#201 – Konstantin Batygin: Planet 9 and the Edge of Our Solar System

Konstantin Batygin is a planetary astrophysicist at Caltech. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Squarespace: https://lexfridman.com/squarespace and use code LEX to get 10% off – Literati: https://literati.com/lex – Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off – National Instruments (NI): https://www.ni.com/perspectives EPISODE LINKS: Konstantin’s Twitter https://twitter.com/kbatygin Konstantin’s Website https://www.konstantinbatygin.com/ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (07:17) – Overview of our Solar System (22:14) – What is the Oort Cloud? (27:10) – Life in the interstellar medium (28:42) – Are there aliens out there? (31:22) – How unique is Earth? (34:02) – Did Jupiter destroy early planets? (40:16) – How hard is it to simulate the Universe? (44:49) – Quantum mechanics in evolution of objects in the Solar system (49:15) – Simulating the first formations around the Sun (55:02) – Will it be possible to simulate the full history of the Solar System? (57:23) – How far should we go with the simulation? (59:43) – Increasing immersion in video games (1:06:09) – What is Planet Nine? (1:12:37) – The origin of life (1:15:02) – Evidence of Planet Nine (1:17:32) – Discovery of Neptune (1:18:42) – When will we find Planet Nine? (1:21:21) – Planet Nine throws rocks into the Kuiper Belt (1:25:15) – Could Planet Nine be a primordial black hole? (1:35:20) – Commercial space revolution boosts science and the human condition (1:42:46) – Solving sex in space (1:43:24) – Would humans evolve if we couldn’t see the stars? (1:49:08) – Military funding and science (1:53:11) – Is Oumuamua space junk from a distant alien civilization? (2:06:33) – Wild ideas create the future (2:14:22) – The perfect place to die (2:16:03) – Greatest song of all time (2:22:34) – Music enables science for Konstantin (2:24:51) – Music practice tips for busy people (2:28:41) – Memories of 1990s Russia (2:35:14) – Advice for young people (2:41:10) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Konstantin Batigan, planetary astrophysicist at Caltech, interested in, among other things, the search for the distant, the mysterious Planet 9 in the outer regions of our solar system. Quick mention of our sponsors: Squarespace, Literati, Onnit, and NI. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that our little sun is orbited by not just a few planets in the planetary region, but trillions of objects in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud that extends over three light-years out. This to me is amazing, since Proxima Antari, the closest star to our sun, is only 4.2 light-years away.

• 0:46Lex Fridman?

  And all of it is mostly covered in darkness. When I get a chance to go out swimming in the ocean, far from the shore, I'm sometimes overcome by the terrifying and the exciting feeling of not knowing what's there in the deep darkness. That's how I feel about the edge of our solar system. One day, I hope humans will travel there. Or at the very least, AI systems that carry the flame of human consciousness. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now. No ads in the middle. I find those get in the way of the conversation. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps, so if you skip, I hope you don't, but if you do, please still check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. I'm very picky about the sponsors we take on,

• 1:31Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:15Lex Fridman?

  And we've got thousands and thousands of submissions. It was quite incredible, actually. The number of people that David inspires is just, it's truly humbling. But the point is, on the website side of things, it was super easy. It's an all-in-one service because you can also register a domain, you can do e-commerce kind of stuff. Really, anything you want from a website, Squarespace has it. Go to lexfridman.com/squarespace for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code Lex to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's lexfridman.com/squarespace and that should forward you to the right place. This show is also sponsored by Literati Book Clubs.

• 2:56Lex Fridman?

  Join book clubs hosted by people like Richard Branson and Stephen Curry, but there are many other ones. They deliver their monthly book picks straight to your door. I personally am part of the Joseph Campbell's Book Club called Myth and Meaning. One book I read in that club is The Spell of the Sentuous: Perception and Language in a More Than Human World. David Abram, the author, describes beautifully how we have become disconnected from nature and how we can reconnect whilst remaining in the modern world. I think there's a lot of people that write books like this in an almost naive dismissal of all the amazing things that technology brings. David doesn't do that.

• 3:39Lex Fridman?

  But he does highlight that there is things to be discovered in the other than human. If we were sort of open our senses to them, that's what nature is. Life all around us that isn't human. Anyway, reimagine what a book club can be. Redeem your 30 day trial for only 99 cents at literati.com/lex. Head to literati.com/lex to learn more. That's literati.com/lex. This episode is sponsored by Onnit, nutrition, supplement and fitness company. They make AlphaBrain, which is a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed and focus.

• 4:20Lex Fridman?

  I use it as a kind of a boost for my mind when I'm thinking about a difficult problem. So if a particular deep work session requires just like sitting there and thinking with a sheet of paper, usually that's kind of like the design stage for the idea when it's purely thinking. That's usually when I, for a prolonged period of time, have to turn my mind to 11. So it's, it's focused, but it's also like actively digging deep. That's how I think about thinking. It's like digging a hole, searching for gold. And most of the times you come up with nothing. Speaking of digging, There Will Be Blood is an incredible movie. Not only is one of the greatest actors in history, but he's also one of the most interesting actors in history.

• 5:04Lex Fridman?

  The few interviews with him that I've seen, you can tell it in his eyes, there's brilliance there. I'm not sure why I brought that up. I think it had to do with digging for gold, but yes, I use Onnit to help me dig for gold, but in the space of ideas. It clears the mind, maintains focus, that kind of stuff. Go to lexfridman.com/Onnit to get up to 10% off AlphaBrain. That's lexfridman.com/Onnit. This show is sponsored by NI, formerly known as National Instruments. NI is a company that has been helping engineers solve the world's toughest challenges for 40 years. Their motto is engineer ambitiously.

• 5:43Lex Fridman?

  I love listening to podcasts, so I'm excited that NI has a new podcast called Testing 123. I love that name. They bring on engineers and innovators to discuss unexpected challenges and explore the world through the lens of testing. In the parts of my work that involve software engineering, I love the process of testing. I mean, you can think even just the debugging process is a kind of process of testing. And that first few moments when you run into problems, into warnings, into errors. That's such a special moment because you're catching problems in the code, thanks to the debugger, that could have been much more painful, much more costly,

• 6:25Lex Fridman?

  if they were encountered in the application of that code in the real world. Anyway, NI's new podcast called Testing 123 is all about that. You can get it at NI.com/perspectives. They also have a bunch of amazing articles on there, or you can get it basically anywhere podcasts are available. That's NI.com/perspectives, and the podcast is called Testing 123. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Konstantin Batygin.

• 7:17Lex Fridman?

  What is Planet 9?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Planet 9 is an object that we believe lives in the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune. It orbits the sun with a period of about 10,000 years and is about five Earth masses.

• 7:34Lex Fridman?

  So that's a hypothesized object. There's some evidence for this kind of object. There's a bunch of different explanations. Can you give like an overview of the planets in our solar system? How many are there? What do we know and not know about them at a high level?

• 7:52Speaker 01

  All right, that sounds like a good plan. So, look, the solar system basically is comprised of two parts, the inner and the outer solar system. The inner solar system has the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Now Mercury is about 40% of the orbital separation of where the Earth is, is closer to the sun, Venus about 70%, then Mars is about...

• 8:20Speaker 01

  One hundred and sixty percent further away from the sun than is the earth. These planets that we, one of them, we occupy, right, are pretty small. Okay, they're to leading order, sort of heavily overgrown asteroids, if you will. And this is, this becomes evident when you move out further in the solar system and encounter Jupiter, which is three hundred and sixteen earth masses, right, ten times the size. You know, and Saturn is another huge one, ninety earth masses at about ten times the separation from the sun as is the earth. And then you have Uranus and Neptune at twenty and thirty, respectively.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  For a long time, that is where the kind of massive part of the solar system ended. But what we've learned in the last thirty years is that beyond Neptune, there is this expansive field of icy debris, a second icy asteroid belt in the solar system. A lot of people have heard of the asteroid belt, which lives between Mars and Jupiter, right? Like, that's a pretty common thing that people like to imagine and draw on, lunchboxes and stuff. But beyond Neptune, there's a much more massive, much more radially expansive field of debris.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Pluto, by the way, it belongs to that second, you know, icy asteroid belt, which we call the Kuiper belt, it's just a big object within that population of bodies.

• 9:57Lex Fridman?

  Well, Pluto, the planet.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  Pluto, the dwarf planet, the former planet, you know.

• 10:03Lex Fridman?

  Why is Pluto not a planet anymore?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  I mean, it's tiny. We used to.

• 10:08Lex Fridman?

  Size matters when it comes to planets.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  A hundred percent, a hundred percent. It's actually a fascinating story. When Pluto was discovered in nineteen thirty, the reason it was discovered in the first place is because astronomers at the time were looking for a seven-earth-mass planet. Somewhere beyond Neptune. It was hypothesized that such an object exists. When they found something, they interpreted that as a seven Earth-mass planet and immediately revised its mass downward because they couldn't resolve the object with the telescope. So it looked like a, just a point mass, you know, star rather than a physical disk. They said, well, maybe it's not seven, maybe it's one, right? And then, so over the next, you know, I guess 40 years,

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Pluto's mass kept getting revised downwards, downwards, downwards, until it was realized that's like 500 times less massive than the Earth. I mean, Pluto's surface area is almost perfectly equal to the surface area of Russia, actually. And, you know, Russia is big, but it's not a planet.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, actually, we can, we can touch more on that.

• 11:18Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's another discussion. So in some sense, earlier in the century, Pluto represented kind of our ignorance about the edges of the solar system. And perhaps Planet Nine is the thing that represents our ignorance about now the modern set of ignorances about the edges of our solar system.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  That's a good way to put it.

• 11:40Lex Fridman?

  By the way, just imagining this belt of debris at the edge of our solar system is incredible. Can you talk about it a little bit? What is the Kuiper Belt? And what is the Oort Cloud?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so look, the simple way to think about it is that if you imagine, you know, Neptune's orbit like a circle, right? Kind of maybe a factor of one and a half, 1.3 times bigger, on a radius of 1.3 times bigger, you've got a whole collection of icy objects. Most of these objects are sort of the size of Austin, you know, maybe, maybe a little bit smaller. If you then zoom out. Right, and explore the orbits of the most long period Kuiper belt object.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  These are the things that have the biggest orbits and take the longest time to go around the sun. Then what you find is that beyond a critical orbit size, beyond a critical orbit period, which is about 4,000 years, you start to see weird structure, like all the orbits sort of point into one direction. And all the orbits are kind of tilted in the same way, by about 20 degrees with respect to sun. This is particularly pronounced in orbits that are not heavily affected by Neptune. So there you start to see this weird dichotomy where there are objects which are stable,

• 13:15Speaker 01

  which Neptune does not mess with gravitationally, and unstable objects. The unstable objects are basically all over the place because they're being, you know, kicked around by Neptune. The stable orbits show this remarkable pattern of clustering. We, back I guess five years ago, interpreted this pattern of clustering as a gravitational one-way sign, the existence of a planet, in a distant planet, right? Something that is shepherding and confining these orbits together. Of course, right, you have to have some skepticism when you're talking about these things. You have to ask the question of, okay, how statistically significant is this clustering?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And there are many authors that have indeed called that into question. We have done our own analyses. And basically, just like with all statistics, where, you know, there's kind of like, you know, multiple ways to do the exercise, you can either ask the question of, if I have a telescope that has, you know, surveyed this part of the sky, what are the chances that I would discover this clustering? That basically tells you that you have zero confidence, right? Like, that's not, that does not give you a confident answer one way or another. Another way to do the statistics, which is what we prefer to do, is to take and to say, we have a whole

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Night sky of discoveries in the Kuiper Belt, right? And if we have some object over there, which has rise, stenchion and declination, which is a way to say it's there on the sky, and it has some brightness, that means somebody looked over there and discovered an object of, was able to discover an object of that brightness or brighter. Through that analysis, you can construct a whole map on the sky of kind of where all of the surveys that have ever been done have collectively looked. So if you do the exercise this way, the false alarm probability of the clustering on which the planet night hypothesis is built is about 0.4%.

• 15:28Lex Fridman?

  Wow, okay, so there's a million questions here. One, when you say bright objects, why are they bright? Are we talking about actual objects within the Kuiper Belt? Or the stuff we see through the Kuiper Belt?

• 15:38Speaker 01

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

• 16:20Speaker 01

  It's just they're reflecting light off of the sun and it's going back and hitting this.

• 16:25Lex Fridman?

  There's a little bit of a glimmer from the different objects that you can see based on the reflection from the sun. So like, there's actual light, but it's not darkness.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  That's right. These are just big icicles, basically, that are just reflecting sunlight back at you. It's then easy to understand why it's so hard to discover them because light has to travel to, you know, something like 40 times the distance between the Earth and the sun and then get reflected back.

• 16:53Lex Fridman?

  Was that like an hour travel?

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, that's right. That's something like that because they, the earth to the sun is eight minutes, I believe. Um, and so.

• 17:02Lex Fridman?

  Something, you know.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, hours. Yeah.

• 17:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, in that, in that order magnitude. So that's interesting. So you have to like account for all of that. And then there's this huge amount of data, pixels that are coming from the pictures. And you have to integrate all of that together.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:19Lex Fridman?

  To paint a sort of like a high estimate of the different objects. Can you track them? Can you be like, that's Bob? Like, can you like?

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. In fact, uh, one of them is, is named Joe Biden. I mean, I'm not like, this is not even a joke. Right.

• 17:35Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Is there a Trump one or no?

• 17:36Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't, I don't know. I haven't checked for, for, for that, but, uh, like the way it works is if you discover one, you right away get a license plate for it. Okay. So like the first four numbers is the first year that this object has appeared on, you know, uh, in the data set, if you will. And then, um, there's like this code that follows it, um, which basically tells you where in the sky it is, right? So one of the really interesting Kuiper belt objects, which is very much part of the planet nine stories called, uh, VP one, one, three. Because Joe Biden was vice president at the time, you know, got nicknamed Biden.

• 18:22Lex Fridman?

  VP one, one, three.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:24Lex Fridman?

  He got nicknamed Biden. Beautiful. What's the fingerprint for any particular object? Like, how do you know it's the same one? Or he's just kind of like, yeah, from night to night, you take a picture. How do you know it's the same object?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the way you know is it appears in almost exactly the same part of the sky. Except for a move, but moves. But and this is why actually you need at least three nights. Because oftentimes asteroids, which are much closer to the earth, like will, um, appear.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  To move only slightly, but then on the third night we'll move away. So that third night is really there to detect acceleration. Now, the thing that I didn't really realize until, you know, I started observing together with my partner in crime and all this, Mike Brown, is just the fact that for the first year, when you make these detections, the only thing you really know with confidence is where it is on the night sky and how far away it is. Okay, that's it. You don't know anything about the orbit. Because over three days, the object just moves so little, right? The, that whole motion on the sky is entirely coming from motion of the earth.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Right? So the earth is kind of the car, the object is the tree and you see it move. So then to get some confident information about what its orbit looks like, you have to come back a year later and then measure it again.

• 19:55Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting. So do three nights and come back a year later and do another three nights. So you get the velocity, the acceleration from the three nights and then you have the maybe

• 20:04Speaker 01

  The additional.

• 20:05Lex Fridman?

  The additional information.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Because orbit is basically described by six parameters. So you at least need six independent points, but in reality you need many more observations to, to really pin down the orbit well.

• 20:18Lex Fridman?

  And from that, you're able to construct for that one particular object and orbit. And then there's of course, like, how many objects are there?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  There's like four-ish thousand now.

• 20:29Lex Fridman?

  But like the, in the future, that could be like millions?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Oh, sure. So in fact, these things are hard to predict, but there's a new observatory called the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is coming online maybe next year. I mean, with COVID, these things are a little bit more uncertain, but they've actually been making great progress with construction. And so that Telescope is just gonna sort of scan the night sky every day automatically. And it's just, it's such an efficient survey that it might increase the census of the distant Kuiper belt, the things that I'm interested in by a factor of 100. I mean, that would be, that would be really cool.

• 21:16Lex Fridman?

  And yeah, that's a, that's an incredible.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  They, I mean, they might just find planet nine. I mean, that's.

• 21:25Lex Fridman?

  Like almost like literally pictures, like visually.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  I mean, sure, yeah, like the first detection you make, all you know is where it is in the sky and how far away it is. If something is, you know, 500 times away from the sun, as far away from the sun as is the earth, you know, that's planet nine. That's when the story concludes.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  And then you can study it.

• 21:44Lex Fridman?

  Now you can study it, yeah. By the way, I'm gonna use that as like, I don't know, a pick up line or a dating strategy, like see the person for three days and then don't see them at all and then see them again in, in a year to determine the orbit. And over time, you figure out if sort of, uh, from a cosmic perspective, this, this whole thing worked out.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  I have no dating advice to give.

• 22:08Lex Fridman?

  I was, I was gonna use this as a metaphor to, to somehow, to, uh, map it onto the human condition. Okay, you mentioned the Kuiper belt, what's the Oort cloud? If you look at the Neptune orbit as, uh, one, then the Kuiper belt is like 1.3 out there. And then we get farther and farther into the darkness, what?

• 22:27Speaker 01

  So, okay, you've got the kind of main Kuiper belt, which is about, say, 1.3, 1.5. Then you have something called the scattered disk, which is kind of an extension of the Kuiper belt. It's a bunch of these long, uh, very elliptical orbits that hug the orbit of Neptune, but come out very far. So that, the scattered disk, um, with the current sensors, like the, some of the longest orbits we know of,

• 22:59Speaker 01

  have. A semi-major axis, so half the orbit length, roughly speaking, of about a thousand, thousand times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

• 23:10Lex Fridman?

  Wow.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Now, if you keep moving out, okay, eventually, once you're at sort of, you know, ten thousand to a hundred thousand roughly, that's where the Oort Cloud is. Now, the Oort Cloud is a distinct population of icy bodies and is distinct from the Kuiper Belt. It's, in fact, it's so expansive that it ends roughly halfway between us and the next star. Um, its, its edge is just dictated by to what extent does the solar gravity reach?

• 23:43Lex Fridman?

  Solar gravity reaches that far?

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:45Lex Fridman?

  So it has to, wow.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. So. In fact.

• 23:50Lex Fridman?

  Imagining this is a little bit overwhelming. So there's like a giant, like vast icy rock thingy.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  It's like a sphere. It's like, you know, it's like, it's an almost spherical structure that engulfs, that encircles the Sun. And all the long-period comets come from the Oort Cloud. They come, the way that they appear, I mean, for already, I don't know, hundreds of years, we've been detecting it occasionally, like a comet will come in and it comes, seemingly comes out of nowhere. The reason these long-period comets appear, that very, on very, very long time scales, right? These Oort Cloud objects that are sitting, you know, thirty thousand times as far away from the Sun as is the Earth, actually interact with the gravity of the galaxy, the tide,

• 24:45Speaker 01

  effectively the tide that the galaxy exerts upon them and their orbits slowly change and elongate to the point where, once they, their closest approach to the Sun starts to reach a critical distance where ice starts to sublimate, then we discover them as comets because then the ice comes off of them. They look beautiful in the night sky, et cetera. But they're all coming from, you know, really, really far away.

• 25:12Lex Fridman?

  So is there, are any of them coming our way from collisions? Like, how many collisions are there? Or is there a bunch of space for them to move around?

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's zero, like, it's completely collisionless. Out there. The physical radii of objects are so small compared to the distance between them, right? It's just, it is truly a collisionless environment. I don't know. There, I think that probably in the age of the solar system, there have literally been zero collisions in the Oort Cloud.

• 25:46Lex Fridman?

  Wow. When you like draw a picture of the solar system, everything's really close together. So that everything, I guess, here is spaced far apart. Do rogue planets like fly in every once in a while and join? Not rogue planets, but rogue objects from out there.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. Oh, sure. Yeah.

• 26:03Lex Fridman?

  Join the party?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. We've seen a couple of them in the last three or so years, maybe four years now. One, the first one was the one called Ua Muu Muu. It's been all over the news. The second one was comet Borisov, discovered by a guy named Borisov.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the way you know they're coming from elsewhere is unlike solar system objects, which travel on elliptical paths around the sun, these guys travel on hyperbolic paths. So they come in, say hello, and then they're gone. And the fact that they exist is totally like not surprising, right? The Neptune is constantly ejecting Kuiper belt objects into interstellar space. Our solar system itself is sort of leaking icy debris and injecting it. So presumably every planetary systems around other stars do exactly the same thing.

• 27:10Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you about the millions of objects that are part of the Kuiper Belt and a part of the Oort Cloud. Do you think some of them have primitive life? It kind of makes you sad if there's like primitive life there and they're just kind of like lonely out there in space. Like, how many of them do you think have life, like bacterial life?

• 27:28Speaker 01

  Probably a negligible amount. Zero, you know, like zero with like a plus on top, right?

• 27:34Lex Fridman?

  Zero plus plus.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  If so, you know, if you and I took a little trip to the interstellar medium, I think we would develop cancer and die real fast, right?

• 27:48Lex Fridman?

  It's rough.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a pretty hostile radiation environment. You don't actually have to go to the interstellar medium. You just have to leave the Earth's magnetic field to, and then you're not doing so well suddenly. So, you know, this, this idea of, you know, life kind of traveling between places, it's not, it's not entirely implausible, but you, you really have to twist, I think, a lot of parameters. One of the problems we have is we don't actually know how life originates, right? So it's kind of a second order question of survival in the interstellar medium and how resilient it is because we, we think you require water.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  But, and that's certainly the case for the Earth, but you know, we, we really don't know for sure. That said, I will argue that the question of like, are there aliens out there? Is a very boring question because the answer is of course there are. I mean, like, we know that there are planets around almost every star. Of course, there, of course, there are other life forms. Life is not some specific thing that happened on the Earth and that's it, right? Just, that's a statistical impossibility.

• 29:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Yeah, but the, the difficult question is before even the fact that we don't know how life originates, I don't think we even know what life is, like definitionally.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:22Lex Fridman?

  Like formalizing a kind of picture of, in terms of the mechanism we would use to, to search for life out there, or even when we're on a planet to say, is this life? Is this rock that just moved from where it was yesterday, life? Or, or maybe not even a rock, something else?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  I gotta tell you, I want to know what life is. Okay, and I want you to show me.

• 29:50Lex Fridman?

  I think there's a song to basically accompany every single thing we talk about today. And probably half of them are love songs. And somehow we'll integrate George Michael into the whole thing. Okay, so your intuition is there's life everywhere in our universe.

• 30:06Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there's intelligent life out there?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I think it's entirely plausible. I mean, I it's entirely plausible.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  I think I think there's intelligent life on Earth.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  And

• 30:20Lex Fridman?

  So yeah, taking that, like, say, whatever this thing we got on Earth, whether it's dolphins or humans, say, that's intelligent.

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Definitely dolphins. I mean, have you seen the dolphins?

• 30:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, they do some cruel stuff to each other. So if cruelty is a definition of intelligence, they're pretty good.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:40Lex Fridman?

  And then humans are pretty good in that regard. And then there's like, pigs are very intelligent. I got I got actually a chance to hang out with pigs recently. And they're, aside from the fact they're trying to eat me, they're very, they're very, they love food. They love food. But there's an intelligence to their eyes that was kind of like haunts me because I also love to eat meat. And then to meet the thing I later ate. And that was very intelligent and almost charismatic with the way it was expressing it himself, herself itself was was quite incredible. So all that to say is,

• 31:22Lex Fridman?

  if we have intelligent life here on Earth, if we take dolphins, pigs, humans, from the perspective of planetary science, how unique is Earth?

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Okay, so Earth is not a common outcome of the planet formation process.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  It's probably a something on the order of maybe a 1% effect. And by Earth, I mean, not just an Earth-mass planet. Okay, I mean, the architecture of the solar system that allows the Earth to exist in in its kind of very temperate

• 32:02Speaker 01

  way.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  One thing to understand, and this is pretty crucial, right? It's that the Earth itself formed well after the gas disk that formed the giant planets had already dissipated. You see, stars start out with, you know, the star and then a disk of gas and dust that encircles it, okay? From this disk of gas and dust, big planets can emerge. And we have, over the last, you know, two, three decades, discovered thousands of extrasolar planets in orbit of other stars.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  What we see is that many of them are, you know, have these expansive hydrogen-helium atmospheres. The fact that the Earth doesn't is deeply connected to the fact that Earth took about 100 million years to form. So we missed that, you know, train, so to speak, to get that hydrogen-helium atmosphere. That's why, actually, we can see the sky, right? That's why the sky is, well, at least in most places, that's why the atmosphere is not completely opaque. With that, you know, kind of thinking in mind, I would argue that we're getting the

• 33:25Speaker 01

  kind of emergent pictures that the Earth is not, you know, everywhere, right? We, there's sort of the sci-fi view of things where we go to some other star and we just land on random planets and they're all Earth-like. That's totally not true. But even a low probability event, even if you imagine that Earth is a one in a million or one in a, you know, one in 10 million occurrence, there are 10 to the 12 stars in the galaxy. Right, so you just, you always win by, by

• 34:00Lex Fridman?

  Large numbers.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  That's right, by supply.

• 34:01Lex Fridman?

  They save you. Well, you've hypothesized that our solar system once possessed a population of short period planets that were destroyed by the evil Jupiter migrating through the solar nebula. Can you explain?

• 34:16Speaker 01

  If I was to say, what was the kind of the key outcome of searches for extrasolar planets? It is that most stars are encircled by short period planets that are, you know, a few Earth masses, right? So a few times bigger than the Earth and have orbital periods that kind of range from days to, to weeks. Now, if you go and ask the solar system, what's in our region, right? In that region is completely empty, right? It's just, it's astonishingly hollow. And thank you, from the sun is not some, you know, special star that decided that it was going to form

• 35:00Speaker 01

  the, the solar system. So I think, you know, the natural thing to assume is, is that the same processes of planet formation that occurred everywhere else also occurred in the solar system. Following this logic, it's not implausible to imagine that the solar system once possessed a system of intra Mercurian, like, you know, compact system of, of planets. So then we asked ourselves, would such a system survive to this day? And the answer is no. At least our calculations suggested it's highly unlikely because of the formation of Jupiter. And Jupiter's primordial kind of wandering through the solar system would have sent this collisional

• 35:45Speaker 01

  field of debris that would have pushed that system of planets onto the sun.

• 35:49Lex Fridman?

  So was Jupiter, this primordial wandering, what did, what did Jupiter look like? Like, why was it wandering? It didn't have the orbit it has today?

• 35:58Speaker 01

  We're pretty certain that giant planets like Jupiter, when they form, they migrate. The reason they migrate is, you know, on a detailed level, perhaps difficult to explain, but you know, just in a qualitative sense, that they form in this fluid disk of gas and dust. So it's kind of like, if I plop down a raft somewhere in the ocean, will it stay? Where you plop it down or will it kind of get carried around? It's not really a good analogy because it's not like Jupiter is being advected by the currents of, you know, gas and dust. But the way it migrates is it carves out a hole in the disk.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  And then through, by interacting with the disk gravitationally, right? It can change its orbit. The fact that the solar system has both Jupiter and Saturn here complicates things a lot, right? Because it's, you have to solve the problem of the evolution of the gas disk, the evolution of Jupiter's orbit in the gas disk, plus evolution of Saturn's and their mutual interaction. The common outcome of solving that problem, though, is pretty easy to explain. Jupiter forms, its orbit shrinks, and then once Saturn forms, its orbit catches up basically to the orbit of Jupiter and then both come out.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  So there's this inward outward pattern of Jupiter's early motion that happens sort of within the last million years of the lifetime of the solar system's primordial disk. So while this is happening, if our calculations are correct, which I think they are, you can destroy this inner system of, you know, few Earth-mass planets. And then in the aftermath of all this violence, you form the terrestrial planets.

• 37:56Lex Fridman?

  Where would they come from in that case? So Jupiter clears out the space and then there's a few terrestrial planets that come in and those come in from the disk somewhere, like one of the larger objects?

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, what actually happens in these calculations, you leave behind a rather mass depleted, like remnant disk, only a couple Earth masses. So then from that remnant population, an annulus of material over a hundred million years, by just collisions, you grow the Earth and the Moon and everything else.

• 38:35Lex Fridman?

  You said amulus?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Anulus.

• 38:37Lex Fridman?

  Anulus.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Anulus, yeah.

• 38:39Lex Fridman?

  That's a beautiful word. What does that mean?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Well, it's like a disk that's kind of thin. It's like a, yeah, it's something that is, you know, a disk that's so thin, it's almost flirting with being a ring.

• 38:51Lex Fridman?

  Like, I was gonna say, this reminds me of Lord of the Rings. So like this, the word just feels like it belongs in a token number. Okay, uh, so that's incredible. And so that, in your senses, you said like 1%, that's a rare. The way Jupiter and Saturn danced and cleared out and, you know, cleared out the, the, the short period debris and then changed the gravitational landscape. That's a pretty rare thing to.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  It's rare and moreover, like, you don't even have to go to our calculations. You can just ask the night sky, how many stars have Jupiter and Saturn analogs? The answer is Jupiter and Saturn analogs are found around only 10% of sun-like stars. So they're, they themselves, like, you kind of have to score an A minus or better on the test to, you know, on the planet formation test to become a solar system analog, even in that basic sense. And moreover, um, you know, low, lower mass stars, which are uh, very numerous in the galaxy, so-called M-dwarves, think like 0% of them, well, maybe like a negligible fraction of them have giant planets.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Giant planets are a rare, you know, outcome of planet formation. One of the really big problems that remain unanswered is why? We don't actually understand why they're so rare.

• 40:16Lex Fridman?

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

• 40:58Lex Fridman?

  And then be able to do that for other galaxies as well?

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so.

• 41:05Lex Fridman?

  Maybe start from the smallest simulation, like what is actually being done today? I mean, even the smallest simulation is probably super, super difficult. Even just like one object in the Kuiper Belt is probably super difficult to simulate.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's super easy. I mean, like, it's, it's just not that hard. But, you know, let's, let's ask the most kind of basic problem. Okay, so the problem of having a star and something in orbit of it that you don't need a simulation for, like you can just write that down on a piece of paper.

• 41:37Lex Fridman?

  There's gravity, what like, yeah, I guess, I guess it's important to try to,

• 41:43Lex Fridman?

  you know, one way to simulate objects in our solar system is to build the universe from scratch.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Okay, we'll get to building the universe from scratch in a sec. But let me just kind of go through the hierarchy of what, you know, what we do.

• 41:56Lex Fridman?

  Two objects.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Two objects analytically solvable, like we can figure it out very easily if you just, you don't, I don't think you, yeah, you don't need to know calculus. It helps to know calculus, but you don't necessarily need to know calculus. Three objects that are gravitationally interacting, the solution is chaotic. Doesn't matter how many simulations you do, you, the answer loses meaning after, after some time.

• 42:23Lex Fridman?

  I feel like that is a metaphor for dating as well, but go on.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Now, look, yeah, so, so the fact that you go from analytically solvable to unpredictable, you know, when you were, when your simulation goes from two bodies to three bodies, should immediately tell you that the exercise of trying to engineer a calculation where you form the solar, the entire solar system from scratch and hope to have some predictive answer is, is a futile one, right? We will never succeed at such a simulation.

• 43:02Lex Fridman?

  I feel like I just to clarify, you mean like explicitly having a clear equation that generalizes the, the whole process enough to be able to make a prediction? Or do you mean actually like literally simulating the objects is a hopeless pursuit? Once it goes beyond three?

• 43:17Speaker 01

  The simulating them is not a hopeless pursuit, but the outcome becomes. A statistical one. What's actually quite interesting is I think we have all the equations figured out, right? Like, you know, in order to really understand this, the formation of the solar system suffices to know gravity and magnetohydrodynamics. I mean, like, the combination of Maxwell's equations and, you know, Navier-Stokes equations for the fluids. You need to know quantum mechanics to understand opacities and so on. But we have those equations in hand. It's not that we don't have that understanding.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  It's that putting it all together is A, very, very difficult, and B, if you were to run the same evolution twice, changing, you know, the initial conditions by some infinitesimal amount, some, you know, minor change in your calculation to start with, you would get a different answer. This is one, this is part of the reason why planetary systems are so diverse. You don't have like a, you know, very predictive path for, you start with a disk of this mass and it's around this star, therefore you're going to form the solar system, right?

• 44:40Speaker 01

  You start with this and therefore you will conform this huge outcome, huge set of outcomes, and some percentage of it will resemble the solar system.

• 44:49Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned quantum mechanics, and we're talking about cosmic scale objects. You've talked about that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with Schrödinger's equation.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  I sure did.

• 45:03Lex Fridman?

  Why? Like, how does quantum mechanics become relevant at, when you consider the evolution of objects in a solar system?

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, let me take a step back and just say it like, I remember being You know, utterly confused by quantum mechanics when I first learned it. And the Schrodinger equation, which is kind of the parent equation of that whole field, you know, seems to come out of nowhere, right? The way that, the way that I was sort of explaining, I remember asking, you know, my professor is like, but where does it come from? Is that like, well, just like, don't worry about it and just like calculate the hydrogen, you know, energy levels, right? So it's like, I could do all the problems. I just did not have any intuition for, for where this parent, you know, super important equation came from.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Now, down the line, I was, remember I was preparing for my own lecture and I was trying to understand how waves travel in self-gravitating disks. So, you know, again, there's a very broad theory that's already developed, but I was looking for some simpler way to explain it really for the purposes of teaching class. And so I, I thought, okay, what if I just imagine a disk as an infinite number of concentric circles, right, that interact with, with each other gravitationally? That's a problem in some sense that I can solve using methods from like the late 1700s.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  I can write down Hamiltonian, well, I can write down the energy function basically of their, their interactions. And what I found is that when you take the continuum limit, when you go from discrete circles that are talking to each other gravitationally to a continuum disk, suddenly this gravitational interaction among them, right? The, the governing equation becomes the Schrodinger equation. And I had to think about that for a little bit. Did you just unify quantum mechanics and gravity? No, this is not the same thing as like, you know, fusing relativity and quantum mechanics. But it did, it did get me thinking a little bit.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  So the fact that waves in astrophysical disks behave just like wave functions of, of particles, kind of like an interesting analogy, because for me, it's easier to imagine waves traveling through, you know. Astrophysical диск, или просто листы бумаги. И причина, почему эта аналогия существует, это потому, что в действительности нет ничего квантового о равнине Шротинга. Равнина Шротинга - это просто уравнение волны, и вся интерпретация, которая приходит от нее, - это квантовое. Но сама равнину не является квантовым существом.

• 48:09Lex Fridman?

  Они могут использовать ее для модели волны. Это не турлы, это волны все вниз. Вы можете выбрать, на какой уровне вы выберете волну. И поэтому она может быть на уровне Солнечного системы.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Да. И также она действительно обеспечивает довольно сложную калькуляционную инструментацию. Потому что это сложно, мы только говорили о симуляциях, но сложно симулировать поведение астрофизических дисков на масштабах времени, которые находятся между несколькими орбитами и их整个进化. Поэтому это на масштабе времени нескольких орбит. Вы делаете гидродинамическую симуляцию. Вы делаете... В основном, это то, что вы можете сделать на современном компьютере на масштабе времени, скажем, недели. Когда дело касается их进化 на всю их жизнь, вы не надеетесь решить орбиты, вы просто надеетесь понять, как система behaves overall.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Между между, да? Чтобы получить доступ к этому, это довольно... Это довольно круто. Вы можете использовать уравнение Шротинга для получить ответ быстро, поэтому это калькуляционная инструментация.

• 49:15Lex Fridman?

  Это потрясающе. Кстати, астрофизические диск, как... что они? Какая это 定义?

• 49:22Speaker 01

  OK, поэтому астрофизические диск имеют огромное количество возможностей. Они начинают, возможно, на smallest scale. Они начинают с, действительно, кайперские объекты. Некоторые кайперские объекты имеют резины. So that's maybe the smallest example of an astrophysical disk. You've got this little potato shaped asteroid, you know, which is, you know, sort of the size of LA or something and around it is or some rings of icy matter. That object is a small astrophysical disk. Then you have Saturn, the rings of Saturn. You have the next set of scale. You have the solar system itself when it was forming. You have a disk. Then you have black hole disks. Uh, you have galaxies.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Disks are super common in the universe. The reason is that stuff rotates.

• 50:13Lex Fridman?

  Right. I mean, Gravity works.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:15Lex Fridman?

  So, uh, and those rings could be the material that, uh, composes those rings could be, it could be gas. It could be solid. It could be anything.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  That's right. So, uh, the disk that made, from which the planets emerged was predominantly hydrogen helium gas. On the other hand, the rings of Saturn are made up of, you know, icicle ice, little like ice cubes this big, about a centimeter across.

• 50:45Lex Fridman?

  That sounds refreshing. So that's incredible. Hydrogen helium gas. So in the beginning, it was just hydrogen and helium around the sun. How does that lead to the first formations of solid objects in terms of simulation?

• 51:00Speaker 01

  Okay. Here's the story. So you're like, have you ever been to the desert?

• 51:06Lex Fridman?

  Yes, I've been to the Death Valley and actually it was terrifying. Just a total tangent. I'm distracting you, but I was, uh, uh, driving through it and I was really surprised because it was at first hot. And then as it was getting into the evening, there's this huge thunderstorm. Like it was raining and it got freezing cold. I'm like, what the hell? It was the apocalypse. I still like just sit there listening to Bruce Springsteen. I remember and just thinking, I'm probably going to die. And I was okay with it because Bruce Springsteen was on the radio.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Like when you've got the boss, you know, you're, you're ready. You're ready to meet the boss. Yeah. So like, I mean,

• 51:42Lex Fridman?

  It's a good line. So anyway, sorry. The does yes.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  True. Yeah. By the way, like to continue on this tangent, I, I absolutely love the Southwest for this reason. Just. You know, during the pandemic, I drove from LA to New Mexico a bunch of times. The madness of weather? Yeah, the the Chaos. The chaos of whether the fact that, you know, it'll be blazing hot one minute and then it's just like, we'll decide to have a little thunderstorm, maybe we'll decide to go back momentarily to like a thousand degrees and then go back to the thunderstorm. It's amazing. It's it's that, by the way, is chaos theory in action. Yeah. Right. But let's get back to talking about the desert.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  So in the desert, tumbleweeds have a tendency to roll because the wind rolls them. And if you're careful, you'll you'll occasionally see this family of tumbleweeds where like there's like a big one and then a bunch of little ones that that kind of hide in its wake. Right. And are all rolling together and almost looks like, you know, a family of ducks crossing a street or something. Or, for example, you know, if you watch Tour de France, right? You've got a whole bunch of cyclists and they're like cycling, you know, within 10 centimeters of each other. They're not BFFs, right? They're not trying to be trying to ride together.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  They are riding together to minimize the collective, you know, air resistance, if you will, that that they experience. Turns out solids in the protoplanetary disk do just this. There's an instability wherein solid particles, right? Things that are a centimeter across will start to hide behind one another and form these clouds. Why? Because cumulatively, that minimizes the solid component of this aerodynamic interaction with the gas. Now, these clouds, because they're kind of a favorable Energetic condition for the dusts to live in.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  They grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Until they become so massive that they collapse under their own weight. That's how the first building blocks of planets formed. That's how the big asteroids got there.

• 54:00Lex Fridman?

  That's incredible.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:01Lex Fridman?

  So that is that simulatable or is it not useful to simulate?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  No, no, that's simulatable. And people do these types of calculations. It's it's really cool. That's actually, that's one of the many fields of planet formation theory. That is really, really active right now. People are trying to understand all kinds of aspects of that process. Because of course, I've explained that, you know, like as if there's one thing that happens. Turns out it's a it's a beautifully rich dynamic. But the but qualitatively, formation of the first building blocks actually follows the same sequence as formation of stars, right? Stars are just clouds of gas, hydrogen, helium gas that sit in space and slowly cool.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And at some point, they, you know, contract to a point where their gravity overtakes the thermal, you know, pressure support, if you will, and they collapse under their own weight and you get a little baby solar system.

• 55:01Lex Fridman?

  That's amazing. So do you think one day it will be possible to simulate the full history that took our solar system to what it is today?

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Yes, and it will be useless.

• 55:16Lex Fridman?

  So you don't think your story, many of the ideas that you have about Jupiter clearing the space, like retelling that story in high resolution is not that important?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  I actually think it's important, but at every stage, you have to you have to simulate, you have to design your experiments, your numerical computer experiments, so that they test some specific aspect of that evolution. I am not a proponent of doing huge simulations because even if we forget the information theory aspect of not being able to simulate in full detail the universe, because if you do, then you.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  You have made an actual universe, it's not the simulation, right? Simulation is in some sense a compression of information, so therefore you must lose detail. But that point aside, if we are able to simulate the entire history of the solar system in excruciating detail, I mean, it'll be cool, but it's not going to be any different from observing it, right? Because theoretical understanding, which is what ultimately I'm interested in, comes from taking complex things and reducing them down to something that, you know, some mechanism that you can actually quantify.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  That's the, that's the fun part of astrophysics. Just kind of simulating things in extreme detail is, will cool, will make cool visualizations, but that doesn't get to, doesn't, doesn't get you to any better understanding than you had before you did the simulation.

• 57:03Lex Fridman?

  If you ask very specific questions, then you'll be able to create like very highly compressed, nice, beautiful theories about how things evolved. And then you can use those to then generalize to other solar systems, to other stars and other galaxies, and then say something generalizable about the entire universe. How difficult would it be to simulate our solar system such that we would not know the difference? Meaning, if we are living in a simulation, is there a nice, think of it as a video game? Is there a nice compressible way of doing that? Or just kind of like you intuited with a three-body situation is just a giant mess

• 57:45Lex Fridman?

  that you cannot create a video game that will seem realistic without actually building a universe on scratch?

• 57:54Speaker 01

  I'm, you know, I'm speculating, but one of the, yeah, I know, I know, like, you have a deep understanding of this, but like, for me, I'm, I'm just gonna like speculate that for, at least in the types of simulations that we can do today. Inevitably, you run into the problem of resolution, right? You're, it doesn't matter what you're doing, it is discrete. Now, the way you would go about asking, you know, what we're observing, is that a simulation? Or, or is that, you know, some real continuous thing? Is you, you zoom in, right?

• 58:33Speaker 01

  You zoom in and try and find the, you know, the grid scale, if you will. Yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a really interesting, it's a really interesting question. And because the solar system itself, and really, you know, the double pendulum is chaotic, right? Pendulum, sitting on another pendulum, it moves unpredictably, once you let them go. You really don't need to like inject any randomness into a simulation for it to, to give you stochastic and unpredictable answers. Weather is a great example of this.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Weather has a lap of time of, you know, typical weather systems have a lap of time of a few days. And there's a fundamental reason why the force forecast always sucks, you know, two weeks in advance. It's not that we don't know the equations that govern the atmosphere. We know them well. Their solutions are meaningless, though, after a few days.

• 59:40Lex Fridman?

  The zooming in thing is very interesting. I, I think about this a lot. Whether there'll be a time soon where we would want to stay in video game worlds, whether it's virtual reality or just playing video games.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that time like came in like the nineties and it's been that time.

• 1:00:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's not just, it's not just came, it's, I mean, it's accelerated. I just recently saw that WoW and Fortnite were played 140 billion hours. And those are just video games. And that's like increasing very, very quickly, especially with the people coming up now, being born now and become, you know, becoming teenagers and so on. Let's have a thought experiment where it's just you and a video game character inside a room. Where you remove the simulation, they need to simulate sort of a lot of objects. If it's just you and that character. How far do you need to simulate in terms of zooming in for it to be very real to you?

• 1:00:40Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:00:40Lex Fridman?

  As real as reality? So like, first of all, you kind of mentioned zooming in, which is fascinating because we have these tools of science that allow us to zoom in, quote unquote, in all kinds of ways in the world around us. But our cognitive abilities, like our perception system as humans, is very limited in terms of zooming in. So we might be very easily fooled.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Some of the video games, like on the PS4.

• 1:01:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Like, look pretty real to me.

• 1:01:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Right? Uh, I think, you know, you would really have to interrogate. Uh, I mean, I think even with what we have today, like, uh, I don't know, Ace Combat 7 is a great example, right? Like, I mean, the way that the clouds are rendered, uh, it's, I mean, it looks just like when you're flying, you know, on a real airplane, the, the kind of transparency. I think that the, you know, our perception is limited enough already.

• 1:01:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  To not be able to tell some of the, uh, you know, some of the differences.

• 1:01:44Lex Fridman?

  There's a game called Skyrim. It's an Elder Scrolls role playing game. And I just, uh, I played it for quite a bit. And I, I think I played it very different than others. Like, there'll be long stretches of time where I would just walk around and look at nature in the game. It's incredible.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 1:02:04Lex Fridman?

  It's just like, the graphics is like, wow, I want to stay there. It was better, I went hiking recently. It was like as good as hiking.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  So, look, I know what you mean. Not to go on a huge video game, you know, tangent, but like, the, the third, like Witcher game was astonishingly beautiful, right? Especially like playing on, on a good hardware machine. It's like, this is pretty, this is pretty legit. That said, um.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  You know, I I don't resonate with the I want to stay here, you know, like, one of the things that I love to do is to go to my like boxing gym and and box with a guy. Right? Like, that's there's there's nothing quite like that physical, you know, experience like.

• 1:02:53Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating. That might be simply an artifact of the year you were born.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:02:58Lex Fridman?

  Because if you're born today, it almost seems like stupid to go to a gym.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Lex Fridman?

  Like, you go to a gym to box with a guy. Why not box with Mike Tyson when you yourself is like in his prime? When you yourself are also an incredible boxer in the video game world.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  For me, there there's a multitude of reasons why I don't want to box with Mike Tyson.

• 1:03:20Lex Fridman?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  I enjoy teeth, you know, and I want to have an ear.

• 1:03:24Lex Fridman?

  No, but your your skills in this meat space, in this physical realm is very limited and takes a lot of work. And you're you're you're a musician, you're an incredible scientist, you only have so much time in the in the day. But in the video game world, you can expand your capabilities in all kinds of dimensions that you can never have possibly have time in the physical world. And so that it doesn't make sense like to to be existing, to be working your ass off in the physical world when you can just be super successful in the video game world.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  But I still.

• 1:04:00Lex Fridman?

  You enjoy sucking and stuff?

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I really.

• 1:04:03Lex Fridman?

  Struggling to get better.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  I sure do. I mean, I think like these days with music, music is a great example, right? We just started, you know, practicing live with my band again, you know, after not playing for a year. And, you know, it was just it was terrible, like, we were just kind of a lot of the nuance, you know, a lot of the detail is just that detail that takes, you know, years of collective practice to develop is just lost. But it was just an incredible amount of fun, way more fun than all the like studio, you know, sitting around and playing that I did, you know, throughout the entire year. So I think there's something there's something intangible or maybe maybe tangible about being being in person.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  I sure hope you're wrong in that, you know, we, that's not something that will get lost because I think there's like such a large part of the human condition is to hang out. If we were doing this interview on Zoom, right? I mean, I'd already be, I'd already be bored out of my mind.

• 1:05:13Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. I mean, there's something to that. I mean, I'm almost playing devil's advocate, but at the same time, you know, I'm sure people talk about the same way at the beginning of the 20th century about horses where they're, they are much more efficient. They're much easier to maintain than cars. It doesn't make sense that, you know, all the ways that cars break down and there's not enough infrastructure in terms of roads for cars. It doesn't make any sense. Like horses and like nature, you could do the nature like where, you know, you should be living more natural life. Those are real. You don't want machines in your life. They're going to pollute your mind and the minds of young people, but then eventually just cars took over. So in that same way, it just seems.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Going back to horses. I'm just, you know.

• 1:05:58Lex Fridman?

  Well, you can be, you can play, uh, what is it? Red Dead.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Red Dead Redemption.

• 1:06:05Lex Fridman?

  Redemption. And you can ride horses in the video game world. So let me return us back to planet nine.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Always a good place to come back to.

• 1:06:13Lex Fridman?

  So now that we did a big historical overview of our solar system, what is planet nine?

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  Okay. Planet nine is a hypothetical object that orbits the solar system, right? At an orbital period of about 10,000 years and an orbit which is slightly tilted with respect to the plane of the solar system, slightly eccentric. And the object itself, we think is five times more massive than the earth. We have never seen planet nine in a telescope. But we have gravitational evidence for it.

• 1:06:52Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Confining them, right?

• 1:07:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 01

  Confining, like grouping their orbits together. See, what would happen if Planet 9 were not there is these orbits that roughly share a common orientation, they would just disperse, right? They would just become asymmetrically symmetric, point everywhere. Planet 9's gravity makes it such that these objects stay in a state that's basically anti-aligned with respect to the orbit of Planet 9, and sort of hang out there and kind of oscillate on a time scale of about a billion years. That's one of the lines of evidence for the existence of Planet 9. There are others. That's the one that's easiest to maybe visualize, just because it's fun to think about orbits

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  that all point into the same direction. But I should emphasize that, for example, the existence of objects, again Kuiper Belt objects, that are heavily out of the plane of the solar system, things that are tilted by, say, 90 degrees, that's not, we don't expect that as an outcome of planet formation. Indeed, planet formation simulations have never produced such objects without some extrinsic gravitational force. Planet 9, on the other hand, generates them very readily. So that provides kind of an alternative, you know...

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Population of small bodies in the solar system that also get produced by Planet Nine through an independent gravitational effect. So there are basically five different things that Planet Nine does individually that are like maybe a one sigma effect where you'd say, yeah, okay, if that's all it was, maybe it's not, no reason to jump up and down. But because it's a multitude of these puzzles that all are explained by one hypothesis, that's really the magnetism, the attraction of the Planet Nine model.

• 1:09:23Lex Fridman?

  So can you just clarify, so most planets in the solar system orbit approximately the same, so it's flat?

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like one degree. The difference between them is about one degree.

• 1:09:39Lex Fridman?

  But nevertheless, if we looked at our solar system, it would look, and I could see every single object, it would look like a sphere.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  The inner part where the planets are would look like, you know, flat, right? The Kuiper Belt and the asteroid belt have a larger.

• 1:09:59Lex Fridman?

  Gets fatter and fatter and fatter.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of like.

• 1:10:01Lex Fridman?

  Becomes a sphere.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  That's right. And if you look at the very outside, it's polluted by this quasi-spheroidal thing. Nobody's, of course, ever seen the Oort Cloud, right? We've only seen comets that come from the Oort Cloud. So the Oort Cloud, which is this, right, population of distant debris, its existence is also inferred. You could say alternatively, there is, you know, there's a big cosmic creature that occasionally, you know, sitting at 20,000 AU and occasionally throws an icy rock towards the sun like that.

• 1:10:36Lex Fridman?

  Spaghetti monster, I think it's called. Okay, so it's a mystery in many ways, but you can kind of infer a bunch of things about it. By the way, both terrifying and exciting that there's this vast darkness all around us that's full of objects that they're just throwing.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Just there, yeah. It's actually kind of astonishing, right, that we have only.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Explored a small fraction of the solar system, right? That that really kind of baffles me because remember as a student, you know, studying physics, you know, you do the problem where you put the earth around the sun, you solve that and like it's one line of math and you say, okay, well, that surely was figured out by Newton. So like all the interesting stuff is not in the solar system, but that it's just plainly not true. There are there are mysteries in the solar system that are remarkable that we are only now starting to just kind of scratch the surface of.

• 1:11:38Lex Fridman?

  And some of those objects probably have some information about the history of our solar system.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. Like a great example is, you know, small meteorites, right? Small meteorites are melted, right? They have they're differentiated, meaning some of the iron sinks to core. You say, well, how can that be? Because they're so small that they wouldn't have melted just from the heat of their accretion. Turns out the fact that the solar nebula, the disk that made the planets was polluted by aluminum 26 is in itself a remarkable thing. It means the solar system did not form in isolation. It formed in a giant cloud of thousands of other stars that were also forming, some of which were undergoing, you know, going through supernova explosions, some of

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  and releasing these unstable isotopes that of which we now see kind of the traces of. It's so cool.

• 1:12:37Lex Fridman?

  Do you think it's possible that life from other solar systems was injected? And that that was was the origin of life on Earth?

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, the panspermia idea.

• 1:12:49Lex Fridman?

  That's seen as a low probability event by people who studied the origin of life, but that's because then they would be out of a job.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think they'd be out of the job because you just then say you have to figure out how life started there.

• 1:13:02Lex Fridman?

  But then you have to go there. We can study life on Earth much easier. We could study in the lab much easier because we can replicate conditions that are from an early Earth much easier, from a chemistry perspective, from a biology perspective. You can intuit a bunch of stuff. You can look at different parts of Earth and just...

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  To an extent. I mean, the early Earth was completely unlike the current Earth, right? There was no oxygen. So, one of my colleagues at Caltech, Joe Kirschnik, is certain, something like 100% certainty that life started on Mars and came to Earth on Martian meteorites. This is not a problem that I like to kind of think about too much. Like, the origin of life, it's a fascinating problem, but, you know, it's not physics. And I just like, I just don't, don't love it.

• 1:14:01Lex Fridman?

  It's the same reason you don't love, I thought you're a musician. So, music is not physics either. So, why are you selling it?

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  100% physics.

• 1:14:08Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:14:09Speaker 01

  No, no, look, in all seriousness, though, I, there are a few things that I really, really enjoy. I genuinely enjoy physics. I genuinely enjoy music. I genuinely, you know, enjoy martial arts and I genuinely enjoy my family. I should have said that all in a reverse order or something. But I like to focus on these things and not worry too much about, about everything else. You know what I mean?

• 1:14:38Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  Just because there is, like you said earlier, there's a time constraint. You can't do it all.

• 1:14:45Lex Fridman?

  There's many mysteries all around us. So, and they're all beautiful in, in different ways. To me, that thing I love is artificial intelligence, that perhaps I love it because eventually I'm trying to suck up to our future overlords. The... The question of, you said there's a lot of kind of little pieces of evidence for this thing that's Planet 9. If we were to try to collect more evidence, or be certain, like a paper that says, like, you drop it, clear, we're done. What does that require? Does that require us sending probes out? Or do you think we can do it from telescopes here on Earth? What are the different ideas for conclusive evidence for Planet 9?

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  The moment Planet 9 gets imaged from a telescope on Earth, it's done. I mean, it's just there.

• 1:15:36Lex Fridman?

  Can you clarify, because you mentioned that before, from an image, would you be able to tell?

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  Yes. So, from an image, the moment you see something, something that is reflecting sunlight back at you, and you know that it's hundreds of times as far away from the sun as is the Earth, you're done.

• 1:16:00Lex Fridman?

  So you're thinking, so basically, if you have a really faraway thing that's big, five times the size of Earth, that means?

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  That is Planet 9.

• 1:16:12Lex Fridman?

  Could there be multiple objects like that? I guess?

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  In principle, yeah. I mean, there's no, there's no law of physics that, that doesn't allow you to have multiple objects. There's also no evidence at present for there being multiple objects.

• 1:16:24Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if it's possible, just like we're finding exoplanets, whether, given the size of the ORE cloud, there's basically, it's rare and rare, but they're sprinkled, Planet 9, 10, 11, 12, like these, some-

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Got 13.

• 1:16:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it goes after that. I can just keep counting. So like, just something about the dynamic system, like, it becomes a lower and lower probability event, but they gather up, like, they become, would they become larger and larger, maybe? Something like that. I wonder, I wonder if, like, discovering Planet 9 will just, like, be almost like a springboard. It's like, whoa, what's beyond that?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  It's entirely plausible. The ORE cloud itself probably holds about five Earth masses, or seven Earth masses of material, right? So it's not, it's not nothing. And it all ultimately comes down to-

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  At what point will the observational surveys sample enough of the solar system to kind of reveal interesting things? There's a great analogy here with Neptune and the story of how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was not discovered by looking at the sky, right? It was discovered by, it was discovered mathematically, right? So, yeah, the orbit of Uranus, when Uranus was found, this was 1781. It's the kind of tracking, both the tracking of the orbit of Uranus as well as the reconstruction

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  of the orbit of Uranus immediately revealed that it was not following the orbit that it was supposed to, right? The predicted orbit deviated away from where it actually was. So in the mid 1800s, right, a French mathematician by the name of Orban Le Verrier did a beautifully sophisticated calculation, which said, if this is due to gravity of a more distant planet, then that planet is there, okay? And then they found it. But the point is, the understanding of where to look for Neptune came entirely out of celestial mechanics.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  The case with Planet Nine is a little bit different because what we can do, I think, relatively well is predict the orbit and mass of Planet Nine. We cannot tell you where it is on its orbit. The reason is, we haven't seen the Kuiper Belt objects complete an orbit, their own orbit, even once, because it takes 4,000 years. But, you know, I plan to live on as an AI being, and, you know, I'll be tracking those orbits as.

• 1:19:11Lex Fridman?

  It takes four, 5,000 years. I mean, it doesn't have to be AI, it could be longevity. There's a lot of really exciting genetic engineering research. So you'll just be a brain waiting for the, for the, your brain waiting for the orbit to complete for the basic Kuiper Belt objects.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  That's, that's right. That's like, kind of the worst reason to want to live a long time, right? Just like, can the brain like, smoke a cigarette?

• 1:19:34Lex Fridman?

  I know, right?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Can you just like, light one up while you're waiting or?

• 1:19:42Lex Fridman?

  But you're making me actually realize that the one way to explore the galaxy is by just sitting here on Earth and waiting. So if we can just get really good at waiting, it's like a Maua Maua or these interstellar objects that fly in. You can just wait for them to come to you. Same with the aliens. You can wait for them to come to you. If you get really good at waiting, then that's one way to do the exploration because eventually the thing will come to you. Maybe that's the entire, maybe the intelligent alien civilizations get much better at waiting and so they all decide, so theoretically to start waiting and it's just a bunch of like ancient intelligent civilizations of aliens all throughout the universe is just sitting there waiting for each other.

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  Look, you can't just be good at waiting. You gotta know how to chill. Like, like you can't just like sit around and do nothing. You gotta be, you gotta, you gotta know how to chill.

• 1:20:36Lex Fridman?

  I honestly think that as we progress, if the aliens are anything like us, we enjoy loving things we do. And it's, it's very possible that we just figure out mechanisms here on Earth to enjoy our life and we just stay here on Earth forever. That exploration becomes less and less of an interesting thing to do. And so you basically, yes, wait and chill. You get really optimally good at chilling and thereby exploring is not that interesting. So in terms of 4,000 years, it would be nothing for scientists. We'll be chilling and just all kinds of scientific explorations will become possible because we'll just be here on Earth.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  So chill.

• 1:21:19Lex Fridman?

  So chill. You have a paper out recently because you already mentioned some of these ideas, but I'd love it if you could dig into it a little bit. The injection of inner orbit cloud objects into the distant Kuiper belt by Planet 9. What is this idea of Planet 9 injecting objects into the Kuiper belt?

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  Okay, let me take a brief step back. And when we do calculations of Planet 9, when we do the simulations, as far as our simulations are concerned, sort of the Neptune, like kind of the trans-Neptunian solar system is entirely sourced from the inside, namely, the Kuiper Belt gets scattered by Neptune and then Planet Nine does things to it and aligns the orbits and so on. And then we calculate what happens on the lifetime of the solar system, yada, yada, yada. During the pandemic, one of the kind of questions we asked ourselves, and this is indeed something

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  we, Mike and I, Mike Brown, who's a partner in crime on this, and I do regularly, is we say, how can we, A, disprove ourselves, and B, how can we improve our simulations? Like, what's missing? And one idea that maybe should have been obvious in retrospect is that all of our simulations treated the solar system as some isolated creature, right? But the solar system did not form in isolation, right? It formed in this cluster of stars. And during that phase of forming, together with thousands of other stars, we believe

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  the solar system formed this almost spherical population of icy debris that sits maybe at a few thousand times the separation between the Earth and the Sun, maybe even a little bit closer. If Planet Nine's not there, that population is completely dormant, and these objects just slowly orbit the Sun. Nothing interesting happens to them ever. But what we realized is that if Planet Nine is there, Planet Nine can actually grab some of those objects and gravitationally reinject them into the distant solar system. So we thought, okay, let's look into this with numerical experiments.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Do our simulations, does this process work? And if it works...

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  What are its consequences? So it turns out, indeed, not only does Planet Nine inject these distant inner Oort cloud objects into the Kuiper belt, they follow roughly the same pathway as the as the objects that are being scattered out. Also, there's this kind of river, two-way river of material. Some of it is coming out from, you know, by Neptune scattering, some of it is moving in. And if you work through the numbers, you kind of, at the end of the day, that it has an effect on the best-fit orbit for Planet Nine itself. So if you realize that the data set that we're observing is not entirely composed of things that came out of the solar system,

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  but also things that got reinjected back in, then turns out the best-fit Planet Nine is slightly more eccentric. That's kind of getting into the weeds. The the point here is that the existence of Planet Nine itself provides this natural bridge that connects an otherwise dormant population of icy debris of the solar system with things that we're starting to directly observe.

• 1:24:58Lex Fridman?

  So it can flow back, so it's not just a river flowing one way, it's maybe a smaller stream go back and

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Backwash.

• 1:25:05Lex Fridman?

  You want a backwash. You want to incorporate that into the simulations, into your understanding of those distant objects when you're trying to make sense of the various observations and so on.

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:25:14Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating. I got to ask you, some people think that many of the observations that you're describing could be described by a primordial black hole. First, what is a primordial black hole? And what do you think about this idea?

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So a primordial black hole is a black hole which is made not through the usual pathway of making a black hole, which is that you have a star, which is more massive than, you know, 1.4 or so solar masses. And basically, when it runs out of fuel, runs out of its nuclear fusion fuel, it can't hold itself up anymore and just the whole thing collapses on itself. Right? And you create a

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  I mean, one, I guess, simple way to think about it is you create an object with zero radius. That has mass but zero radius, that singularity.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Now, that's, such black holes exist all over the place in the galaxy. There's in fact, a really big one at the center of the galaxy.

• 1:26:22Lex Fridman?

  That terrifies me.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  That, that one's always looking at you when you're not looking. Okay, right, and it's, it's always talking about you.

• 1:26:30Lex Fridman?

  And when you turn off the lights, it's, it wakes up.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  But you know, so such black holes are all over the place. We, when they merge, we get to see, you know, incredible gravitational waves that they emit, et cetera, et cetera. One kind of plausible scenario, however, is that when the universe was forming, basically during the Big Bang, you created a whole spectrum of black holes. Some with masses of five Earth masses, some with masses of 10 Earth masses, like the entire, you know, mass spectrum size, the ma, some, the mass of asteroids. Now, on the smaller end, over the lifetime of the universe, the small ones kind of evaporate. And they're not there anymore, at least this is what we, what the calculations tell us.

• 1:27:19Speaker 01

  But five Earth masses is big enough to not have evaporated. So, one idea is that Planet Nine is not a planet, and instead it is a five Earth mass black hole. And that's why it's hard to find. Now, can we right away from our calculations say, that's definitely true, or that's not true? Absolutely not. We can't, in fact, our calculations tell you nothing other than the orbit and the mass. And that means the black hole, I mean, it could be a five Earth mass, you know, cup. It could be a five Earth mass hedgehog, or a black hole, or really, anything that's five Earth masses will do.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  Because the gravity of a black hole is no different than the gravity of a planet. Right? If the sun became a black hole tomorrow. It would be dark, but the earth would keep orbiting it. And like this notion that oh, black holes suck everything in it's it's not. That's like a sci fi notion.

• 1:28:22Lex Fridman?

  Right, it's just math. What would be the difference between a black hole and a planet in terms of observationally?

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  Uh, observationally, the difference would be that you will never find the black hole. Right? The truth is they're kind of, um, I'm actually not, you know, I never looked into this very carefully, but there there are some constraints that you can get just statistically and say, okay, if the sun has a binary companion, which is a five earth mass black hole, then that means such black holes would be extremely common. And, you know, you could sort of look for lensing events and then you say, okay, maybe that's not so likely. But, you know, that said, I want to emphasize that there's a limit to what our calculations uh can tell you. And that's the orbit and the mass.

• 1:29:12Lex Fridman?

  So I think there's a bunch like Ed Witten, I think, wishes it's a black hole. Because I think one exciting things about black holes in our solar system is that we can go there and we can maybe study the singularity somehow. Because that allows us to understand some fundamental things about physics. If uh it's a planet, so planet nine, we may not, you know, and we go there, we may not discover anything profoundly new. The interesting thing, perhaps you can correct me about planet nine, is like the big picture of it. The whole big story of the Kuiper belt and all those kinds of things. It's not that planet nine would be somehow fundamentally different from um

• 1:29:56Lex Fridman?

  from, I don't know, Neptune, in terms of um, in terms of the kind of things we could learn from it. So I think that there's kind of a hope that it's a black hole because it's an entirely new kind of object. Maybe you can uh correct me.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, of course, here my own biases creep in because I'm interested, you know, in planets around other stars. And I would say, I would disagree that, you know, we wouldn't find things that would be truly, you know, fundamentally new. Because as it turns out, the galaxy is really good at making five or three Earth-mass objects, right? The most common type of planet that we see, that we discover orbiting around other stars is a few Earth-masses. In the solar system, there's no analog for that, right? We go from one Earth-mass object, which is this one, to skipping to Neptune and Uranus,

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  which themselves are actually relatively poorly understood, I would say, especially Uranus from the interior structure point of view. If Planet 9 is a planet, going there will give us the closest window into understanding what other planets look like. And I will, you know, I'll say this, that, you know, planets, kind of in terms of their complexity on some logarithmic scale, fall somewhere between a star and an insect, right? And the insect is way more complicated than a star, right? Just all kinds of physical processes and really biochemical processes that occur inside

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  of an insect that just make a star look like, you know, somebody is like playing with a spring or something, right? So the, I think, you know, it would be, you know, arguably, you know, more interesting to go to, you know, to go to Planet 9 if it's a planet, because black holes are simple. They're just kind of, they're basically macroscopic, like particles, right?

• 1:32:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, just like the star that you mentioned in terms of complexity. So it's possible that Planet 9 is supposed to being like homogeneous, is like super like heterogeneous, is a bunch of cool stuff going on.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:32:15Lex Fridman?

  That could give us an intuition. I never thought about that, that it's basically Earth number two. In terms of size and gives us starts giving us intuition that could be generalizable to Earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, Pluto is also in the sense like Pluto is a tiny, tiny thing, right? Just like you would imagine that's just a tiny ball of ice, like who cares? But the New Horizons images of Pluto reveal so much remarkable structure, right? They reveal glaciers flowing, and these are glaciers not made out of water ice, but CO ice. It turns out at those temperatures of like 40 or so Kelvin, water ice looks like metal, right? It just doesn't flow at all. But then ice made up of carbon monoxide starts to flow. I mean, there's just like all kinds of really cool phenomena

• 1:33:11Speaker 01

  that you otherwise just wouldn't really even imagine that occur. So, yeah, I mean, there's a reason why I like planets.

• 1:33:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, let me ask you. I find, as I read, the idea that Ed Witten was thinking about this kind of stuff fascinating. So he's a mathematical physicist who's very interested in string theory, won the Fields Medal for his work in mathematics. So I read that he proposed a fleet of probes accelerated by radiation pressure that could discover a planet nine primordial black hole's location. What do you think about this idea of sending a bunch of probes out there?

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, the way the idea is a cool one, right? You go and you say, you know, launch them basically isotropically. You track where they go. And if I understand the idea correctly, you basically measure the deflection. And you say, okay, there must be something there since the probe trajectories are being altered.

• 1:34:20Lex Fridman?

  Oh, so the measurement, the basic sensory mechanism is the, it's not like you have sensors on the probes. It's more like you're. Because they're very precisely able to capture, to measure the trajectory of the probes. You can then infer the gravitational fields.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think that's the basic idea.

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  You know, back a few years ago, we had conversations like these with, you know, engineers from JPL. They more or less convinced me that this is much more difficult than it seems because you don't, at that level of precision, right? Things like solar flares matter, right? Solar flares, right, are completely, you can't predict which, where a solar flare will happen. That will drive radiation, radio radiance. You don't know where every single asteroid is. So like actually doing that problem, I think it's possible, but it's, it's not a trivial matter. Right?

• 1:35:20Lex Fridman?

  Well, I wonder, not just about Planet Nine. I wonder if that's kind of the future of doing science in our solar system. It's to just launch a huge number of probes. So like a whole order of magnitude, many orders of magnitude, larger numbers of probes. And then start to infer a bunch of different stuff, not just gravity, but everything else.

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  So in this regard, I actually think there is a huge revolution that's to some extent already started. Right? The standard kind of like time scale for a NASA mission is that you like propose it and it launches, I don't know, like 150 years after you propose, I'm over exaggerating, but you know, it's just like some huge development cycle.

• 1:36:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Speaker 01

  And it gets delayed 55 times, like that is not going away.

• 1:36:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  Right? The, the really cutting edge things, you have to do it this way because you don't know what you're building, so to speak. But the CubeSat kind of world is starting to, you know, provide an avenue for like, you know, launching something that costs, you know, a few million dollars and has a turnaround time scale of like a couple of years. You can imagine doing, you know, PhD theses where you design the mission. The mission goes to where you're going and you do the science all within the time span of five, six years. That.

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  Has not been fully executed on yet, but I absolutely think that's on the horizon. And we're not talking a decade. I think we're talking like this decade.

• 1:36:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and the company is accelerating all this with Blue Origin and SpaceX. There's a bunch of more CubeSat oriented companies that are pushing this forward. Well, let me ask you, let me ask you on that topic, what do you think about either one? Elon Musk with SpaceX going to Mars? I think he wants SpaceX to be the first to put a first human on Mars. And then Jeff Bezos, gotta give him props, wants to be the first to fly his own rocket

• 1:37:34Lex Fridman?

  into space, so.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  Wasn't there a guy who like built his rocket out of garbage?

• 1:37:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  This was like a couple of years ago and somewhere in the desert, he launched himself.

• 1:37:46Lex Fridman?

  I'm not tracking this closely, but I think I am familiar with folks who built their own rocket to try to prove the earth is flat.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Yes, that's the guy I'm talking about. Yeah, he was also like, he also jumped some limousine.

• 1:37:58Lex Fridman?

  Truly revolutionary minds. I mean, you have the greater men than either you or I. But what do you?

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  So look, it's been astonishing to watch how really over the last like decade, the commercial sector took over this, you know, this industry that traditionally has really been like a, you know, a government thing to do.

• 1:38:26Lex Fridman?

  Motivated primarily by the the competition between nations like the Cold War.

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:38:30Lex Fridman?

  And now it's motivated more, more and more by the natural forces of capitalism.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. So, okay, here I have, I have many ideas about it. I think on the one hand, right, like what SpaceX has been able to do, for example, phenomenal.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  If that brings down the price of space exploration, that turnaround timescale for space exploration, which I think it inevitably will, that's a huge, you know, that's a huge boost to the, to the human condition. The same time, right, if we're talking astronomy, right, there, there also, it comes at a huge cost, right? And the Starlink satellites is a great example of that cost, right? At one point, in fact, I was just camping in the Mojave with a, with a friend of mine and they saw, you know, this, the string of satellites just kind of like, you know, appear and then disappear into nowhere. So

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  that is beginning to interfere with, you know, earth-based observations. So I think it's, there's tremendous potential there. It's also important to be responsible about how it's executed. Now with Mars and the whole idea of, you know, exploring Mars, I don't have like strong opinions on whether a manned mission is, is required or not required. But I do think, you know, we need to focus, the thing to keep in mind is that I, I generally kind of, I'm not signed on, if you will, to the idea that Mars is some kind of a safe

• 1:40:11Speaker 01

  haven that we can, you know, escape to, right? Mars sucks, right? Like, living on Mars, if you, if you want to live on Mars, like, you can have that experience by going to the Mojave desert and camping and it's just like, it's, it's just not a great.

• 1:40:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's interesting, but there's something captivating about that kind of mission of us striving out into space and by making Mars in some ways habitable for at least like months at a time. I think would lead to engineering breakthroughs that would make life like in many ways much better on earth. Like it would, we'll come up with ideas we totally don't expect yet, both on the robotics side, on the food engineering side, on the, you know, maybe like we'll switch from, we'll, we'll, like there'll be huge breakthroughs in insect farming, as, as exciting as I find that idea to be.

• 1:41:09Lex Fridman?

  That, you know, are, in the ways we consume protein, maybe it'll revolutionize, we do factory farming, which is full of cruelty and, you know, and torture of animals, will revolutionize that completely because of our, like, we don't, we shouldn't need to go to Mars to revolutionize life here on earth. But at the same time, I shouldn't need a deadline to get shit done, but I do need it. And then in the same way, I think we need Mars. There's something about the human spirit that loves that longing for.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  I, I agree with that thesis. The going to the moon, right? And the, that whole endeavor has, you know, has captivated the imagination of so many. And it has, it has led to incredible, kind of incredible ideas, really, and probably in nonlinear ways, right? Not like, okay, we went to the moon, therefore some person here has thought of this.

• 1:42:04Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:42:05Speaker 01

  In, in that similar sense, I think, you know, space exploration is, there's something, there's some real magnetism about it. And it's on a genetic level, right? Like, we have this need to keep exploring, right? When we're done with a certain frontier, we move on to the next frontier. All that I'm saying is that I'm not moving to Mars to live there permanently, ever. You know, and I think that, you know, I'm glad you, you noted the kind of degradation of the earth, right? I think that is a true, kind of, the leading order challenge of our time.

• 1:42:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's a great engineer, it's a bunch of, a bunch of engineering problems. I'm most interested in space, because as I've read extensively, it's apparently very difficult to have sex in space. And so I just want that problem to be solved, because I think, once we solve the sex in space problem, we'll revolutionize sex here on earth. Thereby increasing the fun on Earth and the consequences of that can only be good.

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  I mean, you can, you've got a clear plan, right? And, and it sounds like.

• 1:43:12Lex Fridman?

  I'm submitting proposals to NASA as we speak.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:43:17Lex Fridman?

  I keep getting rejected. I don't know why. Okay.

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  You need better diagrams.

• 1:43:22Lex Fridman?

  Better pictures. I should have thought of that. You a while ago mentioned that, you know, there's certain aspects in the history of the solar system and Earth that resulted, that it could have resulted in an opaque atmosphere. But it didn't. We couldn't see the stars.

• 1:43:41Lex Fridman?

  And somebody mentioned to me a little bit ago, it's almost like a philosophical question for you. Do you think humans, like human society would develop as it did? Or at all, if we couldn't see the stars?

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  It would be drastically different, just dra- if it ever did develop. So I think some of the early developments, right, of like.

• 1:44:08Lex Fridman?

  Fire.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  You know, fire, you know. First of all, that atmosphere would be so hot because, you know, if you have an opaque atmosphere, the temperature at the bottom is, is huge. So we would be very different beings to start with.

• 1:44:24Lex Fridman?

  But it could be cloudy in certain kinds of ways that you could still get.

• 1:44:27Speaker 01

  Okay, think about like a, like a greenhouse, right? A greenhouse is cloudy effectively, but it's, it's super hot. Yeah, it's hard to avoid having an atmos- if you have an opaque atmosphere, it's hard to, right? Venus is a great example, right? Venus is, I don't remember exactly how many degrees, but it's hundreds in Celsius, right? It's not a hundred, it's hundreds. Even though it's only a little bit closer to the sun, that temperature is entirely coming from the fact that the atmosphere is thick.

• 1:45:00Lex Fridman?

  So it's a sauna of sorts.

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, you go there, you know, you feel refreshed after you come back, you know.

• 1:45:07Lex Fridman?

  But if you stay there, I mean, so, okay, take that as an assumption. This is a philosophical question, not a biological one. So you have a life that develops under these extremely hot conditions.

• 1:45:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's see, so much of the early evolution of mankind was driven by exploration.

• 1:45:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Right? And the kind of interest in stars originated in part as a tool to guide that exploration. Right? I mean, that in itself, I think, would be a huge, you know, a huge differential in the way that we, you know, our, our, our evolution on this planet.

• 1:45:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, stars, that's brilliant. So even in that aspect, but even in further aspects, astronomy just shows up in basically every single development in the history of science up until the 20th century, it shows up. So I wonder without that, if we had, we would have, if we would even get like calculus.

• 1:46:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, that's a great, I mean, that's a great point. Newton, in part, developed calculus because he was interested in understanding, explaining Kepler's laws, right? In general, that whole mechanistic understanding of the night sky, right, replacing a religious understanding where you interpret, you know, this is, you know, this whatever fire god riding his, you know, little chariot across the sky as opposed to, you know, this is some mechanistic set of laws, that transformed humanity and arguably put us on the, on the course that we're on today, right?

• 1:46:48Speaker 01

  The entirety of the last 400 years and the development of kind of our technological world that we live in today was sparked by, by that, right? Abandoning an effectively, you know, a non-secular view of the natural world and, and kind of saying, okay. This can be understood, and if it can be understood, it can be utilized. We can create our own variants of this. Absolutely, we would be a very, very different species without astronomy. This, I think, extends beyond just astronomy, right? There are questions like, why do we need to spend money on X?

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  Right, where X can be anything like paleontology, like, right?

• 1:47:37Lex Fridman?

  The mating patterns of penguins.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's like.

• 1:47:42Lex Fridman?

  Essential.

• 1:47:43Speaker 01

  That's right. I think, you know, there's a tremendous underappreciation for the usefulness of useless knowledge. Right? I mean.

• 1:47:55Lex Fridman?

  That's brilliant.

• 1:47:55Speaker 01

  I didn't come up with this. This was, this is a little book by the guy who started the Institute for Advanced Studies. But, you know, it's, it's so true. So much of the electronics that are on this table, right, work on Maxwell's equations. Maxwell wasn't sitting around in the 1800s saying, you know, I hope one day, you know, we'll make, you know, a couple of mics, so, you know, a couple, you know, a couple of guys can have this conversation, right? That wasn't at no, at no point was that the motivation. And yet, you know, it gave us the world that we have today.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  And the answer is, if you are a purely pragmatic person, if you don't care at all about kind of the human condition, none of this, the answer is, you can tax it. Right? Like, useless things have created way more capital than useful things.

• 1:48:59Lex Fridman?

  And the sad thing, I mean, first of all, it's really important to think about, and it's brilliant. In the, in the following context, like, Neil deGrasse Tyson has this book about the role of military-based funding in the development of science. And then so much of technological breakthroughs in the 20th century had to do with.

• 1:49:23Lex Fridman?

  Humans working on different military things. And then the outcome of that had nothing to do with military. It had some military application, but their impact was much, much bigger than military.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  The splitting of the atom is is a kind of a canonical example of this. We all know the tragedy that arises from splitting of the atom. And yet, you know, so much, I mean, the atom itself does not care for what purpose it is being split. So.

• 1:49:53Lex Fridman?

  So I wonder if we took the same amount of funding as we use for war and poured it into like totally seemingly useless things, like the mating patterns of penguins. We would get the internet anyway.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  I think so. I think so. And, you know, perhaps more of the internet would have would have penguins, you know.

• 1:50:16Lex Fridman?

  So we're both joking, but in some sense, like, I wonder, it's not the penguins, because penguins is more about sort of biology, but all useless kind of tinkering and all kinds of

• 1:50:29Lex Fridman?

  in all kinds of avenues. And also because military applications are often

• 1:50:36Lex Fridman?

  burdened by the secrecy required. So it's often like so much, the openness is lacking. And if we learned anything for the last few decades is that when there's openness in science, that accelerates the development of science.

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  That's right. That's true. The openness of science truly, you know, it benefits everybody. The notion that if, you know, I share my science with you, then you're going to catch up and like know the same thing. That is a short sighted viewpoint, because if you catch up and you open, you know, you discover something that puts me in a position to do the next step. Right. It's just so I absolutely agree with with all of this. I mean, the kind of question of like military funding versus non military funding is is obviously a complicated one.

• 1:51:32Speaker 01

  But at the end of the day, I think we have to get over the notion as a society that we are going to, you know, pay for this and then we will get that. Right. That's true if you're buying like.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  I don't know, toilet paper or something, right? It's just not true in the intellectual pursuit. That's not how it works. And sometimes it'll fail, right? Like sometime, like a huge fraction of what I do, right? I come up with an idea, I think, oh, it's great. And then I work it out, it's totally not great, right? It fails immediately.

• 1:52:08Lex Fridman?

  Failure is not a sign that the initial pursuit was worthless. So failure is just part of this kind of this whole exploration thing. And we should fund more and more of this exploration, the variety of that exploration.

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  I think it was Linus Pauling or somebody from, you know, that generation of scientists, that, you know, a good way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas. So that's, I think that's true. If you are conservative in your thinking, if you worry about proposing something that's going to fail and oh, what if, you know, like I, there's no science police that's going to come and arrest you for proposing the wrong thing. And, you know, it's also just like, why would you, why would you do science if you're afraid of, you know, taking that step? It would be so much better to propose things that are plausible, that are interesting,

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  and then for a fraction of them to be wrong than to just kind of, you know, make incremental progress all your life, right?

• 1:53:11Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of wild ideas, let me ask you about the thing we mentioned previously, which is this interstellar object, Amur Amur. Could it be space junk from a distant alien civilization?

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  You can't immediately discount that by saying absolutely it cannot. Anything can be space junk. I mean, from that point of view, can any of the Kuiper belt objects we see be space junk? Anything on the night sky can in principle be space junk.

• 1:53:43Lex Fridman?

  And Kuiper belt would catch interstellar objects potentially and like force them into an orbit if they're like small enough?

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  Uh, not the Kuiper belt itself, but you can imagine like Jupiter family of comets being captured. You know, so you can actually capture things. It's even easier to do this very early in the solar system, like early in the solar system's life while it's still in a cluster of stars. It's unavoidable that you capture debris, whether it be natural debris or unnatural debris, or just debris of some kind from other stars. That it's like a daycare center, right? Like, everybody passes their infections on to other kids. Yeah. Um, you know, more and more and more, there's been a lot of discussion about, and there's been a lot of interest in this over, like, is it, is it aliens or is it not?

• 1:54:33Speaker 01

  But let's, like, if you just kind of look at the facts, like, what we know about it is it's kind of like a weird shape and it also accelerated. Yeah. Right? Like, that's the two, those are, those are the two interesting, uh, things about it. There are, um, there are puzzles about it and perhaps the most, uh, daring resolution to this puzzle is that it's not, you know, aliens or it's not like a rock, it's actually a piece of hydrogen ice. And so this is a friend of mine, uh, you know, Daryl Seligman, Greg Loughlin, came up with

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  this, uh, idea where that in giant molecular clouds that are just clouds of hydrogen helium gas that live in, um, live throughout the galaxy, at their cores, you can condense ice to become these hydrogen, you know, icebergs, if you will. And then, uh, that explains many of the aspects of, uh, in fact, I think that explains all of the more and more and more mystery, how it becomes elongated, because basically the hydrogen ice sublimates and kind of like a bar of soap that, you know, slowly kind

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  of elongates as you, uh, as you strip away the, the surface layers, uh, how it was able to accelerate because of a jet that is produced from, you know, the hydrogen coming off of it, but you can't see it because it's hydrogen gas. Like, all of this stuff, uh, kind of falls together nicely.

• 1:56:10Speaker 01

  I'm intrigued by that idea, truly, because it's like, if that's true, that's a new type of astrophysical object.

• 1:56:19Lex Fridman?

  And they would be produced by, what's the monster that produced initially that kind of object?

• 1:56:25Speaker 01

  So this is giant molecular molecular clouds. They're everywhere. I mean, they are, the fact that they exist is not.

• 1:56:32Lex Fridman?

  Are they rogue clouds or are they part of like an orbit cloud?

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  No, no, they're rogue clouds. Yeah.

• 1:56:37Lex Fridman?

  They're just floating about?

• 1:56:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you go, like, a lot of people imagine the galaxy as being a, you know, a bunch of stars, right? And they're just orbiting, right? But the truth is, if you fly between stars, you run into clouds.

• 1:56:53Lex Fridman?

  They don't have any large object that creates orbits. They're just floating about.

• 1:56:57Speaker 01

  Just floating.

• 1:56:58Lex Fridman?

  But why are they floating together? Or they just float together for time and not?

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  Well, so these are the, these eventually become the nurseries of stars. So as they, as they cool, they contract and, you know, then collapse into stars or into groups of stars. But some of them, the starless molecular clouds, according to the calculations that Daryl and Greg did, can, can create these like icicles of hydrogen ice.

• 1:57:29Lex Fridman?

  I wonder why they would be flying so fast, because they seem to be moving pretty fast at a quick pace. A moa, yeah.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  Oh, that's just because of their acceleration due to, due to the sun. If you step, I mean, it's like,

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  take something really far away, let it go, and the sun is here. By the time it comes close to the sun, right? It's moving pretty fast. So that's an attractive explanation, I think. Not so much because it's cool, but it makes a clear prediction, right? Of when Verarubin Observatory comes online next year or so, we will discover many, many more of these objects, right? And they have, so I like, I like theories that are falsifiable. And not, not just testable, but falsifiable. It's, it's good to have a falsifiable theory where you can say, that's not true. Aliens is, is one that's fundamentally difficult to say, no, that's not aliens.

• 1:58:28Lex Fridman?

  Well, the interesting thing to me, if you look at one alien civilization. And then we look at the things it produces in terms of if we were to try to detect the alien civilization. The there is like, say, there's 10 billion aliens. There would probably be

• 1:58:51Lex Fridman?

  trillions of dumb drone type things produced by the aliens. And then be many, many, many more orders of magnitude of junk. So like, if you were to look for an alien civilization, in my mind, you would be looking for the junk. That's the more efficient thing to look for. I'm not saying Moa Moa has any characteristics of space junk, but it kind of opened my eyes like to the idea that we shouldn't necessarily be looking to the queen of the ant colony. We should be looking at, I don't know, I don't know, like, like traces of alien life that doesn't look intelligent in any way. May not even look like life. It could be just garbage.

• 1:59:34Lex Fridman?

  We should be looking for garbage.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  Just generically.

• 1:59:39Lex Fridman?

  Garbage that's producible by unnatural forces. I mean, for me, at least, that was kind of interesting, because if you have a successful alien civilization, that we would be producing many more orders of magnitude of junk and that would be easier potentially to detect.

• 1:59:57Speaker 01

  Well, so you have to produce the junk, but you have to also lunch, launch it. So this is the, this is where, let's, let's imagine.

• 2:00:04Lex Fridman?

  Disposal.

• 2:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, but let's imagine we are a successful civilization that, you know, has made it to space. We clearly have, right? And yes, we're in the infancy of that pursuit, but, you know, we've launched, I don't know how many satellites.

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  Probably if you count GPS satellites, it must be at least thousands.

• 2:00:27Lex Fridman?

  It's certainly thousands. I don't know if it's over 10,000, but it's on that.

• 2:00:30Speaker 01

  But it's on that, like, large order of magnitude. How many of the things that we've launched will ever leave the solar system, I think, too? Well, maybe the Voyager, the Voyager one, Voyager two. I don't know if the Pioneer. So maybe three, like.

• 2:00:46Lex Fridman?

  There's also a Tesla Roadster out there.

• 2:00:49Speaker 01

  Uh, that, that one, it will never leave the solar system. It'll just, I think that one will eventually collide with Mars. That can be SpaceX's first Mars destination. But look, so there is an energetic cost to interstellar travel, uh, which is really hard to overcome. And when, when we think about, you know, generically, what do we look for in an alien civilization? Oftentimes, we tend to imagine that the thing you look for is the thing that we're doing right now.

• 2:01:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  Right? So I think that, um, you know, if I, if I look at the future, right? And for a while, like, okay, if aliens are, are out there, they must be broadcasting in radio. Right? That radio, um, you know, the amount that we broadcast in radio has diminished tremendously in the last 50 years, but we're doing a lot more computation, right? What are the signs of computation? Like, that's a good, that's an interesting question to ask, right? Where, I don't know, I think something on the order of a few percent of the entire electrical grid last year went to mining Bitcoin, right?

• 2:02:02Lex Fridman?

  Well, there, and the, yeah, the, there could be a lot of, in the future, different consequences of the computation, which, I mean, by, I'm biased, but it could be robotics, it could be artificial intelligence. So we may be looking for intelligent looking objects. Like, that's what I meant by probes, like, things that move in kind of artificial ways.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  But the emergence of AI is not an if, right? It's, it's happening right in front of our eyes. And the energetic costs associated with that are becoming, you know, a tangible problem. So I think, you know, if you imagine kind of extrapolating that into the future, right? What are the, you know, what becomes the bottleneck, right? The bottleneck might be powering, you know, powering the AI, broadly speaking, not one AI, but powering that entire AI ecosystem, right? So, I don't know, I think, you know, space junk isn't, is kind of.

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  It's an interesting idea, but it's heavily influenced by like sci fi of nineteen fifty's, where by two thousand twenty, we're all like flying to the moon. And so we produce a lot of space junk. I'm not sure if that's the pathway that alien civilizations take. I've also never seen an alien civilization.

• 2:03:26Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's true. But if your theory of chill

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:32Lex Fridman?

  turns out to be true, and then we don't, you know, we don't necessarily explore, we seize the exploration phase of, like, alien civilizations quickly seize the exploration phase of their, of their efforts, then, then perhaps they'll just be chilling in a particular space, expanding slowly, but then using up a lot of resources, and they have to have a lot of garbage disposal that sends stuff out.

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:58Lex Fridman?

  And the other, you know, the other idea was that it could be a relay that you'll almost have like these GPS like markers that you send throughout, which I think is kind of interesting. It's similar to this probe idea of sending a large number of probes out to measure gravitational,

• 2:04:21Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  We're getting there as a, as a civilization.

• 2:05:07Lex Fridman?

  No, we're not, not even close.

• 2:05:09Speaker 01

  Well, I mean.

• 2:05:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, okay, I, I mean, like, be able to sort of play with black holes, that kind of thing. So we're talking about a whole nother different order of magnitude of masses. Then it may be very effective to send signals via gravitational waves.

• 2:05:25Speaker 01

  I actually, my sense is that all of these things are genuinely difficult to predict. You know, and I don't mean like to, to kind of shy away. I just, I really mean, if you think, if you take imagination of what the future will look like from, you know, 500 years ago, right? It's just, it is so hard to conceive of the impossible, right? So it's, it's almost like, you know, it's almost limiting to try and imagine things that are an order of magnitude, you know, or two orders of magnitude ahead in terms of progress. Just because, you know, you mentioned cars before, you know,

• 2:06:07Speaker 01

  if you were to ask people what they wanted in 1870, it's faster buggies, right? So, so I, I think the whole like kind of, you know, alien conversation inevitably gets, gets limited by, by our entire kind of collective astrophysical lack of imagination.

• 2:06:29Lex Fridman?

  I, so to push back a little bit, I, I find that it's really interesting to talk about these wild ideas about the future, whether it's aliens, whether it's AI, with brilliant people like yourself, who are focused on very particular tools of science we have today to solve very particular, like rigorous scientific questions. And it's almost like putting on this wild dreamy hat, like some percent of the time, and say like, what are, like, what would alien civilizations look like? What would alien trash look like? Well, what would our own civilization that sends out trillions of AI systems out there? Like how 9,000, but 10,000 out there, what would that look like?

• 2:07:11Lex Fridman?

  And you're right, any one prediction is probably going to be horrendously wrong. But there's something about creating these kind of wild predictions that kind of opens up.

• 2:07:22Speaker 01

  There's a huge magnetism to it, right? And some of, some of it, um, you know, I mean, some of the Jules Bern novels did a phenomenal job predicting the future, right? That, that actually was a great example of what you're talking about, like allowing your imagination to run free. I mean, I just hope, I just hope there, there's dragons. That's like.

• 2:07:48Lex Fridman?

  I love dragons.

• 2:07:49Speaker 01

  Dragons are the best.

• 2:07:53Lex Fridman?

  But see, the cool thing about sci, science fiction and these kinds of conversations, it doesn't just predict the future, I think. Some of these things will create the future. Planting the idea, this will, the humans are amazing. Like fake it till you make it. Humans are really good at taking an idea that seems impossible at the time. And for one, any one individual human, that idea is like a, it's like planting a seed.

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:08:23Lex Fridman?

  That eventually must realize itself. It's weird. It's weird how like, science fiction can create science.

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  Drive some of the.

• 2:08:30Lex Fridman?

  It drives the science.

• 2:08:30Speaker 01

  I agree with you and, and I think in this regard, you know, I, I'm like a sucker for, for sci fi.

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  It's, it's all I listen to like now when I, when I run and, and some of it is completely implausible, right? And it's just like, I don't care. It's, it's so, it's, it's both entertaining and, you know, it's just like, it's imagination. You know about the black clouds book, I think it was by Fred Hoyle. This is like, this has great connections with sort of a lot of the advancements that are happening in NLP, um, right now, right? With, you know, transformer models and so on, but, uh, you know, it's this black cloud shows up in, in the solar system. And then, you know, people try to send radio and then it learns to talk back at you.

• 2:09:24Speaker 01

  You know, so anyway, we don't have to talk at all about it, but it's just, it's something worth checking out.

• 2:09:29Lex Fridman?

  With that, on the alien front, with the black cloud, to me, and exactly on the NLP front, and also just explainability of AI, it's fascinating. Just the very question, Stephen Wolfram looked at this with the movie Arrival. It's like, what would be the common language that we would discover? The, the reason that's really interesting to me is we have aliens here on earth now. Japanese.

• 2:09:51Speaker 01

  Japanese is the obvious answer.

• 2:09:53Lex Fridman?

  Japanese, yeah, that would be the common. Maybe it would be music, actually. That's more likely. It wouldn't be a language. It would be art that they would communicate. But, you know, I do believe that we have. I was Stephen Wolfram on this a little bit, that to me. Computation, like programs we write, that, you know, that they're kind of intelligent creatures. And I feel like we haven't found the common language to talk with them. Like, our little creations that are artificial are not born with whatever that innate thing that produces language with us. And like, coming up with mechanisms for communicating with them is.

• 2:10:37Lex Fridman?

  Is an effort that feels like it will produce some incredible discoveries. You can even think of, if you think that math is discovered, mathematics in itself is a kind of.

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's an innate construction of the world we live in. I think we are.

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  You know, part of the way there, because pre 1950, right? Computers were were human beings that would carry out arithmetic, right? And I think it was Ulam. Who worked in Los Alamos at the at the time, like, towards the end of Second World War. Wrote something about how, you know, in the future, right? Computers will not be just arithmetic tool, but will be truly an interactive, you know. Thing with which you could do experiments, right? At the time, the notion of doing an experiment, not like in the lab with some beakers, but.

• 2:11:38Speaker 01

  An experiment on a computer, designing an experiment, a numerical experiment was.

• 2:11:45Speaker 01

  A new one, that's like, you know, seventy percent of what I do is I design, you know, I write code, terrible code to be clear, like, but, you know, I write code that creates an experiment, which is a, which is a simulation. So in that sense, I think we're beginning to interact with a computer in a way that you're saying, not as just a, you know, fancy calculator, not as just a, you know, call and request type of thing, but, but, you know, something that can generate, generate insights that are otherwise completely unattainable, right? They're unattainable by doing analytical mathematics.

• 2:12:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and there's, with the Alpha Fold 2, we're now trying, we're now starting to crack open biology. So being able to simulate at first trivial biological systems and hopefully down the line, complex biological systems.

• 2:12:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:12:41Lex Fridman?

  My hope is to be able to simulate sociological, like sociological systems, like humans. I've, you know, a large part of my work at MIT was on autonomous vehicles. And the fascinating thing to me was about pedestrians, human pedestrians interacting with autonomous vehicles and simulating those systems without murdering humans will be very useful, but nevertheless is exceptionally difficult.

• 2:13:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say so. When is my Mustang gonna drive itself? Right. I'm not even joking. It looks like.

• 2:13:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:14Lex Fridman?

  It turns out, it's much difficult, it's much more difficult than we imagined.

• 2:13:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:20Lex Fridman?

  And, and I suppose that's the kind of, the progress of science is just like, you know, going to Mars, it's probably going to turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined. Sending out probes to investigate Planet 9 at the edge of our solar system might turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined, but we do it anyway.

• 2:13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:41Lex Fridman?

  And we figure it out in the end.

• 2:13:42Speaker 01

  It's actually, Mars is a great, I mean, going, sending humans to Mars is way more complicated than sending humans to the moon. You'd think, just like naively.

• 2:13:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:52Speaker 01

  But they're in space, who cares? Like, if you go there, why don't you go there? You know?

• 2:13:59Speaker 01

  This life support is a is an extremely expensive thing. Yeah.

• 2:14:03Lex Fridman?

  There's a bunch of extra challenges, but I disagree with you. I would be one of the early people to go. I used to think not.

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:09Lex Fridman?

  I used to think I'd be one of the first, maybe million to go. Once you have a little bit of a society, I think I'm upgrading myself to the first like 10,000.

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  That's right. Front of the front of the cabin.

• 2:14:20Lex Fridman?

  Not completely front, but like it would be interesting to die. I'm OK with death sucks, but I kind of like the idea of dying on Mars.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  Of all the places to die, I gotta say, in this regard, like, I don't want to die on Mars.

• 2:14:38Lex Fridman?

  You don't.

• 2:14:38Speaker 01

  No, no, I would much rather die on Earth. I mean, death is fundamentally boring, right? Like, death is a very boring experience. But I mean, I've never died before, so I don't know from firsthand experience.

• 2:14:52Lex Fridman?

  As far as you know.

• 2:14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:53Lex Fridman?

  It could be reincarnation, all those kinds of things. So you mean, where would you die? If you had to choose?

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  Oh, man. OK, so, you know, I would definitely, you know, there's a question of who I'd want to die with. You know, I'd prefer not to die alone. But like, you know, surrounded by family would be would be preferable. Where? I think northern New Mexico. And I'm not even joking. Like, this is not a random place. It's just like.

• 2:15:26Lex Fridman?

  Would that be your favorite place on Earth?

• 2:15:29Speaker 01

  Not necessarily like favorite place on Earth to to reside at, you know, indefinitely. But it is it is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been to. So, you know, there's something, I don't know, there's something attractive about about going, you know.

• 2:15:48Lex Fridman?

  Returning to nature in a beautiful place. Let me ask you about another aspect of your life that is full of beauty. Music.

• 2:15:58Speaker 01

  OK.

• 2:15:58Lex Fridman?

  You're a musician.

• 2:16:01Lex Fridman?

  The absurd question I have to ask, what is the greatest song of all time?

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:16:06Lex Fridman?

  Objectively speaking.

• 2:16:07Speaker 01

  The greatest song of all time?

• 2:16:09Lex Fridman?

  I suppose that could change moment to moment, day to day. But if you were forced to answer for this particular moment in your life, that's something that pops to mind. This could be both philosophically, this could be technically as a musician, like where you enjoy maybe lyrics. Like for me, lyrics is very important.

• 2:16:26Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:16:27Lex Fridman?

  So I would probably, my choice would be lyrics based.

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  I don't want to answer in terms of just technical, you know, technical prowess. I think technical prowess is impressive, right? It's just like, it's impressive what can be done. I wouldn't place that into the category of the greatest music ever written. Some classical music that's written is undeniably beautiful, but I don't want to consider that category of music either. Just because, you know, so if I, if I stood limit the scope of this philosophical discussion to, you know, the kind of music that I listen to, you know, probably What's My Age Again? By Blink 212. It's just, you know, it's a solid one.

• 2:17:16Speaker 01

  It's got, you know.

• 2:17:20Lex Fridman?

  Said, nobody ever. That's a good song. I don't even know if you're joking.

• 2:17:24Speaker 01

  No, no, I am, I am joking. It's a good one, but it's, yeah, I mean.

• 2:17:28Lex Fridman?

  I think the back is a close second.

• 2:17:33Lex Fridman?

  What's my age again? Yeah.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  No, I mean, it would probably, you know, songwriting wise, I think the Beatles came pretty close to.

• 2:17:43Lex Fridman?

  Were they influential to you?

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:17:45Lex Fridman?

  Like the Beatles?

• 2:17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Love the Beatles. I love the Beatles.

• 2:17:49Lex Fridman?

  What it be yesterday? Yeah.

• 2:17:52Speaker 01

  Like Strawberry Fields Forever is, is one of, you know what? What one of my favorite Beatles songs is? It's, you know, In My Life, right? That's, it's, it's hard to imagine how whatever 24 year old wrote that. It is one of the most introspective pieces of music ever. You know, I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan. And so I think, you know, if you were to, you can sort of look at the entire Dark Side of the Moon album and as, you know, getting pretty close up there to the pinnacle of what, you know, can be created. So, you know, Time's a great song.

• 2:18:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:32Speaker 01

  It's a great song.

• 2:18:32Lex Fridman?

  Just the entirety of just the instruments, the lyrics, the, the, the feeling created by a song. Like Pink Floyd.

• 2:18:43Lex Fridman?

  Can create feelings, the entire experience, I mean, you have that with the wall of just transporting you into another place. Songs don't, not many songs could do that as well. Not many artists can do that as well as Pink Floyd did.

• 2:18:58Speaker 01

  There are a lot of bands that you can kind of say, oh, yeah, like if you take Blink 182, right? If you have no idea, like if you are listening to sort of that type of pop punk for the first time, it's difficult to differentiate between Blink 182 and like Sum 41 and the thousand of other like lesser known bands that all sounded, they all had that sparkling production feel, they all kind of sounded the same, right? When it, with Pink Floyd, it's hard to find another band that you're like, well, is this one Pink Floyd? Like you know, when you're listening to Pink Floyd, what you're listening to.

• 2:19:41Lex Fridman?

  The uniqueness, that's fascinating. You know, in the calculation of the greatest song and the greatest band of all time, you could probably, you probably actually quantify this like scientifically, is like how unique, if you play different songs, how well are people able to recognize whether it's this band or not? And that, you know, that's probably a huge component to greatness. Like if the world would miss it if it was gone.

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. So.

• 2:20:11Lex Fridman?

  But there's also the human story things. Like I would say, I would put Johnny Cash's cover of Hurt as one of the greatest songs of all time. And that has less to do with the song.

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  But your interaction with it.

• 2:20:24Lex Fridman?

  Interaction with it, but also the human, the full story of the human. So like, it's not just, if I just heard the song, I'd be like, okay, that, but if it's the full story of it, also the video component for that particular song. So like that, you can't discount the full experience of it.

• 2:20:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, I have no confusion about not, about being, you know, anywhere.

• 2:20:49Speaker 01

  You know, in that league, but I just like, I sometimes think about, you know, music that is being produced today feels oftentimes feels like, like kind of clothes, like clothes that you buy at like H and M and you wear it three times before they rip and you throw away. So like, so much of it is, it's not bad. It's just kind of forgettable. Right? Like the fact that we're talking about Pink Floyd in 2021 is in itself an interesting question. Why are we talking about Pink Floyd? And it's, there's something unforgettable about them and unforgettable about the, the art that they created.

• 2:21:32Lex Fridman?

  That could be the markets that likes, so Spotify has created this kind of market where the, the incentives for creating music that lasts is much lower because there's so much more music.

• 2:21:44Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:21:44Lex Fridman?

  You just want something that shines bright for a short amount of time, makes a lot of money and moves on. And I mean, the same thing you see with the news and all those kinds of things. We're just living in a shorter and shorter, shorter like time scale in terms of our attention spans. And that, nevertheless, when we look at the long arc of history of music, perhaps there will be some songs from today that will last as much as Pink Floyd. We're just unable to see it.

• 2:22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, just the collected works of Nickelback.

• 2:22:14Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. You know, you never know. You never know. Justin Bieber, it could have, it could be a contender. I've recently started listening to Justin Bieber just to understand what people are talking about. And, you know, I'll just keep my comments to myself on that one.

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  It's too good to explain in.

• 2:22:28Lex Fridman?

  The words cannot capture the greatness that is the Beebs. You as a musician, so you, you write your own music, you play guitar, you sing. Maybe can you give an overview of the role music has played in your life? You're one of the, you're a world-class scientist. And so it's kind of fascinating to see somebody.

• 2:22:57Lex Fridman?

  In your position, who was also a great musician and still loves playing music?

• 2:23:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I wouldn't call myself a great musician.

• 2:23:05Lex Fridman?

  One of the best of all time.

• 2:23:09Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:23:10Lex Fridman?

  We were saying offline, confidence is like the most essential thing about being a rock star.

• 2:23:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's the confidence and kind of like moodiness, right?

• 2:23:20Speaker 01

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

• 2:23:59Speaker 01

  pressing a button or like, you know.

• 2:24:01Lex Fridman?

  So it's not a break from science, it's a part of your science?

• 2:24:04Speaker 01

  It's absolutely is a part of, it's, I would say, you know, it's a thing that enables the science, right? The science would, you know, suck even more than it does already without the music.

• 2:24:17Lex Fridman?

  And that means like the creating of the, the writing of the music? Or is it just even playing other people's stuff? Is it, is it the whole of it?

• 2:24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's definitely both. Yeah, and also just, you know, I love, love to play guitar, love to sing, you know? My wife tolerates my, my screeching singing, you know, and even kind of likes it.

• 2:24:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so people should check out your stuff. You have a great voice, so I love, I love your stuff. Is there something, you're, you're super busy. Is there something you could say about practicing for musicians, for guitar? For, you're also in a band, so like that whole, how you can manage that? Is there some tricks, is there some hacks to being a lifelong musician while being like super busy?

• 2:25:09Speaker 01

  So I would say, you know. The way that I optimize my life is I try to, I try to do, you know, the thing that I'm passionate about in a moment and put that at the top of the priority list. There are moments when, you know, you just, you feel inspired to play music. And if you're in the middle of something, if you can avoid, if that can be put on hold, just do it, right? There are times when you get inspired about something scientific.

• 2:25:39Speaker 01

  You know, I do my best to drop everything, go into that, you know, mode of, that isolated mode and, and execute upon that. So it's a chaotic, you know, I, I think I have a pretty chaotic lifestyle where I'm always doing kind of multiple things and jumping between, uh, between what I'm doing. But at the end of the day, it's, it's not like, um, you know, those, those moments of inspiration are actually kind of rare, right? Like, most of the time, all of us are just doing kind of, uh, doing the stuff that get, that needs to get done.

• 2:26:21Speaker 01

  If you do the disservice to yourself of saying, oh, I'm inspired to, you know, do this calculation, figure, figure this out, but I've got to answer email or just like do something, something silly. You know, that is a, uh, that is nothing more than disservice. And also, like, I have some social media presence, but I, I mostly stay off of, you know, social media to, you know, just frankly, cause like, I don't kind of, I don't enjoy the mental cycles that it, uh, that it takes.

• 2:26:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it robs you of that, the, yeah, yeah, those, those precious moments that could be filled with inspiration in your, in your other pursuits. But there, there's something to, maybe you and I are different in this. Like I, I try to play at least 10 minutes of guitar every day. Oh, like almost on the technical side, like keeping that bass of.

• 2:27:22Lex Fridman?

  Basic competence going. And I mean, the same way like writers will get in front of a paper, no matter what, that kind of thing. It just feels like that for my life has been essential to the daily ritual of it. Otherwise, days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and you haven't played guitar for months.

• 2:27:43Speaker 01

  No, no, I understand. For me, I think it's it's been like if we have a gig coming up, we'll definitely.

• 2:27:51Lex Fridman?

  You need deadlines.

• 2:27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. No, like we will, we will sharpen up. Definitely, you know, especially coming up to a gig. It's like, you know, we're not trying to make money with this. This is like just for the for that satisfaction of doing something, doing something well. Right? But overall, I would say most I play guitar most days, most days. And, you know, when I put kids to sleep, I play guitar, you know, with them. And we like just make up random songs about, you know, about our cat or something, you know, like we just do kind of random stuff.

• 2:28:37Speaker 01

  But, you know, music is always involved in that process.

• 2:28:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, keeping it fun. You have Russian roots?

• 2:28:42Speaker 01

  I sure do.

• 2:28:44Lex Fridman?

  Were you born in Russia?

• 2:28:45Speaker 01

  I was, yeah.

• 2:28:46Lex Fridman?

  When did you come here?

• 2:28:47Speaker 01

  So I came to the US in very, the very end of 99. But so I was like almost 14 years old. But along the way, we spent six years in Japan. So like we moved from Russia to Japan in 94 and then to the US in 99. So then like elementary school.

• 2:29:10Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:29:11Speaker 01

  School in Japan.

• 2:29:12Lex Fridman?

  So elementary school in Japan?

• 2:29:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:16Lex Fridman?

  So that's interesting, Dad. Do you still speak Russian?

• 2:29:19Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 2:29:20Lex Fridman?

  Okay. Ты паруски гувериш?

• 2:29:21Speaker 01

  Да, конечно.

• 2:29:22Lex Fridman?

  Okay, maybe I'll, let me ask you in Russian.

• 2:29:27Lex Fridman?

  Что ты помнишь о России? Обеинчестин ты хереспингла.

• 2:29:31Speaker 01

  Да, в общем, в целом, я помню, то есть мне было восемь, когда мы уехали. И, конечно, как сказать, помню в первом приближении все, включая вот переход, там, девяносто первый, девяносто второй год, вот этот вот турбунетный период, еще, естественно, девяносто третий. То есть еще я очень хорошо помню, как в какой-то момент сначала появилась Pepsi-Cola, а потом появилась Coca-Cola.

• 2:30:06Speaker 01

  Я подумал, я помню, я был лет, не знаю, шесть, и я подумал, как так может быть, Coca-Cola украла продукт и сделала то же самое. То есть я никогда, я долго думал, что и Pepsi, и Coca-Cola изобрели, типа, в девяносто втором году.

• 2:30:28Lex Fridman?

  So for people who don't speak Russian, Konstantin was talking about, basically, his first in nineteen ninety-two interaction with capitalism, which is Pepsi, and at first he discovered Pepsi, and then he discovered Coke, and he was confused how such theft could occur.

• 2:30:47Speaker 01

  Like an intellectual property theft. And remember, Pepsi arrived to the Soviet Union first, and there was some, there's some complicated story, which I don't quite understand the details of. For a while Pepsi like commanded submarines or something. There was, yeah, Pepsi had like a fleet of Soviet submarines that it was.

• 2:31:08Lex Fridman?

  They were sponsoring tanks and this, that, and I, and I remember, there's certain things that trickled in, like McDonald's, I remember that was a big deal.

• 2:31:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 2:31:17Lex Fridman?

  Certain aspects of the West.

• 2:31:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So, I mean, we went to McDonald's and we stood in, I mean, this is, this is absurd, right? From, kind of looking at it from today's perspective, but we stood in line for like six hours to get into this McDonald's. And I remember inside, it was just like. A billion people and I'm just taking a bite out of that Big Mac. I'm like, wow.

• 2:31:45Lex Fridman?

  What was it? An incredible experience for you? So like, what is the taste of the West like?

• 2:31:50Speaker 01

  Uh, you know,

• 2:31:51Lex Fridman?

  Did you enjoy it?

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  I enjoyed the fact that, I mean, this is like, this is getting into the weeds, but I really enjoyed the fact that the top of the bun had those seeds, you know, like, and I remember how on the commercials, like the Big Mac would kind of bounce. I was like, the seeds, how do they inject the seeds into the bread? Like, amazing, right? So I think it was, uh,

• 2:32:16Lex Fridman?

  Artistry.

• 2:32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:17Lex Fridman?

  You enjoy the artistry of the culinary experience.

• 2:32:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. It was the, you know, it was the food art that is the Big Mac.

• 2:32:24Lex Fridman?

  Actually, I still don't know the answer to that. How do they get the sesame seeds on the bun?

• 2:32:27Speaker 01

  It's better to not know the answer.

• 2:32:29Lex Fridman?

  You just wander the mystery of it all. Yeah, I remember it being exceptionally delicious, but I'm with you. I don't know. You didn't mention how transformative Pepsi was, but to me, basically sugar based stuff, like Pepsi was, or Coke, I don't remember which one we partook in, but that was an incredible experience.

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. And, uh, you know, I think it's, um, you know, it was an important and formative, uh, formative period. I sometimes, I guess, rely on that a little bit, uh, you know, in my daily life because, uh, I remember like the, the early nineties were real rough, you know, like my parents were kind of on the, on the bottom of the spectrum in terms of, uh, you know, in terms of financial well-being. So, um, kind of like just when I run into trouble, not like, you know, money trouble, just any kind of trouble

• 2:33:34Speaker 01

  these days, it, it just kind of is not, uh, particularly meaningful when you compare it to that, that turbulent time of the, the early nineties. And the other thing is I think there's, there's like an advantage to, to being, you know, an immigrant, which is that you get, you go through the mental exercise of changing your environment completely early in your life, right? You go,

• 2:34:00Speaker 01

  It's by no means, you know, pleasant in the moment, right? But like going into Japanese elementary school, right? Like, I didn't go to a, some like, private, you know, thing. I just went to a regular, like, Japanese public elementary school. And I was the non-Japanese person in my class. So just like the learning Japanese and just kind of.

• 2:34:24Lex Fridman?

  So that's a super humbling experience in many ways. Was, where you like made fun of all that kind of stuff?

• 2:34:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:34:30Lex Fridman?

  You being the outsider.

• 2:34:31Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. But, you know, you kind of do, you kind of do that. And then you kind of, then you just kind of are okay with, with stuff. You know what I mean? And so like doing that again in middle school in the US. It was arguably easy because I was like, yeah, well, I've already done this before. So I think it kind of prepares you mentally a little bit for, for switching up. For whatever, you know, changes that will come up for the rest of, of your life. So I, I wouldn't trade that, that experience really for anything. It's a huge aspect of, of who I am. And I'm sure you can relate to a lot of this.

• 2:35:13Lex Fridman?

  Yes. Is there advice from your life that you can give to young people today? High school, college, you know, about their career? Or maybe about life in general?

• 2:35:25Speaker 01

  I'm not like a career coach by. Right, like I'm definitely not a life coach. I don't have it all figured out. But I think there's a, um, there's a perpetual cycle of, of, um, you know, thinking that there is a, um, there's kind of like a template for success. Right? Maybe there is, but I, in my experience, I haven't seen it. Right?

• 2:35:54Speaker 01

  You know, I would say people in high school, right? So much of their focus is on getting straight A's, filling their CV with this and this and this so that it looks impressive, right? That, that is not, I think, a good way to optimize your life, right? Do the thing that fills your life with passion. Do the thing that fills your life with, with interest. And, you know, do that perpetually, right? A straight A student, you know, is really impressive, but also, you know, somewhat boring, right? So, so I, I think, you know, injection of more of that

• 2:36:38Speaker 01

  kind of interest into, into the lives of young people would go a long way in, in just both upping their level of happiness and then just kind of ensuring that, looking forward, they are not suffering from a, you know, perpetual condition of, oh, I have to satisfy these like, you know, checkboxes to, to do well, right?

• 2:37:03Lex Fridman?

  Because you can lose yourself in that whole process for the rest of your life. But it's nice, if it's possible, like Max Tegmark was exceptionally good at this at MIT, figure out how you can spend a small part of your, percent of your efforts that, such that your CV looks really impressive.

• 2:37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. There's no, like, without a doubt, like, that's, that's a baseline that you need to have.

• 2:37:29Lex Fridman?

  And then spend, so like, spend most of your time doing like amazing things you're passionate about, but such that it, uh, uh, kind of like Planet Nine produces objects that, uh, that feed your CV, uh, like slowly over time. So getting good grades in high school, maybe doing extracurricular activities or, or in terms of like, you know, for programmers that's producing code that you can show up on GitHub, like leaving traces, like.

• 2:37:57Lex Fridman?

  Throughout your efforts such that your CV looks impressive to the rest of the world.

• 2:38:01Speaker 01

  In fact, I mean, this is somewhat along the lines of what I'm talking about. We see like getting like good grades is important, but grades are not a tangible like product. Like you cannot out show your A and have your A live a separate life from you. Code very much does, right? Music very much takes on, you know, provided somebody else listens to it, right? Provide like takes on a life of its own. That's kind of what I mean, right? Doing, doing stuff that, that can then get separated from, from you is, is exceptionally attractive. Right. It's like, it's like a fun and.

• 2:38:46Lex Fridman?

  And it's also very impressive to others. I think we're moving to a world where grades mean less and less. Like certifications mean less and less. If you look at, especially again in the computing fields, getting a degree, finishing your, currently just getting, finishing your degree, whether it's bachelors, masters or PhD is less important than the things you've actually put out into the world.

• 2:39:08Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:39:09Lex Fridman?

  And that's a fascinating kind of, that's, that's great that in that sense, the meritocracy in its richest, most beautiful form is, is starting to win out.

• 2:39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's weird cause like, you know, my understanding, and I'm not like, I don't know the history of science well enough to, to speak very confidently about this. But, you know, the advisor of my advisor of my advisor from undergrad like didn't have a PhD, right? So I think it was a more common thing back in the day, even in the academic sector to, you know, not have, you know, Faraday, like Faraday didn't know algebra and drew diagrams about, you know, magnetic fields. Like his, Faraday's law was derived entirely from intuition.

• 2:40:02Speaker 01

  So it is interesting to, to how the world of academia has evolved into a, you gotta do this and then get PhD, then you have to postdoc once and twice and maybe thrice. And then like you, you move on. So, you know, it does, I do wonder, you know, if we're. You know, if there's a better.

• 2:40:24Lex Fridman?

  I think we're heading there. But it's a fascinating historical perspective, like that we might have just tried this whole thing out for a while, where we put a lot more emphasis on grades and certificates and degrees and all those kinds of things. I think the difference historically is like, we can actually, using the internet, show off the, show off ourselves and our creations better and better and more effectively. Whether that's code or producing videos or all those kinds of things.

• 2:40:52Speaker 01

  That's right. You can become a certified drone pilot.

• 2:40:58Lex Fridman?

  Of all the, of all the things you want to pick, yeah, for sure. Or you could just fly and make YouTube videos that gets hundreds, thousands of views with your drone and we're never getting a certificate. Um, that's probably illegal. Don't do it. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? So you, you look at planets.

• 2:41:14Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:41:15Lex Fridman?

  They, they seem to orbit stuff without, without asking the why question. And for some reason, life emerged on Earth such that it led to big brains that can ask the big why question. Do you think there's an answer to it?

• 2:41:33Speaker 01

  I'm not sure what the question is. Like, what do you?

• 2:41:35Lex Fridman?

  Meaning of life?

• 2:41:36Speaker 01

  The meaning of life. Um, it's 42.

• 2:41:40Lex Fridman?

  It's 42.

• 2:41:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, you know, aside from that, it's, um, you know, why? I think if the question you're asking is like, why we do all this, right?

• 2:41:53Lex Fridman?

  Why we do all this?

• 2:41:54Speaker 01

  Um, it's part of the human condition, right? Human beings are fundamentally, I feel like, non, like, sort of stochastic and fundamentally interested in, in.

• 2:42:12Speaker 01

  Kind of expanding our own understanding of the world around us.

• 2:42:16Lex Fridman?

  And creating stuff to enable that understanding. So we're like stochastic, fundamentalistic. So like, there's just a bunch of randomness that really doesn't seem like it has a good explanation. And yet, there's a kind of direction to our being that we just keep wanting to create and to understand.

• 2:42:32Speaker 01

  That's right. I've met people that are, you know, that claim to be anti-science, right? And yet, in their anti-science, you know, discussion, like, well, like, if you're so, you know, scientific, then how, why don't you explain to me how, I don't know, this works? And like, it always, there's that fundamental

• 2:42:55Lex Fridman?

  There's a curiosity.

• 2:42:56Speaker 01

  Seed of curiosity and interest that is common to all of us. That is absolutely what makes us human, right? And, and I'm in a privileged position of being able to, you know, to have that be my, my job, right? I think as, you know, as time evolves forward, you know, the kind of economy changes. I mean, we're already starting to see, you know, a shift towards that type of, you know, creative, you know, enterprise as being, as emerging, taking over a bigger and bigger chunk of the sector.

• 2:43:37Speaker 01

  It's not yet, I think, the dominant portion of the economy by any account. But if we compare this to like, you know, time when the dominant thing you would do would be to, you know, go to a factory and do the same exact thing, right? I think, you know, there's a tide there and things are sort of headed in that direction.

• 2:44:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, life's becoming more and more fun. I can't wait. Honestly, what happens?

• 2:44:05Speaker 01

  Can't wait to just chill.

• 2:44:06Lex Fridman?

  Just chill.

• 2:44:07Speaker 01

  The terminal point of this is to just chill and wait for those Kuiper belt objects to complete one orbit.

• 2:44:13Lex Fridman?

  I'm going to credit you with this idea. I do hope that we definitively discover a proof that there is a planet nine out there in the next few years. So you can sit back with a cigar, a cigarette, or vodka, or wine, and just say, I told you so.

• 2:44:30Speaker 01

  That's already happening. I'm gonna do that later tonight.

• 2:44:34Lex Fridman?

  As I mentioned, confidence is essential to being a rock star. I really appreciate you explaining so many fascinating things to me today. I really appreciate the work that you do out there. And I really appreciate you talking with me today.

• 2:44:49Speaker 01

  Thanks, Konstantin. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:44:52Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with Konstantin Batygin. And thank you to Squarespace, Literati, Onnit, and NI. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descendant lifeforms are so amazingly primitive

• 2:45:34Lex Fridman?

  that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.