Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Secrets of the Universe: What Happened Before The Big Bang, Life Across the Galaxy, Surviving a Black Hole & How We’re All Made of Stars | Astrophysicist Janna Levin

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

BLACK HOLES, THE BIG BANG & ALIEN LIFE: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Breaks Down the Universe Ever wondered what existed before the Big Bang? Or why all planets are different, and why Earth is so perfectly suited for life? In this mind-expanding episode of Mayim Bialik's Breakdown, renowned astrophysicist and author of Black Hole Survival Guide, Janna Levin (Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University), takes us on a cosmic journey through the deepest mysteries of the universe, and how they reflect back on what it means to be human. From the terrifying truth about black holes to the surprising science behind moons, planets, and even nuclear weapons, we're answering space questions you didn’t even know you had. Janna Levin breaks down: - Everything You’ve Ever Wondered About the Big Bang: What came before it, myths, how it created space and time - What is Time and how do black holes bend it? - Why planets are round - What moons really are (and the wild origin of our Moon) - How stars give birth to planets - What black holes are, what happens inside, and their role in the fundamentals of physics - Why some stars become black holes and others don’t - How Einstein and Oppenheimer cracked the code on black holes and how we observe them today - What would happen if our Sun became a black hole and could we actually fall into one? - Spooky effects of black holes on time & space (Could they teach us to age slower?) - Why there’s likely a black hole at the center of every galaxy - Why Janna Levin believes we’ll discover alien life within 50 years & what it could look like (it will likely be on moons, not planets!) - Will our tragic reliance on tech destroy us, or save us? - Can we make tech more compatible with nature? - Why advancing tech increases the generational gap - Why Janna doesn’t believe AI will ever become truly conscious - Why the universe is considered left-handed - What would happen if the Sun were knocked out of our system - Nuclear weapons & how they were invented through studying the Sun - Parallels between nature and cosmic phenomena across the universe This episode of MBB is really all about the growing hunger in society to understand the cosmos, and therefore, ourselves. Don’t miss this mind-blowing journey into the heart of space, time, existence, and our place in it all! Janna Levin’s Substack, Janna Levin's Extra Dimensions: https://jannalevin.substack.com/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have not begun to imagine what we could possibly be encountering. The most common misconception about the Big Bang is that it was an explosion in space. But it's so much more interesting than that. Our elements are literally made in the cores of stars. Wow. This is why we're star dust. We are just a tiny bit of residue left over from the Big Bang, a little bit that sparkles in a sea of darkness.

Tell me why I should believe we're the only ones that are intelligent in this galaxy. I wouldn't say that you should believe that. Dr. Janna Levin is an astrophysicist and professor at Barnard College. She specializes in black holes, chaos theory, and quantum and theoretical physics. Jana's going to explain why so many people have a hunger to understand our place in the universe. The supernova is one of the most important things that happens in the universe because it expels all its material.

And that material has carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and out of that you can make a rocky planet. We see hundreds of billions of galaxies, and they all seem to have supermassive black holes. What we've discovered is that most stars have multiple planets like we do. So if you think about the vastness of the stars and the numbers that we talk about, there are more planets than that. So now our search for life becomes very interesting. There's two very different divergent paths.

One is that we will kill ourselves, or we fundamentally, fundamentally changes a species. It's the only possible future for us if we're going to survive. Are we all going to fall into a black hole? Well, here's the thing. Hi, I'm I'm Biallic. I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. We're going to be talking today about the nature of essentially desire. And it's the nature of our desire to understand the things that are so much bigger than us and what that means for our lives right now. Have you ever thought about how you got here? Have you ever expanded that out to how did everything get here? Have you ever expanded that out to how did everything outside of everything get there? And what existed before we got here? We have the perfect person to talk to about this.

Some of these fundamental questions are so important and are on the rise these days. So many people are curious about this because it's scratching this deep fundamental itch to help us understand ourselves, the world around us, and we're looking for purpose and meaning in a way that these conversations about the solar system, what's happening in the universe around us, are starting to help us answer. We're going to be talking with Jana Levin,

an astrophysicist who is a professor at the Barnard College of Columbia University. She's also the founding director of sciences at Pioneer Works and the founding editor-in-chief of Pioneer, Works Broadcast. She's a Guggenheim fellow and she specializes in black holes. She's written this delightful book, Black Hole Survival Guide, and it's very, very cute and there's also beautiful artwork by Leah Halloran. But what we're going to ask Jana to do today is to explain how we got here, why we're here, where we're going, are we alone, and why should we care? It's a deeply moving conversation. It's also a deeply intellectual conversation. And Jan is going to explain

why so many people have a hunger to understand our place in the universe in a way that we never have before. And we now have the capability to understand our place in the universe in a way that we never have before. Don't forget, we're also, there's a big part of this conversation, exploring black holes, the new information that is available about them only recently the scientific breakthroughs that are happening, and how that information shapes everything else you discussed in terms of our role in the universe and the role of black holes in the orbiting of the earth and the formation of our galaxy. In case you're not sure if you want to understand black holes, I'm going to ask you to take a leap of faith. You want to understand black holes. And

The best person to do that is Jan 11, who joins us in person. Jan 11, welcome to the breakdown. Break it down. Thanks for having me here. We're very happy to have you here in person. Yeah, in person's nice, right? It's nice. It's a different kind of conversation.

And I would say that you are an expert in some of the most difficult things to comprehend. Somebody's got to do it. Correct. And I think it feels especially appropriate to get to have this conversation in person because I feel like there's going to be a lot of, wait, what? Right. Can you go back? You know, one of the really special things about the work that you do,

besides what you do academically, which is very significant and important and all the good things, you communicate very, very complicated concepts to people in a way that is very beautiful and it's very lyrical. And in particular, your substack community is very, very devoted, dialed in, and locked in to wanting to understand. things, not just in a scientific way, but in a beautifully scientific way. Yeah. What would you say your mission is and how did you arrive there? I think with most things, I'm pursuing stuff selfishly, because it appeals to me. And the hope is just it'll appeal to others as well and people will join.

And I think that's always surprising and astounding that people do join. But there's a sense in which it kind of hits people in the solar complexes, even if they're not technically understanding everything you're saying, I don't really want to lean into expository writing as though there has to be every detail transmitted. So at the end, there's some kind of scientific comprehension. It's really more describing the view from a certain climb that you've had the opportunity to ascend. And why not share that view with people as best you can. And part of that view and why it's meaningful to us is the personal and poetic interpretation of it. And I think that's the sort of resonance. People want to understand the Big Bang, Black holes, dark matter, the universe, but they also want to understand

how to sew that into the fabric of their own experience. Why do you think that this information now has sort of struck such accord and people are so hungry to try to understand it? Because As you said, the details are way beyond my comprehension, beyond most people's comprehension, and yet it's still fascinating. Yeah. I think that's an interesting question. I do think the appetite seems to be growing more and more. Maybe it's word of mouth people sharing that this changed my perspective.

How many times does that happen to us? We hear the same things over and over again, even sometimes in science. You know, our discussions can medical science or climate science can circulate around the same things. And there isn't a sense of, I actually, there was a shift for me in that moment. I think when people start to experience that, that kind of wait, what? What does that mean for where we are in the universe? What are we? We're a little less than 5% of what's out there.

And that they share that the way we do other kinds of revelations. And I think it's this kind of contagion that's been. very organic. It's not coming from, you know, advertised, intentional networking. It's coming from word of mouth. I think there's also something that we talk a lot about that just occurred to me in this moment is that thinking that we're only 5%, thinking that there is so much happening that is complex, way beyond our understanding that there's all these processes and systems happening in the universe and the galaxy. It's like makes us have a sense of awe and wonder and like what else could be possible that we may not have any concept of.

Right. I think it's this interplay between the sense of the incomprehensibility, the kind of pleasure of the humility of the astronomical perspective, understanding where we are in this enormously complex scheme and reevaluating, reassessing that, but also the sense of the integration, too, that somehow we're all connected. So it's not just, oh, I feel so insignificant, and that's kind of the end of the analysis. It's really that there are these universal themes. There is this unreasonable power of fundamental principles. For instance, that we all can radiate according to a perfect universal law like Planck's law. We all are hot bodies and we all emit light. And that that

also can describe the sun. It can also describe a hot rock. It can describe an incandescent bulb. It can describe the Big Bang. That universal connection is profound. It feels like that also makes people feel like there's some order to the chaos, that things are following some sort of rules, even if they're too complex for us to understand, even if our understanding is still developing, that maybe all this chaos is not only chaos. Absolutely. I mean, the entire paradigm of theoretical physics, cosmology, trying to understand the universe on the largest scales, is to distill our understanding of fundamental law to the simplest principles and to the shortest list, the one mathematical sentence from which everything can be derived in principle. So the goals

are very reductionist, but the complexity that emerges is still enormous and that you can how this kind of complexity emerge from something that really might be unified in some really profound way that we are all fundamentally the same kind of, maybe it's a string, maybe it's a particle, maybe it's a membrane, but that it all maps back to this unity, I think, is really the whole paradigm. And so we're trying all the time to cut through the complexity and try to see that one law, right? Find that universal description. It's really hard. said many physicists over time. Yeah, right now we're operating at the edge of our understanding.

We really are. We're looking at the possibility of extra spatial dimensions, that the universe isn't all we see. And it's hard, but the intention is on the other side of that obstacle is some simple description that we can we can take as a starting point, literally of the universe. I'm fascinated by the statement the universe isn't all that we see. Yeah.

Well, maybe I should say what we see isn't the whole universe. That's probably the more accurate way to put it. And we know that because our tools have changed drastically even in the last 50 years. Yeah. And as we were just saying, we had this stunning discovery in the past few decades that we're just a tiny bit of residue left over from the Big Bang. I mean, a little bit that sparkles, right, literally interacts with light, is luminous

in a sea of darkness, of matter and energy that can't be seen that doesn't sparkle, doesn't interact with light. Miami-Bi Alex's breakdown is supported by Superpower. We all know the feeling of leaving a doctor's office and kind of feeling like we didn't get anything out of the experience that was useful. Maybe they're like, you're fine, drink more water.

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but for a limited time, our listeners get an additional $20 off with the code break. Head to superpower.com. Use the code break at checkout for $20 off your membership. And after you sign up, you heard about them, make sure to mention my ambiolics breakdown to help support the show. It used to be that this field was very, very distant from really every other field. And even when I went to grad school, you know, 8,000 years ago, there was this notion that like, oh, those are those people studying that over there.

You know, there really wasn't a lot of conversation about overlap. And, you know, I, in studying cognitive neuroscience, like, oh, we got to talk to people in the philosophy department. and that was considered crazy, right? Right. But to even have any conversations that might overlap, right, about consciousness, about reality itself, about our perceptions of who we are

versus who we actually are, those are things that do now seem to have all of this overlap, and these are kind of those conversations that you get to help people have. So maybe you can start us off really basic. How did this get here? Meaning where did we start and how did we get to this planet?

So you could start the story with the Big Bang. And it's the idea that the universe had a beginning. It's quite fundamentally observable, which is strange. And then I'm going to kind of reverse some of what I'm saying. But imagine the Big Bang really is the ultimate beginning. It's the beginning of space and time. What was before then? Well, so at some point you have to say, if I really believe in the relativity of time,

I really believe that time is a mutable aspect of the universe, and it's not this rigid stage against which everything unfolds, but it's actually something that can deform. Then I can't, I have to, by those dictates, say that might not be a meaningful question. because if the time really originated in that moment, it's like saying what's north of the North Pole. You're just wrapping round again. So there's a way in which space time can be a continuum in a profound sense, but also have a beginning, not be stretched infinitely far into the past. Okay, so very hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. Okay, so something happened.

Something happened. So let's talk about the Big Bang. So the most common misconception about the Big Bang is that it was an explosion in space, that there was as large space and time just waiting around for this explosion. That's how our brains can frame it. And that's natural to have that first thought. But it's so much more interesting than that. Really, the space itself is bursting out of that primordial event, which we don't fully understand,

What kicked it off? Is it just randomly, occasionally some quantum event happens and a universe bursts into existence? And that might be the case. So going just a fraction after it happens, we do understand it pretty well. It's not an explosion in space, which would have an identifiable center, you know, like a star exploding. You'd be able to see where the center had been. It's not like that at all. The explosion happens everywhere simultaneously.

We are now in the center of what was once the center. the Big Bang, as is another galaxy on the edge of the observable universe. We were all at the center. The center was everywhere. And that is a very perspective changing. So the center itself stretches, explodes, and it happens everywhere. How do we know this? That's a great question. But I want you to explain. I'm not trying to be like, how do you know? I'm saying, can you explain in layperson's terms, how can we understand this event with this kind of specificity? Right. What are you looking at?

Right. So this was first proposed when people were looking at Einstein's theory originally back in 1916 when he first wrote down the general theory, which was describing space time, there were scientists who went to Einstein and said, do you realize your theory predicts that the universe is actually expanding. And if you run the movie of this expanding universe, where all the galaxies are moving away from all the other galaxies, literally like the space

between us is stretching. That's the way to think of it. The space between us is stretching everywhere. All of a sudden there was like, and I'm putting my hands together, this, and then all of a sudden it just expanded into the galaxies and universes that we understand. Right.

I mean, even going like this is actually not accurate, Because that's indicating that there was something that came together. There is confusion about whether or not the universe is infinite, which isn't helping. But if we imagine, even imagine that the universe is finite, and there's only a certain amount of space, of space itself, let alone the stuff in it. And then we're imagining that every single region is expanding equally, literally just one. One way to imagine is often taught or told is that imagine we live on the surface of a balloon. Only the surface. The surface is our whole reality. As that balloon stretches, the distance between,

let's say, stains on the balloon gets greater and greater and greater, right? And in that sense, the surface of the balloon has genuinely gotten bigger. And the problem with that analogy is it sure feels like the balloon's expanding into something, the three dimensions that the balloon lives in. And we're trying to do the exercise of forget this higher dimension. Just you live only on the surface of the balloon. All that matters is the surface of the balloon. In our three-dimensional experience, it would literally mean from my point of view, I would see every galaxy move away from me as though I was at the center of the entire universe. But if I displace myself to a galaxy billions of light years away, it will have the same impression that everything is moving

away from it. And there is no place that you could find that would win the controversy that could, in unambiguous terms, prove, aha, I'm at the center of the explosion. Everywhere you go, you appear to be at the center, but that's the same for everyone else as well. And that's narcissism. Well, it's, you know, it's one of these, it's narcissism and then it's, again, that shift in the astronomical perspective that kind of makes you realize, oh, you know. It's a, you know, It's very much the Copernican idea that we are not at the center. We are not at a special place. Okay, so get back to how do we know?

So Hubble observes this, which is Edwin Hubble, the astronomer after whom the famed satellite is named, the satellite being more famous than the astronomer now, in Mount Wilson nearby. In these incredible what was at the time the largest telescope in the world was not even sure there were other galaxies out there. So even if you just start with that, we talk about our Milky Way galaxy. It's a collection of hundreds of billions of stars. It is this beautiful spiral pattern. That's our single galaxy. When Einstein was working, when Hubble was working before his discovery, they weren't sure

there were any others out there. It could just have been us. It's kind of like not knowing there are other stars are suns and suns have planetary systems. You know, how big does it scale up? How unique are we? And there was some... Turns out not very. And there was some, you know, questions.

Maybe there are these smudges on the sky. They look like nebula. Maybe those are entire galaxies. And we're looking with telescopes now. The telescopes. We're like zooming in. Right. So this is the 1920s, like around early 1920s.

And Hubble looks at one of these famous objects in the sky. And he realizes by studying certain stars in that system that these are stars he understands so well from someone else named Henrietta Leavitt that he could place its distance. It was like knowing that you have a light bulb in your room, you can tell if it's up close or far away, because you know that light bulb so well. So these stars were like these standard candles who was able to say, oh, that is a very bright object, very far away. And by pinning it to the galaxy or the nebula, he was able to say, this is another galaxy. It's an entire galaxy.

It's millions of light years away. It's outside of the Milky Way. And it was Andromeda, which I know you've made jokes about. The Indromeda Galaxy is a galaxy. It's very near to us. It's one of the only galaxies that's coming towards us and not going away because actually we're going to collide with Andromeda one day. What does she want from a woman?

Yes. She wants to make a bigger black hole at the center of our galaxies. So drink the good wine. Right. In about six billion years, a few billion years. So that first discovery, all of a sudden the universe becomes much bigger, and it's full of galaxies. And then he proceeds to observe these galaxies that he can see.

Now that study's gotten incredibly, you know, 100 years later. We're really good at that. And they're all essentially, statistically, moving away from each other. They're certainly all moving away from us, according to the famed Hubble, law, which is exactly the law you would expect if it was the space stretching between us and not the galaxies physically racing around. And that relates back to an understanding of the Big Bang theory. So the energy of the universe is so high energy in this initial moment really scales that

we can only fantasize about ever-reaching, our most powerful colliders that we reach. Incredibly high-energy scales are still trillions of times. less energetic than anything we could possibly imagine from the Big Bang. And so here you have this hot frothing universe matter is in its highest quantum state than we don't fully understand. But our predictions from back the first few minutes is so excellent. We can predict abundances of like hydrogen and helium, certain trace elements that come from the Big Bang.

Most of this in your body comes from the Big Bang. And we have incredibly accurate understanding of that early synthesis of of simple elements. There's also the light left over from the Big Bang is measurable. What does that mean? Yeah. So it was a hot, we were talking about hot, hot radiating. There's a hot mess is what it was.

It was a hot mess and it radiated according to that universal law. And the light has been cooling as it comes out of this energetic event, space itself fuels the pressure of this creation of all this energy. and the space actually expands in direct reaction to this pressure from the matter in the universe. And so the universe comes out expanding. And a bang. And it's hot, very hot, as we're saying,

trillions of times hotter than anything we can conceive of recreating here on Earth. And then it cools over the past nearly, you know, not quite 14 billion years. But it produces light when it's that hot. It produces light when it's that hot. And then eventually, You know, the light is scattering off the matter, and it's all in this chaotic mess that you were describing at the beginning.

And it kind of equilibrates. It comes to this really beautiful, perfectly hot room, you know, space. And eventually, the matter sort of decouples, breaks away. It gets so cold. It starts to fall into little seeds that formed in the early universe, and those become, after a very long time, the galaxies. But the light is left. It just doesn't tire. It doesn't go away.

It doesn't get absorbed by anything. It fills all of space. And so we literally have a 13.8 billion-year-old hot bath of light that permeates the universe in every direction. And by now it's cooled tremendously. It's now only a few degrees above absolute zero. It's just cooled with the expansion of the universe. But we go out and we measure this light. And it is unbelievable, stunning observations.

One of the most important observations came back in the 1980s from a satellite called Kobe. And it was such a perfect measurement of this hot body that clearly had all been together at one point in time, that it drew spontaneous applause. You know, it was like one of those Nobel Prize winning moments. And so we see the Big Bang. We see its afterglom. Okay, so if you don't mind, I'm going to have you keep walking us through this. Yeah. So hot, bright, cooling.

Yes. Take me to, so now I'm kind of grooving on a galaxy. Take me to planets. Right. Take me to these eight or nine, if you're old. Right. You know, balls of stuff and there's an orbit and they're kept in orbit and like what? How?

How did that? Which sounds like beautiful and chaotic and tropic, right? How to get me to planets? Right. So when the matter, the material in the world starts to cool and decouple and fall into tiny little lumps that were seated in the very, very early universe, Eventually, entire galaxies form. They may well form simultaneously with black holes. There's probably a supermassive black hole that forms in the cores of every single galaxy.

We see hundreds of billions of galaxies. That's just what we can see, just as far as our instruments are able to probe. The universe is just full of these. We see hundreds of billions of galaxies. And they all seem to have superbrose. massive black holes as far as we can tell at their cores. That's black holes, millions or trillions, even sometimes the mass of the sun. And they form together with the galaxies. And there's this. Yeah. Yeah. You're like, yeah. Well, I'm trying to place this also in terms of like most of us,

the farthest we know is my very educated mother just served us nine pizza pies. That's the order that we learned the planets in back in the 80s. Most of us kind of stopped there. Right? Uh-huh. Right. We're the third rock from the sun, like, blah, blah. So take me to, so we get these gatherings of elements. Right.

Elements, naturally occurring elements that form for some freaking insane reason. Yeah. Distinct planets, each with a very different character. Right. Different personalities. Yes. Very strange. So how do we get there?

Because that takes a while. And how do I need to incorporate black holes? into this story. Yeah, so let's start with just, let's get to the planets. So planets cannot form out of the primordial material from the Big Bang. It just can't. Right. So there's always a place where you could fill in the gap. And remarkably, I'm sure you've heard this story, we are stardust or we are made in stars. We need those stars to make heavier elements. So stars form out of the primordial stuff and they can be made of the simplest things like hydrogen, pure hydrogen stars. And they're burning thermonuclear fuel. They're thermonuclear furnaces. So they're fusing hydrogen

and they're making the periodic element. It's a periodic table of elements. What is the mechanism for that though? Because like when people look at the periodic table, it's like if you take hydrogen and you know you put two of them with oxygen, you get water, right? Can you explain what a star actually is? It doesn't have a motor. Right. So the oxygen doesn't exist in the early universe. I mean, the periodic table of elements would be empty. It would be theoretical.

It would have some hydrogen, some helium, which is next up, very light, light, light element and maybe tiny trace of some other things. So the star, it's so heavy that if you've ever heard of critical mass for nuclear weapons, one of the big problems I had to overcome in designing a nuclear weapon was they had to have the case implode. And they had to have the case implode because it had not reached critical mass. It's very hard to put things under the kind of pressure that it needs to be under to ignite a thermonuclear reaction. And the sun does this naturally because it's so incredibly heavy in its interior that it reaches these staggering pressures and temperatures that we can't reach artificially. And it very comfortably burns fuel, thermonuclear fuel, and just literally earth's full of thermonuclear fuel.

So stars take that hydrogen, they start making oxygen, carbon, these heavier elements that simply aren't made anywhere else. I'm going to do a poor job of this, and then you can feel free to correct it. When we talk about elements, so when you think about what the most basic element is, the reason that it's the most basic element is, the reason that it's the most basic is it's the smallest collection, right, of protons, right? Of all the, like, you know, protons, electrons, neutrons, right? That's usually where most people, at least of our generation, you know, kind of stopped. So what happens is, and this is like one of my favorite parts, you know, of physics, is that you start, you can start adding to them. Yeah. And when you add, they add in these rings and they're pretty shapes and it's like really dreaming. But what happens

is that's what makes the other elements, right? So, the, you know, the, you know, and the, you know, These are, it's the building blocks. Yeah. But at the most basic, it's kind of like if you had a fireplace and you had perpetual wood that was constantly being placed there and you didn't have to place it, and it would just keep burning. Yeah. That's a star.

The star is going to keep burning until it runs out of fuel until the reactions become expensive. But just for your discussion of elements, what's really relevant is just the nuclei. Yes. So if I have just a single proton floating around in the world, that's a hydrogen. atom as far as I'm concerned. Even if it has no electricity, it's just the nucleus, it's good enough for me. It's an ionized hydrogen nucleus, and that's mostly what's left over after the Big Bang, just these single protons traveling around. Now, if you want to start jamming protons together into the nuclear to make it heavier and heavier to make things like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, everything,

phosphorus, anything you're familiar with, really ironed. But that takes a long time. It's really hard to do. And it's really hard. hard to get those together into a single nuclei. Planets are made of these elements. And so there's no planets with the first generation of stars. None of the stars in the first generation have any planets because there's no material to make planets out of. There's no rocks. It's just OG stars. Yeah, right. There's just simple gas of hydrogen. And so the stars have to do a second thing after they perform their task of populating the periodic table,

so they have to explode. If they don't explode, the material is locked inside the star forever. And that's no good for making planets. So a series of things have to happen is the next thing is that stars have to blow up. And not all of them do, but some of them do. How long from the Big Bang are we at blowing up stars? Millions of years. I mean, it's hard to say because I also kind of argued

when is the first generation of stars Was there also a different population that we don't know of? Did black holes form directly and skip stars altogether in the early? There's a lot of stuff we don't 100% know. But you've heard of a supernova explosion, probably a very popularized or songs about supernova. Champagne supernova. Yes. The supernova is one of the most important things that happens in the universe because it expels all its material back out.

And that material is now has carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and out of that you can make a rocky planet. And the rocky planet will form much, much later, just kind of a snowplow effect. You have a lot of stars exploding that kind of act like a snowplow. And somewhere enough material will be kind of pushed together. And it's round. Not yet, not yet. And it gets reprocessed. And eventually under gravity, it starts to become round.

That's the natural shape. It's a lot harder to make a gravitationally bound triangle or a prism. We just answered why our planet's round. I think that's pretty impressive. They tend to be round. They rotate, so they get a little oblate, a little fatter around the equator. Which is why when you fly on a plane, you watch the arc of where else. And it helps with the tides and the moon torquing us and things like that.

But so we're second generation at the very least, and we know that in terms of the story of stars. And so then you have stars that start to have planets. And the characteristic of the planets has a lot to do with the material that, formed it. The previous star, you know, this is why we're star dust. We are literally, our elements are literally made in the cores of stars. Why are they all different? They're all different. That's actually a really tricky question. It has to largely do with the distance from the sun and how big you can make certain planets in the inner orbits versus the outer orbits. So the rocky planets are all inner. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars. I didn't think.

Are all the inner planets. And then they start to become the gas giants. You start to get Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, you know. I like to say Uranus. You're welcome to. And they, in fact, there's a lot of rocky moons around those planets. There's some 200 plus moons in our solar system. It's not a planet.

It's also a good question. Right. Like it's different than a planet. It's not the sun, that's a star. Right. What's the moons, and we're not the only planet with moons? We only have one. We were pretty humble.

And our moon probably sloughed off the earth. There was probably a collision event that sloughed off a significant chunk of the earth as it was still forming and not quite as hard and solid. Yes. And that lump went out and then did its thing and kind of became a sphere and became the moon. Yeah, it's pretty mad. I mean, our moon has wonderful, lots of wonderful coincidences. So, okay, so we have a very special moon. We do have a very special moon.

My cycle is linked to it, as is yours and all the ladies. But so do other moons do what our moon does in terms of rotation and cycles? We call a moon more or less a satellite that is trapped in orbit around a body that is trapped in orbit around the sun. Right, because they're, yeah. So they're not, if there's something behind us in orbit around the sun, we don't really call that a moon because we haven't trapped it in separate orbit around us. Right. So we have things that will kind of trail behind us sometimes or orbit the sun, and we tend to not call those moons that are like moon-sized. Huh.

Or those are more like asteroids or they're on their own path. There's probably a planet that broke up that's made the asteroid belt. And that's why occasionally things in this case that it broke into debris and the debris fills. This orbit around the sun occasionally a little piece of rock comes our way. I think humans are the least interesting part of the universe right now. Yeah. I mean, we're interesting because we haven't found any others, and we should absolutely talk about that.

Oh, we will. But the moons are very interesting here to look for life. So it's not likely to find we don't think life on Jupiter, which is very gaseous and extremophiles maybe could survive there. I was just going to say, things like, us, you know, we expect to see like us on Jupiter. Right. The like fertility of the Earth has to do with the liquid water. The liquid water has something to do with greenhouse gases, our atmosphere, the magnetic fields. I'd like you to

confirm this is a very special planet. It's a very special planet. If you were to speak... In our list of planets, it's very special. Yeah. Can you give us a like pretending like you're, you know, an alien physicist from another galaxy and you see our solar system. And you see our solar system. Yeah. What would you say is especially, you know, especially special about this planet? Yeah. So the Earth is, even though we feel that we bathe in the sun's rays, we're actually far enough away that we should be an ice-capped planet or an ice-covered planet. And the fact that we're warm enough to thaw the oceans, which must contribute to why we're such a fertile and live planet is because our magnetic field and our atmosphere, and our atmosphere heats up much hotter than we would be without our greenhouse

effect, the natural, the ones we want to curb that are running away. But there's a perfect temperate balance that we want from that, that thaws the oceans. And that plus the fact that we have carbon from some other star, and carbon is very clingy. Carbon likes to bind with lots of things, lots of clever combinations. because carbon becomes the basis for life here because of the way it tries. We're carbon-based. Carbon-based. Carbon tries over and over again to combine, to bond, to experiment in a way that other elements

aren't as, what's the word, prolific. So we have seen the emergence of a carbon-based life form on this planet. Plate tectonics actually, interestingly, also plays a huge part in the Earth. I think that we're the only planet in the solar system, 99% sure this is true. I'm sure this is true. That has plate tectonics. Why? Yes.

The rest are just kind of covered with a solid crust or just gaseous. So that's also been very understood to be very important in churning up material from the earth and keeping things warm. And this cycle has been somehow really participated in the emergence of life. So even when I was in college, you know, the going story was there was a little pool of liquid in, you know, this, it was like a primordial stew and like maybe lightning happened. And it shook up some chemicals and we got, you know, like prokaryotes. Yeah. Is that still your definition of sort of how life as we know it evolved? Yeah.

I think it's something like that. There was a very subtle crossing between inanimate and animate. That must be very subtle. One of these things that if we could find how we still for some reason can't redo this in the lab, right? We can't create a lab experiment where things come alive. Well, right, we can create conditions that seem to suggest and support that if a few other magic things happened, right? Right. Right. We'd have, like, you can put electricity into goo and see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. And see, see these things happening, but they're probably,

if we could get there, we'd be, we'd be hard pressed to say, is this alive or not alive? And then eventually, it's so compellingly alive, right, that it's transition, that we have something that's self-reproducing. Right. And we begin to see things like the structure of DNA and the structure and its cells become complex. And, and these single-celled organisms, it's really interesting, apparently waffled in the oceans, for a billion years, more maybe, it was hard for life to get past that and become multicellular.

And that step to multicellularity is something we think about when we look at other planets. Is that just really hard? Is that one of these filters or these stumbling blocks that make it hard for life to progress past its simplest phase? Well, and that seems to be true for our solar system. as far as we know. I'd be bargaining on life in moons over planets

in the other parts of our solar system. There are moons, for instance, around Jupiter where they have a lot of thermal activity and there's probably liquid water and things that we don't see really on other planets that we're seeing. So I think optimistically we should be looking a lot at moons. How many moons does Jupiter have?

Gosh, I don't know how many. It's a lot. Yeah, it is a lot. But it has some special ones. Oh, there's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot. Around, between 80 and 95. Okay, I was going to say around 100. But there's more than 200 in our whole solar system.

They're largely around those guys. They're not around these inner planets. Right. And some of them are almost Earth-sized. I mean, they're pretty substantial bodies. So I'm just going to ask you to postulate. Let's say there's life on some of the moons in our solar system, not our moon. Right.

What would you imagine this life would be like? Is it carbon-based? Is it silica-based? Is it artificial intelligence? Can we just not see it? And they're very advanced. And we look like ants. I think it's very likely carbon-based,

simple bacterial, single-cell organism-style stuff because we know enough about them to see similarities with our own conditions. The magnetic fields are also really protective. for emergence of life. One of the problems in being a human being on Mars is that you're going to get cancer within a couple of years

because there's no protection from the cosmic rays and things that are DNA damaging. And the magnetic field is very protective. You know, what gives us those beautiful northern lights is actually important. But right, what we've discovered, and this is also really quite recent,

is that planets are the norm, that we weren't sure if planets were just special to our solar system, I mean, you just don't know. We're saying there's hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. That's a lot of stars just in our galaxy alone. That's our like neighborhood now, you know. This is what Hubble realized. Oh, wow, we're just, we're just a small place in this much bigger universe. Even in that place, the Milky Way, we think that most stars have planets and most stars have multiple planets like we do. And that means that there are more planets, more than likely, than there are stars.

So if you think about that, if you think about the vastness of the stars and the numbers that we talk about, hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, hundreds and billions of galaxies, more than the grains of sand on every ocean. And we're saying, and there are more planets than that. So now our search for life becomes very interesting. Tell me why I should believe we're the only ones that are intelligent in this galaxy. I wouldn't say that you should believe that. But I think belief is the wrong word. I think we have to look at those numbers and with enthusiasm,

except the possibility that we certainly should not be by those numbers. Now, there's arguments that you can make. Alone, you mean. Yeah, but the numbers are. That's not a very careful study of the numbers. And if we did a careful study, some people would argue, see, we're alone. And if you did a careful study, other people would argue, see, we're probably going to discover life in the next 50 years. 50?

Yeah, I mean, I would say even sooner is a possibility for... Like tomorrow? Well, I would say even sooner, but you have to understand mostly we're saying, like, bacterial, right? Everything has to start simple. I want another meat. I want to find out what she's like. Well, imagine how varied life is. On earth, you know, the jellyfish and those weird algae and slugs and the whales, you know, whales and fungi, you know, we should be pretty open to how weird they're going to be.

The question is, is it generic to have sticks, like meaning arms and legs? The other you is going to have two heads. Yeah, maybe that works, you know, or their light, their sun doesn't shine in the same waveband that our eyes have evolved to detect. so we would be unable to see each other. Right. We could be naked mulrass. Right. Maybe they see in the gamma rays and they just don't see us.

We don't emit or reflect gamma rays very effectively. Maybe they all possess sci phenomenon. And all of these mean materialists are going to be like, whoops. Maybe they all have special abilities. Yeah. I think we have not begun to imagine freely or liberally enough what we could possibly be encountering. There's some generic things we can ask about. What does intelligence mean? Does intelligence mean a species that wants to control fire, manipulate their environment, make houses, make tools?

That could be what we mean. Eat Cheetos. Yeah. Do, you know, invent Cheetos? And then explore space. So we have, I want, you were talking about the substack. I wrote a piece on there called whales don't want to go to Mars. And it really, just that line really sort of summed it up for me. Wales have an intelligence by all literary and scientific accounts, right? And they care for their young and they communicate. They grieve. And they grieve and they're probably talking, singing. but they don't seem to have any desire to manipulate their environment. And beyond very small things with garbage that we've foisted upon them, they don't tend to invent and tools and then build on those tools

and then become so reliant on their tools that it changes their biology. Just what's happened to us. Right. And other primates do phenomenal things with tools. Phenomenal things. And with communication and, you know, we're really not that different, you know, in terms of, you know, evolution as, let's say, chimpanzees. However, there's something very special about Homo sapiens sapiens in that we can't live without our cell phones. Right.

As you talk about. Yeah. And, I mean, the domestication of fire is still something our chimpanzee cousins have not achieved. And not only can we capture it when natural fires occur, which was probably the first. first step in domestication, you know, carting around hot embers and knowing how to use them to warm your hands and then eventually knowing how to make fire. It actually changed, you know, our mandibles are different and our digestive systems. We eat pre-cooked food. But we're physiologically incapable of really living without, maybe not our cell phones, but our technologies. And that,

to ask that of other evolutionary tracks on other, planets around other stars, might be a lot to ask. So I think then that takes us out of, we have to go out of this galaxy then. We need to step out of this galaxy to have a larger conversation. Yeah. Because there seems to be, you know, I mean, sort of an obsession, right, in this field, right, to talk about the Fermi paradox, to talk about if we haven't seen them, they're not here, or are we being watched in a way that we are not aware of? And, you know, what people like Avi Loeb talk about, if there is something else, which is very likely that there is,

it is likely far older than we are, which means that it has achieved, that civilization would have achieved a level of sophistication that is far beyond even our comprehension. Where do you stand on this notion? Well, I think there's two very different divergent paths that we face right now as an example, the singular example of a technological species that we know of. One is that we will kill ourselves, and it will be a direct result of our sort of tragic flaw,

that we were so creative and we were so inventive and we had all those wonderful things, but it was our downfall. It's very romantic. It's very romantic. I really believe in tragic flaws. I think an entire species can have a tragic flaw in as a technological species. I think that's ours. Or we overcome that there really is, we can overcome our base natures. We can adapt again, fundamentally changes as a species, to live in a way where technology is more compatible with nature. I liked this term isotopia, this idea that we don't have to be. have a dystopian future, we don't have a utopian future, we have this isotopian future. It's the only possible future for us if we're going to survive for more than a few hundred more years. If we're going to survive thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, even millions of years like other species. We don't have that longevity right now. Right. We're very recent. We're very

recent and we're going to have to have, and not doing so great. Wales don't have the capacity to obliterate all other whales. And we're very strangely poised at that dramatic cusp right now. And it could be that other species develop an isotopia and they become indistinguishable from nature. We will find it very hard to find them because they look so compatible with nature. And ways you can find us are all the leaky ways we're not compatible with nature. We're leaving our garbage in the universe. We leave our garbage. We broadcast very sloppily. We're not, you know, we leak a lot. And as we get better, we'll actually be harder to find. So here we are. I mean, I guess. So if we have not found out. As a lesson for the others out there. So if there are, if there is life on other galaxies that, let's say has had a head start, which there's really no reason to believe that they haven't, part of the reason that we have not found them, which is something Adam Frank talked about with us. Part of the reason that we haven't found them

is that they're probably much more careful about the footprint that they are leaving. It could be one of those two. They could also have faced the same fork in the road. I know Adam likes to say every technological species, I'm maybe not saying it the way he would say it, will confront a climate crisis. It's just a necessity of what it means

to be using resources from your planet. And if you want to be a space-faring civilization, then you're going to start to really tax the resources of your planet. And eventually, if you're really sophisticated, like some imaginary civilization that's older than us, that's explored the galaxy, you're imagining taxing the resources of your entire star system and maybe other star systems.

And I would say, this is like popcorn in the movie theater. Yes, exactly. You know, I would say that that's what a climate crisis will be, even bigger than a climate crisis, a solar system. Right. Environmental crisis. And so I think that either they went extinct or, yes, they became more compatible with nature, not less compatible with nature. And also, maybe exploring every other planet out there does not become tenable. And we're talking about scales.

It would take traveling at the speed of light over 100,000 years to cross just our galaxy. It would take millions of years to get to the neighboring galaxy. No, the only way that we could actually fathom interaction or communication would be by some means of travel that we cannot articulate with the current science that we understand. I mean, warp drive is a real thing. I assign it to some of my general relativity students.

Well, you can, you know, you can deform speaking. With space time with certain energies, we don't know if they exist, squeeze things closer together, step right across the bridge and then push them back out again. Energy workers do it all the time. So there's tricky ways where on paper, at least, we can imagine literally pulling another galaxy closer, jumping across and sending it back out again. We don't know how to do it, obviously, in practice. Imagining it on paper is the first step. Yes. Let's go to what you said about we haven't begun to freely imagine.

liberally enough and the idea that the eyes of another intelligent form of life may not have evolved to even see us or us to see them. Right. Uh-huh. That's amazing. Yeah, that's amazing. They could be here. Right.

Right. Right. Right. I mean, presumably if they're made of atoms. Right. You know, they still scatter light in the way. They have to obey some laws. Right.

Some laws. But our eyes. a very, very, very narrow range of light. It's 100% tuned to our specific star. And our star peaks in a certain light, and our eyes evolved to capture that light. And we don't want these huge dishes in our heads that are untenable, so we have these little eyes,

and they do pretty well for certain energies. They're pretty amazing. It's like really cool. But we can't see infrared, and we can't see ultraviolet, and it falls off, you know. So you can imagine a creature that evolves under a different star where their survival required, mostly seeing infrared, for instance, they could see us and we, you know. It's like, they could see us in the dark.

We'd be like sitting there hiding in the dark and they'd be like, ah, I can see you. My older son's colorblind, and I think he's part of like some evolution that's necessary. Right. I mean, we, right, we don't have some of the senses that even other animals here on Earth have. Sure. Because we don't need them as much. I'm fascinated by that because there are so many different wavelengths sound spectrum that we are not processing. So to think that this is all that there is is somewhat naive. Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I think, well, I think to think that I'm a believer in an external reality that we are relating to as best we can. But I don't think that yellow exists. That's 100% in our minds. I think that there is this electromagnetic phenomenon that it interacts with the atoms in my eyes and electrical signals are telling me the energy of the light. And that is somehow in some, thank you, neuroscience way, leading to the qualia of this experience of this visual world. That we've decided to add the phonemes to that says, this is yellow. And it's broad enough so that your yellow is my yellow, we think.

And we don't know. no, I don't know what that qualia is for you and all of that. But I do know that there's a way, I do believe that there is an external wavelength of light of that energy, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But it doesn't, there is no way the world looks. That's, that's meaningless. There is no way the world looks. That, that is in our minds. Yeah, what does that, what does that mean to say that there's an external reality? What does it mean for you? Yeah, for me, um, uh, I think that our descriptions that even the ones that we've been talking about have such powerful predictive value that even if I'm hanging on it all kinds of human things as well, you know, the math is a human

language that, but that also maybe my neural nets reflect because it is an external physical reality. I mean, we could, you know, we could probe this too. It's not like our minds dropped out of nowhere. They were formed under the pressure of the laws of physics and thereby I reflect the logic of the external world. Sure. But even if that is flawed and imperfect in human, I believe it is reflecting some external reality. And that it is true that there are electrons

and elements in another galaxy on the other side of the universe. And that we can expect stars are performing thermonuclear fusion. Before we get to black holes, is this where some of your appreciation for the beauty of this, you know, ability to even fathom any of this, is that where some of that comes from? Because I instantly thought about love, right? What is love then? Like, what's the external reality of that collection of serotonin and, you know, oxytocin? Like, what is that? Is there, you know, an external reality of what love feels like? Thomas Campbell, you know, I joked, accidentally proved that God existed, right?

You know, that if we're seeking a lower entropy and love is that, you know, pathway, where does sort of those kinds of human emotions fit into this kind of explanation? Yeah, I feel we, we, I'm very much a fan of the tenets of evolutionary biology, and I feel a lot of this stuff is traceable to obviously our survival, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have parallels all over in the laws of physics. So, for instance, my first book was How the Universe Got Its Spots because there's a similarity between hot and cold spots and the light left over from the Big Bang and the hot,

the bright and dark spots on a leopard's back, how the leopard got its spots. So just because the leopard spots might have been dictated by some fluctuation in enzymes and some shapes and some shapes, and geometry of the developing embryo doesn't mean it isn't in parallel with other phenomena as enormous as the origin of the universe. And so I think that this idea that we have this love pattern or this poetic disposition could also find parallels in these larger stories. Which religious people would love because the notion is, you know, that if there's a God

or a higher power, it created us out of love, right? And then we then have these systems that mimic that kind of love. Right. I think even with I and myself, I am very much a materialist, but I feel those beauties. I have the experience of communing with the universe that's 14 billion years old and 92 billion light years across. And that connectivity, I think,

for me comes from the naturalist's position. We're going to hit pause here on our conversation with astrophysicist Janelle Levin. We covered so much that is so important for a fundamental foundation of understanding the next level of physics, which is black holes. Part two, we're going to talk all about the death of massive stars, how we know what black holes are, how we know what they aren't, and how harnessing the energy and the lessons that we have learned from black holes have impacted world wars, our ability to harness nuclear energy, and our ability to understand what compassion looks like in the universe. We also cover AI, how it may never be conscious, the role it may continue to play in our lives. and what distinguishes one galaxy from another and how our galaxies are actually en route to collide.

We're also going to dip into how space and time actually can contract and bend. Jonathan turns that into, can we age slower? And we'll talk about what it means to say that the universe is left-handed. Can't wait to see you in part two of our conversation with Jan 11. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. She's got a neuroscience PhD or two One fiction, and now she's gonna break down