive. Yeah, absolutely. There's no, like, without a doubt, that's a baseline that you need to have. So like, spend most of your time doing amazing things you're passionate about, but such that it kind of like Planet 9 produces objects that feed your CV slowly over time. So getting good grades in high school may be doing extra curricular activities

Starting point is 02:37:47 or in terms of for programmers that's producing code that you can show up on GitHub, leaving traces throughout your efforts such that your CV looks impressive to the rest of the world. In fact, this is somewhat along the lines of what I'm talking about. We'll see, like getting, like good grades is important, but grades are not a tangible, like, product.

Starting point is 02:38:12 Like you cannot, you know, show your A and have your A live a separate life from you. Code very much does, right? Music very much takes on, you know, provided somebody else listens to it. Provide, like, takes on a life of its own. That's kind of what I mean, right? Doing, doing stuff that can then get separated from you is exceptionally attractive, right? So it's like a fun. And it's also very impressive to all there. I think we're moving to a world where grades mean less

Starting point is 02:38:50 and less, like certifications mean less and less. If you look at, especially again, in the computing fields, getting a degree, finishing your currently just finishing your degree, whether it's bachelors or masters of PhD is less important than the things you've actually put out into the world. Right, right. And that's a fascinating kind of, that's great that in that sense the meritocracy is in

Starting point is 02:39:15 its richest, most beautiful form is starting to win out. Yeah, it's weird because like, you know, my understanding, and I'm not like, I don't know the history of science well enough to speak very confidently about this, but the advisor of my advisor of my advisor from undergrad, like didn't have a PhD, right? So I think it was a more common thing back in the day, even in the academic sector, to not have fair day, like fair day

Starting point is 02:39:51 didn't know algebra. And Drew diagrammed about magnetic fields and his fair day's law was derived entirely from intuition. So it is interesting to how the world of academia has evolved into a, you got to do this and then get PhD, then you have to post doc once and twice and maybe thrice and then like you move on. So you know, it does, I do wonder, you know, if we're, you know, if there's a better, I think we're heading there. But it's a fascinating historical perspective like that we might have just tried this whole

Starting point is 02:40:29 thing out for a while where we put a lot more emphasis on grades and certificates and degrees and all those kinds of things. I think the difference historically is like we can actually, using the internet show off the show off ourselves and our creations better and better and more effectively, whether that's code or producing videos or all those kinds of things. That's right.

Starting point is 02:40:53 It can become a certified drone pilot. That's true. I love all the things you want to pick, yeah, for sure. Or you can just fly, make YouTube videos, it gets hundreds of thousands of views with your drone and we're never getting a certificate. That's probably illegal. Don't do it. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? So you look at planets, they seem to orbit stuff without asking the why question. And for some reason, life emerged on Earth such that it led to big brains that can ask the big why question.

Starting point is 02:41:28 Do you think there's an answer to it? I'm not sure what the question is. Like what? Meaning of life. The meaning of life. It's 42. It's 42. But, aside from that, it's, you know, yeah, but you know aside from that it's You know why I

Starting point is 02:41:47 Think there if the question you're asking is like why we do all this right why yeah It's part of the human condition right human beings are fundamentally I feel like, sort of stochastic and fundamentally interested in kind of expanding our own understanding of the world around us. And creating stuff to enable that understanding. So we're like, it's stochastic, fundamentally stochastic. So there's just a bunch of randomness that really doesn't seem like it has a good explanation. And yet there's a kind of direction to our being

Starting point is 02:42:30 that we just keep wanting to create and to understand. That's right. I've met people that claim to be anti-science, right? And yet in their anti-science discussion, we're like, if you're so scientific, then why don't you explain to me how, I don't know, this works, and like it always, there's that fundamental seed of curiosity and interest

Starting point is 02:42:58 that is common to all of us. That is absolutely what makes us human, right? And I'm in a privileged position of being able to have that be my job, right? I think as time evolves forward, the economy The economy changes. We're already starting to see shift towards that type of creative enterprise as emerging and taking over a bigger and bigger chunk of the sector. It's not yet, I think, the dominant portion of the economyiney account, but if we compare this to like, you know, time when the dominant thing you would do would be to, you know, go to a factory and do the same exact thing, right? I think, you know, there is a tide there and things are sort of headed in that direction. Yeah, life's becoming more and

Starting point is 02:44:02 more fun. I can't wait. Honestly, what happens next? I can't wait to just chill. Just chill. The terminal point of this is chill. And wait for those Kuiper Belt objects to complete one orbit. I'm going to credit you with this idea. I do hope that we definitively discover a proof that there is a planet nine out there in the next few years.

Starting point is 02:44:23 So you can sit back with a cigar, a cigarette, or vodka, or wine, and just say, I told you so. That's already happening. I'm going to do that later tonight. As I mentioned, confidence is essential to being a rock star. I really appreciate you explaining so many fascinating things to me today. I really appreciate the work that you do out there. And I really appreciate you talking with me today.

Starting point is 02:44:49 Thanks, Constantine. Thanks for the pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Constantine Batigian. And thank you to Squarespace, Lederati, Onit, and I. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Starting point is 02:45:10 Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descendant life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time. you

Lex Fridman Podcast - #201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System

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