Moonshots with Peter Diamandis - EP #27 Black Holes, Exoplanets, and other Webb Telescope Discoveries w/ Amber Straughn (NASA Astrophysicist)

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

In this episode, Amber and Peter discuss the 25-year journey of bringing the James Webb Space Telescope to life; they dive into space theory and the future possibilities with the JWST and answer the question, “are we the first sentient beings in the universe?” You will learn about: 09:34 | What It's Like Strapping $10 Billion Onto An Explosive Rocket. 44:01 | Are We The First Sentient Beings In The Universe? 58:23 | The Stars That Brought Amber Straughn To Tears. Dr. Amber Straughn is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and serves as the Deputy Project Scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. Her research explores how black holes and stars form in distant galaxies. _____________ Resources Check out the latest discoveries of the  James Webb Space Telescope Learn more about Abundance360. Read the Tech Blog. Learn more about Moonshots & Mindsets.  _____________ This episode is brought to you by: My executive summit, Abundance360 Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter  Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's the sound of unaged whiskey transforming into Jack Daniel's Tennessee whiskey in Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around 1860, Nearest Green taught Jack Daniel how to filter whiskey through charcoal for a smoother taste, one drop at a time. This is one of many sounds in Tennessee with a story to tell. To hear them in person, plan your trip at tnvacation.com. Tennessee sounds perfect. Of all these trillions of galaxies, trillions of planets that we've talked about, all the stuff we can see, all the stuff we can sense, all that stuff, as immense as it is, only makes up 5% of the universe, right? 95% of the universe is something we don't understand at all. And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like,

this is who I am. This is what I'm going to do. This is the dent I'm going to make in the universe. Welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. We're about to enter a 90-minute conversation with an extraordinary astrophysicist dr amber strong who is one of the deputies at the james webb space telescope this is the telescope launched that's a hundred times more powerful than hubble a 10 billion dollar mission that took 25 years from inception to launch and has shocked the world with its data with amber's work we're going to talk about everything from gigantic black holes at the center of every universe whether alien life form is ubiquitous out there every place or whether the human race is on its own. We're going to talk about the

discoveries that have been made. We've seen further back in time than ever before, 13.8 billion. We've seen more galaxies out there than we can imagine, brighter and more numerous. We're going to talk about the other images that have come from Hubble and the future telescopes. In fact, one of the most interesting is going to be the Habitable Worlds Telescope that's going to be looking for life on planets around other star systems, exoplanets. So join me for one of the most extraordinary conversations I've had yet on moonshots and mindsets with Dr. Amber Strong and get ready to have the child inside you just explode with awe and excitement. Hi everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots and

Mindsets. I am here as a nine-year-old kid about to have an extraordinary conversation with Amber Strong. Amber, I've introduced you already. I'm so excited. You know, we first met at an XPRIZE event in which you just wowed the audience. And I was like, I want to get your message and everything you stand for out to the world. Good morning. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's a fun time in space right now, I'll just say. Yeah, no, it is between, you know, Starship about to launch and, you know, our missions back

to the moon. But I think the James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, has captured the world's imagination. And we're going to dive into, I think, for me, what you find exciting. I wake up every morning and the first 15 minutes I'm catching up on science news. I don't watch CNN or Fox or any of that stuff. I dial in and there's always a what's new in the universe type of, and that's awesome. Are you having like the time of your life right now? Absolutely. I mean, it's just like you said, there's new images almost daily, new discoveries now that are happening now that us scientists have had time to sort of delve into the images

and find out what they're telling us. But yeah, it's one of the things I love most about this mission and about astronomy in general is that it is sort of this bright spot in our lives right now. All good news. Yeah, it's good news, right? And I love it. I love that aspect of it. Yeah, the only thing that would be really a bummer is if, you know, the telescope discovered a black hole heading our way,

or if, you know, like there's an asteroid about to like plummet into the Earth. know like there's an asteroid about to like plummet into the earth i mean i remember someone saying listen you're you're you're uh an asteroid coming towards the earth is a way of god saying how is your space program doing that's a that is a fun way to put it yeah oh my god and we'll talk about black holes we'll talk about all of these these things in this conversation and i'm going to speak to you about alien life in the universe because we've had that conversation and I want to share it. So let's take a second and actually describe what is the James Webb Space Telescope because it's an extraordinary piece of technology. You want to talk a little about the history and about, you know, describe what makes this thing so significant? Sure. Well, just a little personal aside, I've been working on this mission at NASA

since I've been at NASA for almost 15 years now. And so just to give a sense of scale of how big this mission is, not in terms of, well, also in addition to in terms of the physical size of the mission, but it's just, it's been going on for so long, you know, for well over 20 years, we've been building this telescope. And for even longer than that, we've been conceptualizing what it would do and how to build it in order to do what we wanted it to do. And so the JWST is the biggest, most complex, and most powerful telescope that NASA has ever sent to space. And to build something that big and complex and incredible, it really has taken the collective effort of tens of thousands of people over almost three decades in order to bring this

telescope to space. And it's personally to me just been the most incredible thing I ever could have thought about working on in terms of astronomy. And we're just, we're so happy that it is up there and it's doing great things. It is. I mean, like I looked at the dates, it was conceived of in 1996 and launched in 2021. So it's a 25 year moonshot. I'm going to call this one a moonshot. Is that fair enough? That's fair. Yeah. And I have to ask the question, were there like significant

moments of doubt along the way? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. There were several of those. And, you know, I think and they happened, of course, even long before I was on the mission myself. But just thinking about dreaming about building a telescope this big when we when engineers first started thinking about how to build it um we didn't have the requisite technologies in order to actually build it when we got started um engineers had to invent 10 brand new technologies just to make the telescope a reality and when you're doing something that big and transformative of course there are going to be points along the way where you encounter

major doubts, major setbacks. You know, it's thankfully well in the past, but, you know, Congress canceled the mission at one point. And so talk about a setback. Thankfully, we, we, the astronomical community and really the public in general, you know, stepped in and said, this is something we think is worth doing. And there were some, you know, reformulation at NASA. And we convinced our funders that we could actually do this. And it was there were several points in the in the mission where things were, you know, it's reality here. several points in the mission where things were, you know, it's reality. Dire.

Yeah. I mean, over budget, over schedule, you know, all the things that tend to plague these big, big, giant missions. This episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood. Now glucose is the fuel that powers your brain. It's really important. High prolonged levels of

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want to do doesn't exist when you set your objective. And because if it existed, it would be easy. But inventing it along the way and setting something that is by all standards, huge, crazy, scares you, but it's within the realm of the laws of physics. So let's start with that. Yeah. So that's crazy. I mean, of physics. So let's start with that. Yeah. So that's crazy. I mean, the other thing I remember when JWST announced it was going to go up on an Ariane 5, right? So this is the European's largest launch vehicle with the largest fairing. And Ariane 5 has a good track record, but not a perfect track record. And I mean mean just the fear that you had spent 25 years uh what's the budget of this program uh 10 billion us and then contributions 25 years 10 billion and everything is riding on a single launch that as a i don't know what the number was four percent

chance of not succeeding that's got to be nerve wracking. Absolutely. I mean, and space is nerve wracking, right? Space is hard. Like every time we put something in space, we put it on top of a stack of explosives. You know, that's just, that's the only way to get to space. And so it definitely, that moment of launch is for sure, I think, for anyone that's ever worked on space programs is a very scary moment. But like you said, the Ariane 5 has a good record, and it performs spectacularly. The rocket itself, the launch itself was so efficient, Peter, that we expect this telescope to have, it has propellant for over 20 years.

Wow. Yeah. So, explain that a second, because the life cycle of these, of spacecraft isn't necessarily decided by how long the electronics live and so forth. It's how long it can point and how long it can remain in the right orbit, which is how much gas does it have on board? Exactly. And that was a major consideration for this telescope. And of course, you know, you have these very constrained mass margins

where you have to build a spacecraft to fit within, you know, a certain mass. And then whatever extra you have at the end, you pack on more fuel to be able to keep it into orbit longer. And your listeners probably know this, but of course, JWST is a million miles away. It orbits the sun in line with the Earth, but that's a semi-stable point in space. So it's not like you just put a spacecraft there and it will stick.

So we have to use fuel to sort of keep it in that orbit out a million miles from space. Let's describe this visually. So the moon is a quarter million miles away. And we're talking about a spacecraft effectively on the other side of the moon by another four lengths of the earth moon distance so a million miles away right in line between the sun and the earth in a lagrange point yes right right second lagrange point amazing yeah and and why there so we put the telescope there mainly because in addition to being big this this telescope also had to be very, very cold. And the reason for that is the telescope

observes the universe in infrared light. So you think about most of the images from Hubble that we see are visible light, light that your eyes see. In order to do the very transformational astronomy that we had planned for this telescopes, we needed an infrared telescope and infrared light, you can sort of think of it like heat radiation. And so in order for the telescope and the instruments to be able to take these faint infrared signals, the telescope itself has to be very, very, very cold. That's because if it was warm, it would sort of glow and see itself, essentially.

So the telescope has to be cold. And that's one of the reasons we put it out in that part of space. And also being in that part of space means it can observe the universe functionally all the time, you know, except for when it's doing slews, when it's looking to a different place or something like that. So it gives us really good efficiency of observations. You think about Hubble, Hubble orbits the Earth, so it's only able to observe the universe half the time,

because half the time it's sort of in the sun. And so there's a lot of good reasons to put telescopes in that part of space and eventually on the dark side of the moon right yes uh yeah oh yeah yeah eventually for sure putting putting telescopes on the moon massive telescopes yeah telescopes on the other side the dark side of the moon you know one thing the when hubble went up and i remember the hubble launch Hubble launch went up in the payload bay of the space shuttle, and it was a giant, you know, cylindrical telescope, and it basically went up there fully assembled. It had to have its solar panels deploy. But that wasn't the case with JWST, right? It was a piece of origami art.

JWST, right? It was a piece of origami art. Can you explain that? Because what constrained it and how complex was its sort of deployment? Because that was epic in itself. Yeah, well, we talked about the scary moments of launch for most space missions. And launch was not the scariest part of this mission, to be honest. So, yeah, the telescope itself is so big. It stands almost four stories tall. It has a sunshield that's the size of a tennis court. So it's giant. It's much bigger than any rocket we have to launch it fully deployed.

So we had to build the telescope, like you said, as an origami telescope. We folded it up and put it in the rocket for launch, and then it unfolded once it was in space. So this deployment system took about two weeks total. There were hundreds of individual deployments to get the telescope completely unfolded. There were over 300 single point failures on this telescope. So if any one of them goes wrong, we're done. So that's the kind of intensity we were all experiencing over these two weeks of telescope deployments. It was absolutely pushing the edge of what we can do in an

engineering sense. And it was, you know, people used to ask me all the time before launch, like, are you nervous? And of course, you don't ever want to actually say you're nervous because our engineers have done all this work. And we trust that they've done all they can in order to make it work. But oh my goodness. But I mean, how do you test everything on the ground in one gravity when it's got to work in zero gravity in extreme temperature ranges? It sounds like, you know, it's what the kind of engineering we can do in the last decade. Exactly. Yeah, it's incredible that, you know, I'm a scientist.

I'm an astrophysicist. But being able to work at NASA sort of alongside the engineers as they built this telescope, it just it blows me away what they were able to do to build this telescope to get to get it to work. complex and the deployments happened beautifully. You know, and then after that two weeks of deployments, we had another five and a half months of getting the mirrors aligned, of getting the instruments turned on. So it was a total of six months after launch before we actually knew the thing was going to work. And it's just, it's absolutely incredible engineering. The telescope overall is working better than we expected across the board. As much as I or others may be critical of the organization here, of crazy discoveries and theories that are being predicted or disputed. Let's dive in there. What are you finding exciting here? Yeah, I mean, and one of the wonderful things about this telescope and about any sort of big observatory is that it's able to do so much.

You know, NASA has all kinds of different scales of telescopes, right? We have small telescopes that do one specific thing. And then all the way to this sort of extreme end, where we have this observatory that's able to look to the most distant regions of the universe, all the way to our own solar system to looking at planets in our own solar system and everything in between. And in just this first, it's really only been operational for about six months, which is incredible. In six months, we already have, you know, all these amazing images, all this incredible science. And yeah, we could talk for hours about the discovery. But if I'm going to pick one to delve into a little bit, for me, it would be the discovery of these very distinct galaxies. So I study galaxies and black holes.

So that's my specialty. So I'll admit I will have a little bit of a bias here. us here. But one of the fundamental primary things that this telescope was designed to do was to be able to look back in time and see the very first epic of galaxies that were born after the Big Bang. So we're talking about looking back in time over 13 and a half billion years. So the universe is, we think, about 13.8 billion years old. But there's this whole part of the early universe that we've never seen, the epic when galaxies first turned on. And we would never have been able to see them with Hubble, because this is where we get back to infrared light and why infrared light was so important. We needed an infrared telescope to be able to detect these very early galaxies.

And, you know, we hoped we would see them. It all depended on if our theories were right, you know, sort of fingers crossed. And then just in the very first image, the first deep fields, they're everywhere. And the more that we, the more data that we take, the more of these deep fields that we're getting, the deeper that we're able to look, it seems like there are more galaxies in that part of space and that they're brighter and more evolved than any of our theories predict. I keep on hearing and seeing sort of stories like,

you know, JWST disproves the Big Bang. And I think that's not true. That's not true. Okay, that's good. I mean, you know, we got to count on certain things in life. And the Big Bang was one of those things I was counting on existing. Yep. But this is, I mean, is this like, you know, the hottest subject for galactic formation? I mean, it's like more and brighter and older. And what does that mean? What's the early theories? What are people, what's happening over the coffee, the coffee filters these days? So we don't quite know yet what it means.

And that's part of the fun part of science, right? Is that, you know, before JWST, we had theories, you know, simulations and theories of what the early universe was like. And those were built on physics, you know, and they were built on also observations of what the current day universe looks like. So, you know, writing a code that sort of builds the universe for us. And so we had theories of what we thought we should find in that very early epic. And what we're seeing is like, like I said, there's more, they're brighter, they're more well formed.

And so what does it mean? they're brighter they're more well formed and so what does it mean what we we don't know yet but we're we're trying to think about about ways that the early universe could have built galaxies so quickly um and again this is very very early on and with the caveat that i'm an observationalist and not a theorist um but we know what we do know is that dark matter has a very critical role in how galaxies evolve so of course dark matter is this unseen stuff in the universe that we know makes up a bulk of the matter in the universe but we have no idea what it is we have some theories we call it dark matter because we don't idea what it is we have some theories we call it dark matter because we don't know what it is exactly right right um right when astronomers

have this annoying habit of when we don't know what something is we label it dark so we have dark matter dark energy um and we don't know what it is but with dark matter with dark matter at least we can measure its effects on stuff we know about like galaxies and stars. And we can get a sense of at least what it's doing. And we measure that by its gravitational pull. That's right. So dark matter interacts gravitationally with normal matter. And so by looking at how things like galaxies are behaving,

we're able to sort of get a sense of what the dark matter is doing. And so what we know from these kinds of observations is that massive galaxies, all galaxies, are embedded in these what we call dark matter halos. So, you know, you look at an image of a galaxy in any of these deep fields or think about the image of the Andromeda galaxy. And, you know, that's only about 10 percent of the mass of all the stuff. So there's this massive halo of dark matter around all galaxies.

It's just it's sort of intuitive that if there's that much other stuff that it must have an effect on how the galaxies themselves are evolving. And we think that those effects might have been even stronger in the early universe. So that's a long-winded way to say that we don't know yet what's going on and how we're going to have to tweak our theories of the early universe. But the observations are, they're the reality. They're telling us that something is amiss and we have to figure out what we need to tweak. we have an average galaxy. Let me try this out on you. You tell me where I'm wrong. The average galaxy is 100 billion stars in a galaxy per galaxy. And the current theory

on how many galaxies there are in the universe. And I've heard everything from 200 billion to 20 trillion galaxies. And so what number do you choose for the number of galaxies in our universe well one of the annoying things about us astronomers is a lot of our answers are are we don't know for sure um but it's it's almost certainly somewhere in that range and and um you know the couple hundred billion to 20 trillion. And that is backed up not only by theory, but also by observations. So we take these deep images of the universe. So, you know, my example a year ago or six months ago was always think about the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, which is still a great beautiful a beautiful image if you're watching us on youtube we'll we'll put it up here just like every dot every point of light on on this you know they took hubble they pointed it at the darkest point in the sky right is that correct right and every point the light is not a star it's a galaxy and god it's gorgeous yeah it's beautiful um and the original hubble deep field uh actually

came out um when i was like in high school and so that was one of the things that i already knew i wanted to be an astronomer but it was one of the things that was like blew my mind like oh my god look at all these galaxies you know this is what i have to do with my life um but but so i always use the hubble ultra deep field and it's still a great example. But of course, now we have deep fields with JRST and it's just like galaxies everywhere. But yeah, so we could still take the Hubble Deep Field as an example in this image, which by the way, is a teeny tiny little piece of sky. It's like if you hold your pinky out at arm's distance, you can cover up the little tiny piece of sky, much less than the size of the full moon on the sky in 10 000 galaxies right um and still we know we're missing galaxies in that view

galaxies that now jdrst has been able to see but you can kind of just do easy statistics you know by thinking okay there's 10 000 galaxies in that little spot multiply it by the times you would need to to cover the sky and that's where we sort of get these numbers you know i'm i'm a geek do you guys do you remember uh from chemistry something called avogadro's number yeah of course yeah 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd it's the number of uh of atoms in a mole and in uh i was playing with the numbers and if you multiply the number of stars per galaxy times the estimate of the number of galaxies in the universe, you get pretty close to Avogadro's number. It's inside that range. That's super interesting. It is interesting. I don't know. I'm going to geek out on that for a minute.

So, yeah, I mean, I guess to summarize, there's hundreds of billions of galaxies and perhaps trillions of galaxies. And do you ascribe to the idea that there might be an infinite number of universes too? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think the multiverse theory, it's theory again, and I'm an observer, but yeah, it sort of, it even aesthetically kind of makes sense, you know, to think that our universe is the only one. I don't know. It's outside the realm of observational confirmation, at least right now. So it is, that is very much theory.

So if you're having a bad day today and you're concerned about something, just think about, you know, sort of perspective in the universe. It's okay. There's, you know, 20 trillion galaxies out there and, you know, an infinite number of universes. Infinite number of universes. Yeah. Oh my God.

That's insane. How do you sleep at night? That's, you know, it's one of the things about astronomy is you can really quickly get into like the existential dread realm but i choose to to look at it in a positive way you know the universe gives me joy it makes me happy it it fills me with a sense of awe and wonder uh which is why i think astronomy is so great the child the child you know this this is the nine-year-old Peter here just having a blast talking to an incredible astronomer. So looking at the earliest galaxies that formed and seeing more of them, brighter, what else has JWST sort of uncovered for us in the first only six months of its existence? sort of uncovered for us in the first only six months of its existence.

So we've also been able to, sort of on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, now talking about the nearby universe, we've been able to already do some really incredible exoplanet discoveries. So thinking about planets that orbit other stars. And when we first started thinking about J-Rest, we didn't even know of confirmed exoplanets, right? We thought they probably were out there, but we hadn't seen them yet. Let's define an exoplanet for folks. Yeah. So an exoplanet is a planet that's orbiting another star outside of our solar system. And yeah, when I was a kid, we didn't even know about them. But now we know that they're everywhere. And this has also been a revolution in astronomy, really just within the last decade, thanks to telescopes like the Kepler, the TESS telescope.

galaxy is literally teeming with planets like if you go outside tonight and point up at a random star almost certainly it has at least one planet orbiting and probably more and that's so fascinating fascinating right because because i don't know how long ago what kepler is now what 15 years ago roughly something like that and kepler was the telescope that was looking for planets by occlusion, right? It was looking for what exactly? dip in light of the star. And if that dip in light is very regular, it could be because a planet is orbiting it and it's causing its light to go down periodically. And you happen to be just in the plane of that star planet orbit.

Right. Luckily. So, right. It has to be perfectly lined up. If it was, you know, face on, you wouldn't see the transit. So, yeah. perfectly lined up. If it was, you know, face on, you wouldn't see the transit. So yeah, transits is what Kepler and TESS are looking for. And yeah, it's the same thing. It's statistics,

you know, by looking at a little patch of sky, looking at the stars, figuring out how many of these transits we see and sort of doing the math that would say, okay, if we see this many, that means this other amount is probably, probably also have planets that are at another angle that we see and sort of doing the math that would say okay if we see this many that means this other amount is probably probably also have planets that are at another angle that we're just not seeing um yeah so our milky way galaxy has a couple hundred billion stars and probably trillions of planets yes i man the trekking inside me is like let's go find them. We'll talk about that in a minute. But that's crazy because it wasn't too long ago that theory actually had no idea if there were planets out there. Were the nine planets, depending on if you include Pluto or not, I'm still a fan of Pluto as a planet.

I don't know about you. Yes? Pluto as a planet? I mean, I have affection for Pluto. I'll say that. Okay. Yeah. These dwarf planets.

I don't know. I still think of Pluto as a planet. It's got two moons, for God's sakes. Yeah, true. Anyway, I go there. But interestingly how the paradigm changed to maybe planets exist to planets are everywhere. Yeah. Right?

Absolutely incredible. In an area that you're passionate about, which is black holes. Uh-huh. Right? Because, I mean, the theory of black holes and did they exist? Do they exist? How many are there? Do they exist? How many are there? And I guess, is it the theory now that there is a black hole at the center, but a gigantic, supermassive black hole at the center with the mass of, you know, thousands to many hundreds of millions times the mass of the sun.

So these monster black holes exist at the center of every galaxy, including our own Milky Way. Wow. And what about the thing that worries me a little bit, like micro black holes sort of wandering around the universe? Is that a thing? Well, I'll say it doesn't keep me up at night. But yeah, primordial black holes are certainly, you know, also in the realm of theory that there could have been these sort of microscopic black holes that formed very early in the universe. And because they are so small, they could still be lurking around and wreaking havoc on the universe. We don't have the observations yet to back that up. So like I said, I don't lose a lot of sleep over it.

But it's a fun theory. Yeah. What are you doing in the black hole world? What's your area of passion there? So I am interested in these supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies. So I'm glad that's the one you thought of first. So I'm really interested in how galaxies change over time and how, you know, we look we look in the early universe and we see that galaxies look very different than galaxies in the present day, nearby universe look. You know, you think of a galaxy and what probably comes to mind is large spiral arms, you know, very organized structure like our Milky Way. And that's what a lot of big galaxies, you know, in the universe today are like. But when we look into the distant past, into the early universe, galaxies are much different.

But when we look into the distant past, into the early universe, galaxies are much different. And now we know that, like you said, galaxies have these giant black holes at their centers. So those black holes must have an effect on how the galaxies change and vice versa. The galaxies have an effect on the black holes. So I'm interested in how those processes play out. Like how does a galaxy that's actively that has a black hole at the center that's sort of actively feeding a creating material. How does that impact how the galaxy grows? How does that impact how the galaxy forms stars? Those kind of processes.

And is the James Webb telescope playing into that? Absolutely. In really big ways, actually. Because in addition to, you know, searching for these very, very distant, very early galaxies, having this giant telescope that's able to observe the universe in infrared light means that we can study galaxies that are actively forming stars in their earlier stages of formation. So it's sort of the same concept, whereas Hubble was only able to look back so far, with JWST, we're able to push back even further and see these processes playing out earlier in the universe to help us, again, just sort of put together

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So we've talked about finding these early galaxies. We've talked about exoplanets, but we didn't finish on exoplanets. We talked about Kepler and TESS being the mechanism. What have we been seeing with the JWST in terms of exoplanets? Yeah, so like you said, Kepler, TESS, what they do is they sort of watch the stars to find the planets. And by doing that simple analysis, the simple transit, like, oh, there went a planet, crossed in front of its star, we're able to do some sort of basic analysis of what that system is like. So the combined mass of the planet and the star, obviously how long the planet takes to orbit. But with JDRS-T, the whole goal is to watch those transits. So watch the planet as it passes in front of the star,

and then look at the starlight as it filters through the planet's atmosphere. So this is incredibly, incredibly hard because planets are tiny, and the stars are so bright. And a planet's atmosphere is just, you know, you've probably seen the beautiful images of the Earth from the International Space Station. You know, just this little sliver of an atmosphere on the Earth. It's like the skin of an orange, they call it, the skin of an apple, right, on top of it. Exactly. So you can imagine trying to look in detail at starlight as it filters through those atmospheres is really hard to do but with jbris t we're doing it more easily quicker more efficiently even than we had hoped

so let me ask a couple questions here so number one are we with uh with kepler you couldn't actually visualize the planet you were just looking at this dip in the intensity of the starlight that gave you a rough size of the orbital. You knew the size of the star, and if you knew how quickly it was orbiting, you could infer the mass of the planet and such. Are we actually visualizing the planet itself with JWST? So mainly what we're doing is taking spectra of the atmosphere.

We are able to do direct imaging with JWST with basically a technology that sort of blocks out the light of the star so that you can see the dimmer stuff around it. And so we've released a couple of those images, direct images of exoplanets, but they're just little tiny pixels, you know, not a lot to see. Now, when you see the spectra, right, the sunlight, the starlight, not sunlight, the starlight coming through the atmosphere tells us what that atmosphere is made of, right? And what are we looking for when we're looking through that spectra right so that that's the critical thing right is that by doing taking these spectra we're

able to see the fingerprints of the atmosphere um and also just another great thing about the infrared part of the spectrum is a lot of really interesting molecules lie in that infrared part of the spectrum. So we're talking about things like water vapor and carbon dioxide and methane, those kind of chemicals that could potentially point to habitable surface. Now, what about oxygen, free oxygen? Because I think that's the holy grail for is there a life? That's what I hear at least. Yeah. So, yeah, my exoplanet friends tell me that you really need a certain. By the way, how cool it is to say have some good exoplanet friends. They're doing awesome stuff. But yeah, so you need like very definitive ratios of these different signatures and able to be able to sort of point to a planet and say that was got life on it.

And we, of course, don't have that yet. We probably won't get that with JVST. We're probably going to need the next big telescope in order to find that. That being said, you know, the telescope is doing awesome things. We found the first definitive detection of carbon dioxide in an exoplanet, which is incredible. dioxide in an exoplanet which is incredible um and so you know while while i don't think we're going to be able to to definitively find life with this telescope um it's definitely our next big step in that that huge epic journey of searching for life in the universe yeah okay i'm gonna go there so uh i mean i think if there's like one thing that will define uh a generation uh is its discovery of life in the universe definitive

life that's not you know sitting here on planet earth and uh that could come from mars or some of the moons of jupiter or saturn um or it could come from one or some of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn, or it could come from one of these advanced telescope discoveries. But I remember asking you this question, and I'll ask it to you again. You have two options on this quiz. One, we are the first. Earth is unique. Intelligent life, we're precious. We need to protect it. Option number two, life in the universe is ubiquitous. What do you think? I think it's ubiquitous. Yeah. I still think we need to protect the planet. No question. I'm still happy to be a human living on planet earth, but I do think life in the

universe is ubiquitous. It's interesting when I, I don't know if we had this conversation, I was thinking about when, how much life could there be? So if we stick with the 13.8 billion years of this solar, of this universe, and then you ask like, what is the heaviest element that is required for the human body? I think it's like iodine. And if you ask, when did iodine come into the solar evolution, you know, the life birth, life birth of stars, I think it's like a billion years after the big bang iodine would have, would have come into existence. And so, you know, okay, let's add

like 5 billion years for margin. So what does life look like? If you say life could have existed 5 billion years ago, what does it look like compared to us? We can't predict what life will be like 100 years from now, let alone a million or 5 billion. Yeah, it's fascinating. It really is to think, you know, I mean, we're obviously human centric. It really is to think, you know, I mean, we are obviously human centric. We think about us looking outward for life. But how likely is it that, you know, another life form has already found us? You know, it's just it's incredible to think about it.

And I do think it's ubiquitous. I think space is so big. It is. It's sort of preposterous to think that we're the only ones. I mean, we've already exactly we've we've already touched on it you know there's a couple hundred billion stars just in our milky way and there's hundreds of billions of other galaxies other milky ways essentially and trillions of stars again just within our little home galaxy trillions of planets trillions of planets i meant yeah so yeah there's

gotta be others out there although the converse to that of course is that because space is big it gives us the possibility but also because space is big it makes it very very hard to detect life and so i sort of think that well i, I definitely think there is other, are other life forms out there. I don't know that we would ever make contact with them just because the travel times are so big. It's kind of lonely. Yeah, I get it. I'm still holding out for warp drive, but you know. Well, me too.

We know so little about the universe and its laws fully. We have some basics that we need to relate to and respect, but I'm sure I'm hoping for a lot more. And as quantum technologies come online and AI comes online even greater, I'm hoping we'll have some interesting discoveries there. I saw an article recently that said, because we're discovering the size of the early galaxies and because of the rate at which the universe is expanding, even if we were able to travel the speed of light, we still couldn't get to ever get to 80% of the stars out there in the universe or something like that. I found that fascinating.

Yeah, that idea is really incredible. And yeah, just thinking about, of course, the universe is accelerating its expansion or it's going faster and faster all the time. You know, that at some point in the far future, provided humans, you know, make it, you know, there will be a time when looking up at the sky, we wouldn't even be able to see any other galaxies, you know. So think about those future humans, because space will have accelerated so much that the sort of horizon distance, the distance to which you can see, basically precludes there

being any other galaxies in your sky. And so those future humans, this is probably going to be after the Earth is already engulfed by the sun. So we presumably we would have made it to somewhere more hospitable. Would only think that the Milky Way is all that there is. So looking at it that way, like what a wonderful time we live in. We live in this particular point in cosmic history when we can know this much about the universe you know it the the anthropomorphic model you know there is our our myopic human-centric point of view

that has dominated a lot of astronomy over the ages right Like the earth's the center of the universe. Um, and then, uh, not long ago, I think it's true that, uh, we believed there was only a single galaxy at the Milky way was all there was. Isn't that correct? Right. Right. I mean, yeah, we, that's all we had sort of reason to, to believe until we got telescopes and could see these little you know these little fuzzy dots these little island universes uh that we discovered um and yeah that sort of expanded our view and then of course not wondering if planets were unique so you know it's it's interesting we have such a uh a our our understanding of the fundamentals are constantly being uh being blown away so i have a theoretical question for you and um i'm wondering if you're if you're a game for this so it's five

years from now and uh headlines around the world are discussing a discovery from the james webb space telescope that is like epic What would that headline be about? You can give me a couple if you want. Yeah. I'm going to say if we're talking epic as in maybe unexpected, but really transformational, I would say it would be that discovery of, you know, a planet that has a surface that has some life form on it. So I think that, I think that when we do, and I believe we will, when we do discover life elsewhere off of our planet, that that's going to be, you know, a society changing moment. And the thing about JRST is if we're really, really lucky and if one of those planets does exist nearby enough, close enough, and if we're able to observe it for long enough in order to detect the things we it's I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility I think it's probably unlikely but I think that that would be the most transformational thing we could

discover amazing any other ones I mean like with theories being proven or disproven and you know that'd be true it's like you know what could it possibly be yeah so i mean another and it's it's a little hard to to even pin down but um to discover more about the nature of dark matter um dark energy these big big mysteries um it's just it's so it's so wild that we don't know what it is that we don't know what it is and that it's almost everything at the same time right of all these trillions of galaxies trillions of planets that we've talked about all the stuff we can see all the stuff we can see, all the stuff we can sense, all that stuff is immense as it is only makes up 5% of the universe, right? 95% of the universe

is something we don't understand at all. And so to think that we could make some big, you know, revolutionary discovery about the nature of dark matter or dark energy would be, that would be, that would be incredible. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the crisis news network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology,

how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to demandus.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode.

So I want to go back to the discoveries that we've seen in the first six months. And just again, we're six months on a 20-year plus roadmap here. And by the way, Hubble is still making discoveries, right? Absolutely. Hubble's still going strong. And it's so awesome to have these two telescopes in space at the same time. Yeah, I'm amazed by that. But by the way, let's take a second to describe the difference between the two. So you said James Webb is infrared mostly. Hubble is visual. The cost-budget change.

I have actually a comparison chart here. I'm going to use my crib notes here on my exam. $2 billion for Hubble, $10 billion for James Webb. Size-wise, I mean, probably. Can you give me a sense of magnification difference sure um so yeah size size-wise Hubble's sort of the size of a school bus a little bit bigger and we've already talked about the size of JWST magnification wise it's sort of I mean it's sort of hard to think about magnification in the sense of like a backyard telescope. But when we're talking power, so it's sort of observing power overall.

So when we're thinking about things like efficiency of the detectors, efficiency of the observing, all those things built together or considered together make JWST about 100 times more powerful than Hubble. The resolution of the images is about the same because you get a little bit of a tradeoff between wavelength and diameter of the mirror. So that's just physics. But when we're looking at similar wavelengths between the two, you know, it's, I mean, you look at the images of Hubble or of JRST and compare it to Hubble and you can see the difference, right? You can see that it's a much more powerful telescope. So are scientists like battling it out to get access on the Webb telescope? I mean, it's like, are they hand wrestling? Are they bribing? Are they queuing up? I mean, how are they getting? Because it must be like, you know, the hottest user group out there. In fact, our proposals to use the telescope were just due last Friday. So I spent the weekend resting. So, yeah, the way it works is that once a year, astronomers from all over the world get together and teams usually and propose their best ideas for using the telescope.

Just here's what I want to look at. Here's why it's so important. And then another team of astronomers gets together and reviews the proposals and ranks them. And that it's all dual anonymous. So everything's anonymous. And, and then yeah, the best proposals get awarded time to choose a telescope. And one of the awesome things about this telescope data from NASA that I find not a lot of people even realize is that it's all public. You know, sometimes there are certain cases where the proposer gets a year of proprietary time, a year of exclusive access. But then after that, it goes online. It goes in an archive and anyone in the world can access it and download it. That's amazing.

And, you know, I remember years ago, I knew the head of the Viking program back when I was in high school. And Gerald Soften was his name. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He was a tremendous mentor for me. and and goddard yeah yeah he was a tremendous mentor for me and i remember him saying like we've looked at a fraction like less than one percent of all the data that came back from viking at that time and it's like i just think for anybody who is a you know in their heart hearts an astronomer being able to get access to that data and then to use generative AI and all of the, you know, the ability to write algorithms to look at it.

I mean, the era of the citizen astronomer could be huge. is getting there with all of this data. Even with the advanced sort of quantitative analysis techniques, you know, there's all these new, really cutting edge things going on in machine learning with astronomical data, which is really, really cool. But right now, at the end of the day, the human brain is still the best at, for example, picking out patterns. So citizen science is a big, big thing, and it's going to get even bigger as we have more data coming online. That's amazing. Any other special areas of discovery or any of your favorite images that you want to chat about that came out of the last six months? Oh, there's just so many.

It's hard to know where to start. I mean, it's gorgeous, right? It's like between stability, stable diffusion, and Dolly 2, and the James Webb telescope. I'm like, it's visualization overload. Yeah, it's awesome. I mean, it's just been such a fun six months. One of the really fun parts about my job at NASA is that I review a lot of the material that comes online before it's public. And I've been doing that for years.

You know, I review all our news, press releases, all that kind of stuff. And so I was in the queue to get to see the first images before they were released to the public and i kid you not i mean they brought tears to my eyes seeing those images for the first time was just it was it was overwhelming in a lot of ways um particularly the carina the image of the carina nebula um okay and we'll show that for folks watching, but describe it to us. So the Carina Nebula is this image of basically a stellar nursery. So it's a region within our own Milky Way galaxy. I think it's about 7,600 light years away. So that's quote unquote nearby. So that's quote unquote nearby.

But it's this place that's just teeming with star formation. And in the image, we're seeing newborn stars. We're seeing hundreds of stars in this image for the very first time. But the thing to me that's so visually striking about it is it just it's this it looks almost like a mountain, almost like, you know, something you would expect to encounter on Earth. You know, it's this beautiful orangish nebulosity with blue, you know, the blue background of space above it. It turns out that in this image, there are these giant newborn stars up above, like out of the view of the image, but that their, their radiation and stellar winds are sort of pressing down on this gaseous material. And you can see it, like you can see almost that that's what's happening in this beautiful image. And it's just, it's just so, it's so stunningly beautiful. It's probably still my favorite. It's like my background on all my computers and on my phone and all that. It's just, it's wonderful.

Want to pick one more favorite? Oh, yeah, sure. I mean, there are so many. I've been to thousands, I know. But the deep fields. I mean, the first image that we released, that President Biden released, I got to go to the White House for that event.

It was so awesome. But that first image of that galaxy cluster is just, aside from the sheer beauty of it, it just, it was such an awesome demonstration of just how incredible this telescope is, because it is, you can see the depth of the image. You know, you can see, again, it's a deep field type image. There's a galaxy cluster in the center. So all of the sort of light white looking galaxies you see at the center are mirror. And then you see the thousands of galaxies in the background. And then you see these little wisps, these little sort of wispy,

elongated structures kind of around the edges of the image. And what those are, are actually direct evidence of dark matter. Because what's happening in this particular image, this was the S-max cluster. In the center, you've got a galaxy cluster. And a galaxy cluster is Exactly what it sounds like. It's where a bunch of galaxies are packed together pretty tightly in space, like a galactic city in space. And we know, again, that there there's dark matter surrounding all of these galaxies in this huge galaxy cluster. And the combined mass of that dark matter is causing galaxies from the background to be magnified and stretched out.

So the dark matter is acting as a giant cosmic lens, just like if you took a wine glass and you look through it and it stretches and stretches the light that's coming through it. Same thing's happening in space. It's the exact same physics. And so it's just like this one snapshot encapsulates all these awesome things about the universe, these distant galaxies and the fact that there's dark matter and the fact that dark matter behaves in a way that we can understand. And it's also, it's just beautiful. It's just so pretty. One of the things I love is that we pointed the JWST at things that we pointed Hubble at before. And all of a sudden, you see it with renewed levels of detail, right?

Like it was the Southern Ring Nebula that all of a sudden comes into brilliant life in the infrared spectrum with that resolution. Or it was looking at one of Titan's moons and seeing cloud layers in the atmosphere. So that's pretty, pretty amazing.