The Jordan Harbinger Show - 1050: Lisa Kaltenegger | In Search of Alien Life and Livable Worlds

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Are we alone in the universe? Alien Earths author Lisa Kaltenegger joins us to discuss new discoveries in humanity's hunt for extraterrestrial life. What We Discuss with Lisa Kaltenegger: The universe contains billions of stars and galaxies, with an estimated one out of five stars having a planet that could be similar to Earth in terms of potential habitability. Scientists use various methods to detect exoplanets, including observing changes in starlight and analyzing the light spectrum of planets to detect signs of life-sustaining elements like oxygen and methane. The search for extraterrestrial life involves looking for planets in the "habitable zone" or "Goldilocks zone" around stars, where conditions might allow for liquid water on the surface. The observable universe is limited by the speed of light and the age of the universe (approximately 13.7 billion years), meaning we can only see as far as light has had time to travel since the Big Bang. Anyone can contribute to space exploration and scientific discovery by staying curious, learning about new discoveries, and supporting science education. Even simple actions like looking up at the night sky and wondering about our place in the universe can inspire a lifelong passion for science and exploration. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1050 If you love listening to this show as much as we love making it, would you please peruse and reply to our Membership Survey here? And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally! This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Light needs time to travel. Let's say we go two billion light years away. We look two billion light years away. We look back in time two billion years. I cannot look any further than these 13.7 billion light years away. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people

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That will help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. There's quite a variety, as you know. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, Lisa Kultenegger breaks down the odds of life on other planets. How many similar Earth-like planets are there? How far away are they? Will we ever be able to see them? Maybe even travel to them?

How would we even communicate if we were able to do that when we got there? I was actually quite astounded at the rate we are discovering new planets. It's something like one every other day. It just absolutely mind-blowing. I also found the science and technology that we're using to evaluate the probability of life on other planets to be absolutely fascinating. Again, I think you will agree. Enjoy this fascinating conversation about space and life on other planets or possible life on other planets with Lisa Kaltinegger.

Here we go. This is the part that blew my mind initially, and it's a good hook for the book, by the way. So congrats on putting that in the beginning. I think that's a good idea. And by the way, if people buy the books, please use our links in the show notes and help support the show. There's a new world, on average, being discovered every other day since we built the equipment to find them. So that's really wild. The fact that a few times a week they're just finding another planet.

And that could continue for a really long time. Because like you said, even if we're like, oh, we've kind of exhausted some of these closer ones, but we can't see the small ones. Well, once they invent, I don't know, higher resolution whatever's or AI. is able to help us. It's like, oh, between all the, we have to start over and come back close again because now we can see these really small things we couldn't see before. So we could be discovering a new planet every single day at some point, which is just bonkers if you think about it. It's absolutely, you cannot overstate how amazing that is. And this is why I wanted to share, right? Because I think this is passing us by a little bit that we live in this incredible time

of exploration because you could say Monday, planet Tuesday. Yeah. Wednesday? One at. Thursday? You know, Friday planet. It was like, and there are three totally new worlds that we know about at the end of each week or four really, right? So three to half. But this is only getting better, as you were saying, because with bigger telescopes, with more time looking, we can find smaller worlds. We can find worlds that take more time to with surround their star because we can only see them currently, or most of the time, the way we find, them as when they go between us and their star and block out part of the hot stellar surface from our view. So we just have to stare at those stars without blinking to see when they become

a little bit less bright, to know that they have a companion, that I have a planet. And you were saying in school, and it was the same for me. When I was in school, we were like, oh, maybe they're planets, maybe they are not. It's such a long shot. But we have actually changed our our whole understanding of the cosmos in this respect, that there are so many other stars out there. And when I talk to my daughter, we usually say, like, the sun is a star, as you said, we know that the one star that we all love is our own sun, our star. But those other stars are also suns. Sun is a name, so the other stars have different names and these are planetary systems.

but it's basically the same. The star out there, these are other sons with their worlds. And for the first time ever, we are in a place where we can spot them, where we can do some inventory, where we can do exploration, even though we don't have to ships to get there yet, we can catch the light and read it. So there are billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, which for people who don't know is the one that we happen to be in.

And there are, is it what, billions of galaxies as well, I assume? Absolutely. Wow. And so if you go one out of five and you have 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone, you have billions and billions of possibilities, that there could be a world like ours. And I don't know if there's life in the universe, but the biggest surprise would be if we find nothing. Yeah. It seems unlikely. I mean, just by sheer probability, having no life in the universe would be like, and someone's done the math on this, I wish I had looked it up. That would be like rolling a pair of dice and getting double sixes every time, 10 million or billion times in a row. That's like the likelihood that there's no life

anywhere at all. And so now it comes down to the question, can we find it? Right. Can we find it? And so when you look at the earth, and so when I called the book Alien Earth, I was thinking about these worlds around other stars, but also our planet through time, that kind of resembles an alien world if you were a time traveler and you would step out of, let's say, the TARDIS from Doctor Who, right? And do bring an oxygen mask because the composition of the air on our planet changed so that there was no oxygen initially. So you wouldn't be able to breathe or survive if you open your time machine. But it would be like an alien world. There would be no Himalayas that are made, you know, because the continents crash into each other and form this majestic hills and mountains.

And even the stars, because they move individually, the star constellation that we're familiar with wouldn't be there at the beginning of our world. So it would be a real alien world in a way. If you didn't know, it was ours. Because what would you use to say this is our own planet? Yeah, if there's no Himalayas, I mean, what are you looking for, Starbucks at that point? Yeah, or the hand of the Statue of Liberty, as we have in the Plants of the Apes, you know, that's only a tiny time frame that you can actually find out. Exactly, yeah, it's like a fraction of a second, essentially, in geological terms. You mentioned before that the planet has to be close enough to their sun or their star

that there's liquid flowing water, so not farther away, not so hot that it's all evaporated. Why do we think all life needs liquid water? People, mammals and stuff do, life on Earth does. And does that water have to be on the surface? Great questions. So first, we go with what we know. And if you look at the Earth, all life needs water. And then you can argue that other liquids could also work.

And we have some really cold moons in our solar system like Titan, where we're sending a quadcopter. It's one of the moons of Saturn. And we're hoping we're going to find some kind of organics that might indicate that life could be in another base because it's much colder there. so they are ethin and methane lakes. But if we just go back and say, all life that we know so far requires liquid water, then that's our first goal of finding liquid water to provide these circumstances. But it could be subsurface. It could be under a huge ice layer or it could be trapped in a kind of, I don't know,

cave somewhere on the bottom. And so what we get back to is could we find it? because if it's free-floating on the surface of a planet, then it doesn't impede any gases to go into the atmosphere and change the atmosphere. So I, from very far away with my telescope, can spot those signs of light. If it's under a huge ice layer or deep down under the surface, I probably won't see it. And so our search for life is, is there life? and then which part of that can we actually spot with our telescope? Because we don't have a Starship Enterprise yet,

even so I'm hoping the engineers are hard at work at that. That's incredible. So we might see a planet where we go, oh my gosh, there could totally be life there. You know what? It just looks like a big ice ball, nothing to see here. And then until we find technology that can look into that ice remotely, we got nothing.

But we might be able to look underneath and find that it's just teeming with life. there's just a shell on the outside. That's crazy. Exactly. But this is why it's so good that we have such a big number, right, of planets to spot because we know for some with we'll miss it. But with the numbers that we found, they just seem to be in our favor, right? This is where we were saying maybe, you know, the biggest surprise would be if we find nothing. But there's always this big but in it. We need life that changes its whole planet like life did on Earth to spot it. Because if it didn't, if it's subsurface, or if it's kind of hidden, then we can say, ooh, interesting, product. But for now, a question mark.

It sounds like the signs that we can read or see are always hidden in light. Like you mentioned, it has to pass between their star and us so we can see them backlit, essentially, or we look at the light that the planet, the way that things, actually, you're going to have to explain this because I can't even ask the. question. It's like you look at the planet with equipment and you see that there's gases in there and somehow we can see like, oh, there's a lot of carbon dioxide on this planet. Maybe something is exhaling that or there's oxygen on this planet. But is that also hidden in light or am I stretching the definition of what light is? No, you're perfect. And the key thing is light and matter interact. And so Einstein already taught us that. But if you go out and you put your hand in the sun, it gets warm, so you know, light carries energy. And then if you think back to different molecules,

when you had it in school, maybe, it's like, for example, every molecule has a different structure. Like if you think about a water molecule, it's two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom that are stuck together. And usually in school, you always show it a bit like a triangle, like, you know, the two hydrugns hanging off the oxygen. And so that's one shape. And then if you have an oxygen molecule, to oxygen atoms, they are connected. These two. So they have a different shape. And so you have to hit that shape with the right energy to make it swing and rotate.

And so what is happening, if I had a world, let me get one here. And so if it goes between us and let's assume the star is behind it, and so the light gets filtered through the air of that world before it gets to my telescope. the light that not, that does not arrive with my telescope, that's what tells me what's in the air off that planet and if anything is breathing. And so it's a little bit like a passport stamp. Did you just bring a planet with you? That's so weird, but also really funny that you did that. You brought a lot of planes. She brought a lot of planets. I brought three different colors because one of the things that I'm trying to point out is that

when we have another planet, even if it's an alien earth, it doesn't have. to look exactly like a carbon copy of ours. And this is not really a cool exoplanet, but I found some Earth globes in different colors. And so you take what you got, but it basically shows that even an Earth like planet could be very different. And so, yes, I brought some in their light, and I can even juggle with one of them. Not three. I'm working on that. I don't know if that's juggling. Yeah. Yes, it's not juggling yet. I'm working on it. So the good thing is this is mostly a podcast, so only people who go on YouTube will see the desperate attempt of trying to catch it again. If you are listening and not watching, you have missed nothing. She threw one up and

caught it, barely. So, yeah, don't bother going to YouTube just to watch that particular. Invite me back in about two or three years. I might have managed it. It's so funny that you brought three plastic planets. Tell us about the Fermi paradox, because this is kind of, I have so many questions about this, and I think a lot of people, this is the endless debate. Is there life? What are the probabilities? Can we ever contact them, et cetera. I always find this endlessly fascinating. I agree. I find it endlessly fascinating, too. But what's always so interesting is to look at the question in a little bit more detail. Because the Fermi paradox is basically saying, well, if the universe is deeming with life, then where is everyone? And so we know that one out of five stars and we have 200 billion

stars in our galaxy alone has a planet that could be like ours. So you're like, well, well, why is nobody here, right? And then the idea that permeates history, really, people were discussing about this for a long time, even when we didn't know how many plants were out there. And so the worry was that maybe there is no life at all out there. So if we wouldn't have had other plants that could be like ours, that would be a good solution. Or that if life becomes advanced so it could travel or talk to us, then it actually destroys itself. And Fermi's question came in this time when we invented nuclear weapons. And so that worry was foremost on his mind when he asked his question. But what's kind of interesting is that if you go the opposite way, and if you say, let's just

assume there's a lot of different planets out there with life, then why would anybody want to come to us? And I do this in class a lot. And I love the Earth. My favorite planet don't want to be anywhere else. But when I ask my students, and I say, look, if I find two planets, right, and I only have the resources to go or contact one out of the two. One is 5,000 years older than us than show sign of life and one 5,000 years younger. Which one do you, my students, want me to go in contact, right? The one that's 5,000 years ago or the one that's 5,000 years ago. And basically all of them want the one that's in the future because it's more advanced. We might be able to talk to them. They might be traveling the stars. We can learn something. And then if you reverse that,

Are we really that interesting to another technological civilization if they're out there? Because we have boots on the moon, but we don't even have boots on Mars yet, our next planet over. So in a way, maybe we're not on the adult table yet. Yeah, that makes sense. I, well, first of all, I would definitely go to the planet that's 5,000 years ahead. Me too. And maybe Earth is, like you said, undeveloped, uninteresting. Because this alien world could easily be 100,000 years.

years ahead of us, a million years ahead of us. I would want to visit ancient Egypt, for example, but I would probably pass on visiting pre-humans in caves and whatnot. I agree with you, but you know, ancient Egypt, absolutely. But what about the fifth element world or something that we see in science fiction, right? It's like, even ancient Egypt for me is not as interesting if I can't just go once. If I can just do one trip, I have the resources for one trap. I want to go to the future to have fun and in the future, if I could show you. Sure. And so that kind of makes this question and this Fermi paradox less scary because a lot of

times it packs this real punch of saying, well, maybe advanced civilizations can survive. Or, well, maybe we're alone. And to me, looking up at the sky and finding these new worlds, it actually brings the cosmos closer. it connects me even more because I know there are other worlds that could be like ours. Even so I don't know if they are. But there's hope and there's wonder and there's our human curiosity that gets us to investigate, to explore. Even so we don't have the ships, we can read the information encoded in life.

It is kind of a bummer to think that advanced civilizations all kill themselves before they develop the technology to travel or communicate. over cosmic distances. And it makes you also go, oh, I hope we don't do that. And then you look at the fact that we have nuclear weapons, but we don't have like nuclear-powered spaceships. And you think, well, we are trending in one particular direction, and maybe it's not the right one. And so I think this is where this fear came in, right?

And it depends a little bit if you're an optimist or a pessimist. But I think even if, and I hope it's not, because I think the advances in technology we're making can be used for good, and for bad, right? We have to choose. But you should have a distribution. If you have enough worlds, if you have enough civilizations, there's probably not one answer fits all. There's going to be the in-betweens, the one that don't care if they're alone or not and don't want to communicate because why. They're the ones who never look up at the sky and never actually figured out that they are one of many, many planets. And then there's the subset of curious beings, I hope,

and we are now in the realm of science fiction. And some of them are probably not going to make it out of the cradle, their homeworld, because they don't figure out how to not be aggressive. And some of them will. And I think we have time because, as you were saying, we don't have those spacecrafts yet. So maybe there's evolution that still needs to happen. Because, you know, if you're on a spacecraft and you're like on a tiny space and with other, let's say, six people who are 20 or 25, you'd better be a peaceful civilization

because you probably don't have anybody left when you land on the other side if you're not. That's right. That's right. And I also wonder how would we communicate with aliens? I think you mentioned this in the book. It might be like us trying to talk to a jellyfish. I mean, what about science and math? Are those universal languages?

It seems like we're all bound by physics, mostly the same physics, probably the same physics, at least so far. Absolutely. Whenever we look through the universe, the laws of physics hold. So math holds, physics holds. And then, let me just say, in the center of a black hole, there's kind of a

singularity. So we don't have all the information yet. We don't know how the laws change when gravity becomes so high. So that's just a caveat. But generally, everywhere else, the laws that we know are physics hold. And also the chemistry we see is the same. This is also why would life be based on water, right? Because carbon, water, and oxygen is everywhere. So chances are that if you're at the right distance from the star, there is a liquid that's water. But for that, as we said before, it could be a different liquid. But the carbon scaffolding seems to be really, really versatile and important. So this is why, even though life on the earth is carbon and water, it might not be as narrow of you to look for life somewhere else. But I completely hijacked your question because

you asked something completely different and I went off rail with the things. I appreciate that. I'm more like, simplify this for me. Like that movie contact with Jody Foster. Have you seen that? Oh yeah, how we could talk. Absolutely. Yeah. And so basically this is, I brought this example of jellyfish in because absolutely, the idea, movie contact, amazing movie, right? Is this we're going to put mathematical frequencies out, like or signals that have prime numbers, right? Numbers that do not occur in nature. We have to find something that doesn't occur in nature. And it stands to reckon that a civilization that could communicate. and travel the stars needs to understand math and physics to be able to do that. So we have a commonality, even if everything else could be different. And I mean like, you know, they could look different. Even maybe the chemistry of the body is different. Maybe the solvent is different.

But the commonality of the loss of physics and the language of mass should be there. So absolutely. But sometimes that makes it sound so easy, right? We send prime number frequencies out and then there's a prime number frequency comes back. Great. contact established. But how do you communicate? And so I love the show you've done about how to effectively listen and communicate one of the earlier shows in your series. And it's so hard for people

on this planet, same species, maybe even same country, to actually not misunderstand. That's true. And so I brought this example of a jellyfish in just to show my students a jellyfish evolved on the earth, right? You can see it. You could touch it. Maybe don't. But I can't communicate with it. It's not to say that nobody can, and they're amazing scientists who try to communicate with dolphins and whales, right? And maybe they'll get to jellyfish. But it is not a simple problem. And if you've seen Arrival, if you've read the novel that Arrival is based on this movie where these big spaceshifts land, and then it's basically the biggest problem we have is communicating, learning their language, not misunderstanding what they're trying to tell us, right?

And so it's a really beautiful idea that, A, hopefully you're going to find signs of life soon, but the next step, the one you were talking about, the civilizations, the communication, we have so much to learn. But what's great, is this learning about how to communicate? is probably going to also feed back on how we all going to communicate better and also with the other species on our planet. And the search for life in the universe, looking at these other planets and exploring them, these other Earth, that teaches us about our own planet too. And so this is why I think this research is not just about are we alone in the universe. It's also about understanding our planet, getting a glimpse in our potential future when we look

all the earth and using all that knowledge to safeguard our pale blue dot. I always think about the end of, I think it was the end of that movie contact, where the aliens appear to Jody Foster as her dad who had passed away. And I was like, just completely confused by that. And then I realized, ah, okay, they're so advanced, they can scan her brain or whatever, figure out some memories, something that's going to be calm for her because her puny human brain can't comprehend the actual form of this alien life. Like, they had sort of figured it out because they were so advanced that they were able to tell us how to build that machine or whatever in the movie.

And you're right. We could be jellyfish to that extraterrestrial life. Or they could be jellyfish and we can't get to them because we're not there yet. And it's just, it's so interesting to think about. Or there could be jellyfish language signals coming through our planet like since forever. And we just haven't figured them out because we don't know how to speak to. fish. And of course, that's a funny interpretation, but there are so many things we don't know. But we're chipping away at it. Science is chipping away on the different issues, but it's fun to

think about it. I always think of those quantum particles. You know how they have to build those buildings 30 stories underground because they're looking for, I don't know, some sort of like alpha particle and everything else gets blocked by the earth except this one particle that's so small, It can just float through the whole Earth, no problem. It just goes between the nucleus and the, whatever, in the atoms and the proton, whatever. It doesn't bounce off anything, and they can detect it with that. That would be a great way to communicate with some other planet, right? Because you can shoot that thing through other planets, through asteroids, through everything,

and nothing can touch it because it's so tiny. And I'm just imagining this jellyfish civilization light years away going, how are they not picking up our signals, for God's sake? We've been blasting these things at them for thousands of years. they can finally pick it up and they built this building to receive it and they're going, aha, there's one of those things and it's like, we've been sending you trillions of those things

and you got one and everybody celebrated. Look at these idiots down there. I mean, it's just, I'm imagining that, you know, one day we're going to think, oh, my gosh, they've been the whole time this thing has been on and we've never noticed. I think the other funny part in that example that you've just given is,

what about this one thing where we're like, oh, great, we found one, right? And that's great. And that's all good. it actually contained information and they're waiting for a phone call back. Or it was like, so if you actually want to talk to us, give us a call back and we're like, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. They were like, well, they're not interested.

So we're going to go and look at the next planet over and try that. That's right. Yeah, it's like we can't see. All we can do is detect that particle exists. It would be like looking at someone's blood and thinking, this is the smallest thing we can see is a drop of blood. And now, of course, we can see DNA in the cells of the blood. And we just don't have the resolution to view what is.

in that particle. And I think this is why, you know, if you want to take out the component of maybe we can't find the signal yet, maybe somebody is not messaging us, right, if there's somebody out there. This is why this search in the light of other worlds is actually a passive search. And it actually scans the whole time since life changed the Earth significantly, so about two billion years ago. If you think about the Earth's history is at 24 o'clock, around lunchtime, life actually changed our atmosphere so strongly that we can pick it up with a telescope from far away. So when we look at other planets and we look at all these different epochs where life, you know, equivalent could have changed on that planet, then we get so much more information and we take out the component of,

did they want to talk to us? Do they want us to know if they're there? But it's also fun to think about it in reverse, right? Because for two billion years, if anybody were looking and just had our level of technology, they couldn't figure that, that we are here. And then I wonder what they're thinking, right? It's like, why are they not picking up? What are they doing to their climate? Oh, okay, I fixed the ozone hole, but oh, my God, what are they doing now? So it's kind of funny to think about it like a reality TV show in a sense. Yeah. And just hope that we're a good protagonist that will make it. It's like keeping up with the Kardashians, except where all the Kardashians, except we're all the Kardashians.

I want to go back to light, because I'm curious about it. Light from the sun takes, what, minutes to reach us? Eight minutes. Eight minutes. It's from the sun to us. And one second from the moon to us. One second from the moon.

Okay, now how long light from the next closest stars? It ranges, right? Years, decades, even centuries. Am I still correct here? Absolutely. The closest star to us, it's about four light years from us. So we see that star like it was four years ago,

and they, if anybody were looking, would see us like we were four years ago. And so that is kind of fascinating because when you go and look up at the sky at night, everything you see has already happened because light needs time to travel and carries that information to us so we can write it down in our cosmic notebook.

But while it's kind of frustrating at a certain point that there's a limit to light speed, so we don't know what's going on right now everywhere in the cosmos, us. The flip side of that is that the further away we look, the further back in time we can look. And so we can look at a time where there were no humans, not even the sun and our planet, because we can catch ever more light from further and further away places. And so there's this this hobbled deep field or James Webbdibs field, that's what we call them, that show us galaxies

as there were billions and billions of years ago or down to about 13 billion years ago, it's like a huge number. Wow. The universe is only 13.7 billion years old, roughly. But we can unravel the history of the universe to its beginning because light has a speed limit. And so we can delve into deep time.

And the way that I think about space around us or space time is that it's kind of like a fabric. and the further it goes away from us, the older it is, or the younger universe it shows us. And so that I find us a privileged position because we miss our star and our planet, missed the first two-third of the life of the universe or the history of the universe, but we get to figure it out because we were curious enough to look up, catch the light from other galaxies, and read it. And now we can do this with ever bigger telescope

for ever smaller objects. And so from galaxies, we go to stars, we go to planets, we go to Earth-sized planets, and that's where we are right now. You know what else is out of this world? The great deals on the fine products and services that support this show.

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You can find the course at six-minute networking.com. Now, back to Lisa Kaltanager. When I was a kid, I had the idea to go really far away from Earth and then look at it with a really powerful telescope and see the dinosaurs. There are admittedly a few holes in that plan. You would need instant trouble, but other than that, really in the plan. Other than breaking the laws of physics entirely, the second half of the plan might have worked. Yeah, so it's fascinating to think there's a star who's light. is just now reaching us that was sent, that light was generated or whatever, sent on the day that

we were all born. And since there are so many stars, every single one of us has multiple stars whose light is reaching us on the day we were born. Is that, am I doing this math right? I'm not, I'm not usually that good at this kind of thinking. No, you're absolutely right. This is where I think we have another connection with the cosmos, right? Because you can spot a star if you're more than four years old, right? The closest other star after the sun is four years. So it works for toddlers plus. Yeah, there's a limited number of toddlers listening to this show, so we should be covered. It would be okay.

But the interesting thing is that, yeah, you have several stars and you can pick one because there's the northern hemisphere, where we are in New York, for example, in the south end. And so there's a northern and thousand sky. You see different stars if you're here in the north or if you go downtown. And so what do you want to do is you want to put it in a browser and select star, your age, let's say you're 21. 21 light years away. And then you actually figure out Northern Hemisphere, if you like us, somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. And then it tells you which stars are about 21 light years away. And so the light that gets to us today was sent out in the year you were born. And it's a great present. And it doesn't cost you anything. And it's fast to make. And it's probably something most

people don't have. And the star changes every year because you get a year older. Right. So the star needs to be a year, a light year for the O.A. And it's your star. You don't know how to pay for it. Don't name it. Don't worry about that. Just go out and select that one. The light's coming. And if you think about if that one had a planet and somebody were looking in the earth right now, they would see it like it was when you were born. Do we need the moon for life? I know it affects tides and it affects life on Earth, but is it a requirement for life? to have a moon like ours? No, because life evolves for the condition it finds. Right, okay. That's what we know. And even if it were hard, you know, if the season changed a lot because there is no moon

or a very, very intense season, a life would be able to evolve for it when it gets out of the water. We think it's started in water. Or if it's on the bottom of the ocean, it wouldn't care how intense the seasons are on the surface. So for you and me, for us, the moon's really important because it's stabilized the seasons on the earth. I didn't know that. And this is what we evolved for. But if we didn't have a moon, we would have evolved for something else. Yeah. No, I had no idea it stabilized the seasons on the earth. It stabilizes the axis of the earth. And so that's why the seasons,

you know, if the axis of the earth, the seasons come because the earth is basically, if you think about it if it's a leaning axis. The part that leans towered steers, if you want, it's a sphere, right? That one is summer and the other one is winter. And so if that axis changes a lot, so it goes from zero to 23 and back, then the season, the intensity of the seasons would change during that. Right. Okay. The moon stabilizes this tilt compared to our star. So we go around and the seasons are pretty much the same. Gotcha. Okay. So the last. thing we want is the whole world is just Texas in July and Texas in December, right? It's just you don't want that. We don't want, even Texans don't want that. It would be extreme to extreme.

You're getting my list of Neil deGrasse Tyson questions and I hope you don't mind. Why do we need carbon for life? You know, I read the very scientific book by Michael Crichton called the Andromeda Strain, which is clearly science fiction from the 90s. But I think, and it's been a while, it's been like 30 years, that was a silicon-based life form, and I think it was a virus or something like that, but basically people would die and they would get sick, and then their lungs were full of sand because it was replicating in their lungs. The whole premise was it was a silicon-based life form, not a carbon-based life form. So is that just nonsense, or is it possible that we have something like that?

Or is carbon kind of like up there with water where we think, okay, this probably is a requirement for life? So carbon can make very flexible and very complex structures. Right. So great. And the good thing is you can break them easily. So recycling is easy. And that's where it actually has its superpowers.

Because if you take silicate, what's in the periodic table is a similar element, so can do similar things, can make long structures. It requires an incredible amount of energy to break. I see. So you would make something. thing, but you couldn't remake it. And the other thing that happens is that if carbon and oxygen are next to each other, they will react to carbon dioxide and gas, right? You can dissolve it in water. All good. You can get the carbon back. If you have silicate and oxygen, it makes silicate oxide. So the sand you were talking about, or rocks, granite, right? And so the key point about this is

then you need to go to a temperature of about 2,000 degrees to get the silicate back out. Because it will just be, it's a rock, right? It's sand in the lungs in the science fiction story. So you cannot reuse it. So you basically use it, and then you would have to require so much energy to recycle it to do something else. And everything we know about life is that it tries things. And then, ooh, this didn't work, so it tries something else. And so the silicate instead of carbon,

you would start to get into this situation where nothing is left for you to try because you have no billing box anymore that you could use. I see. Unless somehow that is being, that element's just being manufactured over and over. But then you'd have the carcasses of all the other things just laying around everywhere, right? Piling up, piling up, piling up. Interesting. Tell me more about how we can see if there's life on other planets using light.

I mean, you mentioned the telescope. Yeah, if there's giant things on there, we can see them walking around or something like that. but you have a really interesting, I'd never seen or heard of anything like this. In the book, you talk about growing life in a lab and then using, I guess, the same or similar instruments that we use over distance in space

to see if we can detect, I guess, gases that that life gives off in the test tube or whatever you've used to grow the life in the first place. That's really interesting, right? So you grow some sort of moss or whatever in a little dish that's enclosed and then you aim a tiny Hubble telescope

at it and you say, oh, if I zap this laser towards it, it turns green. Let's aim that at a planet and see if it turns green. If so, there's a bunch of carbon dioxide or whatever on that planet. Am I close? It's even easier than that. You're absolutely close, but it's easier than that because the way that I like to think about it is think about an algae bloom, right? You could have a world covered in, let's say, red algae. All the oceans are tomato soup colored, kind of. So that would look to my telescope like a red planet. But I know that life has many different colors and pigments. So the biopigments make those colors. And so what I need to do is I need to figure out which biopigments life does, which colors life is. And so this is where we get back to my lab

because I'm an astronomer, right? So I actually don't usually grow things and I don't grow them very successfully. But what's really important is I don't want to miss. signs of life if they're out there. And so if they're just a little bit different than the green plants that I think about when I go outside in my garden or like the flowers or trees, whatever you want to think about, then I don't want to miss it. And so if you, for example, walk through Yellowstone National Park, you see these gorgeous colors in this hot sulfur springs. They're actually different kinds of life. They are maths of biota that just uses, is happy to live and strive under different conditions than you and me. And so what we're doing in the lab is we basically

try to make as extreme and as complete and as diverse a set of life. And then I have an amazing colleague who's a microbiologist who grows this way better than me because I kill most things that I grow that grows these organisms. And then we put them in, I call it like a high-tech device, our rucksack, we put the slask to the rucksack and walked to the other department, the remote sensing department, where we can, as you said, a small Hubble or a small, whatever the next telescope is going to be like, the habitable world observatory or the extremely large telescope. Well, we basically have a look at it and say, if this was the dominant life form on another planet, if we had a huge algae bloom on another water world, for example,

how would it look to my telescope? Would I be able to spot it? And so we make a comparison chart, if you want, a database of what life can look like, informed from everything we know here on the Earth, and then say, okay, and this is what it would look like to my telescope. And so it reverses that when I have the information now for my telescope, I can actually look and see, oh, does it look like this. And it works for gases right now. So, for example, oxygen is produced by life on the earth. You want to see water. You want to see a gas that reacts with oxygen. So the golden fingerprint for life is oxygen with a reducing gas just means it's a gas that reacts with, like methane. Oxygen plus methane makes CO2 in water. So if I find huge amounts of oxygen and methane in the

atmosphere in the air of another world, then I know something is making both of these gases right now because they react with each other and they would produce CO2 in water. And this is how I then say, well, for this amount of oxygen, CH4 methane can come out of volcanoes or from life, but for the amount of oxygen to be there while the methane's there as well that react with it, I have no other explanation in life. So it gets a little bit complicated, but the context tells you which gases you need life to produce because you have no geological solution. You cannot just invent a volcano big enough that spews this out. And this is how we look at the light fingerprint of these worlds.

To see signatures that we cannot explain with anything else but life, that's our first step in the discovery. And then if we get even bigger deloscopes, we want to look at these planets like a dot of light, so not just when they go in front of their star, but if you see them as a dot of light, you could see their color. You could see if they're red, if they're blue, if they're green, and figure out if there are some colors of life, as you know it, on another world as well. And we use machine learning for that. We use loads of algorithms. We use a computer program where we build these worlds. So what I have in my lab, I take and then I'm many,

In a manufacturer worlds on my computer, I basically paint my computer and my computer code being my canvas. And sometimes I think it's a little bit, you know, Douglas Adam. They had this workshop where they basically created other worlds. And then he, really funny, says that the Earth was actually created. I create worlds on my computer too. I don't get one to hold. This is why I'm bringing these normal ones. You bring your own from the gas station.

Yeah. from the gas station, exactly. But it's incredible to imagine what could be out there because circumstances and characteristics of these planets are different from ours, and so the diversity, if there's life out there, will be astonishing. It seems like, I know we're usually thinking of life

as like animals and plants and stuff, but there's crazy, and I know you know this, but I was surprised to see this. There's something called extremophiles. they live in these like super hot vents in the puddles of sulfuric acid at the bottom of the ocean under crazy pressure in hundreds of degrees. It's just absolutely wild the conditions that life can exist on. So that really opens up the band of what, because we're not like looking for whales all the time, right? We're not looking for deer running around on the surface or buildings built by humanoid type of creatures.

We can be looking for a bunch of, for lack of a better word, algae that lives in a volcanic kind of zone. and that's good enough. Exactly. I think the diversity is just astonishing. And when I was in school, we didn't learn about extremophiles. We probably also didn't know much about extremophiles at that point. But we have learned so much more about the limits for life. So at one point, it gets too hot and cells breakdown.

At one point, it gets so cold that the reactions are so slow that we don't think you can't actually start life because everything is just like so slowly moving. and then there's radiation that can destroy cells. But within that realm, there's a huge realm inside of that where life happily strives and does so on the earth and different niches like on the sulfur springs that you were talking about where there's the cutest, well, cutest, it depends, but there's this cutest thing that's called a tardy grade or a water bear.

It's not even an extremophile because it's not extreme, extreme, but you can cook it, you can boil it, you can freeze it, and they put it into space on the outside of a rocket. And when it came back down, a couple of days later, they put water on it. And it was like, okay, I'm fine, you know, I'm good again. Really? And so that is just amazing what life can survive. And this specific organism, the Tadigrade, actually, you need a microscope to see it,

but it's basically everywhere in the world. But it's really cute, so look it up. But the interesting thing about this is that it does this because it can go into something called a tuned state. It can frivel up and lose most of its water and lose most of it or pause most of its life functions. And it can do this for hundreds of years. It basically goes dormant, but in a really, really huge way. And so it does that because it lives in areas where water can become sparse. And so instead of dying, it shrivels up and waits for the next.

extreme. But the shriveling up also allows it to withstand much more radiation than we do or temperatures we couldn't withstand. And so now this research has also led to a lot of other research where people like, oh, could we use some of this for, you know, extending human lifetimes, for space travel. And so it's fascinating how diverse life here is in finding life on other planets. Oh my God. You know, that should be even more different. But one of the key questions, That's just really interesting is we don't know if life can start under extreme conditions. We don't know that yet. So if it can start under extreme condition, great.

We have a much, much wider range of planners to look for. If it can't, if it can just adapt to extreme condition once it got started, then we have a smaller range where we can look. I got to go back to this little water bear, tartar grade thing. This is crazy. So I looked them up. They're 600 million years old on Earth. They can survive in space.

these are almost like tiny seeds that can travel through space and then we just add water. That brings up all kinds of questions. Could these things have land, I mean, could they have landed on Earth from another place? I mean, I don't know if humans could come from something like that or plants or little animals, but it seems like if they can survive for you said hundreds of years in those conditions, potentially, and withstand radiation, it seems like that could be something that comes from another planet or another solar system and have landed it, they land all over the galaxy or all over the universe. And if they land on Mercury, they're shit out of luck, right? They burn up and they die. But if they land on a place

with a bunch of water, they go on and live happy lives and reproduce. I mean, there's a lot that you could think this is really blowing my mind. I mean, this could be on every, they could land on every planet that's potentially hospitable for life and be alive there. That is absolutely bananas when you think about it. And so the great thing about this is, I should actually clarify that radiation is there, Achilles heel. Oh, I thought you said they withstand radiation well. Right. They do stand radiation better than you may.

Okay. But at a certain point, it's also bad. But sorry, I should have been more clear on that. But no, no, better than you and me so they can still go traveling. But what's really interesting is that this is, by the way, the science fiction plot, if you haven't seen it or read it off the three-body problem, that a civilization like tardy grades live somewhere else. they need to go. And it's kind of a weird plot just in case you know that story. I don't,

but I'm sure a lot of people do. The premises is that the planet and the star system isn't stable. And so that actually would not happen. So it would just be immediately unstable or stable in the long run. So basically, but it's a great book. It's a fun series right now. But going back to tardy grades. So what is really important is that it's not just the water that you need to bring. It also needs the atmosphere that we have. And so anything that you want to travel from one world to another and see it there again, if you want, you have to bring enough of its environment with you to actually allow it to adapt to this new world. So now you're not just talking about having to transport like tiny tardig birds. You're also talking about having to transport, you know, let's assume

water is there, right, but water can be very different if it's salty, if it's not salty, if there's other chemicals in it. And also it will require the atmosphere on top of it, right? A right atmosphere, like if you put it into a sulfur atmosphere, it's not going to do fine. So it is a little bit more complicated in terms of the environment you have to add to bring for a space traveler. It's a little bit like a spacecraft, right? We need to bring our environment, our food, our water, if we wanted to go to Mars or to another planet. But this is a miniarized signature for that, like our minarized version of that because tardigrat is smaller. But if you think about where you have the highest chances to get life started, at least in our solar system for now, if you need a rocky surface

and water, that's so far what we think you need for life, at least two of the things you definitely need, then the Earth gives you the highest chances to get that started. So the interesting question will be more if we find something like tardigrate somewhere else. Yeah. Have we littered that planet? And that's the tardy graze. there. And another fun part is like, we actually shot some tardigrades onto the moon, apparently. It was not really sectioned. It was on a private Israeli moon lander. And one of the people who was behind that project said, oh, yeah, I actually put lots of tardigrades into this. And then the thing crash landed. So it didn't land like it should. And then the question is open.

Did those involuntary space travelers survive? And if you think about, far future, completely hypothetical. They're like alien archaeologists. And I think it's just fun to think about these things. And they find the tardigrates on the moon. They're like, ooh, this species managed to travel all the way to the moon, right? And they'd be like, where's the spacecraft? What's happening? And they're like, oh, the spacecraft has crashed here. So it's going to be really, really hard for future alien archaeologists to figure out what we did. I'm going to give them a little more credit and they're going to go, I'm guessing this close planet that was teeming with life before they destroyed themselves screwed up this one too.

Thankfully, they only had the technology to get to the moon and didn't end up going and colonizing anywhere else before they blew themselves up. It's got to be so hard to spot planets. You can tell them an optimist. It's got to be so hard to spot planets far away, right? They're small planets don't emit light. Of course, they reflect light, but don't they reflect less light than stars emit? So they're washed out, right?

You wouldn't want... Absolutely. I mean, that's going to be tough to develop that film, so to speak. And this is why it took so long for us to find those. Because if you take the Earth and you put it a hundred times next to each other, that's roughly the diameter of the sun. So our sun is so much bigger and it's bright and it's hot and it's close by, right? The Earth is here and then it's a huge bright thing next to it. So the star outshines the planet by at least a billion. Right. So it just means lots of photons, lots of light from the planet.

planet versus tiny, tiny amount of reflected light from the tiny planet next to it. And so this is why. And I think that's also, I think it's intriguing, that we have found more than 5,600 planets orbiting other stars, circling other stars. But we haven't seen most of them. Because we look at the star. And what I explained before is that you have the star. And if the star dims ever so slightly, look at the star.

ever so slightly less bright for a little time, then you can figure out that something went between us and that star and blocked our view of the hot stellar surface. And by how long it takes for this to go around, you can figure out how long a year on that planet is, how many days or earth hours, if you want. And then you can figure out by how much light it blocks, how big it is. But you haven't seen the planet, not really. You have seen its effect on the starlight. And this is how you can do it, because you take the hotter, brighter, more massive object in this pair, right, or in this family of things, of objects at the big, hot, bright star. And you figure out if these small plants have any influence on its movement, on its brightness,

and this is the trick of how to spot them. And so the way that I explain this to my students is if you go to a park and you see somebody walking a dog and the dog is pulling in that direction the owner doesn't want to go. You don't have to see the dog to see something is pulling if somebody is leaning back. And so the pull, the gravitational pull after planet on the star makes it wobble a little bit. And that wobble we can see in the light or the brightness change if by chance the planet goes between our line of sight to the star. That's what we can see. But it is so hard. I completely agree. you. And this is why it took such a long time to find Earth-sized planets. And the first planets we found

where these big, massive Jupiter hot things that just whiffs around the star in a couple of days because you find them fast and they're big, they leave a big wobble. They block a lot of the light from the star's surface. Yeah. And the better our instruments are getting, the smaller and the cooler the planets are getting we can spot. Now for a quick break, our sponsors better than being wiped out by a giant asteroid. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name

of a sponsor, a lot of you are like, hey, what was that one with the thing? Just email me, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. I'm more than happy to surface any codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. All right. Now for the rest of my conversation. with Lisa Kaltanegger. Is there... I'm gonna show my ignorance here. Well, that's what this whole show is about, whatever. So is there something like a Doppler effect with light?

So for people who don't know, the Doppler effect is when like a car races by you and it goes, and the sound changes because you're closer or it's moving closer to you or moving further away from you. Is there something like that but with light? Because like, then you could tell

if the planet was reflecting light and it was, see, this is where I lose myself. Am I making any sense? Am I close to something that makes sense? You are very close. And thank you very much for making the sound scape. I can handle the sound. Then I got lost with the light part.

That's all right, because it's exactly like for the sound waves. So if something comes towered to you or it moves away from you, we hear the sound change if it's an ambulance, for example, or a race car. but light that's the same. So basically, if a star moves away from you, you see the light redder than it should be. And if it comes tower to you, you see the light bluer than it should be. And if the planet jiggles, or if the stars jiggles, we're just looking at the star right now, nothing about the planet.

If the star jiggles because the planet pulls on it, and so the star actually makes a counter movement, basically, you see the stars light going towards the red, then it's normal again, and then it going towards the blue, then it's normal again, then it's towards the red and normal again, because it comes tower to us, blue shifted, away from us, red shifted, and so on. And then you can say, okay, it's moving. It's moving around the center of mass, so it's kind of jiggling. And so that's because something pulls. And if that jiggle is very small, you can say the thing that pulls.

is not very massive. And if you don't have much mass, then you don't have enough temperature and pressure in your core to start nuclear fusion and to start shine like a star. And so then you found a planet. And the light, the movement of an object is encoded in the light, do this Doppler shift, red and blue shift. And this is also why we know that our universe is expanding

because these galaxies actually all look redder than they should be. So everything's in average moving away from us. And this is when you figure that out and we figure out what the speed is that they move away from us, you can figure out how long it took all of these galaxies from the start to now to move away from each other. And this is how we figured out what the age of our universe is. That's incredible. It's complicated and people are like, wait, should I rewind right now or just keep going? And that's up to you.

But that kind of thing is really incredible. I was almost thinking like, oh, can you tell if there's a moon by the Doppler effect of the planet, wobbling the planet a little? But you took it to universal scale, and I appreciate that. If you actually could then see the planet, like when we can see the planet next to the star, when we can block out the light from the star, that's going to be the easiest way, if it's like a mask that we can put on top. If you go in war, it's bright, you want to see your friends.

You basically block out the light from the lamp, and then you can see them, right? same for the star. If we could lock out the light from the star, we could see the dimmer planet close to it, and then we could do the exact same thing that you were just mentioning with the Doppler effect. So then if the planet actually wobbles, then you know that the moon goes around the planet,

and so you can split axo moons that way. But we're not there yet, because even finding the planet is such a hard measurement that finding a moon around a planet, whew, that's like so much harder. Right. It's like finding a needle in a haystack, And I, you're like, find the rust spot on the needle in the haystack.

Thanks, Jordan. Exactly. I know you have promising candidates you mentioned in the book, Kepler 62 and Trappist, I think, one E or something like that, was what makes these planets exciting? What makes them promising? So we found about a couple of dozen planets right now already that are at this right distance, not too hot and not too cold. So I start thinking about it like a bonfire.

if you get too close, it gets too hot. If you go further away, it gets too cold. Right. There is like a nice region, this habitable cell now I talked about, just at a certain distance from the star. And now, I said, when you see this wobbling or this jiggling of the star or when you see the brightness change of the star, you can basically see how long does it take the star to wobble back and force

or how long does it take for the star to become a little less bright and then come a little less bright again. so you know how long it takes the planet to go around the star. And Kepler has already, it's a long time ago, Kepler and astronomer, has actually figured out that how long it takes you to go around your star tells you how far away the planet is from the star. The further away, the longer it takes. So we go around the star faster than Mars does.

Mars is further out, so Mars is going slower or takes more time to go around the sun than we do the Earth. And so that means we can tell you, how far away a planet is from the star with these search techniques. And then we can say, okay, so it's just at the right distance that there could be liquid water on top of that planet. And the liquid water on top is what I need to spot it with my telescope, right? Because if it's locked under ice or if it's locked subsurface, then the gases or the life

that could change the color of the surface is locked away and hidden. And so this is why we're so excited about this planet at the right distance. And then the planets have to be small enough. So if you have a huge Jupiter planet, huge gas ball, we are less excited because we learned, at least from everything we know, that you need a surface and liquid water to get life started. That's some of our key ingredients. So in a gas ball, you don't have that. Maybe on a moon around the gas ball, but we just talked about that finding moons is even harder.

Yeah. So small enough planet at the right distance, incredibly hard to find. But from the ones that we found, and we're about 45, 50 in right now in these 5,600 planets, we know how hard it is to spot those. So by the ones we found, we can tell you how many must exist for us with our not so great technology. Like it is great technology, but it's just not cutting it fully yet. to have found that many. And this is where the number one out of five comes from. So one out of five stars must have a rocky world in this right distance for us to have found what we found. And that makes these planets so exciting at the right distance and rocks. And then you say, okay, maybe that's what it takes. If there's water, it's a rock and it has the energy from its star.

That's what it took on the earth. maybe if that's what it takes, then life could get started there again too. And that's what we're looking for. Really incredible. So there's so many planets, some we can't even see because they're too small. But it just occurred to me. They could also have moons where there's no life on the planet, but the moon has life. I hadn't even thought about that possibility. And you can't see the moons because those are too small. So, I mean, it is just like, people might say it's unlikely there's other life out there. From reading the book, it seems like there's just a near certainty that there is because there's so many things in the Goldilocks zone on so many different stars, the

habitable zone. And this is a non-sequitur, I suppose, but you mentioned that the universe is expanding. Do we have an edge of the observable universe? Can we see it? Or is it just theoretical? Or is there no edge? And it's something you can't explain. Remember I said that when we look further away, we look back in time? Yeah. So you have to, if you have that question, and it's a great question. You have to now mesh time and space because everything is embedded in space and time at the same time. And so basically...

I won't pretend I understand that. Okay. It's not just space, right? Because on the earth you could say, okay, you get to the edge of the table and you fall off, right? There's an edge. That's what I'm thinking. Right.

The edge of the universe, there's some sort of like weird wall thing, Forsefield can't get past at the end. Yeah, no. We haven't found any of this, but the further away we look, So towers, an edge that you want to see, the further will look back in time. So we're actually not hitting any edge of the universe. We're hitting the beginning of time.

I feel like I need to roll up a joint, but continue. This is now become the Joe Rogan podcast. Oh, my God. You're going to have to hit this blunt. So when you look at the sky, light needs time to travel. Let's say we go two billion light years away. We look two billion light years away. We look back in time two billion years.

Now the universe is only 13.7 billion years old. So because time and distance are combined or correlated, I cannot look any further than these 13.7 billion light years away. Right. Okay. Gosh, so hard to wrap your mind around that. It's really great, though, right? Because it is crazy. It's so interesting, but it's so hard for my puny human brain to comprehend this.

This is really unbelievable. Okay, while we're there, let me do one more. Sure. It's going to be harder. Okay. But more fascinating. Okay. Blow your mind.

So the Big Bang, I cannot explain that as well. Okay, and nobody can explain it as well because it's kind of a very weird thing. It was an explosion of space time everywhere at the same point in time. So it's not an explosion like we think one point out, okay? And so what that means is me here at this part of the universe, I have an observable horizon of the universe that's about 13.7 billion years old, right? And then things move. So these things that were there 13.7 billion years ago are now somewhere else, all of that.

But let's just go with, I have my horizon how far I can see because of the age of the universe. But if you go hugely far away outside of this horizon that I can see, and you put somebody there who would look too, they would have the same size horizon. Oh. But their horizon and our horizon would never have to intersect. And so this tells you when you were talking about is their edge of the universe. If this can exist, if there can be billions of people or of places with different horizons that never. intersect, it's infinite everywhere. So basically, because I was going to say, is there a center where we're like,

the Big Bang happened and this was the point at where it happened and everything expands from that. No, there's no center of the universe. Everywhere is the center of the universe at the same time somehow. Right. And so what's really interesting is it took us a while to figure this out. Sure. Because it looks as if everything is moving away from us, right?

And so then you could say, ooh, we were the center, right? that's clearly. But it's not. Think about it a bit like a raisin bread where when the yeast dough expands, I don't know if you know what a raisin bread is, but in Germany and Austria we do. Now you're in my zone of genius. All right. And so every, when this thing expands in the oven, right, every raisin moves away from every other raisin. It's a little bit tricky because a raisin bread also has a center. But if you just jump on one of the raisins in this raisin bread, all the other reasons around it look like they move away from it. But if you jump on another reason, all the raisins around it look like they move away from it. So it's your point of view that basically

determines what your horizon, observable horizon, cosmic horizon is. And there is no reason to think that somewhere completely different outside of our horizon, somebody else, if there's life out there, wouldn't have the same horizon, but that just doesn't intersect. And so that gets you into this realm where you were just saying, now we're starting to blow our mind. It's fascinating that human curiosity figure that out, right? Because you wouldn't think that we look at the stars. And we haven't done this for such a long time like humankind. But what we've figured out and what concepts we're trying to wrap our mind around, I just think that gives me hope for our future. to figure that out, that the universe is expanding, that there was a big bang, that we're changing

our climate rate. We can fix so many things or we can solve so many things because we were curious and looked and we invited this wonder in and you want me to blow your mind, like to a certain extent, right? And that, I think, is what it takes to figure out how we fit in this beautiful cosmos. I am just grateful that you were able to explain this in terms of raisins, because you're doing a good job communicating with this jellyfish of a podcaster, I have to say. I'm impressed. The raisin analogy really did do it for me. I think there's people out there that are like, okay, I don't want to admit this, but the raisin thing works. I do understand this quite a bit more now. It's still hard for me to believe that everywhere is the center of the universe at the same time.

The observable universe. Everywhere is the center of the observable universe, right? Of the observable universe. I see. Okay. Yeah, that's a key, a crucial distinction. And the little bit of time we have left, it's occurred to me that Earth is a certain size, right? There could be really big Earths, I suppose, right? Smaller might be harder because there's not, you mentioned, not enough core mass to create volcanic activity, yada, yada, no life. But there could be bigger Earths, right? Or is that also hitting a wall at some point due to the gravity of that planet? Absolutely.

So what we find, and what was one of the biggest first surprise? So you look for planets outside, right? And you kind of expect them to be like the ones in our solar system would make sense because that's the one system we know. And what we found is that most of the planets we've found so far are actually in between, in between the size of the biggest rock we have, that's the Earth, and the smallest gaspull we have, that's Neptune. So we call them mini-Neptunes, if they're smaller gaspoles and Neptune, and super-Earths if they're bigger rocks than the Earth. So your question, absolutely, there could be Earths that are more massive. Gravity would be stronger, so you would need more muscles to actually be able to walk around, or you would want to slither around and never actually stand up, right? Or you have a different bone structure if you wanted life on those worlds.

But at a certain point, the gravity that this planet has will actually, when the planet forms, it forms in an environment in a disk around the star that has one. rocks, ice, and gas. At a certain point, it becomes so big that it will actually basically vacuum up all the gas and dust. And it will become very, very fast, a big gas ball. And we think the edge is somewhere around 10 to 15 times the mass of our planet. Oh, wow.

And about twice the size. And so we call it super earth because astronomers are really good at naming things. Yeah. But it doesn't mean that they're any better. or any worse. So this is why these search is so fascinating because we have no idea. There's no reason to sink there couldn't be light. There's, you know, some reasons to sink with more gravity. You know, you'd have a different structure, a different way of moving. And with a bit less gravity, you could actually go to about half the mass of the earth, still have the atmosphere. It's probably not a thick. You could, with our muscles, we could jump much higher. It would be much more

fun, right? Like the moon, the astronauts, like jumping around on the moon. With my muscle strengths, I can do feast of aerobics, right, or of sports. But there is this range from about half the mass of the earth to about 10 to 15 times the mass of the earth where you get a rock and that might have more water or less water. Many of these more massive planets seem to have less rock and more water, making them water worlds. Like when we talked about Kepler 62 E and F that I got to actually help discover. And so what's so fascinating when you then think about this? So more water, what would that mean?

Could that be an ocean world? Could there be waves that never break? Because there is no shore. The whole planet is covered in oceans. And one other thing that's so fascinating about these worlds, because physics works, right? And so if you were on a water world and you would jump into that ocean, you would go down, down, down. It would be a deep ocean much, much deeper than what we have here in the earth because there's more water there. And so the bottom of the ocean, you would actually hit ice.

It's not the cold ice that we know of. It's water that has so much pressure on top of it that it solidifies. It's called high pressure ice. Whoa. And so that planet would work so differently. And you shouldn't dive down because all the water inside of you would also solidify. It never occurred to me that you could have ice that's not cold, right? But the pressure pushes the water molecules together so much that it turns into just warm ice.

It's just a rock of water. That's really interesting. I never thought about that. And it wouldn't go up to swim, right? Because the density would be very, very strong, like very high. So it would stay where it is. But it would be completely different because you wouldn't have water with a rock, like interface, like we have here on the Earth, on the bottom of our ocean, there's a rocky surface. I see.

And so these planets could be very, very different in how they work from us. And there are geological or sinks like, you know, like volcanoes or how does the magnetic field work or how does the interior of our planet work that we don't understand yet. Because we don't have a way to actually make this in the lab, right? because the pressures are hard to do. But we're starting to think about how different these worlds could be. And there, I take the extremophiles that we talked about, right? Extreme is in the eye of the beholder. Because I always think like these extremophiles would like look at humans like,

oh, poor guys, you know, they don't have any acidity. They have like only this measly temperature range. And so maybe other worlds that look very bizarre and weird to us. If there's life there, that would be the norm there. And they would be like, oh, that planet around this yellow sun, there can't be no life because they don't have enough pressure to do it. That's true. Yeah, they're looking at us and they're going, oh, all that water and that oxygen. There's no way everything there just doesn't oxidize immediately.

There's no way. No way. Okay. I know there is a such thing as a planet without a star, rogue planets. I'm guessing there's no life because there's no star, so there's no sort of energy there. I mean, I guess remains to be seen. But still, so let me throw you a curveball. What about planets with more than one star? Does that exist? I'm talking about like tattooing from Star Wars where Luke Skywalker is from. Can there be a two star solar system? Absolutely.

Yeah. Actually, 50% like half of the stars out there have a stellar companion. So double sunrises and double sunsets are not as rare as you might think. Because they are planets that actually orbit those two. And I got to dive into science fiction in the book too where it was like planets. it's maybe even better than the science fiction worlds. And I know I'm getting myself into all kinds of troubles here. But it was pretty funny because Tatooine was, of course, one of the ones with two stars. And a friend of mine then actually accused me of ruining Star Wars for him forever, what I did not do on purpose. Because my one question was like, where's the second shadow on Tattooing? Whoops, didn't think of that.

But, you know, we can fix that. CGI. Now everything works. Yeah. But there are actually systems where you have a planet. that goes around two stars. But there's another stellar pair that orbits in the same system. So quadruple star system. So you would have to double sunset and double stars at sunrise and double sunset. But you would still have two close by stars that belong to your system too.

So it can be a much more interesting and much reader than the sci-fi worlds that we have imagined so far. Would having more than one star increase or decrease chances, for life, I'm guessing, decreased because now it has to be in the Goldilocks zone of both stars, so that's just added complexity? There is added complexity, but if those two stars orbit very close to each other, and then the planet just goes around both of them, then it's actually not as hard. And so we find a lot of planets around double stars, so the jury is completely out if there's any good or bad effects that would happen to that, except for beautiful sunrises and sunset.

Man, I love your passion for this. It really comes through in the way that you speak about this stuff. And it's funny, I want to note that when I called you, it was the day of the eclipse. And it was really clear that this is like 100% your thing. And you were born for this. And it was just, it's an honor to have you bring that passion to this show. And I thought it was especially funny that you brought, you travel across the country. You saw a rocket launch. You bring your kid to this rocket launch and to the eclipse. And afterwards, it's like, you go to some habachi place. The daughter, remembers the onion volcano that the chef made. That's what she took away from the rocket launch in the eclipse. I know, the same is like, I was just like, I, for every parent out there who takes their kids to rocket launch, right, when they're small, do not go to the Japanese place after because the cool, on the volcano will actually outpace, you know, the amazing impression. But I keep reminding her.

And I think it's just great that we get to take the young people in the world to this adventure because it's their world coming up. It's refining these worlds. Somebody has to study them. Somebody has to figure this out. And science is so much fun. And I think this is what we sometimes don't get to convey. You get to travel. You get to figure something out that nobody has ever figured out before. And you get to do that with a team of people from everywhere. So I love science for that. And now I get to talk about the passion and share it. So I love. I love it. So I love, love that part too. Thank you so much for having me, and for the great questions and for helping with communicating with the jellyfish. Oh, that's right. You got it. Here's a sample of my interview

with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. We talk about why an interest in science serves every field of expertise from law to art, what our education should ideally train us for. Here's a quick look inside. Walt Whitman, when I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs, the figures were ranged in columns before me, when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add, divide, and measure them. When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, how soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick, till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself into the mystical moist night air,

and from time to time looked up in perfect silence. at the stars. It's the same curiosity you have as a kid, but I just have it as an adult. I've had it since childhood. You don't have to maintain it. You just have to make sure nothing interferes with it. So the counterpart to this would be, oh, sir, literate one, why ruin what something looks like by describing it with words when I can see it fully with my eyes? Your words just get in the way. I'd rather my mind float freely as I gaze upon something of interest. and have the writer step in between me and it and interpose his or her own interpretation. You don't know the thoughts that you're not having.

What keeps me awake is wondering what questions I don't yet know to ask because they would only become available to me after we discover what dark matter and dark energy is. Oh, man. Because think about it, the fact that we even know how to ask that question, that's almost half the way there. But I want to know the question that I can't know yet. what is the profound level of ignorance that were manifest after we answer the profound questions we've been smart enough to pose thus far?

For more, including how science denial has gained a global foothold, what it'll take for the U.S. to get to Mars before China, and why it's dangerous for people to claim the Earth is flat, check out episode 327 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Man, there was so much we couldn't include. The Voyager missions. Apparently there's a cosmic record player out there with Earth sounds, famous songs, sound effects, things like that. It's going to be a hell of a collector's item for some alien civilization someday. I mean, it might never be found. Probably won't be, or maybe it's found millions of years from now. We might be long gone by then. That might be all that's left of us. That's kind of weird to think about. We don't really know which conditions were needed to get life started here on Earth. It could be cold. It could be warm. We really don't know because apparently the ancient rocks on Earth have been destroyed by tectonic plate movement over millions a year. So we just really have no idea. If we find life on frozen or hot worlds, we might actually figure that out. So we might find out more about Earth by exploring other planets.

Could be hot, could be cold, could be both. We don't know. I also find it fascinating. She explains this a little bit in the book. If you break Earth's lifespan right into a day, humans have been alive for a few seconds, dinosaurs for about an hour. That's why there's so many fossils. They were around a long, long, long, long time.

I mean, humans have been around for quite some time. Dinosaurs were around for hundreds of times longer, apparently. So that explains why they're, because I was always wondering. How are there so many dang fossils? I mean, we find these things all the time, and they're getting destroyed by tectonic plate movement as well, I would imagine. But there's just so many of them in the ground, unbelievable. And last but not least, I just thought it was mind-blood, really hard to wrap my mind around,

but like crazy that light takes so long to travel to far reaches of the universe that observers on other planets looking at Earth might actually be looking at a planet full of dinosaurs or possibly a planet that has no life at all if they're really, really far away and they have the technology to observe the Earth. So that puts things in perspective, man. I don't know. Drive like you know each other, as my friend David Smalley says, because we're very insignificant in the scheme of things. And the big problem you're having right now, well, on a universal scale, doesn't matter at all. All things, Lisa Kaltinegger will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show,

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My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show, it's that you share it with friends and you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. So if you know somebody who's interested in cosmic space exploration, aliens, whatever, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show

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