Modern Wisdom - #808 - Dr David Kipping - Black Holes, Alien Civilisations & How The World Ends

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

Dr David Kipping is an astronomer, a professor at Columbia University and a YouTuber. Expect to learn David’s thoughts on Terrence Howard’s appearance on Joe Rogan, what actually happens as you approach the speed of light, if there is any chance of finding intelligent life out there in the universe, how big the universe actually is, the biggest questions we still have about black holes, how the moon was created, whether time is infinite or if the universe will ever end and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get up to 20% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. David Kipping. He's an astronomer, a professor at Columbia University and a YouTuber. Expect to learn David's thoughts on Terrence Howard's appearance on Joe Rogan, what actually happens as you approach the speed of light, if there is any chance of finding intelligent life out there in the universe, how big the universe really is, the biggest questions we still have about black holes, how the moon was created, whether time is infinite or if the universe will ever end, and much more.

David is phenomenal. His YouTube channel, Cool Worlds, is one of my favorites and he's just great. He's talking about all of the interesting space stuff that you always want to know about, about alien civilizations and exo moons and the history of the solar system and what happens in the future. It's great. He's phenomenal at what he does and the two and a half hours of me harassing him about all of the weird questions I have about how the universe works. It is so good. You might have heard me say that I took my testosterone from 495 to 1006 last year and one of the supplements that I used throughout that was Tonkat Ali. I first heard Dr. Andrew Hubern talk about the really impressive effects that tons of research was showing and Lamentis make the only NSF

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at shopify.com slash modern wisdom, all lowercase, that's shopify.com slash modern wisdom to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dr. David Kipping. thing. Dude I love your YouTube channel. The number of airplane flights that I've been on delays sat somewhere where I wish that I wasn't listening to your YouTube channel has been insane.

So thank you very much for what you do. Likewise. I've been listening to your podcast for a while and you have so many great guests, so much wisdom on the channel as the name suggests. So I really appreciate being on here as well. You got tenure. Congratulations. Yeah.

That's a big, big deal for me personally to hit this landmark. Yeah. I don't know if too many people know what it means though. I think tenure is a, is a term which may be outside of academia. It's unclear what that really means. Yeah, but it's like, uh, you're allowed to research whatever you want now and no one can tell you no. Right.

Ultimate freedom. That's kind of one way to think about it. It's yeah, it's supposed to be, I think ideally that it gives you the ability to pursue much more high risk endeavors. So maybe as a 10 year track faculty, which is what I was before, you're kind of living like day to day, like each project has to deliver something within the next quarter, the next year, and everything's kind of very short term, which is how a lot of corporations work, of course. But when you get tenure, you get to think about going truly long

term for something, which is 10, 20 years for the rest of your career. And that's exciting. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I want to do with my tenure, but it's an amazing gift to have. Speaking of high risk, explorative conversations, did you listen to Terrence Howard on Joe Rogan? I did. I was actually listening this morning. I was in the gym and I was listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson's video, which was a response to it.

And, and I think Neil did a great job in being very respectful and thoughtful and polite, but at the same time, forcefully pushing back about many of the things which were questionable in this tree ties that that targets had come up with. What did you make of the conversation with Joe? Cause there's been a lot of, I think it caused a lot of ripples. A lot of people were very excited and, you know, it seems

like it's upended or some people believe that it was able to upend mathematics and, you know, this sort of a narrative, it's personified, they're keeping the real information from us type thing. What did it feel like as someone who kind of lives in the world of maths and physics, listening to that conversation? Yeah, I only saw snippets of the conversation, but I will say that it's not unusual to see a reaction like this. I know it's kind of blown up on social media and in social media

world, perhaps it's unusual. But in my world, I receive letters every day coming through my, through my postbox with theories and ideas. I get of course, many, many blind emails, cold emails saying here's my theory of everything. Please check it out. You know, I've proved that Einstein is wrong, this kind of stuff. It's very, very common to not just myself, but many academics, we are used to this. And I think Neil is in the same boat. I'm sure he gets tons of those kinds of pet theory sent to him as well. And so, you know, they range from a, from some of them are just a complete crap

shoot to some of them, there's some serious thought in it. And I think Terrence actually did try to put some thought into it. Despite the fact there was many missteps and misrepresentations of other information that predates his ideas. However, I think it is true what Neil said that it is really important that we don't kill that idea, that love and that passion, because I was that person once. I remember when I was probably 11 years old, I wrote a theory and I sent it to my physics teacher at school. And I said to him, I think I've proven I sent it to my, I gave it to my physics teacher at

school and I said to him, I think I've proven there's like a new relativity theory that I've proven. And it was something about clocks ticking at different rates to different observers. And it was kind of like a proto-relativity. So I hadn't actually, I'm not claiming I independently invented relativity or anything, but I wasn't aware of relativity and it just struck me that somebody approaching a clock close to the speed of light would see the rate at which it ticks be very different to someone flying away from the clock. And so does that have some interesting implications about time? And so I wrote one of those crazy, not crazy,

but you know, not, not well informed, speculative theories down because I wasn't crazy. And I don't think Terrence Howard's crazy. And I think you write down these ideas and it gets you impassioned and excited about physics and part of me is a little bit embarrassed about doing that as a kid, but I also think, uh, whether, whether you're a kid, where you're an adult, whether you're whatever stage you're coming at, when you first start diving into this world, it's natural to have lots of ideas and questions and want to put them down into paper and have other people look at them and want to talk about them. So you know, physics and science is like being in love.

Like when you're in love, you just want to sing it to the world. And I think that's just where he is right now. He's just at that stage where he's like getting really thick and heavy into it and enjoying it. But, uh, hopefully we can direct him towards, towards some of the truths along the way as well. And peer review, uh, guides, a combination of guides and beats it out of you and sort of moves you toward what's more accurate. It can do peer peer review is not a perfect system.

I mean, and I think this is why people like Terrence are gaining traction because we all recognize that having one or two people who are so-called experts in that field sway judgment about whether your idea is right or wrong has its own flaws. There are political reasons why someone might want to squash your ideas or simply because they might not like it because it's so fundamentally different to everything they're used to. Hold on, this isn't what I was taught in the textbook. I don't like this because it's going to force me to have to reteach the way I've been taught

everything for years and years. So there is resistance to new ideas. And I think that came up in the podcast with Joe and that's right. There is definitely resistance to new ideas. However, if you have a great idea and it disseminates to the community, which is the way it works these days, you can put it on social media, you can put it on an archive posting is how scientists typically do this, or on Twitter or on X, you can put it out there and hopefully if it's a good idea, it will sustain, it will

survive that process of not just academic peers, but a much broader peer community looking at it. So peer review, I mean, it's kind of obvious that that has to be the way you do it. You have to have lots of people look at an idea and it's like a meme. If it hits, if it tracks with people, if there's something in it which appeals and explains phenomena in a way which we previously couldn't explain, then it's going to survive and in Darwinian evolution sense, uh, persist. And hopefully the key with science is that we, we're using evidence and to, to make that assessment as to whether it's the assessment criteria. Yeah. Obviously not just, not just an emotional appeal. How sexy is this?

Yeah. Which is the thing, which has its own aspects. And there's certainly scientists are also appeal to that as well. There's definitely the string theory or multiverse. Well, perhaps, perhaps in a physical sense too, but I was really thinking about just the ideas can be attractive and alluring. And I think when people talk about, for example, the multiverse, that's something very alluring about that idea that there could be other versions of you who were more successful and, uh, or maybe less successful. And the kind of that imagination kind of runs wild. I think a lot of us get drawn into that idea as well. And so it's hard to sometimes stop yourself and say, hold on. Uh, I think I'm getting deceived by what I want to be true rather than what is really true. A pretty sexy idea that's been floating around, uh, continues to sort of resurface

all the time is that quantum entanglement allows for faster than light communication. What's the scientist's perspective on that? Yeah, it really doesn't work. It seems like it should work when you first hear about the idea. Let me try and just break this down a little bit. So you can imagine that you have a pair of particles, which are what we call quantumly entangled to each other. And what that really means is that their state is in a superposition

together. So the idea of superpositions in quantum theory is very familiar. Whenever you have a single particle whose spin could be up or spin could be down, for example, until you measure it, it really is in a superposition of those two states. We don't know. And then once you measure it, it collapses down, makes a choice essentially to one of those variables. With a pair of particles, if they are created together in a certain set of conditions, you can create them such that they are entangled, which really means that the combined sum and combined nature of their state is entangled to one another. So for example, the total of their spins could be zero. So in that case, one would have to be up and one would have to be down, but you don't know which one is which. So this is very

similar to having like a box of shoes. So you can have a left shoe and a right shoe, they're in the box and you kind of blindfold yourself and you take one of the shoes and you give it to your friend, he goes on an aeroplane, he keeps himself blindfolded and you know, you don't feel the shoes, you don't break the illusion as to what it really is. But then once you get to the other side, one of you opens the box and when you open the box, it collapses the uncertainty you might say. And so the question is, can that be used for communication? And the answer is, well, no, because if I open my box and I discover that it's a left footed shoe,

then that instantaneously tells me the other shoe must be right footed. And not only does it tell me that, but in the quantum world it actually does force that state to be right footed as well. It really is a physical effect that it forces it into that state. But nevertheless, there's no way to use this for communication.

Since I can't manipulate, I can't force my shoe to be left or right. If I could, then we could use it for communication. If I could push it to be not just a 50, 50 probability, but rather a 60, 40 probability, even just slightly nudge the probabilities, there would be a way to use it for communication. But as long as it's inherently random, which it is from my perspective, when I open that box is inherently random process. All I can ever do is just get a string of, if I had a whole box of these things,

many, many boxes of just left, right, left, right, right, left, it'd just be random sequences. There's no way we can use these shoe boxes to send a message to each other. And manipulating the one that you have doesn't change the one that your friend has. Well, there is no way to manipulate it. Or you can do it. The only manipulation you really have is that you can open the box. You can measure it.

That's it. That's the only manipulation you can do. If someone could invent a way to manipulate the quantum state without measuring it, which seems like an oxymoron to me, then there would be a path forward for communication. Because during the act of measuring causes it to collapse. And then after that, there is no such thing as changing it. Once the states have collapsed, they're no longer entangled to each other.

So then the link has been broken. So once the measurements have been made, that's it. They both collapse into their state and the entanglements gone. So it's not persistent past that point. Right. That makes so much, that makes the quantum entanglement communication thing seem quite simple as why it's not going to work. It is fairly simple.

Obviously the way I'm describing it is a little bit simplified, but in a nutshell, that's kind of the basic principle. I obviously have a video if you want to go much deeper, that gets into all the nuts and bolts of how this works and kind of looks at the superposition states and things. But essentially that is the problem. And it's a shame because in, you know, I think there's a game Mass Effect 2, which has a quantum communicator in it. I actually used that a scene from that in one of my videos about this.

And I think the character comes up to this computer and it says, you know, I have a quantum entangled state particle. And as long as, you know, there's one back on earth and there's one the ship, we can communicate with this particle. But of course that doesn't make any sense. The moment you interact with that particle and measure it, the state collapses. And so the entanglement is gone. Entanglement is actually a very delicate state of affairs. It's hard to the entanglement is gone. Entanglement is actually a very delicate state of affairs. It's hard to maintain entanglement and basically any interaction with the real world will collapse it including and especially you trying to measure that thing.

Wow. That's so interesting. Well, I remember reading this was in college. This must be nearly 20 years ago. I read that gravity moves quicker than the speed of light. Is that true to gravitational waves? If the sun disappeared now, would we start flying off immediately? Or would it take us four minutes?

No, it would take, or eight minutes. Yeah. It would take eight minutes. It actually does turn out it in general relativity. It is assumed that it travels at the speed of light. It's kind of built into the theory. And there have been some measurements, some measurements that have attempted to measure this or at least constrain it. And although we don't have like a super precise measurement like we have for the

speed of light, where we can pin it down to fractions of a meter per second, for the speed of gravity, it does appear to be at least consistent with the speed of light. But one of the ways we can actually do better with this is looking at the, what we call electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources. So there were these black holes, which are smashing into each other and combining out there. And we've been detecting those hundreds of them now using a telescope or really an instrument, I should say, called LIGO.

It's not really a telescope in the conventional sense. It's just kind of giant laser beams beams essentially. But using these laser beams, we've been able to detect as gravitational waves ripple past, they squish and squash the Earth, just a fraction of a proton in diameter. It's a tiny, tiny disturbance, but these lasers are so sensitive. They can tell when they've been squished and squashed by that tiny amount using a technique called interferometry. So we've been able to tell there's these gravitational wave sources that those as black holes merge, and in some cases we've even seen neutron stars merge. So neutron stars are not black holes. They're kind of like failed black holes, if you like.

They didn't quite have enough mass to collapse all the way down to a black hole. But, and the Sun will also not turn into a neutron star. It's not heavy enough to get into that regime either, but some massive stars will collapse down to a neutron star. These are things which are about the same size as New York city, Manhattan, even. And they're almost the same mass as the sun, maybe a little bit heavier. So incredibly dense objects. And these, because they're not black holes, when they collide with each other, they shine, they do produce a huge amount of energy.

So we have two things. That is like a race happening, right? You have the gravitational wave racing towards you from that collision. And you also have the light that was admitted during that race. Yeah. So we can actually time when those two events arrived and we can use that to test how similar they are. And for all accounts so far, they've been pretty consistent, but it's

still fairly early days. We only have a handful of neutron stars. Most of the events we've detected have been black holes, but we're getting to the point where we should have hundreds of these things coming online in the next few years. So I expect we will be able to pin that number down really precisely as going forward. Would there be anything special? Or would it be unbelievably shocking if the speed of gravity was less than the speed of light? Would that cause some oddities?

For sure. I mean, it would basically mean general relativity was wrong. So we'd have to, we'd have to go back to the drawing board a little bit with the ideas of general relativity. So I think you'd have to speak to some theorists about the wild ideas about what that could mean, but it might imply some kind of foam or some kind of resistance to space-time itself for the propagation of gravitational waves in a way that is not expected in simple general relativity.

So it would be a very exciting result. And it's important to remember that despite scientists, for one aspect, not being often resistant to new ideas, on the other hand, they love new ideas. And so I think if we discovered that, theorists would be very, very excited because it kind of gives theorists, at least, and observers, an excuse to do a lot more science. Right? Because now we've got this mystery to explain, so we can plan either more observations to try and explain that mystery, or we can come up with lots of ideas and speculations about what might be going on, see how it lines up, hypothesize about what future observations will make.

So scientists do actually really enjoy a mystery. And so I think if we discovered that, most of us would be celebrating. Right. Yeah. Lots of work to do, lots of research and grants and new exciting things to focus on. Yeah. I think the most boring outcome is that we understand everything. That's like, that's actually what put me off when I was studying physics at school.

I remember being kind of put off physics because it kind of the way it's taught at schools feels like everything's been figured out. Like here's Newton's laws of gravity. Here's the, the atomic structure. Here's the electromagnetism, how that works. And it kind of feels like, well, what's left to do. I wish I was born 200, 300 years ago when it felt like back then we used to do is throw some wooden water and pointed it and say it floats and you could get the Nobel prize or something.

Now it's so hard, like what's happened. And it does feel like that, but then that's why I got attracted to astronomy because in astronomy, it really is like a multitude of things that we can discover out there. The galaxy alone has a hundred billion stars in it and there's a hundred billion at least galaxies out there. So like, there's only 10,000 astronomers on Earth. We are never going to run out of stars and planets and galaxies to study. There'll be millions each for us. So that was always the appeal for me is that it's just like, if I'm going to choose a subject to study, and I don't want to run out of things to be surprised and amazed about, astronomy has got to be the one. Well, you're hopelessly outnumbered stars to astronomers.

It's a- For now, we're going to try and pull it back. Yeah. I seem to remember reading an article about how the number of kangaroos that exist on the planet compared to the population of like Czechoslovakia. And it was like that it would result in each Czech citizen having to fight 11 kangaroos and that that was a really important, uh, stat that we weren't talking about. It's kind of the same with you and the astro.

I can't believe there's only 10,000 astronomers. Where did you go to school? What was your academic comeuppance? So I grew up in the UK and people get confused about it. Cause my accent, I think I've been in the U S for a while. And sometimes even people get confused about where I grew up, but I grew up in Warwickshire in the UK. I went to a little school near, near twy cross it was called.

Um, and then I eventually, I went to Cambridge university and I studied physics there were really natural sciences was the name of the degree, but primarily I studied physics. They're kind of a little bit pompous that way. They won't let you have a physics degree. No, this is Cambridge. It has to be called something else. So it's called Natural Sciences. And then once I got that, I decided to go to London and study astronomy for my PhD. And eventually came stateside during that process. So I really loved being in the UK. I miss the UK quite a lot. Um, but I do feel the direction, especially scientifically, uh, the, you

know, with the Brexit and the, the, the reduction in science funding, the state of the economy, it doesn't feel like the future is bright, at least for me, sat here in the U S and there's problems in the the US for sure as well, but certainly looking at what's going on in the UK, there's nothing about that's drawing you back in a career perspective. But I'm very fond of the UK. I love the people. I love have so many great friends there.

My family's still all there. I love the countryside and there's something special about being back in the UK. I feel the same. It's a, an odd sort of push and pull where you go somewhere because it's a better environment for the work that you do and there's more opportunity and then there's sort of this wistful, uh, cultural, uh, like departure that you make from, uh, from the place that you know so well. So yeah, I feel you with that.

Uh, just as a side point, totally unrelated. I just got, before we started talking, an email from Dominic Cummings. Remember Dominic? Oh, yes. Yes. So I'm going to bring him on just after the results of the general election in July. Okay. Great.

And, uh, I think that's going to be a really fascinating insight about exactly what's going on, not, I don't really care that much about politics, but I'm very interested in the social dynamics of what's happening and why people behave the way that they do. And I think that he has some, he has some amazing insights, uh, regardless of what you think about sort of how he contributed to anything, uh, he just knows what white hole is like from the inside out. So I'll have a, I'll have some interesting, interesting stuff to go through that. Yeah.

Uh, it's a crazy world over there. Yeah. I think with everything going with the election right now, I know everyone in the UK keeps asking me, everyone on the phone, they're like, what do you think of what's going on in the election? I'm like, I don't know. My head's pretty explaining with what's going on in November over here right now. So let's, I don't know if I can handle all the elections happening in the world right

now. It's pretty distracting as a scientist actually to try and like sit down and focus on doing some serious work. And then you open your phone and it's just crazy headline after crazy headline. You think, and yeah, I think I'm starting to think I need to unplug as November approaches. Yeah. I wonder how many people, smart people are having their precious mind cycles captured by stuff that is

sexy and interesting and newsworthy, but totally unrelated to their primary pursuit. And I wonder how much that's holding back human progress across the world. I would guess an awful lot. Massive, massive. I, I've never felt personally so distracted by what's going on in the world and I'm trying to be, you know, I feel like this is a responsibility to be a good citizen and be engaged because this is a democracy and this nation and the

world will be what we make it as participants in it. And so it feels wrong to just stick your head in the sand and ignore what's going on, but at the same time, my effectiveness and my productivity crashes. The more I open that, you know, New York times app or CNN or Twitter or X, whatever it is, like just it's, you're being bombarded with these, these headlines that just take you down these rabbit holes. And before you know it, it's 2 PM and you haven't done anything yet. So I think I'm seeing it with lots of people.

I'm seeing it with lots of my colleagues that students and young people, especially, I think are really being heavily affected by what is happening and their studies and their focus is being almost stolen from them because of the state of the world. Well, especially for you being captured by things that's happening on earth when the entirety of your job occurs outside of earth. Like the only place that you shouldn't be looking really is like here. Everything is up there. Yeah, it's kind of, you know, we do lots of work in looking out in the universe, but in a way that's

almost like a reflection of us as well. There's people say this often beautifully about SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, that the things that we choose to worry about and look for, so for instance, there are ideas that we should look for planets which are undergoing nuclear war, because we're on the precipice of that potentially. And so you could make the argument that other civilizations will do this, and therefore it's our responsibility and our opportunity to detect them using neutrinos or using bright flashes from the explosions on these other planets. And so that really is a reflection not so much of what aliens are doing, but of ourselves. It's a mirror of us, a dark mirror of our own fears and hopes for the future. And I think that's very much true in SETI, but I think when you look

expansively out even beyond searching for aliens, just trying to get a sense as to who we are in the universe is still very much an inward journey as much as it is an outward one of trying to figure out what is the point of my life. If the universe is so vast and so big, where do I fit in it? Where do our lives queue into this line? And so for me, you know, looking for answers out in deep space is as much a process for looking for answers inward as, as beyond. Did you get to watch the three body problem? Yeah, I did. And I'd read the couple of the first couple of books and I thought the

show was really intriguing. Um, it was pretty well done. Actually, I thought I like all the actors from the game, because it's kind of the game of Thrones, mop version two or something, right? It just put into like the modern world or something with aliens. So I kind of enjoy seeing all those actors again, doing well and getting jobs. Cause I thought they did a great job of game Thrones and the story, the story was done well. They obviously the physics is a bit spoofy.

I mean, the idea, I think like one of my biggest gripes with it was the idea that the nearest star, cause they never actually named the star, but they keep saying it's four lights obviously the physics is a bit spoofy. I think one of my biggest gripes with it was the idea that the nearest star, because they never actually named the star, but they keep saying it's four light years away. So there's only one star that's four light years away and that's Proxima Centauri. There is a triple star system there, but it's nowhere near compact enough to have this chaos that they have in the story. So they've taken some license there, artistic license to make things a little bit more interesting. But I think the idea that the nearest star system would have an intelligent civilization on it is a little bit contrived because if the nearest one has it, then basically

every single star should really have intelligent civilizations on it. And then that just seems very curious because for the vast majority of Earth's history, four and a half billion years, there was basically no intelligent species on this planet until very, very recently. So it would seem an enormous coincidence that all the planets which have completely different ages, some were born very recently, some were born billions and billions of years before the sun was, and yet they all just happened to line up so that civilization is just kind of queue up at the same time. So that that's always a little bit contrived to me that every single star

system is going to have civilizations on it. But, you know, I could let that go. When I watch, when I watch a show, be it, you know, fantasy or sci-fi, I can, I can let go of those things, just to sit down and enjoy it. A bit of artistic license. Can you explain it to me? Can you explain the three body problem? So yeah, the physical idea of the three body problem, it's essentially it's a chaotic system.

So if you have a single particle, it's obviously fairly trivial to predict its path in the future. If you know it's what direction it's moving and you know its current location, then you should be able to predict at any point in the future where it will be. It will just basically travel along a straight line. However, if you have two particles, it's a little bit more complicated and they have mass and they're going to gravitationally interact with each other and circle around one another, but it was shown by Newton and many others that this is also a completely determinable system as well. So if you give me the starting positions of those two particles

and you give me the momenta in which they're moving, then again, we should be able to calculate for a billion years into the future to exact precision where they will be. But this all kind of breaks down when we get to three bodies. So when you have three, same situation, just three particles, you know their initial positions, you know their initial trajectories.

Now you can predict where they will be, but if you very, very slightly deviate one of those particles, so you just say, I'm going to shift one of those particles a millimeter over to the left and redo that calculation, you will get a wildly different answer for the final outcome. So this is kind of like the butterfly effect. So if a butterfly flapped its wings and you think, well, what difference does that make? But if you propagate it over a long enough time, it can have enormous implications. And people playfully say it could cause like a hurricane, right?

The flaps of a butterfly. That's maybe a little bit exaggerated, but in this case, certainly a very slight nudge to one of these particles will give a wildly different answer. So whenever you have a system like this, we call it a chaotic system because it basically means we cannot make predictions that are reliable about their final position in a million years, a billion years from now, because we can never know the position of a planet to absolute precision. There's always going to be some slight uncertainty.

And if you nudge it within that uncertainty, you get a very different answer. So it's not the same as being random because there's not randomness. It's still fully determined, but so chaotic and complex that it's unpredictable. Is that a way to say it? Yeah, I think unpredictability is the key word. It's it's that you can't forecast with any meaningful accurate prediction where it will be. You can actually make distribution. So you can say, I'm going to run this simulation a thousand, a million times over and over again, and just slightly nudge it around and see what the spread of results are. And then

that can kind of help you to like place your bets as to where you think is most likely to land, like kind of going to the casino and gambling where you think the ball will land on the roulette table. So you can kind of make that kind of statistical analysis, but you certainly can't make a good prediction So even for the solar system, this is true So for the solar system, it's been shown that if you go forward about a billion years into the future Mercury is not necessarily stable. So in about 1% of simulations I think it is and this is worked on by Constantine Batigan during his PhD

He showed that about 1% of the time, the solar system will become unstable. So in one billion years, that's before the sun actually will long engulf the earth. And what tends to happen is I think Mercury gets ejected from the solar system altogether and Earth and Venus swap positions. No way. Earth becomes the Venus and Venus gets a chance to cool down and could potentially become habitable, I suppose, if it was far enough away from the star. So it's pretty wild that even the solar system, which we think of as incredibly ordered and structured

and long lived as not just a three body system, but a many body system also has instability. So the real question is for any multi-body system, not whether it's chaotic or not, they're all chaotic. The question is how long is that chaos timescale start to creep in? And so for the solar system, the chaos timescale, it's called the Lepin of number technically, it's around about five billion years or so. Whereas for some solar systems that we look at, the chaos timescale is very, very short of all of a hundred million years.

And so for those, we're really looking at them and thinking that thing might not even be around here much longer. Cause it's just, it just seems like it's balanced on a knife edge of instability. Dude, that's so cool. Chaos timescale being how long will the current system remain similar in terms of what we would expect to see? I think it's better to think of it as when do your predictions diverge? So, you know, almost like in a, in a multiverse scenario of living different lives, if you, you know, like the film sliding doors, whether you get on the train or don't

get on the door, over what timescale do the outcomes diverge? Meaningfully, because presumably there's a not point, not, not, not, not, not, not, not 1% chance that Mercury gets ejected tomorrow. Correct. Yeah, there's a definition of exactly what that means of how quantitatively large it has to be, but typically it's of order of sort of an exponent number. So that's like a power of about 2.5 in terms of like the same major axes, the orbital periods, things like that. So if they change by a factor of two or three, then that's definitely a very major change to the order of the system.

Will Barron How is it the case that there's so many bodies in the solar system and yet were relatively stable at least maybe for the next half billion to a billion years? Like why is there seems to be so much going on? How is it that orbits get settled into kind of reliably? Why is there not more play in the system? It is kind of a miracle, right? It's a miracle of stability that we should be thankful for, because if it wasn't so, then we wouldn't be here. But on the other hand, perhaps that's the answer right there, that if it wasn't so, we wouldn't be here to talk about it. And it's not a guaranteed situation. So when we look at other exoplanet systems, which we have been cataloging now over the last 20 years,

it's actually quite rare that we see a solar system that looks like ours. There's something not necessarily completely unique, but rare about the structure and architecture of our solar system. For example, we often see planets in highly elliptical orbits going around their star, which if in our solar system, if you had a plant like that, if Jupiter entered a highly elliptical orbit for whatever reason, it would completely destabilize the rest of the planets. We also have lots of hot Jupiters. These are Jupiter-sized planets, which are orbiting very, very close to the star. And again, in order to get Jupiter, which has to form far out in the star system, to migrate inwards, it's like a bulldozer coming through the planetary system. It just knocks

everything else out. But it's possible that the solar system had instabilities. It's thought that at one point in the past, there may have been another planet similar to Uranus and Neptune that we lost. So there could have been what's called the fifth gas giant in the solar system. And the reason why we think this is true is that when you do these simulations and you put the eight planets in and you let them kind of all interact with each other and you speed up over time, you very often find that Uranus or Neptune get ejected out of the solar system in like half of the simulations. So therefore it seems odd, you know, how, if Uranus and Neptune are so unstable, why are they so stable when we look at them today?

So the explanation for this and David Nesvonier, one of my colleagues at the Southwest Research Institute suggested this. He said, look, if you put in an extra planet on the back end of that solar system, it's the one that often gets ejected and it sacrifices itself to save Neptune and Uranus. And then that all make, and then everything makes sense if you do that. So even though we don't have direct evidence for this fifth giant planet, it kind of neatly explains why the outer solar system seems coherent and stable because it wasn't always coherent and stable.

And it's only got that way as a result of basically chucking out the unstable stuff. So we don't just have a rare earth hypothesis. We have a rare solar system hypothesis as well. Yeah. I think about this a lot. This is one of those thoughts that really bothered me as an exoplanet scientist is understanding how special and unique we are. So it's like the driving question I have as a scientist is, is our home, is there something special about not just the Earth,

but maybe the Earth-Moon system, the solar system, even our Sun, even our part of the galaxy, maybe even our galaxy itself? Like where, which aspects of this are special and which aren't? For example, the Sun is not a typical star. Only about 10% of stars in the universe look like the Sun. And amongst those, our Sun is unusually quiet. Most stars have lots of flaring and activity, lots of star spots. Our Sun is curiously very very stable as well in terms of its luminosity output. So that's also kind of odd. You look at the solar system we have a gas giant. As far as we can tell just having one gas giant is kind of unusual. Certainly less than 20% of

exoplanet systems have that, possibly as low as 10%. So just having a Jupiter around your star is weird. And Jupiter is thought to be potentially a good thing because it could hoover up all the asteroids, for instance, that's been suggested. Maybe that protects the earth from getting bombarded. You put something in one of your videos. When was it 2000? And when did Jupiter take one for the team recently?

The Schumacher Levy. Yeah. That hit it. Yeah. Yeah. That was a huge impact. That happened when I was a kid. So yeah, I wasn't, when I was a professional astronomer, I think this is when I was like

13 or 14, I think that was happening. And I remember seeing it in the news and seeing the images, but that was, yeah, that was a situation that obviously happens very often. If it happened in a human lifetime, it's happening probably every few decades or so to a plant like that. So that's not surprising. And if that had hit the earth, it would have definitely extinguished life on earth. No doubt about it. It was a massive, massive impact. So having Jupiter take that up for a team was one that we were pretty grateful for.

Have we got any idea about the odds of life and intelligence? That's something that is definitely right up my street. I've been thinking about my whole career, I'd say. You know, there's stuff to say there are two types of astronomers, the ones who want to understand how the universe works. They want to understand the mechanisms, what was the big bang, how does space-time work. And there are astronomers who just want to have this itch, are we alone? And it just drives you and you can't help thinking about it. And I've probably fallen into that

latter category. I find both questions very interesting, but that latter one really bothers me. Calculating on odds is very difficult because there's only us that we know of. So you have 100 billion stars potentially, and so a lot of people would say therefore the probability of life somewhere in the galaxy is very high because if the probability is say 0.1%, then that would mean there's millions and millions of civilizations out there in the galaxy. Fine, but we don't know that the probability is 0.1%. So there's 10 to the 11, a hundred billion stars, let's say a hundred billion

potentially earth-like planets out there. But if the probability of life starting on each one of those earth-like planets is less than one in a hundred billion, then it's just us. That's it. And that's just life. I mean, then you could add on, well, what about multicellular life? What about eukaryotes? What about photosynthesis? What about getting all the way up to intelligence and technology even? Because intelligence and technology are not the

same thing. You have intelligent species on earth, which do not have technology, such as crows or humpback whales and dolphins and things. So just being intelligent isn't enough either. or humpback whales and dolphins and things. So just being intelligent isn't enough either. We have no idea what the outcome of all those steps would be, but what we do know is that life started pretty quickly on the Earth, and that's interesting. So we can look at the time scan, we can say it happened within about the first maybe 200, 300 million years as evidence for life on Earth since when the oceans formed, whereas intelligent life took a lot longer. It took intelligent life four, four and a half billion years, depending on when you make the start date. That's a long time, and

the Earth will not be habitable that much longer. I just think this is kind of an amazing fact. The Earth will probably be uninhabitable to complex life in less than a billion years, about 900 million years is the estimate. CB So if it had taken only a little bit more, we would have been just about getting to the stage of intelligence just about when we would be uninhabitable. MG Yeah, yeah. There's a really interesting idea called the hard locks idea that Brandon Carter wrote about and his idea was it's kind of odd that we have these major evolutionary

transitions such as the development of combigenesis, which is sex, the development of eukaryotic cells, photosynthesis, all these major evolutionary developments. They seem to be kind of uniformly spaced in time from the start date of Earth to the end date of Earth. They seem to be kind of uniformly spaced. And he said, look, that's actually similar to trying to pick a lock, a very hard lock. So imagine you had a sequence of doors in front of you, and the lock on average would take, let's say, 100 hours to pick. But I only give you 30 minutes to pick all six, and you've got to get through these six locks to get to the end. Now Now the vast majority of people, of course, will not get through the six locks, and we just never hear from them. They never become an intelligent civilization in this picture. But very, very rarely, someone will

be fortunate enough, just very lucky, that they'll get through those six locks despite the fact the odds are against them. And when you look at the distribution of how long it took them to get through those locks, they end up being uniformly spread in time, even if the locks are grossly different in difficulty. So the first lock could take maybe an hour to break, the next one could be a thousand hours, the next one could be 10 hours. And if they could be completely different numbers, as long as they're all hard, the final distribution is always uniform, which is what we see. So he suggested this is consistent with each of these steps being incredibly unlikely events. And that would naturally explain why they seem to be almost coincidentally evenly spread in time in evolutionary record, which is obviously bad news for intelligent life.

If that's true, then yeah, because the hurdles to get over are all really, really high. Yeah. So I, I'm receptive to that argument. The only real thing I feel confident saying anything about on this. I've done a paper about this a few years ago where I said, well, let's just intelligent life is hard to deal with, but let's look at the early life situation. And despite the fact life did start early when we did this full basic analysis of the

timing and the chronology of Earth's history, it is a good sign for life starting. Again, if we kind of reran the clock, if we could go in a time machine and we did what we did for the chaos theory, we kind of pushed things around a little bit, we just nudged things around, and we rerun the tape and we see how often would life start again. And the outcome was that about nine out of every 10 simulations, we would expect life to start again, given that situation. So that's just purely looking at the chronology and how fast life started. But it's not a guaranteed outcome, so it is possible that you could have planets that do not form life as well.

Whereas when it comes to intelligence, we try to do the same thing for intelligence. It actually slightly disfavored intelligence. It said that when you look at the numbers, it looks kind of unlikely that intelligence would happen again, but it was a very marginal result. We just really what that's telling us, we need more data. Whenever you come to a point where your statistical significance is kind of weak as a scientist, that's a point to reflect that we need better data. And certainly for intelligent life and for life as well,

we need more data. And my analysis was only restricted to running the earth tape backwards. I mean, who knows if earth is common either, like the earth might be special out there as well. What are the planetary conditions required for life as far as we know it? For life as we know it, the basic condition is liquid water. So every single living organism on this planet has to have living water in order to survive. There are some animals and some creatures which can go without water for extended periods of time but they can't go

forever without liquid water. So that seems to be a basic requirement. You also need an energy source. All life metabolizes so there has to be some source of energy. For most life on earth that essentially comes from the Sun. Obviously we get our food from eating animals and plants, but all of that essentially still derives from the Sun if you go far enough back down the food chain. And then there's some things like chemotrophs which get the energy from chemical gradients or from deep down near to the bottom of the ocean there are some volcanic vents that could be a source of energy. So you have to have an energy source, you have to have water.

And I think a lot of us think that you need some kind of information storage system as well. So for us, that's DNA, some life uses RNA. Whether there's other versions of that on other planets is an open question, and I think that's very interesting to explore. RNA seems to be a popular idea that it could be almost a common precursor for life out there that we might find. It's very difficult to form RNA spontaneously. So it doesn't seem like it's easy to make RNA, but somehow it must have got started. And once you get it, it's auto catalytic. So it can make more of itself. It does reproduce, but getting that first one is kind of the chicken and egg problem with life quite literally. And then you probably also want to have some kind of cell structure, something to bind

the organism together. It can't just be diffuse and just dilute across the entire ocean. It probably needs some physical structure. So that could be, for instance, like an oil droplet can actually form almost a natural vessel without having to have an organism already around. You can have the oil do that job for you. It's also been suggested that in clays, they can form these little bubbles as well. If you have wet clay and air cycling through it, you can form these bubbles. And those clay balls could also be potentially little pockets

that form protocells as well. So there's lots of interesting ideas about getting the precursors to life going, but of course that's just life on Earth. It is possible that life elsewhere does not require liquid water, but I think there are very good arguments as to why it probably would. You want some kind of solvent and there are alternatives that you could imagine, such as, you imagine, such as alcohols for instance. But in general, it's difficult to argue that water is both extremely common in the universe, it's one of the most abundant things out there. We see it in many, many planetary atmospheres that we've been studying over the last couple of decades, so we know this stuff is all over the place. It's just hydrogen-oxygen to the most obvious and common things in the universe,

and it has so many advantages for life. So if you want to have liquid water as your, as your basic requirement, then that all comes down to the surface temperature. Or the subsurface temperature of the object. You want to have it in that, in that temperature range where it's not too cold. So it's not freezing to ice and not too hot. There's boiling to steam. Why do you need the lubricant? The solvent. Solvent. Yeah. So you need the solvent to basically carry nutrients around the organism.

If you have a completely solid object, it's difficult to imagine how it would transfer energy from different organelles and different components of the cell. So a solvent is just useful for, for, for keeping, I mean, I'm not a biologist, but my understanding is it's just, it's just to keep, keep a way of moving stuff around inside the cell. What else about the planet stuff like the magnetosphere and plate tectonics and a big moon and stuff like that? What else is sort of rare about where we are? I mean, possibly the part of the galaxy could be rare as well.

People have suggested that the way we live in the galaxy may be itself special. We live in a, in a spiral arm and we live, you know, sort of like halfway to two thirds of the way out from the, from the center of the galaxy to its edge. Yeah. So the suburban district. And we certainly think that if you were too close to the galactic center, that would be bad. As you get closer and closer towards the galactic core, the density of stars increases, there's more and more stars, which means the spacing

between stars decreases. Now that's problematic because you can have exposure to supernovae and gamma ray bursts, which can be essentially life extinguishing events. So if you get too close, that's a problem. We also did some work in my team with Moir McTeer, where we showed that actually the instability we talked about earlier, the three-body problem type effect, also gets worse as you get closer in because stars themselves often not collide with each other, but come very close to each other. And when that happens, the gravity of a nearby star can actually rip off and destabilize the planets that you're trying to form. So this is bad. And we think that certainly once you get within that inner core, you actually lose the majority of your planets this way. This is why I always get a little bit bothered. Sometimes you

hear astronomers say, there's a pet heave I have with my colleagues, that locally we know this is true, nearby to the star, that about let's say 10% of Sun-like stars have planets of similar kind of size to the Earth. Not necessarily habitable planets, but similar size to the Earth. Therefore there are 100 billion stars, therefore there's 10 billion of those in the entire galaxy. Now the problem with that is that we just don't know that we can extrapolate what happens locally in our neck of the woods to the entire galaxy and especially to that galactic core.

It seems very unlikely that the inner region, you know, unlike Star Wars and Star Wars, the inner regions where like all the activities going on, everyone wants to live in Coruscant, which is like right in the center of the galaxy. In the real Coruscant, which is like right in the center of the galaxy. In the real world, you do not want to live in the center of the galaxy. That's actually a hellhole place to be living. So I don't think we can generalize these numbers elsewhere. And so when you look out to the outer neck, the suburbs of where we live, there are some reasons why it seems useful.

We're far enough away from all that behavior, but we're in a region that's dense enough to be forming stars and dense enough to be forming planets, the metallicity gradient's good. We also happen to move around the galaxy, orbit around the galaxy. It's comparable to the speed at which the galactic arms themselves rotate round. And so- So we're not crossing streams and other lanes of traffic. Right, exactly. So we don't get these, the spiral arms are basically compression waves And so, so we're not crossing streams and other lanes of traffic. Right. Exactly. So we don't get these, these, the spiral arms are basically compression waves of, of gas that are moving through the galaxy.

And those compression waves, as they push through, they get, they lead to a star formation increases. So you have this compression wave, suddenly you get more and more stars being born. And that's generally hazardous to have lots of stars being born, because that means you're going to have some stars, which are going to go supernovae. It's not common. You know, one in a thousand stars will go supernovae, but if you have a star forming surge, a few of them will. And that's going to be bad if you live in that neck of the neighborhood. So it's like having a swarm of, I don't know, like migrants or something

swarming through your neighborhood. And some of them just explode randomly as they come through or something. You don't really want that. You'd rather be in a place where there's no visitors and it's a fairly stable place and that seems to be kind of the neck of the woods that we live in. So in that sense, uh, it may be fortuitous that we live where we are, but this is an open question. I don't think we really established this, but we have some ideas as to why it might be so, but ultimately this is something we hope to test.

If we can detect planets right down in the center of the galaxy, that would disprove what I'm saying and prove that actually planets can form in these bizarre places, which would be again, interesting to discover. Or maybe we'll even discover that there's Earth-like planets in that region and life in that region, which would again, upend a lot of what I'm saying. So it's a testable theory, but it is the only idea we've got right now prior to having any data that it does seem like there's some advantages to being where

we are in the galaxy. Rare Earth, rare solar system, rare suburb. It's so interesting to think about that number of, this is how many billion stars there are, and this is how many planets we think are on average around each star. Therefore, if you run the numbers forward, but what it doesn't account for is that not all star localities are created equal. And presumably as you get closer toward the center of the galaxy, that accounts

for a very large number of the number of stars, but at a much lower, um, appropriateness, the environment within which those planets inhabit isn't sufficiently stable and long lasting to actually allow life. Yeah, that's so cool. Yeah. I mean, one of the, one of the strange things, not just location, but star type is the most common type of star in the universe is a red dwarf. So 75% of all stars are red dwarfs. And it immediately you might think, well, how come we don't live around one

if they're so common? But it gets even worse than that because as far as we can tell, they seem to have more earth sized planets around them than Sun-like stars do. And yet more, we know that they live for far, far longer. So the sun, as we talked about earlier, will eventually burn out and die. It'll probably take another 5 billion years before it turns into a giant. But even within a billion years from now, it will become hot enough that it will make the earth uninhabitable. So this is climate change forced from the sun over a billion year timescales. That would just basically mean there's no way for us to adapt to that and we will die. However, these red dwarfs, it's like everything happens in slow motion for a red dwarf. So their lives, they're extended to trillions of years because they're so small, it takes them a lot longer, they're much less efficient

at burning that nuclear fuel in their center. And so that means that if you lived around a red dwarf, you could have a civilization which lasts far, far, far longer than we ever will. And so all of this kind of is intriguing. You know, there's more of them, they have more Earths, and they last for far longer. So they seem to have everything going for them, and yet we don't live around one. And that has also kind of bothered me in the past. And I called this the Red Sky Paradox. Like why don't we have a red star in our sky rather than a yellow star in our sky and one possible resolution is is that there is something wrong with red dwarfs that we don't understand maybe the radiation they spew out is just hazardous to

forming life in the first place they have these very prolonged I say if they do everything in slow motion that includes that adolescence so the Sun went through its adolescence pretty quick in order of like 10 million years. It kind of settled down, it chilled out, it stopped spewing flares out all the time. What happens during adolescence? It's just a very active star. So it's very unstable. It's very volatile. Its luminosity is changing dramatically. It's spewing out high energy radiation, it is not a nice place to be living during that time. For red dwarfs, that adolescence extends for a billion years in some cases. So the problem with that is that it can actually eradicate the planets of

their water. So let's say the Earth happened to be a water-rich world born around a red dwarf, but then it's being bombarded with this high energy radiation. It can actually remove the atmosphere completely off the planet. They're so powerful these events. When you remove the atmosphere the water then just escapes. It boils off, it forms maybe clouds at a high altitude but then the ultraviolet radiation which these stars also produce splits water up into hydrogen oxygen. So it's like fission of the of the molecule into hydrogen oxygen and the hydrogen will escape into deep space so an earth-like planet does not have enough gravity to hold on to hydrogen if you let out hydrogen in the air into a balloon or something minus the weight of the of the film itself of the balloon the hydrogen will just float off into

deep space and not come back the earth does does not have enough gravity to hold onto it. So once you lose your hydrogen, you now just got oxygen by itself. You can't make water with just oxygen. And so the planet loses all of its water this way. This is thought to have happened to Venus actually in its past. And so this is, which is a very dry planet and we can see that. So this is potentially an explanation as to why, despite the fact red dwarfs are everywhere, they may not be as hospitable as we hope, but perhaps

civilizations go there eventually. They might be like the retirement homes, like the Florida of the universe, because I think a civilization like us would recognize that there's something here for our future, right? Even though there's no water, maybe we could bring water with us. We can have a huge settlement program. We eventually have huge ships and we can move over there and bring everything we need. And these stars will be energy sources, stable energy sources for the future

trillion years of the rest of the universe. When all the other stars go out, it will just be the red dwarfs left shining. And so it seems obvious that that's where civilizations would be drawn to one day. It's a reliable retirement home, reliable, long-term goods, stable property prices throughout. I've seen, uh, sunshine. I've seen that movie. How much truth is there in what we can do to stars to prolong them, to control them?

Yeah. We actually have an idea in my team where we've been working on some of these ideas. If one immediate threat to in our solar system is of course the sun. So the sun is evolving, which means as it's as maturing, it's becoming more luminous over time. When the sun, when the earth was first born, the sun was about 20 to 30% less luminous than it is today. That's a big drop off, 30% less luminous over 4 billion years.

So if you go like another billion years into the future, that's another sort of 10% increase in luminosity, even a bit more than that. And then that will wreak havoc to the climate at this point. So you have to do something. One option that one of my colleagues suggested, Greg Loughlin, was to try and push the earth back into a wider orbit. So what you could do is you could actually hurl an asteroid directly just off center of the earth. And as it hurls towards it, it will swing around or do like a gravitational slingshot around the earth and it will fling off in the other direction. But every time that you have one of these gravitational interactions, if it does a slingshot it basically steals a bit of speed

and it will steal that speed and go off faster than it was before and that means the earth will change speed, it will lose speed. So you can actually modify the orbit of the earth by having these interactions. So in this case we'd actually want to increase the earth's angle momentum, we want to increase its speed and as you do, it would push it out into a wider orbit. So you'd have to throw thousands and thousands, millions of asteroids at the earth to do this. And every time you'd have to do it very close, but not just too close. It's a high risk strategy.

It's like a very high risk strategy. It's a high risk strategy for an advanced civilization that really knows what they're doing, but that's where you can move the earth back at just the right rate to keep the temperature the same. I guess you could do this for climate change as well in the near term, but I wouldn't recommend it. I think there's probably safer solutions. Um, the other solution there's, I think, uh, more feasible, uh, or at least less

risky to this is actually to remove mass off the sun, but maybe this is a bit more sci-fi, uh, even more sci-fi than throwing asteroids at the Earth. You could actually have some kind of way, like most simply like a ram scoop or something off the surface of the Sun, but you could actually probably do it with lasers as well. You can actually excite certain modes on the surface of the Sun and get material to be ejected out this way. If you make the sun lose mass, that reduces its gravitational pressure in the center. And so the core of the sun is where all the energy's produced

and it's like a thermostat. The greater the gravitational pressure from the outside, squeezing down on that core, the hotter it gets. So if we take some mass off the top, it'll reduce the pressure and the oven will cool down a little bit. And so we've actually reduced it to expand. It's got less gravity. It would cause it to slightly change in radius, but it would, it would not be a dramatic effect. So when we, when we modify the radio of these sides, it would actually end up probably overall,

net decreasing the radius of the sun, because as you cool down the core of the Sun, there's less outward radiation pressure. So that radiation pressure is basic. If that wasn't there, the Sun would collapse into a black hole. The Sun wants to collapse into a black hole or to a very small object, maybe not a black hole because of electron degeneracy pressure, but it wants to collapse all the way down. The only thing stopping it from collapsing down is radiation pressure, like energy spewing out in all directions and pushing back against that force. So if we reduce the power in the

oven, we make that core less powerful, the radiation pressure will decrease and will actually shrink very slightly. So actually that's why if you look at stars with lower masses, they tend to have smaller radii. They don't actually get bigger as a result of the lower gravity, which you might think of. So overall, this would slightly decrease the radius of the Sun and the net effect would be to decrease the luminosity. So we calculated a rate of doing this and it turns out to be, I'm trying to remember the number, but it was about something like one asteroid's worth, like Vesta is like one of the largest asteroids, is one asteroid's worth of material off the sun every year.

So not very much. That's how much you have to remove off the sun to basically keep it cooling down gradually over the next billion years, such that it basically doesn't change temperature. It'll basically stay exactly the same luminosity as it is today. So we did this calculation in my team and we think it's an intriguing idea. And we think that if somebody was ever going to move to another star and potentially colonize it for a trillion years, this would be an obvious thing that they would do. And they're actually signatures that we could look for potentially to detect this. So we call this starlifting. I was, I was thinking about solar landscaping, but like a solar landscaper would be a future job.

Solar gardening almost. Yeah. And another idea was that my, my student had this idea that, you know, you could also use this in the neighborhood. So we talked about supernovae being potentially dangerous, like Beetlejuice is nearby and people are worried about Beetlejuice one day going supernovae and potentially, you know, it's too far away to actually really affect us to be honest, but you could have a star like this nearby. We could potentially, or a civilization more advanced

than us, could potentially fly there, do this mass removal process almost as a pruning technique, right? So this star is kind of like a weed in your garden, like a pest that you want to get rid of. And so by stripping mass off the top, you could remove that threat and declaw it and mean that your neighborhood is safe again. So it's really fun to imagine this is all what physics allows, right? There's nothing about the laws of physics which prevents somebody from doing any of this.

And so if the laws of physics allow it and there's a good motivation for why a civilization might want to do it, then it's interesting to ask whether somebody is actually trying this right now. Given the requirement for water that's needed for life in any form, at least as far as we know it, uh, what is the likelihood of underwater civilizations? And if you have an underwater civilization, I seem to remember learning that there's a few restrictions that those kinds of species would have. Like they can't smelt, uh, iron and materials that they would be able to use to build

things in the same way to be able to go to other planets. Is that something you've considered? Yeah, I mean, this is super intriguing. I've also, one of the most interesting aspects of this is the communication aspect of dolphins and whales as our sea, intelligent companions that live in the ocean. And for years and years, we've been trying to just communicate with them, right? If we want to communicate with an alien civilization, we should at least be able to communicate with dolphins and whales and have a conversation with them. But we haven't really succeeded very well at that.

Although there has recently been breakthroughs in this. There was a wonderful podcast on the Daily, Daily podcast, the New York Times does that talked about some recent breakthroughs in this area. So there are, there are some advances happening, but in terms of a whale or a dolphin or anything analogous to that ever becoming a civilization, it does seem like there's obvious hurdles. My colleague Adam Frank has been thinking about this a little bit harder than I have, and he pointed out that oxygen is not just a problem in the ocean, but it could be a problem in the atmosphere as well. You could be on an exoplanet that has no oxygen, but you could still be a creature with thumbs and opposable thumbs and hands and things in a smart brain that you

might have the idea of developing technology. But similarly, you wouldn't be able to really do any industry if you couldn't burn. if you didn't have access to combustion, that seems to prohibit a huge range of technologies that were foundational to us getting started. And then people often say about fossil fuels as well, like fossil fuels are clearly a poison to our atmosphere, but had they had not been on our planet at all, it's questionable whether we would have got to a point where we'd even be developing solar panels, right? Because that requires some pretty advanced technology compared to Stone Age tools.

You can't go from Stone Age tools to solar panels. You need something in between to bridge that. And combustion was certainly a pivotal filling in step for us in our own development. So we're getting a little bit speculative as to whether other civilizations could use other things. I think Adam Frank has been interested in alternatives to oxygen for combustion. I think he talks about hydrofluoride as a possible alternative, but that's a very toxic molecule.

And so it's unclear if anything could actually survive and not be intoxicated by having such a poisonous fume for its one combustion thing. And also that doesn't just combust, but it combusts way harsher than oxygen does. So it would really explode basically every time you tried to use it. So it'd be very difficult maybe to imagine combustion. So similarly, it does seem like having an oxygen rich atmosphere could be a requirement to potentially developing a technological civilization. But subsurface intelligences and subsurface life more broadly is one of the most interesting

things we can do in the near term to look for because we have Europa and we have Enceladus, these moons in our solar system, which almost certainly have liquid water beneath their icy crusts. And we know we can visit them and we know we could think of ways of getting down to that surface and probing and looking for life in them. It's going to be very difficult to do so, but I think the investment is worth it because we could answer this most profound question as to whether life started in a completely different environment to that of the earth. I think if we found that there, it would resolve the question I brought about earlier as to how often does life start in general. If there's two instantiations of it in the same solar system, but under completely different independent circumstances, that essentially proves that life is easy and life could therefore

start everywhere. So having that second data point will be incredibly important for us in our understanding of life and the universe, even if it's not intelligent. I doubt we're going to find the city of Atlantis on the bottom of Europa. But I do imagine, yeah, we might, we might find, who knows, we might have Europa and sushi in a few centuries and the billionaires will be shipping over some European sushi and selling that at a premium I'm sure. But, uh, it's, uh, it's, it's a possibility that I think is to be taken very seriously

that there could be life in our own solar system. And for me, that is the most likely place we're going to find it beyond the earth. I suppose the only, one of the potential pushbacks that would be what, if there was some sort of cross pollination, how do you know that we're in the same solar system, something hit us, there was something carried on that, which seeded this other moon or some other area of the solar system with the same original sort of Genesis of this. Yeah, that's a great question.

And that's, that's an idea called panspermia. So panspermia is the idea that life couldn't transfer between planets, between moons and spread out between within a solar system, but potentially even beyond into other solar systems as well. So the nice thing about Europa and the solar system is that they're pretty much sealed behind this prison of this thick ice sheet, which is at least a kilometer, probably several kilometers thick for both of those objects. And so it's very difficult to imagine. Let's say a rock got knocked off the Earth in an impact and on that rock was a tardigrade or a whole bunch of them, a whole bunch of extremophiles clinging on for dear life. And they somehow survive the journey of space, which I think is actually feasible. They survive the impact, but even so, unless that impact is extremely massive,

it's not going to crack all the way through many kilometers of ice and penetrate through into that ocean water. So I think the challenge, and also not only this, but it's also, it's further out in the solar system. So you're going from, imagine like a well, you know, there's coin drops that you throw a coin, it circles down, it circles down, it circles down, it circles down. Now you can have two coins hit each other fairly deep down in the well, that's the Earth. The Earth is pretty deep down in the gravitational well. It's pretty close to the sun. Jupiter is pretty far out. It's 5.2 further times out than the earth is from the sun.

And that's where the nearest one of these moons is Europa. So you have to have a collision that is impactful enough that that rock can then circle all the way back up five times higher and then still have enough energy to strike Europa and break through the ice. It's not impossible. I don't think, but it would be pretty unlikely that you would, you would have the circumstances to create something like this for Mars, for Venus and the earth. There, we can imagine interchange of material much more readily.

And it is intriguing to ask, maybe life started on Venus or maybe life started on Mars and moved over to the earth and there's some transfer between us. But I think you rope and sell it to us. They're, they're almost like sealed boxes. But then that does raise the question that we might break that seal, right? Because if we deliberately drill down into it, whether we want to or not, some extremophile is going to cling onto the side of that spaceship. It's basically impossible to completely clean the spacecraft. There's always something and then it's basically impossible to completely clean. Sterilize your, your spaceship out in space. Yeah. There's always something and then it's going to penetrate into that ocean and

potentially be a source of contaminant. So, you know, you get that one chance of doing the experiment correctly. And if you screw it up, you've, you've potentially introduced an entire new biosphere that could be fairly dangerous in fact, to an existing biosphere there. Talking about large impacts, can we talk about the importance of the Moon and its creation and stuff? Yeah, the Moon's a puzzle that we still wonder about today,

despite the fact it seems like it's a sealed story. We think the Moon formed from a huge impact. It's thought that there was a Mars-sized planet, which smashed into the proto-Earth billions of years ago, just after the solar system formed. So the Earth would have actually been larger than it had this impact not had occurred. It would have been maybe 50% more massive than it is today, maybe twice as massive. And this impactor came along, smashed into the Earth, and knocked off a huge amount of material. And it's thought that impactor, which we normally give it the name

Theia, would have been almost completely obliterated in this and vaporized in this collision. And then some chunk of the Earth was knocked off. And that chunk of the Earth is ultimately what formed the Moon, or maybe even multiple moons that then coalesced later into a single Moon. So there's a huge amount of interest about why you might come up with a speculative idea and still people challenging this idea. The thing we know for sure is that the Moon rocks that were collected by the Apollo astronauts have almost the exact same isotropic ratio of oxygen 18 to oxygen 17, I think it is, as Earth rocks do. And this is thought to be a fingerprint that the rocks formed in the exact same place around the Sun. We look at rocks from

Mars, we look at rocks from Venus, these are basically meteorites we've collected that land in on the Earth. They have distinct isotropic ratios, but the moon and the earth have exactly the same. So that tells us that they formed from the same inherent clump of material. That's challenging with this impactor. With the impactor, if this thing really did have its own unique origin, this impactor Theia, why didn't it contaminate that then and have its own distinct signature that gets mixed in? So that has been a challenge.

One idea that has been suggested to Kant, right? This is called synestia. I think I'm pronouncing that right, synestia. And that's when the impact happened. It was so extreme that it formed basically one giant donut shaped planet for a while. So the Earth and the Moon would have smashed together, formed basically a ball of lava, essentially, that was shaped like almost a donut in space, spinning very rapidly because of all the angular momentum from the impact, and then gradually have peeled off and formed

a Moon and the Earth separately from this giant impact. The reason why this is attractive is because it allows for this material to mix in thoroughly. So this impact, whatever it was, the Earth, and the Earth completely mix into one single object, and then it separates out into the Earth and the Moon separately. That seems to explain some of the mysteries, but not everybody accepts that idea and there's still a lot of controversy about the Moon. The Moon's far side has a very different appearance and thickness to the near side. If you've ever seen a picture of the far side of the Moon, it looks radically different to the near side. The near side has these Maria, these beautiful

lava flows that happened millions of years ago that smooth it out, and then it has these more cratered areas. Whereas the far side is almost completely cratered. There's very, very few Maria. That's because the crust, the actual lithosphere of the moon is much thicker on the far side than the near side. And again, that's weird. Like why, why should that be? Why is there a dichotomy like that? And so once one idea of there is that actually two moons formed in this process and then one kind of pancakes onto the back of the moon today. And that is that pancaking that then formed like a thicker shell on the far side of the moon. So there's, it's like, I wish we had a time machine because this would have been like the greatest

fireworks shown in the universe to have seen the formation of the moon. And again, it raises so many questions like how unique was that? Does that happen in other exoplanet systems? Are we special that this happened here? We don't really have any observational evidence either way. But obviously my team and I, one of the things we've been trying to do over the last few years is to try and detect moons around other planets to try and ultimately answer this question because at the end of the things we've been trying to do over the last few years is to try and detect moons around other planets to try and ultimately answer this question. Because at the end of the day, the moon has a huge influence on our planet. It stabilizes the obliquity of the Earth. It gives us the tides. It gives us the rise and the fall of the tides, which potentially are a useful thing for life.

They create rock pools on the coastlines, especially when the Moon was closer in. It would have formed continent-covering tides basically. The entire continent would have been covered in a massive tide that would have formed all these rock pools all over the place. It also potentially stripped off the upper lithosphere of the Earth. So basically the crust. So the crust may have been much thicker of the earth when it first formed and then the impact could have ripped off some of that thick crust and had that not had happened, the crust may have been too thick to have allowed for plate tectonics. So plate tectonics we think are absolutely crucial for life as late life as we have it on the earth because they allow for something called the carbon cycle. So when an animal dies in the bottom of the ocean, its carbon is locked up in its bones and its shell, whatever it is, and it settles down to the bottom of the ocean.

It just stays there. And if there was no, if that was just the way it was, the world would run out of carbon basically, and there'd be no way for animals to grow on the surface anymore, because there'd be no carbon left. But instead what happens is these plates subduct and they go under each other, and so that carbon recycles, it comes back out in CO2 in volcanoes, and that allows access for photosynthesis to happen in plants, for instance. So without the carbon cycle, it's difficult to imagine

how we'd have the biosphere we have today, and the Moon may actually be the reason why we have a carbon cycle, for if it had not stripped off that upper crust, the crust would have been so thick that would have formed what we call a stagnant lid. A stagnant lid seems to be the case for Venus. Venus seems to have a very thick lithosphere, which basically prevents plate tectonics as we have them on the earth. So yeah, very intriguing. Like you look at all the things the moon does and you think, wow, are we a product of the moon? The idea of plate tectonics kind of tilling, like doing global tilling, uh, is so, so fascinating.

And yeah, I mean, the moon being tidally locked or rotationally locked, what's that, what's that called? Yeah. Tidally locked. Yeah. Tidally locked. Yeah. So we only ever see how rare is that to have something that doesn't rotate at all.

That seems bizarre. That's pretty, that's actually pretty common. So a lot, yeah, a lot of millions, that's true. And we think we understand why this should happen. Whenever you get fairly close to a planet or a star, the gravitational effect obviously increases as you get closer and closer. And it kind of locks in the shape of that object

to always have one side facing it. So especially if you have some kind of fluids like the Earth does, these tides can be quite effective at slowing things down. It happens for many moons around Jupiter, Saturn, so we think this is pretty common. It's thought that this should be common for exoplanets as well, which is interesting, but again, unproven. But we think that there are some stars which have very close in planets and those planets are so close that they should tidal locked their star. And we've measured many of these hot Jupiters and we've watched them whizz around their star and we can even see basically read thermal maps. We can kind of read thermally map the distribution of energy on these planets and they look indeed like they are tidally locked as we would expect them to be. So everything about exoplanets seems

to support this idea that tidal locking should happen. But there are also mysteries of tidal locking. We don't really know exactly when it stops. The theories of tidal theory that we use are fairly primitive to be honest. They kind of parameterize things in a very basic way. Ideally, you would just simulate an entire planet, like every single atom, but we just don't have computers powerful enough to simulate every single atom. So we use these simplified models and we know these simplified models don't always work. So for instance, for Mercury, it was predicted that Mercury should be tied

a lot to the sun, but it's not. It's in a pseudo synchronous orbit. And probably the reason why that's happening is because of general relativity, because actually there's general relativistic effects that come into play when you get close to a star as well. So it's thought that tidal locking should happen, but in some instances, it's more complicated than just a simple formula. And you really need to think about the composition of the star, the composition of the planet,

what it's made out of, does it have a core? What's its density profile like? How, how much general relativity kicking in here? So the calculation is quite non-trivial, but it does seem like it's common in the solar system and expect it to be common elsewhere. Are there any other interesting rotations of planets in our solar system? Yeah. I mean, one of the things I think is interesting is Uranus is tilted on its side, which is like kind of confusing.

So even though it's spin isn't particularly unusual, it's somehow been knocked over. So it's just spinning in a sideways configuration. So that kind of thing- Like it's rolling forward? It's like, it's just, it's, it's axis in which it spins. Like the Earth's axis is basically pointed orthogonal to its orbital plane. So normal to its orbital plane, pointing up if you like. Whereas for Uranus, it's kind of tilted so that its North Pole is pointed at the Sun. So it's like it's rolling forward on a surface

that doesn't exist. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. And as it goes around, what's kind of weird is that the moons I've also tilted over alongside it. So this has been like curious how we can imagine maybe the planet getting knocked over on its side, but then why are all the moons also on its side as well? We don't really understand what happened there. So very strange to understand how to have a urinus. And then one of the, one of the cool things we're thinking about a lot of my team at the moment, my research group, the Cool Words Lab, is the rotation of Jupiter and Saturn, which are rotating pretty fast, once every 10 hours.

And we think this is to be expected pretty much for all giant planets once you get far enough away from the star. So if Jupiter came too close to the sun, that tidal locking thing would cook in and it would slow Jupiter down. It would put the brakes on Jupiter's spin and slow it down to days rotation rate, basically whatever its orbital period was. But Jupiter is far enough away that it still retains what we would call its primordial spin. And Jupiter and Saturn don't really

have any way of getting rid of that spin. For the sun, it does lose spin. It was probably spinning much faster when it was young and it's been losing it through its very strong magnetic fields. Jupiter has magnetic fields, but nowhere near strong enough that it can lose spin the same way that the sun does. It's so far away from the sun that it's not going to be slowed down by being closer. Yes, correct. So it doesn't really have any way to shed this spin.

That's interesting because we are now, we have some observations coming up with the James Webb Space Telescope in October, where we're going to basically measure a Jupiter analog. So a planet, an exoplanet around a different star, it's over a thousand light years away, but we're going to measure very precisely its shadow as it passes in front of another star. And we think that this planet should have similarly a fast spin and why that's interesting is that that fast spin causes Jupiter to bulge out at its equator more than its pole so it's actually 5% wider than it is tall and Saturn's 10% wider than it is tall through this spinning effect. We think we can measure this it's never been measured before if we can measure it. It's never been measured before.

If we can measure it, it will tell us basically what the planet is made out of, how fast it's spinning, and even its tilt angle. So as I said, Uranus is tilted right over. Jupiter and Saturn are not very tilted compared to that, but we should be able to actually measure the angle for the first time and really get a deeper insight as to how these planets are forming. So I'm just excited that we might have access for the first time, thanks to James Webb, to a completely new observational technique learning about exoplanets. We have their mass, we have their radius, but now we can get their spin, their bulginess, their tilt angle, and really just complete the picture as to how these things formed.

Are most solar systems and galaxies on a kind of a plane? Like why, why is, why are things not spheres? Why is there not sort of three dimensions of movement? Yeah, that's a great question. You might think of that as being an obvious possibility. Um, and certainly there are actually some plants which do that, Chris. So it does happen sometimes that you have plants in these wild chaotic orbits. If you look at Jupiter as like a mini solar system, it has these four inner moons, the Galilean moons as they're called, that's Io, Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, and they look like a mini solar system, like a pizza, like a flat disc. But then around that, you have this nebula

of spherical orbits, basically, as you say, like just stuff in all kind of crazy directions. We think that all of that stuff in the wild orbits is what we call irregular moons. And the stuff that's close in and formed like a disc, we call a regular moon. So we think the regular moon's formed basically from a disc of material that was around Jupiter when it first formed. So as it was forming, it was spinning and collecting material. And just like spinning a pizza, a piece of dough, it naturally wants to form a disc through that angular momentum. And then from that disc, the moons just coalesced and popped out. But the irregular moons, they kind of formed that way. So we think those are probably asteroids and even minor planets that were captured by Jupiter's gravity. and even minor planets that were captured by Jupiter's gravity. So that's more like the three-body problem type stuff. That's instabilities that kicked in, then Jupiter got in the way and kind of dragged them into these wild orbits around themselves.

And we do see in some exoplanets, planets doing very strange things like that. There's even many cases of planets orbiting backwards around the stars. So the stars spinning say in a clockwise sense and the planet goes around sometimes even in a plane, but in the complete opposite direction, which is, we don't have that in the solar system at all. That's very, very odd. And that has been a big headache for lots of people trying to understand how these things form.

How on earth do you get a planet to go around in the complete opposite direction? So is angular momentum the explanation for why most things seem to be on a plane? Yeah. I mean, disks happen all over the universe. Like think about Saturn's rings. It's in a disk. Think about the galaxy. It's in a disk. And think about, you know, when we look at young stars, we see disks around them.

They're actually, we've taken photos of them. We see these disks forming. discs around them. They're actually, we've taken photos of them. We see these discs forming. So essentially things as they, as they spin that angular momentum wants to spread material out into a wide disc. Is it possible to know the size of the universe outside of the observable universe? Is that something that we can answer? That's a hard question to answer because of the fact we can only see so far. So when we look out into the universe, the greatest distance we can see is just how long light has had to travel given the age of the universe. So you might naively think if the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, the furthest distance we could see would therefore be 13.8 billion light years away. would therefore be 13.8 billion light years away. However, the distance actually much greater than that

because the universe is expanding. So during the time this distant object produced a particle of light, a photon towards you, and it travels that distance, that origin point has itself moved further and further away from you. And so due to the rate at which we think the universe is expanding, Origin point has itself moved further and further away from you. And so due to the rate at which we think the universe is expanding, the most distant point that we could possibly see, which would be 13.8 billion light years of travel,

would actually be probably something like 45 billion light years away, due to that expansion effect. So therefore you have 45 billion light years in one direction. You could do the other direction another 45. So that gives you a diameter of about 90 billion light years. So we can say the universe must be at least this big, because when we look out in that region, we don't see repetitions. So we don't see if the universe was like on a sphere and you just traveled around and

around the sphere over and over again, you see the same stuff happening over and over but everything in the universe seems unique every patch seems a different patch to everywhere else so the universe seems to be at least 90 billion light years in size but it's probably much larger than that because when we look out at that distant speck there's nothing fundamentally different about it and presumably from its perspective it could see another 45 billion light years again in the other direction. And so the question is how many times can this go before there is some kind of wraparound or perhaps there is no wraparound it just goes on forever. So this really speaks to the curvature of space-time like what is the shape of it? Is it indeed totally flat? If it was perfectly flat then the universe would essentially be infinite in every

direction. You could just travel and travel and travel, and you'd never come back to the same point. It doesn't mean necessarily that the universe in terms of matter is infinite. There may be a region where all the matter and energy lives, and then eventually you just exit that region. You're still in space-time, but there's just no stuff anymore. And then eventually you just exit that region, you're still in space-time, but there's just no stuff anymore. And then eventually you might travel far enough away and you'd hit another universe, if you like, another region of mass and energy that's completely separate from that of our own. But generally, I think we assume that that's not the case, that it's just kind of homogenous everywhere. By the cosmological principles, we kind of assume that where we are is typical of everywhere else.

There are some measurements trying to constrain the curve through a spacetime, especially using Gaia. You can essentially draw triangles on the sky and add the angles up of those triangles. And if you draw a triangle on a flat piece of paper, the angles should add up to 180 degrees. But if you imagine drawing a triangle on a balloon or on a football that's curved, the angles will actually add to an angle greater than 180. And so you could therefore tell that there's some curvature based off that sum of those angles. So we can do a similar kind of experiment in astronomy. And as far as we can tell, the angles do add up to 180. The flatness of the universe is very, very flat. It may just be though that like

our early ancestors who looked out at the horizon and they saw what seemed to be the flat Earth, the Earth does look flat, but if you travel far enough and you get a tower big enough, you will eventually see the curvature. So it may simply be that the curvature evades us and there is a curvature, but we just are not able to see it yet. But it does simply be that the curvature evades us and there is a curvature, but we just are not able to see it yet. But it does imply the universe is very, very, very large, much larger than that which we see. And it is potentially and mind bogglingly infinite. What would the implications of that be? An infinite universe?

In a sense, there's no implication. In other sense, there's profound implications. So in a sense, there's no implication. It doesn't really affect anything outside of the, this barrier. As far as we can see 13.8 billion years of light travel time or 90, 90 billion years, when you convert to the diameter of this physical scale, anything outside of that Hubble volume, as we call it, can have no interaction or effectiveness in any way. So there's no way if there was a malevolent alien out there who could ever affect us, there's no supernova which could go off, there's nothing which can ever happen there ever in

the past or the future which can influence us. And so in that sense, it doesn't really matter what's happening out there. So it's like, if a tree falls in a forest and no one's around to hear it, does it really make a sound? It's like, does it even really matter? Does it, philosophically, does it matter whether this stuff is out there? And if you think about quantum interpretations of the universe, they, some interpretations would basically say it doesn't even exist.

If it's not observable, its superposition is basically completely ill-defined and you can't even talk about it being a physical object in a sense. So, there's that kind of perspective of it. But another perspective is profound because if the universe is infinite and not just infinite in scale, but there's mass and energy all over the place. And there would be an infinite number of Chris's and an infinite version of David's out there. And with enough monkeys typing on a typewriter, infinite opportunities, everything will happen again and again and again and again, an infinite number of times. And sometimes they'll be slightly different. Sometimes they'll be exactly the same. And That's a strange concept. It means none of us ever really die. There is someone who has the exact same life experience as you, who is you in every measurable sense of the word, down to the atom, down to the electron. They are the same as you, and yet they could be offset a

hundred years into the future or a hundred years into the past, whatever this really means in terms of time, because we're such wide separations at this point, but we would all basically be alive forever somewhere. So you can get into kind of like metaphysical philosophical aspects of it, which are very strange to ponder as well. Yeah, it's, I'm right in saying that there is, I don't know what the cubic meter space that I inhabit is, but there's only so many ways that matter can be arranged inside of the space that I occupy.

And if you have an infinite universe, therefore there must be at least at some point this. Is this not Boltzmann brains? Is this not something else as well that kind of ties in with that? Yeah, it's a similar argument to, Boltzmann brains? Is this not something else as well that kind of ties in with that? Yeah, it's a similar argument to the Boltzmann brains. The Boltzmann brains argues that it's really thinking about the future, the far future typically when people talk about Boltzmann brains. But if you imagine time running forever and ever into the distant future, then random particles will sometimes coalesce in random ways to eventually form a conscious brain.

And what's kind of strange about that idea is that the conscious brain doesn't even have to exist for very long. It could exist for just a microsecond and then fall apart. But in that microsecond, it could have all of your memories. Every experience you've ever had would be hard coded into its wiring. And so it would believe it was in this room. It had had all the experiences we had had and it would be indistinguishable, there'd be no way to disprove that. And in fact, when you really think about the infinities involved, there's far more boxman brains than there are rational human brains.

It's far harder to have a human go through all the steps of actually living a life, it's just to emulate the life. And so by that account, it's much more likely you'd be a boxman brain. The original simulation hypothesis, dear God. Right. It is kind of like simulation hypothesis, but a lot of astronomers have turned very sour to this idea and a lot of the arguments against it fall into like entropy camps. And that, you know, if you really look at the far future of the universe and look at the heat death, you can't

just have entropy reversed like this. And even in spontaneous ways and in a probabilistic sense, it just, it just really shouldn't happen once you get to these kind of extreme times where the particle density drops down so much that each particle eventually will just be in its own universe. So it can't possibly coalesce into these Boltzmann brains if it's the only particle around. So when you, when you think about the practical implications of the cosmological model that we think is most likely answer for the future of the

universe, the Boltzmann brain's idea starts to fall over a little bit. Have you read the five ages of the universe? I haven't, no. That's the Fred Adams, Greg Loughlin book. Oh, I know, I probably know, I know the paper because they wrote a paper, which is the deep time of the universe. And that's a classic paper that I've given to my students many, many times. It talks about, yeah, the decay of the proton, the, the far

future of the, of how the last stars all go out and the possibility from new stars. So I know the paper quite well. I haven't read the book. This is, this is like the normie translation probably of that paper. It's just, I think it's maybe 25 years old now. Uh, it's in the nineties. I think that the book was written, uh, it's written excessively, but it's still heavy going for a muggle like me.

Um, but I love thinking about far futures. I absolutely, there's something so. True or inspiring and sort of dreadful about it. And it's into the same way as spatially looking up at the night sky makes you feel small and insignificant. This is the same, but doing it with time, like a temporally insignificant. And, uh, yeah, just thinking about how much further they go ahead. You had that beautiful story. I must've listened to it five or 10 times.

The one about the civilization that waits until the very, very final stars are going to die. That stuff to me, far futures thinking is one of the coolest thought experiments to do. Yeah. It's a bizarre concept to think that we are at the beginning of the story. It kind of feels like everything is often presented to us as we should treat ourselves as mediocre. So if you were born in a random country, it's pretty unlikely you're gonna be born in a tiny country like the Virgin Islands or something,

because it's just the population is so tiny there versus being born in a country like United States or China or India or something, you're much more likely to be born there. So that's the mediocrity principle. But when we apply the mediocrity principle to time, it just doesn't work. So the history of the whole universe should stretch out for trillions and trillions and trillions of years, even 10 to the 10 type years we're talking about here. And we live in the not just the first chapter and not just the first page,

but like the very first letter of that whole story. And that feels really odd. It feels incongruous with our expectation that we should be typical and we shouldn't expect to be special. And yet when we look at our timing, it is clearly very special. And there's no reason why in all of that vast, deep future, we couldn't arrive much, much later in the story. You can imagine, as I said, these red dwarfs, which will live for trillions of years. Why shouldn't they have planets and life around them for a very long time? In that paper, and I'm sure the book as well, Greg Loughlin talks about the idea of brown dwarfs colliding together and birthing new stars. And that would be a very rare event, but over the vast, vast epic of time, they actually form a significant population of stars which form. And in all of that deep, deep future, Boltzmann brains, it seems odd that we would live right at the very, very beginning of the story. And I think about

that a lot. I'm trying to make sense as to what it means. It seems to suggest that either our idea of mediocrity is fundamentally wrong, that we should not assume we're in the middle, that maybe it's okay to assume we're special in this sense, which is strange as that sounds. Or, or perhaps there is something about the deep future, which is, which is inhospitable. The universe, there's two ways out. The universe could which is inhospitable. There's two ways out. The universe could just become inhospitable over time. And it may be not necessarily through stars because we think there'd be plenty of stars,

but maybe a roaming civilization, just like a virus. Hoovering up. Hoover's up all planets, which could potentially have life. That would actually work really well as explanation. If a roaming AI went around the universe and it happened spontaneously in many different parts of the universe

at a certain amount of time, an AI just arrives and it spreads off and it just knocks off everything and it just converts everything into computers. And it would actually- Paying attention to everyone. Yeah, that would actually make sense as to why we lived when we did in history

of the universe. Or if there was another catastrophic event, like the universe went through like a false vacuum decay event, which essentially means the universe itself becomes unstable. And we have almost like another big bang type event in the next 10, 20 billion years. It's kind of improbable when you do the math that should happen. But that again would, would rationally explain why we live when we live. And so the mediocrity principle does seem in strong tension with this chronology. And I think that's probably why you and many others and myself included get so alluring this idea. And so there's something about it, something profound

here. There's a lesson and we just can't quite see what the lesson is, but there's something here for us to pick apart and there's some deep truth that we're missing that this is telling us. Is there not something to be said about the rate at which new stars and therefore planets are being born that that will sort of drop off over time? Therefore being shunted toward the start is more likely to kind of more fertile ground. That's only true. So suddenly star formation rate is already in decline in the GAR, in our galaxy.

It's already in decline. So the peak of star formation rate has passed, which is already kind of sad, right? The good times have peaked in terms of the economy of the galaxy. We're in a stellar depression. Yeah, right. It's kind of depressing to think of it that way. But despite that, there's just so much time ahead of us that even if you reduce the rate to 10% of that, which is now, that if you have a trillion times longer to go, you're

still going to have like a lot of stars. So even though there is a peak, it's not a symmetric peak. I guess that's the thing to get your head around. It's a very, very long tailed peak and it takes a long time to decline all the way down to zero star formation. And so if you actually add up how many stars live in the tail of that distribution, there's far more stars and planets born in the tail of the distribution than there are born at the peak of the distribution. And so then, then it gets, then it gets really curious, like why, why

therefore should civilizations also be correlated in their birth rate to planets, you might expect that naively to be true. in their birth rate to planets. You might expect that naively to be true. How right is it to say that we would be one of the first civilizations to come about, assuming this sort of mediocrity principle, but then also I've heard that, you know, stars and planets have been born, lived and died many times over before ours was even created. Therefore we should see

some civilizations out there that they've had chance to get to where we are and way beyond. Yeah, it's certainly a way of resolving many puzzles. Like why do we not see a galactic empire spanning the galaxy that has done this star lifting thing we talked about earlier, or just converted stars into giant machines or built infrastructure or have starship lanes across the galaxy. We don't see any of this. We have been doing SETI for 50, 60 years and we don't hear any radio signals from other parts of the galaxy either. I mean, it is possible there's someone out there, but they're very quiet. It's not a chattery, loud galaxy out there. And this raises a puzzle.

Like it may be one explanation. This is really the Fermi paradox we're talking about now is one explanation is that we are the first. And not only would we be the first, that would necessarily imply that intelligent civilizations are very, very rare, right? Because the galaxy is already 13 billion years old, almost the same age as the universe. So that implies that it's a one per 13 billion year event,

which is incredibly unusual then, if that was the case. So it is possible with first, I tend to lean more on the idea that I think lots of, if there is life out there and civilizations out there, I think getting to this point is not that hard. I think it probably does happen. But the real question is the future for us, the future of humanity, whether we can continue on this path that we've been continuing on in a, this is unsustainable trajectory that we've frankly been living in over the last few centuries, certainly. It seems questionable that we can keep doing this.

One way to resolve this is to try and live in balance with your planet, of course, and try to be like a more sustainable civilization. I think having, you know, I used to work with nuclear weapons, like having nuclear weapons is just immediately unsustainable, because as long as there's a 0.00% risk of someone clicking the red button each year, given enough time, it will happen. It's just the same thing. Given enough time, there will inevitably be a nuclear war as long as nukes exist. It's just a question of when, not a question of if. It's just going to happen. So that's already kind of terrifying.

And really, what we're doing to our planet is kind of terrifying. And really what we're doing to our planet is kind of similar. We are affecting the habitability of our planet by this huge experiment of modifying the chemical composition of our atmosphere. And that's also kind of concerning. I don't think it's going to cause an extinction event for humanity. I'm not a doomist in that sense, but I do think it would probably put pressure on our economy. It will mean we'll probably take resources away from science, from develop, you know, exploring space. And I think we'll become more and more insular.

And then you can kind of imagine why a civilization would never spread between the stars because they get so distressed and so hung up on, on just keeping alive basically, and trying to maintain some level of comfort level to what they're used to that the idea of spending 10% of your income on something which might seem frivolous like building a moon base or a Mars base just becomes a lower and lower priority. And certainly that's happening with our own budgetary definitions over the last sort of five, 10 years or so we're seeing less and less money go to basic sciences in the United States. And so this is also a worry that it could be that very,

very slow decline. And I think that could be a possible explanation for the Fermi paradox, that this happens quite often. Civilizations, they're inherently unsustainable and they run up into themselves and it's themselves that are the ultimate threat to their own growth. But on the other hand, that means that if someone cracks this and they do become sustainable, we probably would never see them because someone who is completely sustainable would be invisible. If you're in complete equilibrium with your planet, then there's nothing to look for. I mean, if we want to look for a civilization, what do we look for? We look for the solar panels because that's want to look for a civilization, what do we look for?

We look for the solar panels, because that's in disequilibrium with the planet, because that's not the natural material on the surface of the planet. Or you would look for a nuclear bomb going off. That's in disequilibrium with the natural state of the planet. But if a civilization truly reaches a completely 100% sustainable state, there is no signature to look for that would be indistinguishable from a natural, perfectly natural biosphere.

So that's intriguing. We may not be able to actually detect those civilizations because they're so good at looking like a natural planet. Given the time that you spend thinking about potential futures for civilizations, the ways that they may or may not be in equilibrium. Does it give you a, an additional sense of seriousness and trepidation sort of about what, whatever we do here on earth, the fact that you kind of can see cosmically, galactically, this sort of knife edge of just how easy it would be to not end up keeping going the way that maybe we would like to.

Yeah. I think it's such an awesome responsibility when you think about the pressure of just existing as a species. It is, you know, I think about this my own life a lot. And maybe you do as well that if you've played computer games growing up, well as I did, it does feel sometimes that life is a bit like a computer game. Like it's kind of wild. And in a computer game, you realize there's certain rules and you realize what

you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do. And once you know what you're allowed to do, it's kind of sometimes a little bit crazy that you actually, I could like complete the game. I could basically finish the whole thing. I could, you know, could build this massive city or massive empire, whatever it is you're playing in the game. And life is kind of like that. When you realize the rules of the game, you realize there's nothing really stopping you

from do it, from completing everything you want to complete in the thing. And I think as a species, it's wild to think that we have that. As far as we can tell, the rules of this game that we're playing do not prohibit us from one day colonizing the entire galaxy if we wanted to. There's nothing in the game that prevents us from doing that as far as we can tell. There's nothing that prevents us from having a civilization which would last for a trillion years of building wonders that would, you know, light up the universe essentially. And yet none of that has happened. And so it is interesting that we have this awesome power as we still have free will, I believe. I still believe

in free will and choice. And so I believe that we have the opportunity if we decide to take our civilization, wherever we want to take it and become that dream civilization, that maybe whatever it is we have, for me, maybe it is a civilization that spans the galaxy, maybe for you it's something else. But whenever that dream is, we can achieve it. And so that just reframes for me a little bit, the power we have. I think we often feel powerless, but when you realize it's just, there are these rules and there's nothing in the rule that prevents this. It's exciting. It means it's up to us what we do.

It's still our choice, what we do with this planet, what we do with our society. It's all up to us. There's a lot of responsibility that comes along with that. Yeah. It can feel sometimes paralyzing and crushing the weight of that. Like, wow, I could, you know, if you were told you were a child progeny and therefore you're expected to become the greatest genius since Einstein, that could feel like an enormous pressure on your shoulders. You can only fail from there. Yeah.

To live up to your father's expectations. That's as many of us have felt that, that, that pressure, but there is no father. That this is just us. It, there's no, no one's expecting us to do anything because it is just us. It's, it's, we're, we're in a game. It's a one player game. It's just us in the game. There's no one else out there as far as we can tell.

So we can do whatever the hell we want to do. And if we want to destroy our planet, we are totally capable of destroying our planet. If we want to live in squalor and have a terrible economy and society and burn the environment down, it is within our power, but it's equally within our power to do something completely different and have the future that we dream of. I, that's what I believe. And so I've always found that uplifting actually, that we have the agency.

That's the keyword, the agency to be whoever we want to be both personally as individuals, I think, but also especially as a civilization, but it's a collective agency to work together to form whatever we want to form. Yeah, that's the coordination problem, right? It would be, what a shame it would be if we jump through all of these evenly spaced, insanely unlikely, suburb of the galaxy into having the moon that's tidally locked into having the sun that's the right size and where the right distance and then the pro- cryotic life into the eukaryotic

life and then all the way up, all the way up, all the way up. And then tribal biases and in-group out-group signaling and, you know, just define what feels like the final hurdle before you go. Because I'm going to guess this would be an interesting question. I suppose that, um, if we were to get ourselves to something close to multi-planetary life, how much of a, how big of a step change in our long-term survivability odds do you think that that makes? I think a significant one. Um, it's hard to put a number on that. I think it would obviously save us from certain threats that we could either put ourselves into the Earth or could

come from outward forces. So an outward force might be an asteroid impact, most obviously. Inward forces could be some kind of massive conflict or a virus or something like this. So it certainly provides some fencing off of that kind of danger conflict or a virus or something like this. So it certainly provides some fencing off of that kind of danger. But of course, there are other threats beyond that. I mean, we all know that with COVID, it wasn't self-contained to a single country, right? And so if there was a virus, whether it's a mind virus or a physical biological virus, it still would most likely have vectors to spread to neighboring colonies even in the solar system. It seems quite plausible that the entire solar system would still be in danger of suffocating by such a threat. And of course, an outward threat could

be a supernovae or a gamma ray burst, which would equally put the whole solar system at risk. So it's definitely an advantage, but it's not enough. If your sole priority is to perpetuate the flame of consciousness, as Musk would say, then you'd want to not just be interplanetary, but interstellar to truly achieve that and even eventually intergalactic to achieve that. But then you have to question, why hasn't a civilization done that? Because as we say, we don't see evidence for regions of the Stegi which have been colonized in this way. Although perhaps they're just doing it in such a way that they don't want to be detected or hiding from us in some way. But as far as we can tell, this kind

of empire building doesn't seem to happen very often. But I would hope that we can continue to keep this consciousness going because I think there's so much, it's such a boring universe without it. And I think of the potential far-flung futures of what we could be really helps to give perspective. It really is kind of the, um, sort of philosophical, imaginative equivalent of looking up at the night sky and making yourself feel small and, and putting your problems into perspective and, and realizing just how much you should probably be thinking of a broader horizons in all directions, in all different types.

And, uh, it's oddly existentially reassuring, I think, in some ways, or at least I find it, I find it is. Yeah. Yeah. One of my colleagues says about time a little bit as well. And he said to me, um, I think with it, with our lives, sometimes as individuals who feel this way that I'll get to this point and then I'll be happy. I'll get to this point and then I'll do this. There's always that thinking of the future as a point of rest or a point of achievement. And one of my good

friends, he said to me, this is it, you're in your 30s, this is life right now. Don't let life slip you by because you're so focused on the future. And I think as astronomers, I tend to live especially in the future because we think about this deep time, but don't live your whole life thinking about making sure, obviously it's important to have enough money for retirement and be comfortable with things like this,

but don't obsess your whole life about that because you'll miss out on what's happening right in front of you and somehow being present and, and seizing what's in front of you isn't, is an equally important lesson because at the end of the day, life is incredibly short and I'm turning 40 this year. And that's like making me think like, wow, like where's the last 10 years just gone? Like they're just disappeared under the abyss. And you do start to realize that like, this is it.

You only get this one life and it's going by pretty fast and you don't want to mess around. There's a, should be a sense of urgency, I think, in your life. That's how I try to live my life with a sense of urgency that every day is kind of precious and matters and you're not going to get a second chance at this. Yeah, I love that. Can we talk about my new favorite pet obsession, which is TUN 618?

Is this massive galaxy or massive star? It's a black hole. Oh, the black hole. Yeah. I don't know too much about this black hole though, to be honest. I think it's just the biggest one that's been logged. But when you look at the size of this thing, I think it's, it's event horizon is larger than the orbit of, it's basically larger than our entire solar system. Like this thing is just beyond, beyond. It's like gargantuan from interstellar,

basically. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's just beyond obscene. And the more that I learn about the, again, far futures and then looking at, um, at black holes and kind of the, the very odd way that they break much of the intuitions that even someone that knows as little about me, uh, as me about physics has, uh, they're just so fascinating. Like the unanswered questions about black holes are just beyond fascinating. Well, they're such bizarre objects. I mean, they really seem like a nightmare that's come to real life. They're so strange, like a hole in space time.

And many people, including Einstein, didn't believe they were possible until we really started to see more and more direct evidence for their real existence. So they're very strange. And I think the massive ones have been a puzzle mostly in context of what astronomers, research astronomers are talking about. The most common thing I hear about with massive black holes is the puzzle of how they got so big, especially as fast as they seem to have got that big. So when we look at the images from the James Webb space telescope, we do see evidence of massive black holes, what we call quasars, these active galactic nuclei, which basically fed. So there's material falling into the black hole and it forms these very

powerful jets and we can see these jets. And that allows us to kind of weigh how heavy the black hole likely is. And we see evidence for black holes, which are just so large in the early universe that it doesn't seem possible that there was enough time given the age of the universe then to have built something that big, that massive. And that has been a puzzle. It's similar for galaxies as well. Galaxies and black holes tend to go together for the supermassive black holes.

It's kind of an open question, like a chicken egg problem as to what comes first. Is it the galaxy that first forms and then in the center you end up with a black hole or does the black hole come first and that leads to kind of like a seed to the rest of the galaxy or maybe a bit of both, maybe a bit of both is going on. But certainly when we look at these early images, we're seeing evidence of both unusually massive black holes and galaxies in the early universe. And it's puzzling that the universe can form stuff this fast. There are some ideas around this that are maybe a bit more exotic that people are floating around. One idea is a primordial black hole. So this is something which could have actually formed from essentially the conditions of the Big Bang itself. So very soon after the Big Bang, it's a very dense soup, right? The universe when it first formed and it gets less and less dense as it expands. And so maybe some of those densities

are a little bit denser than others, little pockets, and those pockets could collapse down and form black holes directly, no stars involved, just from the raw material of what came out of the cosmic super the Big Bang. And those things could be potentially both very big and very small. They could even be earth-sized, earth-mass black holes, or they could form things all the way up to like the kind of turn 618 gargantuan style black holes as well. So people are struggling and they're reaching a little bit for some of these more exotic theories right now. And you know, we have many surveys still planned with J2ST. It's still only two years into its sort of 20 year mission. That's hopefully got ahead of itself. And so this is definitely an area of active research right now. And

I don't really want to predict what the answer will be at this point because it's hard to tell. I think a lot of people are saying we should rip up our models of cosmology, and I don't agree with that. I don't think the Big Bang theory is fundamentally wrong or the models we use, we call like the standard model of cosmology essentially, is fundamentally an issue. I don't think you have to throw that out to explain these things, at least not yet. And I think astronomers have very good reasons to not want to do that because then how do you explain the fact that it explains 999 other things perfectly? Like that's really, how do you explain

all that other stuff so well, so perfectly well, if you throw out this model? So I think it's probably issues of, you know of some of the early galaxies, especially that are being discovered. It was actually the star formation models were probably in error. So we take the rate of how we think stars form and we take the local star formation rate of what we see around us as kind of a proxy for that. So you say if you have a certain amount of density, a certain amount of gas, you expect to form this number of stars. And we see that around the solar system locally. And then we take those models and we extrapolate them onto these very, very distant galaxies on the other side of the universe. And reasonably, astronomers have pointed out that's probably not

a good idea because why should we expect the way in which stars form from this mature metal rich, you know, very old gas cloud to at all be similar to the way the very, very first primordial stars formed. And when you modify your models to account for those differences, you actually can explain where these early galaxies came from. So I think it's probably an issue of not the fundamental cosmology being wrong, but the way in which we think that stars and black holes form within that cosmology probably needing updating. At least I hope that's the case because if we have to throw out cosmology completely, you know, it's both exciting, but we make problems. It'd be a big headache to explain all

of the other stuff that it works so well for. Do you class yourself as an experimentalist? Is that sort of the camp within which you sit? Yeah. You know what? I don't like labels at all. So maybe a bit controversial in a sense, but a lot of astronomers, maybe an astronomer is a label I'm okay with, but a lot of astronomers, maybe an astronomer isn't a label I'm okay with, but a lot of astronomers would split themselves up into categories of theorist, modeler, or observer. They're probably

your three categories of astronomer, theorist, modeler, or observer. A modeler kind of sits in between those two, the theorist who do pen and paper math and their work and stuff out on the blackboard, the observers who are going to the telescope collecting data, and the modelers who are trying to connect the two worlds to each other. And I do all three. So that's why I don't really like a specific label. And I also just think in general advice I give to students is that it's not useful or conducive to work with such a label. If you tell yourself you're an observer, then it's like someone saying, I can't do math. And I hear this all the time. So many students who come into the classroom and say, I've never been able to do math. I can't do it. It's just, it's all gobbled

up to me. And if you approach the world with that mindset, then of course you won't be able to do math. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. You've predestined that you can't do math. And so I think calling yourself an observer is, can have negative connotations like that was negative self connotations that you think, therefore I can't do X, Y or Z. So I prefer personally to, to, to really not work with those labels. Not because I'm trying to be pretentious, but just because I think it doesn't serve any purpose for my, for my, for me, thinking about the things that I can it doesn't serve any purpose for me thinking about the things

that I can and can't do. And even with astronomy, I'd prefer not even to really be an astronomer because I like a bit of philosophy, I like thinking about astrobiology, I like thinking about the connections to biology and the chemical world as well. So I don't really want to be... And statistics, I write a lot of almost pure statistics papers, so I don't want to be in any one camp. And I think that's how it was. And back in the day, there was just these polymaths that just worked on everything. And that was beautiful because they could see connections

between things that you would miss. And we live in an academic world right now that really promotes extreme specialization. Not only are you an astronomer, you are an exoplanet astronomer. And over you an exoplanet astronomer, you're an exoplanet atmosphere astronomer. And only you're an atmosphere astronomer, you're a cloud astronomer. It gets like more and more niche.

And like, literally I'll bump into students at meetings and post-docs who will say, you know, oh, I'm a cloud specialist. And that you know, a cloud specialist and that's great. But, you know, don't you think about other aspects as well? Because how, if you're not thinking about the chemistry and the surface, how can you possibly connect that to the chemistry in the atmosphere that has all these things are connected to each other in some way. So yeah, a bit of a rant there, but I just don't think it's particularly useful personally to operate with a label. And I just, it's kind of one of my pet heaves that in a, in a world of

academia, we have become overly specialized in niche in our interests. Yeah. That's a specialization being for insects. It's I spoke to Eric Weinstein twice about this. I remember I spoke to Sabina Hossenfelder a while ago about this too. It seems to me that the theoretician's less, maybe so on the astronomy side, but as I'm hearing you speak today,

it's so evident that there's just tons of cool, interesting stuff that's being found out, that's being tested. And you have a sort of vim and vigor about, it's so cool. Your passion's infectious. That's why I love your YouTube channel. Um, but then I look over to kind of M theory string theory, you know, like hardcore theoretician side of stuff.

And it just seems like I can say this because I'm not a physicist and I'm not getting you in trouble, but it just seems like this weird, boring, groundhog day circle jerk of people not really making legitimate progress in any one direction. From what I know, it's incredibly sort of tribal and quite politically, um, kind of, uh, driven, uh, oddly the people that are trying to sort of transcend or helping us transcend humanity, some of the ones that are the most captured by it. Um, it just must be of all of the different areas that you could have found yourself in, in physics.

It seems like there's lots to do, lots of new territory and ground to cover. Very much a kind of like Captain Cuck new worlds, sort of, let's go find some cool stuff out over here mentality as opposed to, yeah, this very slow moving quicksand that may be going backward, maybe going in the wrong direction, who knows, uh, on the like hardcore theoretician side. Yeah. I think academia is littered with many issues, many problems. It is by far away from a perfect idyllic system.

I mean, when I was a kid, I actually did want to be a professor. I thought about that. I never thought I'd be doing it to be honest. I never thought I'd get to that point. It seemed like you'd have to be like some kind of super juniors or something to become a professor, but it seemed idyllic in that I imagined you just sat in your office and thought about the universe all day.

And that's not really, sometimes you get moments to do that, but most of the job is not doing that. People don't act with pure intent. People aren't all driven just by this pure scientific ideology. Like any industry, like any corporation, any field, there's personalities, there's cultures, there's people trying to play politics, trying to protect their little area and trying to shoot down your little area. And that's distressing. A lot of academics do become disenfranchised and disillusioned with the whole game and eventually leave the field and go on to become much more successful working in a hedge fund

company or finance, especially my colleagues, that's very popular to, to basically just cash out. Right. You call these math skills. Why not, why not use it to make bank, right? Because it's actually not that hard to do. So finding all of these stupid planets, we can't make money off the back of that. Yeah. And I think, and I know very clearly there was a colleague of mine, he was

brilliant and he felt this way. He said, um, look, I wrote this package that everybody, this software package, this statistical package that everybody in the whole community is pretty much using at this point. It's been cited thousands of times. There were entire conferences organized about his paper and about his work, and yet he could not navigate his way to a successful faculty job despite that. Because people would say, well, you're just a software engineer in the field. You're not a real astronomer. And so there was that pretentiousness of you're not doing the kind of hardcore maybe string theory, M theory,

pen and paper stuff that maybe people might imagine when they think about a physicist looking like. And so those stereotypes have been problematic. It frustrated him enormously, of course. And he said, I just don't know what I'm supposed to aim for. I just want to know what is it that I am supposed to do? Is it supposed to get citations? Because I've got that. Is it because I'm supposed to be invited to talks? Because I get, so what am I supposed to do? And he was so frustrated and eventually said, I'm done with this. I'm just left the field. And I think that's, it's a different example, but software engineers, we are now trying to promote that actually.

So the Simon's foundation, which is down the road from us here, they're now starting up faculty jobs that are supported privately just in software engineering, in astronomy and other sciences as well. But they're really putting money to support these types of positions because they are so important. But even in my own little world of exo moons, which is like the most niche thing in the world you could imagine working on, I spend not all my time working on that, but I spend a significant fraction of my time working on that. But I don't want to do one thing. But when in that little world, there's probably only a few dozen of us on the planet

who are thinking about exomeons in a professional setting. And even within that little world, it's been not always the most pleasant experience amongst colleagues. Because I think sometimes when it is a very small field, people do get very competitive. And if it is a small pond, the temptation is to have that, we just have to have one big fish. And where if it's a big pond, people maybe play a little bit more easily together or maybe like a large collaboration tries to become the big fish that takes over. But certainly if you're in a niche field, and I think string theory and M theory have become, there's not many students we recruit now that are interested in work on that topic.

But I think whenever you have a field that does become fairly insular, politics and the darker side of human behavior doesn't inevitably play out. And that happens in all fields. I don't think it's necessarily isolated to theoretical physics, M theorytheory, string theory. I think it happens in every aspect of science to just different degrees.

And it is something which I hate. And I always try to avoid as much as I can, but even doing stuff like this, like doing YouTube videos, podcasts, even that will create friction, right? Because people are like, well, you're not doing real science. You know, you should be just, all your time should be dedicated to just doing pure research, which obviously I disagree with. Like we don't talk about our research. We don't talk about the universe and get people excited about what's out there.

What the hell is the point of this? Like, no, we're not training the next generation. We're not inspiring anyone. We're not ultimately bringing in funding to support our activities. So, and also it makes, it makes me a better scientist when I, when I do this kind of work, but everything you do, there's always going to be a site that's going to be that side that like wants to downplay it and pour cold water on it. But I think just having a thick skin is probably the best advice I can give

anyway, like if you just get to a point where you just don't care, which is kind of eventually what I've got to, then you, you just like, I know this is the right thing for me, I'm just going to do it. I know this is the right thing. And I think that's hard to get through, but when there's politics playing out, that's the only advice I have is just try to like keep your head down and just, and just push through those headwinds. Yeah.

It's strange that Puritans and politics exists even in physics, which we would hope are kind of above that or outside of that, maybe in a different dimension. I did want to ask about how your YouTube channel, which is nearly a million subscribers, all of the different things that you do, how that, how balancing that with tenure track. I mean, have you got people that just purposefully take your modules and your courses because they love your YouTube channel and they want to be near Professor Kipping? Like how have those streams sort of crossed over? Has it helped you get access to really phenomenal grad students to come into your lab? It must be a big usefulness there. It has been, yeah.

It's always weird to me. When I make the videos, I always make them assuming nobody watches them. At least nobody I know watches them. That's for sure. I kind of make them in a sense that I want them to be high quality and the highest product I can, the best I can do with it. But I always assume that no one in New York watches it.

And when I, and so it's always very strange to me when someone talks to me about it and, you know, bumps into you because sometimes it's in the street, someone asks you about it. Not that often. I'm not super famous or anything. But, and especially odd when I go to an astronomy conference and other astronomers say I watched your video and that's always a surprise to me because I was like, well, I almost feel bad because that video wasn't meant for you. Like it's, it's cool that you watch my video, but that video was not meant for a professional astronomer. Not that there's anything wrong in the video, but you were just not the audience that I was like gearing that to when I made that video. So I almost feel like bad when they watch my videos, that they, they see a, a presentation style as a speaker, which is not reflective of how I would give a colloquium or a seminar or something in a way. But it has been useful and we've been able to, one of the major ways it's been useful is actually through donations to my team. So we have a

research account called the Cool World's Lab Research account here at Columbia University. And people donate anywhere from five bucks a month up to, I think our maximum is 500 bucks a month. We have a few of those. Why can people go? So if they want to donate to your lab, why should they go? Yeah. It's coolworldslab.com is the website.

And then there's a link called support in there you can hit. So if you head over to there, you can support us. And the amazing thing is that you are, you know, this isn't money that I get. So this isn't like a Patreon where you get to a golden throne in your office somewhere at Columbia. No, no, there's, I don't see any of this money directly. It all just supports. It all just supports research.

That's it. So we're supporting like paying for, um, the students stipends to keep them, to hire them, to recruit them. We're paying for supercomputer time, cluster time, for disk space, publication costs, travel costs to conferences. We're supporting Bridge Program students. So we're doing all this activity with that.

And especially it's been great because it's allowed us to get off this academic wheel that we've sort of been alluding to of, how do you pursue your research passions? One of my research passions is, as we've sort of been alluding to of, um, how do you, how do you pursue your research passions? One of my research passions is, as we've talked about searching for life in the universe, but believe it or not, that's very hard to find funding for, especially for intelligent life in the universe. It's still kind of got a giggle factor aspect a little bit to it.

And it's pretty hard to persuade NASA or the National Science Foundation to hand over much money to do research in that area. But it's, I think, one of the most interesting questions we can do. And many people agree. And so the funding we get from the public has allowed us to basically pursue the questions that we think are the most interesting rather than the questions which we know are most likely to get funded. Right. So that's typically when I'm writing a grant, that's typically how we have to write grants.

You typically have to write the grant to be, this isn't what I'm interested in. This isn't even particularly interesting to anybody, but I know this is the boring science that they will likely fund. And it's usually boring because it's low risk. It's something that you just know you can do. And anyone could frankly do it. Who's a professional astronomer. It's just arduous. And it's not even in my, frankly, half the time, particularly that interesting half the stuff that you get done with these grants, but you know, it's kind of a guaranteed slam dunk hit that you will have a guaranteed science product at the end of this work. Whereas high risk work is by nature, you don't know like where it's going of a guaranteed slam dunk hit that you will have a guaranteed science product at the end of this work.

Whereas high risk work is by nature, you don't know like where it's going to go, like what the product's going to be, but you're asking much bolder, ambitious questions. And if we stop, if we just always, you know, cut short and just go for the simplest stuff with the guaranteed results, we're never going to really advance the field and advance our ambitions in space. So, I've been very proud and honored to have those donations to support our work. And that's been a big influence. And of course it has been useful for recruitment to some extent as well. Yeah.

What is this satellite time, this observation time that I know that you just got a big allowance for, I saw your video about it. Yeah. So it's a telescope time on the James Webb space telescope. So James Webb is the big one. This is like playing Glastonbury, right? Main stage. Oh yeah. This is, this is the pyramid stage.

Yeah, this is big. So the, uh, the James Webb space telescope, six and a half meter telescope is an infrared telescope. It was launched a few years ago now. It's in its second year of science operations. For the previous two years, we had proposed as well to search for an exoplanet for an exomoon. We had previously claimed evidence, tentative evidence of exo moons in two of the systems. Um, but we hadn't really got to the point where the evidence was overwhelming. And to do that, you really want something with a precision of the best telescope,

which is James Webb. So we put in this pitch, but the problem is, I mean, there's, as I said, there's hardly anyone working on exo moons. So it's very unlikely this gets peer reviewed that the peer reviewer is going to be someone who's particularly fond of exo moon. So there's a little bit of politics there in terms of like getting selected time. And so I have to say we were very pessimistic.

We put in, we had this planet that I actually discovered. I discovered this planet myself in 2016. It's called Kepler 167E and I knew it was the perfect planet to look for an exo moon, just coincidence, I guess, that I found it. But the planet is as similar to Jupiter as you could possibly want, has the same temperature as Jupiter, the same mass within 1%, the same radius, the same orbital eccentricity, everything about it is just Jupiter, Jupiter, Jupiter. So if this planet is like Jupiter, it should have the same kind of moons that Jupiter has, and we could prove that JWST could detect those moons.

So this was why it was so exciting. It was the only system this was true of. So we actually went through all 5000 exoplanets that had been discovered to date. And we calculated for each one of them. What's the biggest moon it could have? Could JVST detect that? And there was only about half a dozen or a dozen of planets that came out as potentially doable. And this one was by far the best, by far the best at the top. But only transits, which is the event we use when it eclipses its star, it only does that every three years. So if we didn't get the telescope time in the next cycle, which is in October, we would have to wait three more years until 2027, just to have another shot at doing this again. And J2ST, I hope it's still around, it should still be around 2027, but you never know. Like it's been hit by a meteor already once and damaged one of the mirrors.

So we just don't know for sure. We want to see this thing happen over and over again to get shored up evidence of its existence. So we were surprised, but very excited that they granted us a huge wallop of telescope time. We asked for 60 hours of telescope time and they gave us it. And we need 60 hours because this planet is so far from its star that it takes a long time for it to eclipse over its star.

Remember the total eclipse we had when the moon passed in front of the sun that we had in America just recently, that's a four minute transit basically. Whereas the event we're looking at lasts for about 20 hours, I think. So it's a 20 hour eclipse that you have to stare at. And then you wanna have like 20 hours either side to sort of calibrate your data and look for the exo moons. What would happen if you found exo moons? I think the hope is that this is just the start

of what happened in the field of exoplanets. So let's go back 25 years ago, we're at 1995, a little bit 30 years ago, you have the first exoplanet being discovered, 51 Pegasi b. Before that, hardly anyone was working on exoplanets. It was considered fringe. It was considered like looking for alien life and not a serious science. And despite that, most people thought, well, they should be out there. It seems obvious that planets should be out there, but it's intrinsically risky to try and claim you're the first person in anything in a scientific discipline. So I think with exo-moons, I see an

analogy that we will hopefully be able to make the first one and now cycle forward 25, 30 years after that first discovery, you have 5,000 plus exoplanets being used, being found. Now exoplanets represents probably about a quarter of all astronomy funding, depending on how you count it, but about a quarter of all astronomers and astronomy funding goes to exoplanetary science. 30 years ago that was zero. So there's been a blossoming of an entire field and it's not just for the sake of a field. We've learned so much about, it's completely revolutionized our understanding of planetary systems. We thought the solar system was the way it happened everywhere. We thought that was it. And that's totally wrong. That's totally wrong. The solar system is, if anything, like a weirdo on the block. It has just profoundly altered our worldview of

who we are in the universe, and it has now opened up the door to potentially detecting life in the next 10 years or so using these next generations of telescopes. Exo-moons will surely offer up so many surprises that we can't even anticipate yet. They may be seats for life in their own right, as we've already talked about. They may influence the possibility of life on the planets they orbit. The Moon and the Earth, remember, there's a connection there as to how that could be interacting with one another. And then finally, if we want to eventually take a photo, which I think we do, we want to take a photo of an Earth-like planet one day, we have to know about the moons around them. Because if I take a photo of an Earth-like planet one day, we have to know about the moons around them. Because if I take a photo of a pale blue dot of light, a distant image, I will be able to resolve

the planet from the star with these impressive next generations of telescopes we're planning, but I will not be able to resolve the moon from the Earth. They will be too close together for the telescope to resolve. So that pale blue dot of light Will actually be a pale blue gray blob of light It will be the mixture of light from the moon and the earth And when we look at that light if we don't understand there's a moon in there We're gonna completely misinterpret what the hell that light even means if you don't recognize that there's a moon in there In fact, it could even cause us to think we've detected life when we haven't. So I think

this is a very, very important question to figure out both for scientific goals, but also for our goals of trying to understand our uniqueness and origins in the universe. How exciting, man. David, I love your stuff. I love your YouTube channel. Let's bring this one into land. Where should people go? They want to check out everything that you do and follow you and support. Yeah.

So you can head to my YouTube channel. That's called the Cool Worlds Lab, at Cool Worlds Lab. And you can find that channel over there. We also have the Cool Worlds Podcast, which we started out over the last year. Again, just grab that on YouTube or iTunes, wherever you are. And finally, you can also just check out my Twitter handle, David underscore Kipping and head to my website, CoolWordsLab.com. If you want to learn more.

Oh yeah, David, I really appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you.