Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets About this episode Clara Sousa-Silva is a quantum astrochemist at Harvard. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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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
(07:57) – Discovery of phosphine on Venus
(20:34) – Phosphine gas
(30:47) – Searching for molecular fingerprints
(41:44) – What does a quantum astrochemist do?
(56:48) – Spectroscopic networks
(1:01:13) – Biosignature gases
(1:04:06) – UFOs and aliens
(1:17:24) – Alien civilizations
(1:34:59) – Programming
(1:42:15) – Why science is beautiful
(1:46:07) – How to be productive
(1:56:27) – Books
(1:57:59) – Meaning of life
Transcript 20,270 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? The following is a conversation with Clara Souza Silva, a quantum master chemist at Harvard specializing in spectroscopy of gases that serve as possible signs of life on other planets, most especially the gas phosphine. She was a co-author of the paper that in 2020 found that there is phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus and thus possible extraterrestrial life that lives in its atmosphere. The detection of phosphine was challenged, reaffirmed, and is now still under active research. Quick mention of our sponsors: Onnit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I think the search for life on other planets
0:45 Lex Fridman? is one of the most important endeavors in science. If we find extraterrestrial life and study it, we may find insights into the mechanisms that originated life here on Earth, and more than life, the mechanisms that originated intelligence and consciousness. If we understand these mechanisms, we can build them. But more than this, the discovery of life on other planets means that our galaxy and our universe is teeming with life. This is humbling and terrifying, but it is also exciting. We humans are natural explorers. For most of our history, we explored the surface of the Earth and the contents of our minds. But now, with spacefaring vessels, we have a chance to explore life beyond Earth,
1:27 Lex Fridman? their physics, their biology, and perhaps the contents of their minds. Now is the part of the program where I do a few minutes of ads, and never any ads in the middle. I think those are annoying and really get in the way of the conversation. I try to make these ads interesting, but I give you timestamps, so if you skip, and 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 fortunate to be able to be very selective with the sponsors we take on, so hopefully if you buy their stuff, you'll find value in it just as I have. This episode is sponsored by Onnit, nutrition, supplement, and fitness company. They make AlphaBrain, which is a
2:10 Lex Fridman? Unutropic that helps support memory, mental speed and focus. I've recently been using it on occasion to be a kind of super boost when I'm thinking through a difficult problem. It clears the mind, helps me maintain focus. It's really important for me to not rely on anything like that. So I don't take it as a, as a regular part of my productive life. I take it as a way to boost my mind through difficult, deep work sessions. Plus, I really like the brand on it. I get to pass their gym quite often while I'm here in Austin. Obviously Joe Rogan is involved with it. And since I've been a long time fan of his podcast, the Onnit brand is kind of implanted in my head at this point.
2:53 Lex Fridman? Anyway, go to lexfridman.com/Onnit to get up to 10% off AlphaBrain. That's lexfridman.com/Onnit. This show is sponsored by Grammarly, a writing assistant tool that checks spelling, grammar, sentence structure and readability. Grammarly Premium, that's the one you pay for, offers a bunch of extra features. My favorite is the clarity check, which helps detect rambling, overcomplicated chaos that many of us, certainly I do, can descend into. Whenever I say a sentence where parts of the sentence rhymes with another part of the sentence, my brain gets distracted and I start mentally giggling at the internal dad joke of it.
3:37 Lex Fridman? I find a little bit of silliness is good for the soul. It reminds you that life is quite absurd. What does that have to do with Grammarly? I have no idea. Anyway, Grammarly is what Clippy always wanted to be. It's a kind of little assistant that guides you. You don't necessarily have to accept all the suggestions it makes. It's almost a thing you argue against as you try to clarify and improve your writing. Grammarly is available on basically any platform and major sites and apps like Gmail and Twitter and so on. Do more than just spell check. Get your point across more effectively with Grammarly Premium. Get 20% off Grammarly Premium by signing up at grammarly.com/lex. That's 20% off at grammarly.com/lex.
4:22 Lex Fridman? I wonder if it can help me mumbo less. Maybe there's a company called mumberly.com and maybe they can be a sponsor too. This episode is also sponsored by Blinkist, my favorite app for learning new things. Blinkist takes the key ideas from thousands of nonfiction books and condenses them down into just 15 minutes that you can read or listen to. There's a huge number of really popular books on there, many of which I would recommend, like Sapiens or Homedaeus by Yuval Harari. I've been thinking of doing a project where I read a book a day for maybe like a month. Since I've been really slacking on the amount of reading I'm doing per day, it's really been in like 10 minutes, 20 minute periods as opposed to hour, two hour,
5:06 Lex Fridman? three hour, four hour. I want to get back into sort of serious reading, note taking and thinking through stuff. I think it makes me a better person. I think it makes me a better friend. It makes me a better conversationalist on a podcast, certainly makes me a better like mind that thinks about this world. Reading is like the most efficient and cheap way to travel, both through space and time. So I definitely want to do that kind of project. And Blinkist helps me guide which books I want to read or which books I want to reread. It also reminds me of the key ideas from books I've already read. It's just a great companion to the full reading experience.
5:50 Lex Fridman? Go to blinkist.com/lex to start your free seven day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist premium membership. That's blinkist.com/lex, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, blinkist.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Indeed, a hiring website. I've used them as part of many hiring efforts I've done for the teams I've led. They have tools like Indeed Instant Match, giving you quality candidates whose resumes on Indeed fit your job description immediately. Actually, as we speak, I've been doing interviews of video editors today and I'm going to do some more tomorrow. It's really incredible how many people apply to work with me and how cool they are
6:33 Lex Fridman? and just how fortunate I am to be surrounded by cool people, but also for more cool people to reach out to me and just want to connect with me. I don't know. I'm deeply grateful for that. But finding the right people that kind of have that energy, that positive energy that you can feed off of as you collaborate, as you brainstorm about how to present stuff the best way, that's difficult, but I think I'm going to be able to do it. There's a bunch of cool people in the pipeline that I'll get a chance to talk to. But hiring is really difficult, really important, and tools like Indeed make it easier. So you should definitely use it if that's what you're interested in doing. Anyway, right now, get a free $75 sponsored job credit
7:18 Lex Fridman? to upgrade your job post at indeed.com/lex. Get it at indeed.com/lex. Terms and conditions apply. Offer valid through June 30. Again, the website is indeed.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast, and here's my conversation with Clara Souza Silva.
7:57 Lex Fridman? Since you're the world expert in, well, in many things, but one of them is phosphine, would it technically be correct to call you the queen of phosphine?
8:10 Speaker 01 I go for Dr. Phosphine. Queen is an inherited title, I feel.
8:14 Lex Fridman? But you still rule by love and power, so, but while having the doctor title, I got it.
8:22 Speaker 01 Kindness.
8:22 Lex Fridman? Kindness, kindness. In September 2020, you co-authored a paper announcing possible presence of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus and that it may be a signature of extraterrestrial life.
8:38 Speaker 01 Big maybe.
8:39 Lex Fridman? Big maybe. There was some pushback. Of course, from the scientific community that followed, friendly, loving, pushback.
8:49 Lex Fridman? Then in January, another paper from University of Wisconsin, I believe, confirmed the finding. So where do we stand in this saga, in this mystery of what the heck is going on on Venus in terms of phosphine and in terms of aliens?
9:05 Speaker 01 Let's try to break it down.
9:07 Lex Fridman? Okay.
9:07 Speaker 01 The short answer is, we don't know. I think you and the rest of the public are now witnessing a pretty exciting discovery, but as it evolves, as it unfolds, we did not wait until we had, you know, years of data from 10 different instruments across several layers of the atmosphere. We waited until we had two telescopes with independent data months apart. But still, the data is weak, it's noisy, it's delicate, it's very much at the edge of instrument sensibility, sensitivity. And so we still don't even know if it is phosphine. We don't even really know if the signal is real.
9:52 Speaker 01 People still disagree about that. And I think it, at the more philosophical end of how this happened, I think it is a distinction, and myself and other co-authors were talking about this, it's a distinction between hypotheses generation and hypotheses testing. Now, hypothesis testing is something that I think is the backbone of, you know, the scientific method, but it has a problem, which is, if you're looking through very noisy data and you want to test hypotheses, you may, by mistake, create a spurious signal.
10:28 Speaker 01 The safest, more conservative approach is hypothesis generation. You see some data and you go, what's in there with no bias? Now, this is much safer, much more conservative, and when there's a lot of data, that's great. When there isn't, you can clean the noise and take out the signal with it. The signal with a bathwater, whatever the equivalent of the analogy would be. And so I think the healthy discourse that you described is exactly this. There are ways of processing the data, completely legitimate ways, checked by multiple people and experts, where the signal shows up and then phosphine is in the atmosphere of Venus. And some where it doesn't. And then we disagree what that signal means. If it's real, and it is an ambiguously phosphine,
11:13 Speaker 01 it is very exciting because we don't know how to explain it without life. But going from there to Venusians is still a huge jump.
11:23 Lex Fridman? And so. Venusians, so that would be the title for the civilization if it is a living and thriving on Venus's Venusians.
11:31 Speaker 01 Until we know what they call themselves and that that's the name, yes.
11:35 Lex Fridman? So this is the early analysis of data or a data analysis of early data. It was nevertheless, you waited until the actual peer reviewed publication.
11:46 Speaker 01 Of course, and analysis of the two different instruments months apart. So that's Alma and JCMT, the two telescopes.
11:54 Lex Fridman? I mean, still, I mean, it's really exciting. What did it feel like sort of sitting on this data? Like, kind of anticipating the publication and wondering, and still wondering, is it, is it true? Like, how does it make you feel that a planet in our solar system might have phosphine in the atmosphere?
12:14 Speaker 01 It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts. I mean.
12:19 Lex Fridman? In the best possible way?
12:21 Speaker 01 I've been working on phosphine for over a decade.
12:26 Lex Fridman? Before it was cool.
12:27 Speaker 01 Way before it was cool. And before anyone could spell it or heard of it. And at the time, people either didn't know what phosphine was or only knew it for being just possibly the most horrendous molecule that ever graced the earth. And so no one was a fan. And I'd been considering looking for it because I did think it was an unusual and disgusting, but very promising sound sign of life. I've been looking for it everywhere. I really didn't think to look in the solar system. I.
13:01 Speaker 01 Thought it was all pretty rough around here for for life. And so I wasn't even considering the solar system at all, never mind next door Venus. It was only the lead author of the study, Jane Greaves, who thought to look in the clouds of Venus and then reached out to me to say, I don't know phosphine, but I know it's weird. How weird is it? And the answer is very weird.
13:26 Lex Fridman? And so the telescopes who are looking at this is visual data.
13:30 Speaker 01 That's what I mean by visual. You wouldn't see the phosphine.
13:33 Lex Fridman? Well, but I mean, it's a well, it's a telescope.
13:36 Speaker 01 It's remote.
13:37 Lex Fridman? It's remote. You're observing, you're what, zooming in on this particular planet? I mean, what, what, what does the sensor actually look like? How many pixels are there? What does the data kind of look like? It'd be nice to kind of build up intuition of how little data we have based on which. I mean, if you look at like, I've just been reading a lot about gravitational waves and it's kind of incredible how from just very little, like probably the world's most precise instrument, we can derive some very foundational ideas about our early universe. And in that same way, it's kind of incredible how much data, how much information you can get from just a few pixels.
14:20 Lex Fridman? So what are we talking about here in terms of based on which this paper saw possible signs of phosphine in the atmosphere?
14:30 Speaker 01 So phosphine, like every other molecule, has a unique spectroscopic fingerprint, meaning it rotates and vibrates in special ways. I calculated how many of those ways it can rotate, vibrate. It is 16.8 billion ways. What this means is that if you look at the spectrum of light and that light has gone through phosphine gas on the other end, there should be 16.8 billion tiny marks left, indentations left in that spectrum. We found one of those on Venus, one of those 16.8 billion. So now the game is, can we find any of the other ones?
15:10 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
15:10 Speaker 01 But they're really hard to spot. They're all in terrible places in the electromagnetic spectrum. And the instruments we use to find this one can't really find any other one. There's another one of the 6.8 billion we could find, but it would take many, many days of continuous observations. And that's not really in the cards right now.
15:30 Lex Fridman? I mean, how do you, there's all kinds of noise, first of all.
15:33 Speaker 01 Yes.
15:33 Lex Fridman? There's all kinds of other signal. So how do you separate all of that out to pull out just this particular signature that's associated with phosphine?
15:48 Speaker 01 So the data kind of looks somewhat like a wave. And a lot of that is noise and it's a baseline. And so if you can figure out the exact shape of the wave, you can cancel that shape out and you should be left with a straight line. And if there's something there, an absorption, so a signal. So that's what we did. We tried to find out what was this baseline shape, cleaned it out and got the signal. That's part of the problem. If you do this wrong, you can create a signal. But that signal is at 8.904 wave numbers. And we actually have more digits than that, but I don't remember by heart. And, and Alma in particular is a very, very good telescope, array of telescopes.
16:30 Speaker 01 And it can focus on exactly that frequency. And in that frequency, there are only two known molecules that absorb at all. So that's how we do it. We look at that exact spot where we know phosphine absorbs. The other molecule is SO2.
16:47 Lex Fridman? If there is extraterrestrial life, whether it's on Venus or on exoplanets where you looked before,
16:56 Lex Fridman? how does that make you feel? How should it make us feel? Should we be scared? Should we be excited?
17:03 Lex Fridman? Let's say it's not intelligent life. Let's say it's microbial life. It's, is it a threat to us? Are we a threat to it? Or is it only, not only, but mostly a possibility to understand something fundamental, something beautiful about life in the, in the universe?
17:21 Speaker 01 Hard to know. You would have to bring on a poet or a philosopher on the show. I
17:28 Lex Fridman? You don't feel
17:29 Speaker 01 I feel those things. I just don't know if those are the right things to feel. I don't certainly don't feel scared. I think it's rather silly to feel scared. Definitely don't touch them. Um, you know, sometimes in the movies, you don't go near it. Don't interfere. Um, I think one of the things with Venus is because of phosphine, now there is a chance that Venus is inhabited. And in that case, we shouldn't go there. We should be very careful with messing with them. Um, bringing our own stuff there that contaminates it. And Venus has suffered enough. If there's life there, it's probably the remains of a living planet, the very last survivors of
18:15 Speaker 01 what once was potentially a thriving world. And so I don't want our first interaction with alien life to be massacre. So I definitely wouldn't want to go near out of a, let's say, galactic responsibility, galactic ethics. And I often think of, you know, alien astronomers watching us and how disappointed they would be if we messed this up. So I really, I really want to be very careful with anything that could be life. But certainly I wouldn't be scared. Humans are plenty capable of killing one another. We don't, you know, we don't need extraterrestrial help to destroy ourselves.
18:51 Lex Fridman? Scared mostly of other humans.
18:53 Speaker 01 Exactly.
18:53 Lex Fridman? But these, this life, if there is life there, it does seem just like you said, it would be pretty rugged. It's like the cockroaches or, or Chuck Norris. I don't know. It's the, some kind of, um, it's something that survived through some very difficult conditions.
19:10 Speaker 01 That doesn't mean it would handle us, you know, it could be like war of the worlds. You come, just because you're resilient in your own planet, doesn't mean you can survive another. Even our extremophiles, which are very impressive, we should all be very proud of our extremophiles. They wouldn't really make it in the Venusian clouds. So I wouldn't expect, because you're tough, even Chuck Norris tough, that you would survive on an alien planet.
19:37 Lex Fridman? And then from the scientific perspective, you don't want to pollute the data gathering process by showing up there. The observer can can affect the observed.
19:49 Speaker 01 How heartbreaking would it be if we found life on another planet? And then we're like, oh, we brought it with us. It was my sandwich.
19:55 Lex Fridman? But that's but that's always the problem, right? And certainly a problem with Mars, because we've visited the that if there is life on Mars or like remains of life on Mars, it's always going to be a question of like, well, maybe we planted it there.
20:10 Speaker 01 Let's not do the same with Venus. It's harder because when we try to go to Venus and things melt very quickly.
20:16 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
20:16 Speaker 01 And so it's a little harder to pollute Venus. It's very good at destroying foreigners.
20:25 Lex Fridman? Yeah, well, in terms of Elon Musk and terraforming planets, Mars is stop number one and Venus maybe after that. So can we talk about phosphine a little bit? So you mentioned it's a pretty.
20:38 Speaker 01 Love phosphine.
20:40 Lex Fridman? What's your Twitter handle? It's like Dr. Phosphine.
20:42 Speaker 01 It's Dr. Phosphine, yes. You'll be surprised here. It wasn't taken already. I could just I just grabbed it. Didn't have to buy it off anyone.
20:50 Lex Fridman? Yeah. So what what is it? What's phosphine? You already mentioned it's pretty toxic and troublesome. What and outside troublesome.
21:01 Speaker 01 No, I love it. I'm going to stop calling you troublesome.
21:04 Lex Fridman? The so maybe what are some things that make it interesting chemically? And why is it a good sign of life? One is present in the atmosphere like you've described in your paper, aptly titled, The Phosphine as a Bio-Signature Gas in Exoplanet Atmospheres. I suppose you wrote that paper before Venus.
21:28 Speaker 01 I did, yes. And no one cared, you know, in that paper, I said something like, if we find phosphine on any terrestrial planet can only mean life. And everyone was like, yeah, that sounds about right. Let's go. And then Venus shows up and I was like, are you sure? I'm like, I was sure before I was sure. Now that is right here. I'm less sure now that my claims are being tested.
21:53 Speaker 01 So phosphine, phosphine is a fascinating molecule. So it's shaped like a pyramid with a phosphorus up top and then three hydrogens. It's actually quite a simple molecule in many ways. And you know, it's the most popular elements in the universe. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur. When you add hydrogen to them, it makes quite simple, quite famous molecules. You know, you do it to oxygen, you get water. You do it to carbon, you get methane. You do it to nitrogen, you get ammonia. These are all molecules people have heard of. But you do it to phosphorus, you get phosphine. People haven't heard of phosphine because it's not really popular on earth. And we really shouldn't find it anywhere on earth.
22:36 Speaker 01 Because it is extremely toxic to life. It interacts with oxygen metabolism. And everything you know and love uses oxygen metabolism. And it interacts fatally, so it kills in several very imaginative and very macabre ways. So it was used as a chemical warfare agent in the First World War and most recently by ISIS. So really bad. Most life avoids it. Even life that might not avoid it, so life that doesn't use oxygen metabolism, anaerobic life, still has to put crazy amounts of effort into making it. It's a really difficult molecule to make, thermodynamically speaking. It's really difficult to make that phosphorus want to be together with a hydrogen.
23:21 Speaker 01 So it's horrible. Everyone avoids it. When they're not avoiding it, it's extremely difficult to make. You would have to put energy in, sacrifice energy to make it. And if you did go through all that trouble and made it, it gets reacted with the radicals in the atmosphere and gets destroyed. So we shouldn't find it anywhere and yet we do. It's kind of weird molecule that seems to.
23:46 Speaker 01 Be made by life and we don't even know why. Life clearly finds a use for it. It's not the only molecule that life is willing to sacrifice energy to make, but we don't know how or why life is even making it. So absolutely mysterious, absolutely deadly. Smells horrifically when it's made. It produces other kind of diphosphines and it's been reported as smelling like garlicky fishy death. Uh, once someone referred to it as smelling like the, let me see if I remember the, the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan.
24:17 Lex Fridman? Oh, very nice.
24:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, very, very vivid. And so
24:21 Lex Fridman? You're a poet after all.
24:23 Speaker 01 I didn't, I didn't call it that. Someone else did. And so it's just this horrific molecule, but it is produced by life. We don't know why. And when it is produced by life is done with enormous sacrifice. And the universe does not sacrifice. Life sacrifices. And so it's this strange contradictory molecule that we should all be avoiding. And yet seems to be an almost an ambiguous sign of life on rocky planets.
24:49 Lex Fridman? Okay, can we dig into that a little bit? So what on rocky planets? What, uh, is, is there biological mechanisms that can produce it? And is there, is there?
25:01 Lex Fridman? You said that why is unclear, why life might produce it. But is there an understanding of what kind of mechanisms might be able to produce it? This very difficult to produce molecule?
25:13 Speaker 01 We don't know yet. The enzymatic pathways of phosphine production by life are not yet known. This is not actually as surprising as it might sound. I think something like 80% of all the natural products that we know of. So we know biology makes them. We don't know how. It is much easier to know life produces something because you can put, you know, bacteria in a petri dish and then watch. And then that gas is produced. You go, oh, life made it. That actually happened with phosphine. But that's much easier to do, of course, than figuring out what is the exact metabolic pathway within that life form that created this molecule. So we don't know yet. Phosphine is really understudied. No one had really heard of it until nowish.
25:57 Lex Fridman? What you were presenting is the fact that life produces phosphine, not the process by which it produces phosphine. Is there an urgency now? Like, if you were to try to understand the mechanisms, the, what did you call them? Enzymatic pathways that produce phosphine? How difficult is that of a problem to crack?
26:18 Speaker 01 It's really difficult. If I'm not mistaken, even, you know, the scent of truffles, obviously a billion-dollar industry, huge deal. Until quite recently, it wasn't known exactly how those scents, those molecules that create this incredible smell were produced. And this is a billion-dollar industry. As you can imagine, there is no such pressure. There's no phosphine lobby or anything that would push for this research. But I hope someone picks it up and does it. And it isn't crazy because we know that phosphine is really hard to make. We know it's really hard for it to happen accidentally. You know, even lightning and volcanoes that can produce small amounts of phosphine. It's extremely difficult for even these extreme processes to make it.
27:02 Speaker 01 So it's not really surprising that only life can do it because life is willing to make things at a cost.
27:09 Lex Fridman? So maybe on the topic of phosphine, what, again, you've gotten yourself into trouble that I'm going to ask you all these like high-level poetic questions. I apologize.
27:19 Speaker 01 No, I would love it.
27:20 Lex Fridman? Okay. When did you first fall in love with phosphine?
27:26 Speaker 01 It wasn't love at first sight. It was somewhere between A long relationship and Stockholm syndrome.
27:35 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
27:37 Speaker 01 When I first started my PhD, I knew I wanted to learn about molecular spectra and how to simulate it. I thought it was really outrage outrageous that we as a species couldn't detect molecules remotely. We didn't have this perfect catalog ready of the molecular fingerprint of every molecule we may want to find in the universe. And something as basic as phosphine, the fact that we didn't really know how it interacted with light. And so we couldn't detect it properly, you know, in the galaxy. Just I was so indignant. And so initially, I just started working on phosphine because people hadn't before. And I thought, we should know what phosphine looks like. And that was it. And then I read every paper that's ever been published about phosphine. It was
28:22 Speaker 01 quite easy because there aren't that many. And that's when I started learning about where we had already found it in the universe and what it meant. I started finding out quite how little we know about it and why. And it was only when I joined MIT and I started talking to biochemists, that the that it became clear that phosphine wasn't just weird and special and understudied and disgusting. It was all these things for oxygen loving life. And it was the anaerobic world that would welcome phosphine. And that's when the idea of looking for it on other planets became crystallized. Because oxygen is very powerful and very important
29:06 Speaker 01 on Earth, but that's not necessarily going to be the case on other exoplanets. Most planets are oxygen poor. Overwhelmingly, most planets are oxygen poor. And so finding the sign of life that would be welcomed by everything that would live without oxygen on Earth seemed so cool.
29:29 Lex Fridman? And but ultimately, the project that first was born of the idea that you want to find that molecular fingerprint of any of a molecule. So and this is just one example. And that's connected to then looking at for looking for that fingerprint elsewhere in the in a remote way. And obviously, that then at that time, where exoplanets already, when you were doing your PhD, and by those, you say your PhD thesis was on.
29:58 Speaker 01 It was all on phosphine, 100% on phosphine, with a little bit of ammonia. I have a chapter that I did where I talked about phosphine and ammonia.
30:08 Lex Fridman? Got it.
30:09 Speaker 01 But no, phosphine was very much my thesis.
30:12 Lex Fridman? But at that, at that time, when you're writing it, there's already a sense that exoplanets are out there, and we might be able to be looking for biosignatures for on those exoplanets.
30:25 Speaker 01 Pretty much. So I finished my PhD in 2015. We found the first exoplanets in the kind of mid to late 90s. So exoplanets were known. It was known that some had atmospheres. And from there, it's not a big jump to think, well, if some have atmospheres, some of those might be habitable, and some of those may be inhabited.
30:45 Lex Fridman? So how do you detect? You started to talk about it, but can we linger on it? How do you detect phosphine on a faraway thing, rocky thing, rocky planet? What what is spectroscopy? What is this molecular fingerprint? What does it look like? You've kind of mentioned a wave, but what are we? What are we supposed to think about? What are the tools? What are the uncertainties? All those kinds of things.
31:14 Speaker 01 So the the path can go this way. You've got light, kind of pure light. You can crack that light open with a prism or a spectroscope or water and make a rainbow. That rainbow is all the colors and all the invisible colors, the ultraviolet, the infrared. And if that light was truly pure, you could consider that rainbow to just cover continuously all of these colors. But if that light goes through a gas, we may not see that gas. We certainly cannot see the molecules within that gas. But those molecules will steal, absorb some of that light, some, but not all. Each molecule absorbs only very specific colors of that rainbow.
32:00 Speaker 01 And so if you know, for example, that shade of green can only be absorbed by methane, then you can watch as a planet passes in front of a star. The planet's too far away, you can't see it. And it has an atmosphere. That atmosphere is far too small, you definitely can't see it. But the sunlight will go through that atmosphere. And if that atmosphere is methane, then on the other side, that shade of blue, I can't remember if I said blue or green, but that color will be missing.
32:27 Speaker 01 Because methane took it. And so with phosphine, it's the same thing. It has specific colors, sixteen point eight billion colors, that it absorbs it and nothing else does. And so if you can find them and notice them missing from the light of a star that went through a planet's atmosphere, then you'll know that atmosphere contains the molecule. How cool is that?
32:51 Lex Fridman? That's incredible. So you can have this fingerprint within the space of colors and there's a lot of molecules. And I mean, I would, I wonder, it's a question of like, how much overlap there is? How, how close can you get to the actual fingerprint, like can phosphine unlock the iPhone with its lights on? He says sixteen point eight billion. So presumably this rainbow is discretized into little segments somehow.
33:17 Speaker 01 Exactly.
33:18 Lex Fridman? How many total are there? How, how, how a lot is sixteen point eight billion?
33:23 Speaker 01 It's a lot. You, we don't have the instruments to break these, break any light into this many tiny segments. And so with the instruments we do have, there's huge amounts of overlap. Methane is an example. A lot of the ways it's detectable is because the carbon and the hydrogens, they vibrate with one another, they move, they interact. But every other hydrocarbon, acetylene, isoprene, has carbon and hydrogens also vibrating and rotating. And so it's actually very hard to tell them apart at low resolutions. And our instruments can't really cope with distinguishing between molecules particularly
34:05 Speaker 01 well. But in an ideal world, if we had infinite resolution, then yes, every molecule's spectral features will be unique.
34:16 Lex Fridman? Yeah, like, almost too, like, it would be too trivial.
34:19 Speaker 01 At the quantum level.
34:20 Lex Fridman? At the quantum level, yes.
34:21 Speaker 01 At our level, there's huge overlap.
34:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah. But then you can start to then, what, try to disambiguate, like, what the miss, the fact that certain colors are missing, what does that mean? And hopefully, they're missing a certain kind of pattern where you can say with some kind of probability that's this gas, not this gas. So you're solving that gaseous puzzle. I got it. Okay.
34:46 Speaker 01 We can go back to Venus, actually, and show that. So with this, I mentioned there was two molecules that could be responsible for that signal, the resolution that we have. It was phosphine and SO2, sulfur dioxide. And that resolution could really be one or the other. But in the same bandwidth, so in the kind of the same observations, there was another region where phosphine does not absorb, we know that, but SO2 does. So we just went and checked, and there was no signal. So we thought, oh, then it must be phosphine. And then we submit to the paper. The rest is history.
35:24 Lex Fridman? I got it. Well, yeah, that's beautifully told. Is there, so the telescopes we're talking about are sitting on Earth? What can it help solving this fingerprint molecular fingerprint problem if we do a flyby? Does it help if you get closer and closer? Or are telescopes pretty damn good for this kind of puzzle solving?
35:51 Speaker 01 Top scopes are pretty good, but the Earth's atmosphere is a pain. I mean, I'm very thankful for it, but it does interrupt a lot of measurements and a lot of regions where phosphine would be active, they are not available. The Earth is not transparent in those wavelengths. So being above the atmosphere would make a huge difference. Then proximity matters a lot less, but just escaping the Earth's atmosphere would be wonderful. But then it's really hard to stay very stable. And if there is phosphine on Venus, there's very little of it in the clouds. And so the signal is very weak and the telescopes we can use on Earth are much bigger and much more stable. So it's a bit of a trade off.
36:35 Lex Fridman? So is it, are you comfortable with this kind of remote observation? Is it at all helpful to strive for going over to Venus and like grabbing a scoop of the atmosphere? Or is remote observation really a powerful tool for this kind of job? Like the scoop is not necessary?
36:59 Speaker 01 Well, a lot of people want to scoop. I get it. I get it completely.
37:03 Lex Fridman? My natural inclination, yeah.
37:04 Speaker 01 I don't want to scoop specifically because if it is life, I want to know everything I can remotely before I interfere. So that's my, I've got ethical reasons against the scoop more than engineering reasons against the scoop. But I have some engineering reasons against the scoop. Scoop is not a technical term, but I feel like now it's too late.
37:23 Lex Fridman? Thank you for going along with this.
37:24 Speaker 01 It's too late to take it back.
37:26 Lex Fridman? I appreciate it.
37:27 Speaker 01 We don't understand the clouds well enough to plan the scoop very well.
37:31 Lex Fridman? Because it's not that saturated, like there's not that much of it present.
37:36 Speaker 01 No, and the place is nasty. You know, it's not, it's not going to be easy to build something that can do the task reliably and can be trusted, the measurements can be trusted and then pass that message on. So actually I'm for an orbiter. I think we should have orbiters around every solar system body whose job is just to learn about these places. I'm disappointed we haven't already got an orbiter around every single one of them. A small, it can be a small satellite, collecting data, figuring out, you know, how do the clouds move? What's in them? How often is there lightning and volcanic activity? Where's the topography? Is it changing? Is there a biosphere actively doing things?
38:19 Speaker 01 We should be monitoring this from afar. And so I'm for a over the atmosphere, hopefully around Venus. That would be, that would be my choice.
38:29 Lex Fridman? Okay, so now recently Venus is all exciting about phosphine and everything. Is there, is there other stuff maybe before we were looking at Venus or now looking out into other solar systems? Is there other promising exoplanets or other planets within the solar system that might have phosphine or might have other strong biosignatures that we should be looking for like phosphine?
38:59 Speaker 01 There's a few, but outside the solar system, all are promising candidates. We know so little about them. For most of them, we barely know their density. Most of them, we don't even know if they have an atmosphere, never mind what that atmosphere might contain. So we're still very much at the stage where we have detected promising planets, but they're promising in that they're about the right size, about the right density. They could have an atmosphere and they're about the right distance from their host star. But that's really all we know. Near future telescopes will tell us much more, but for now, we're just guessing.
39:38 Lex Fridman? So you said near future, so there's hope that there will be telescopes that can see that far enough to determine if there's an atmosphere and perhaps even the contents of that atmosphere?
39:48 Speaker 01 Absolutely. JWST launching later this year will be able to get a very rough sense of the main atmospheric constituents of planets that could potentially be habitable. And that's this year.
40:03 Lex Fridman? What's the name?
40:04 Speaker 01 JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope.
40:06 Lex Fridman? Okay. And that's going to be out in space past the atmosphere?
40:10 Speaker 01 Yes.
40:11 Lex Fridman? Is there something interesting to be said about the engineering aspect of the telescope?
40:15 Speaker 01 It's an incredible beast, but it's a beast of many burdens. So it's going to do.
40:23 Lex Fridman? See, you are a poet. You are, yeah. I love it. This is very eloquent. You're speaking to the audience, which I appreciate.
40:32 Lex Fridman? So yes, it's a giant engineering project. And is it orbiting something, do you know?
40:37 Speaker 01 So it's going to be above the atmosphere. And it will be doing lots of different astrophysics. And so some of its time will be dedicated to exoplanets. But there's an entire astronomy field fighting for time before the cryogenic lifetime of the
40:57 Speaker 01 instrument. And so when I was looking for the possibility of finding phosphine on distant exoplanets, I used JWST as a way of checking with this instrument that we will launch later this year. Could we detect phosphine on an oxygen poor planet? And there I put very much a hard stop where some of my simulations said, yes, you can totally do it, but it will take a little under the cryogenic lifetime of this machine. So then I had to go, well, that's not going to, no one's going to dedicate all of JWST to look for my molecule that no one cared about. So we're very much at that edge, but there'll be many other telescopes in the coming decades that will be able to tell us quite a lot about the atmospheres of potentially habitable
41:42 Speaker 01 planets.
41:44 Lex Fridman? So you mentioned simulation. This is super interesting to me. And this perhaps could be a super dumb question, but.
41:51 Speaker 01 Not this thing.
41:53 Lex Fridman? I'm going to prove you wrong on that one. You simulate molecules to understand how they look from a distance is what I understand. Like, what does that simulation look like? So it's a, it's talking about the, which colors of the rainbow will be missing? Is that the goal of the simulation?
42:11 Speaker 01 That's the goal, but it's really just a very, very nasty Schrodinger's equation. So it's a quantum simulation.
42:18 Lex Fridman? Oh, so it's simulating at the quantum level?
42:21 Speaker 01 Yes, so I'm a quantum astrochemist. Hi, I'm Clara. I'm a quantum astrochemist. How we should have started this conversation?
42:28 Lex Fridman? Can you describe the three components of that? Quantum, astro and chemist? And how do they interplay together?
42:36 Speaker 01 So I study the quantum behavior of molecules, hence the quantum and the chemist, specifically so I can detect them in space and see astro.
42:48 Speaker 01 So what I do is I figure out the probability of a molecule being in a particular state. There's no deterministic nature to the work I do. So it's every transition is just a likelihood. But if you get a population of that molecule, it will always happen. And so this is all at the quantum level. It's a Schrödinger equation on, I think, 27 dimensions. I don't remember it by heart. And what this means is I'm solving these giant quantum matrices. And that's why you need a lot of computer power, giant computers, to diagonalize these enormous matrices, each of whom describes a single vibrational
43:32 Speaker 01 behavior of a molecule. So I think phosphine has 17.5 million possible states it can exist in. And transitions can occur between pairs of these states. And there's a certain likelihood that they'll happen. This is the quantum world. Nothing is deterministic. There's just a likelihood that it will jump from one state to another. And these jumps, they're transitions. And there's 16.8 billion of them. When energy is absorbed, that corresponds to this transition. We see it in the spectrum. This is more quantum chemistry than you'd ask for. I'm sorry.
44:08 Lex Fridman? No, no, I'm sorry. Brain's broken. So when the transitions happen to the different states, somehow the energy maps the spectrum?
44:18 Speaker 01 Exactly. Energy corresponds to a frequency. And a frequency corresponds to a wavelength, which corresponds to a color.
44:25 Lex Fridman? So there's some probability assigned to each color then?
44:29 Speaker 01 Exactly. And that probability determines how intense that transition will be, how strong.
44:34 Lex Fridman? And so you run this kind of simulation for a particular? So that's seventeen point five squared or something like that.
44:40 Speaker 01 Exactly, seventeen point five million energies, each one of whom involves diagonalizing a giant matrix with a supercomputer.
44:49 Lex Fridman? I wonder what the most efficient algorithm for diagonalization is, but there's some kind of
44:54 Speaker 01 There's many.
44:55 Lex Fridman? There's many, yeah.
44:55 Speaker 01 Depends on kind of the shape of the matrix, so they're not random matrices. So some are more diagonal than others, and so some need more treatment than others. Most of the work ends up going in describing this system, this quantum system, in different ways until you have a matrix that is close to being diagonal, and then it's much easier to to clean it up.
45:16 Lex Fridman? So how how many, how hard is this puzzle? So you're solving this puzzle for phosphine, right?
45:25 Lex Fridman? Is this, are we supposed to solve this puzzle for every single molecule? Oh, boy.
45:32 Speaker 01 Yes, I calculated if I if I did the work I did for phosphine, again, for all the molecules for which we don't have spectra, for which we don't have a fingerprint, it would take me sixty two thousand years, a little over.
45:45 Lex Fridman? Sixty two thousand years. What time flies when you're having fun. Okay, but you you write that there are about sixteen thousand molecules we care about when looking for a new Earth or when we try to detect alien biosignatures. If we want to detect any molecules from here, we need to know their spectra, and we currently don't. Solving this particular problem, that's my job.
46:10 Speaker 01 Where was that? That, I mean, that's absolutely correct. I could have could have not said it better myself. Did you take that from my website?
46:16 Lex Fridman? Yeah, the guy stole it. And your website is excellent, so it's worthy place to steal stuff from.
46:21 Speaker 01 Thank you.
46:22 Lex Fridman? How do you solve this problem of for the sixteen thousand molecules we care about, of which phosphine is one?
46:30 Speaker 01 Yes.
46:30 Lex Fridman? And so, so taking a step a little bit out of phosphine.
46:37 Lex Fridman? Is there?
46:39 Speaker 01 But we were having so much fun.
46:41 Lex Fridman? We were having so much fun. No, we're not saying bye. It's staking around. I'm just saying we're joining more friends coming to the party. How do you choose other friends to come to the party that are interesting to study? As we solve one puzzle at a time through the space of sixteen thousand.
46:57 Speaker 01 So we've already started. Out of those sixteen thousand, we understand water quite well, methane quite well, ammonia quite well, carbon dioxide. I could keep going. And then we understand molecules like acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, more or less.
47:13 Speaker 01 And that takes us to about four percent of those sixteen thousand. We understand about four percent of them, more or less. Phosphine is one of them. But the other ninety six percent, we just really have barely any idea at all of where in the spectrum of light they would leave a mark.
47:32 Speaker 01 I can't spend the next sixty two thousand years doing this work. And I don't want to, even if, you know, somehow I was able that, that's not, that that wouldn't feel good. So one of the things that I try to do now is move away from how I did phosphine. So I did phosphine really the best that I could, the best that could be done with the computer power that we have. You know, trying to get each one of those sixteen point eight billion transitions mapped accurately calculated.
48:03 Speaker 01 And then I thought, what if I do a worse job? What if I just do a much worse job? And can I just make it much faster and then it's still worth it?
48:14 Lex Fridman? Yes.
48:14 Speaker 01 Like, how bad can I get before it's worthless? And then could I do this for all the other molecules?
48:22 Lex Fridman? Yes.
48:22 Speaker 01 So I created exactly this terrible, terrible system.
48:27 Lex Fridman? How bad? So how, what's the answer to that question, that fundamental question I ask myself all the time in other domains?
48:32 Speaker 01 How crappy can I be before I'm useless?
48:34 Lex Fridman? Before somebody notices.
48:36 Speaker 01 Turns out, pretty crappy, because no one has any idea what these molecules look like. Anything is better than nothing. And so I thought, how long will it take me to create better than nothing spectra for all of these molecules? And so I created Rascal, Rapid Approximate Spectral Calculations for All.
48:58 Speaker 01 And what I do is I use organic chemistry and quantum chemistry and kind of cheat and then both. I just tried to figure out what is the fastest way I could run this. And I simulate rough spectra for all of those sixteen thousand. So I've managed to get it to work. It's really shocking how well it works, considering how bad it is.
49:20 Lex Fridman? Is there insights you could give to like the the tricks involved in making it fast? Like, what are the maybe some insightful shortcuts taken that still result in some useful information about the spectra?
49:35 Speaker 01 The insights came from organic chemistry from decades ago, when organic chemists wanted to know what a compound might be, they would look at a spectrum and see a feature and they would go, hmm, I've seen that feature before. That's usually what happens when you have a carbon triple bonded to another carbon. And they were mostly right. Almost every molecule that has a carbon triple bonded to another one looks like that, has other features, different that distinguish them from one another, but they have that that feature in common. We call these functional groups. And so most of that work ended up being abandoned because now we have mass spectrometry, we've got nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
50:16 Speaker 01 So people don't really need to do that anymore. But these ancient textbooks still exist. And I've collected them all, as many as I could. And there are hundreds of these descriptions where people have said, oh, whenever you have a iodine atom connected to this one, there's always a feature here. And it's usually quite sharp and it's quite strong. And some people go, oh, yeah, that's a really broad feature every time that combination of atoms and bonds. So I've collected them all. And I've created this giant dictionary of all these kind of puzzle pieces, these Lego parts of molecules. And I've written a code that then puts them all together in some kind of like Frankenstein's monster
50:59 Speaker 01 of molecules. So you ask me for any molecule and I go, well, it has these bonds and this atom dangling off this atom and this cluster here. And I tell you what it should look like. And it kind of works.
51:14 Lex Fridman? So this creates a whole portfolio of just kind of signatures that we could look for.
51:20 Speaker 01 Rough, very rough signatures.
51:22 Lex Fridman? But still useful enough to analyze the atmospheres, the telescope-generated images of other planets?
51:31 Speaker 01 Close. Right now, it is so complete, so it has all of these molecules, that I can tell you, say you look at an alien atmosphere and there's a feature there, it can tell you, oh, that feature, that's familiar. It could be one of these 816 molecules.
51:49 Lex Fridman? And there's the.
51:49 Speaker 01 Best of luck.
51:50 Lex Fridman? Yes.
51:51 Speaker 01 So I think the next step, which is what I'm working on, is telling you something more useful than, it could be one of those 816 molecules. That's still true. I wouldn't say it's useful. So it can tell you, but only 12% of them also have a feature in this region, so go look there. And if there's nothing there, it can't be those. And so on. It can also tell you things like, you will need this much accuracy to distinguish between those 816. So that's what I'm working on, but it's a lot of work.
52:21 Lex Fridman? So this is really interesting, the like, the role of computing in this whole picture. You mentioned code. So like, you as a quantum astrochemist, there is some role for programming in your life, in your past life, in your current life.
52:37 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, almost entirely. I'm a computational quantum astrochemist, but that doesn't roll off the tongue very easily.
52:43 Lex Fridman? So this is fundamentally computational, like if you want to be successful in the 21st century in doing quantum astrochemistry, you want to be computational?
52:51 Speaker 01 Absolutely. All quantum chemistry is computational at this point.
52:53 Lex Fridman? Okay. Well, does machine learning play a role at all? Is there some extra shortcuts that could be discovered through, like, you see all that success with protein folding, right? A problem that thought to be extremely difficult to apply a machine learning to because it's.
53:16 Lex Fridman? I mean, mostly because there's not a lot of already solved puzzles to train on. I suppose the same exact thing is true with this particular problem, but is there a hope for machine learning to help out?
53:28 Speaker 01 Absolutely. Currently, you've laid out exactly the problem. The training set is awful. And because there's so, a lot of this data that I'm basing it on is literally many decades old. The people who worked on it and data that I get, often they're dead. And the files that I've used, they, some of them were hand drawn by someone tired in the seventies.
53:51 Lex Fridman? Yes.
53:52 Speaker 01 So I could of course have
53:53 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
53:54 Speaker 01 Have a program training on these, but I would just be perpetuating these mistakes without hope of actually verifying them. So my next step is to improve this training set by hand. And then try to see if I can apply machine learning on the full code of the full sixteen thousand molecules and improve them all. But really, I need to be able to test the outcomes with experimental data, which means convincing someone in a lab to spend a lot of money putting very dangerous gases in chambers and measuring them at outrageous temperatures. So it's a work in progress.
54:30 Lex Fridman? And so collecting huge amounts of data about the actual gases. So you, so you, so you, you are up for doing that kind of thing too? So actually, like, doing the full end to end thing, which is like having a gas, collecting data about it. And, and then doing the kind of analysis that creates the fingerprint and then also analyzing using that library, the data that comes from other planets. So you do the full?
54:58 Speaker 01 Full from birth to death.
55:01 Lex Fridman? Interesting.
55:02 Speaker 01 Yes, I worked in an industrial chemistry laboratory when I was much younger in Slovenia. And there I worked in the lab actually collecting spectra and predicting spectra.
55:13 Lex Fridman? What's it like to work with a bunch of gases that are like not so human friendly?
55:18 Speaker 01 Terrifying. It's horrific. It's so scary. And I love my job. I'm willing to clearly sacrifice a lot for it. You know, job, stability, money, sanity. But I only worked there for a few months. It was really terrifying. There's just so many ways to die. You know, usually you only have a handful of ways to die every day, you know, but if you work in a lab, there's so many more. Or there's a magnitude more. And I was very bad at it. I'm not a good hands-on scientist. I want a laptop connected to a remote supercomputer or a laptop connected to a telescope.
56:00 Speaker 01 I don't, I don't need to be there to believe in. And I am not good in the lab.
56:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Well, there's a bunch of things that can poison you, a bunch of things that could explode and they're gaseous. And they're often, maybe they might not even have a smell or they might not be visible. It's like.
56:17 Speaker 01 So many of them give you cancer. It's just so cruel. And some people love this work, but I've, I've never enjoyed experimental work. It's so ungrateful, so lonely.
56:30 Lex Fridman? Well, most, I mean, so much work is lonely if you find the joy in it, but you enjoy the results of it.
56:37 Speaker 01 Yes. I'm very thankful for all the experimentalists in my life. But I, I'll do the theory, they do the experiment, and then we talk to one another and make sure it matches.
56:47 Lex Fridman? Okay, beautiful. What are spectroscopic networks? Those look super cool. Are they related to what we were talking about? The pictures look pretty.
56:56 Speaker 01 Oh, yes, slightly. So remember when I mentioned the 17.5 million energy levels?
57:01 Lex Fridman? Yes.
57:02 Speaker 01 There are rules for each molecule on which energy levels it can jump from and to, and how likely it is to make that jump. And so if you plot all the routes it can take, you get this energy network, which is like a ball.
57:19 Lex Fridman? So these are the constraints of the transitions that could be taken?
57:23 Speaker 01 Exactly for each molecule.
57:25 Lex Fridman? Interesting. And they're not, so it's not a fully connected, it's like, it's sparse somehow?
57:31 Speaker 01 Yes, you get islands sometimes, you get, a molecule can only jump from one set of states to another and it's trapped now in this network. It can never go to another network that could have been available to other siblings.
57:44 Lex Fridman? Is there some insights to be drawn from these networks? Like something cool that you can understand about a particular molecule because of it?
57:51 Speaker 01 Yes, some molecules have what we call forbidden transitions, which aren't really forbidden because it's quantum. There are no rules. No, I'm not, there are rules, it's just the rules are very often broken in the quantum world. And so forbidden transitions doesn't actually mean they're forbidden.
58:06 Lex Fridman? Low probability.
58:07 Speaker 01 Exactly. They just become deeply unlikely.
58:09 Lex Fridman? Yeah, cool. And so you could do all the same, like I'm coming from a computer science world, you know, I love graph theory. So you can do all the same, like graph theoretic kind of analysis of like clusters or something like that, or all those kinds of things. And drawing insights from it.
58:26 Speaker 01 And they're unique for each molecule. So these, the networks that you mentioned, that's actually not too difficult, a layer of quantum physics. By then, all the energies are mapped. So we've had high school children work on those networks. And the trick is to not tell them they're doing quantum physics until like three months in, when it's too late for them to back out. And then you're like, you're a quantum physicist now. And it's really nice.
58:49 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Okay. But like the promise of this, even though sixteen thousand, even just a subset of them, that's really exciting. Because then you could do, as the telescope data get better and better, especially for exoplanets, but also for Venus, you can then start like getting your full, like you know how you get like blood work done or like you get your genetic testing to see what your ancestors are? You can get the same kind of like high resolution information about interesting things going on on a particular planet based on the atmosphere, right?
59:20 Speaker 01 Exactly. How cool would that be if we could, you know, scan an alien planet and go, oh, this is what the clouds are made of. This is what's in the surface. These are the molecules that are mixing. Here are probably oceans because you can see these types of molecules above it. And here are the Hadley cells. Here are. How the biosphere works, we could map this whole thing.
59:41 Lex Fridman? Wouldn't it be cool if the aliens like are aware of these techniques and like would spoof like the wrong gases just to like pretend that's how they can be, it's like an invisibility cloak. They can generate gases that would throw you off or like, or do the opposite. They pretend they would artificially generate phosphine so they like the dumb, the dumb apes on earth again like go out like flying in different places because it's just fun. It's like some teenager alien somewhere just pranking. Yeah.
1:00:11 Speaker 01 I was asked that exact question this Saturday by a, by a 70 year old boy in Canada.
1:00:17 Lex Fridman? Oh, seven? Yes.
1:00:21 Speaker 01 But it was the first time I'd been asked that question, this, the second in a week.
1:00:27 Lex Fridman? We're kindred spirits, him and I.
1:00:29 Speaker 01 We can, they can prank us to some extent, but the, this work of interpreting an alien atmosphere means you're reading the atmosphere as a message and it's very hard to hide signs of life in an atmosphere because you can try to prank us, but you're still going to fart and breathe and somehow metabolize the environment around you.
1:00:53 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:00:54 Speaker 01 And call that whatever you call that and release molecules. And so that's really hard to hide. You know, you can go very quiet. You can throw out some weird molecule to confuse us further, but we can still see all your other metabolites.
1:01:09 Lex Fridman? It's hard to fake. Is there, so you kind of mentioned like water, that what, what other gases are there that we know about that are like high likelihood as biosignatures in terms of life? I mean, what are your other favorites? Into, so, so we know we've got phosphine, but like what, what else is a damn good signal to be, that you think about that we should be looking for if we're looking in another atmosphere? Is there gases that come to mind or are there all sort of possible biosignatures that we should love equally?
1:01:46 Speaker 01 There's many. So there's water. We know that's important for life as we know it. There's molecular oxygen on earth. That's probably the most robust sign of life, particularly combined with small amounts of methane. And it's true that the majority of the oxygen in our atmosphere is a product of life. And so if I was an alien astronomer and I saw earth's atmosphere. I would get a Nobel, I think, on, you know.
1:02:09 Lex Fridman? What would you notice? I mean, this is really.
1:02:12 Speaker 01 I would be very excited about this.
1:02:14 Lex Fridman? About the oxygen.
1:02:15 Speaker 01 About finding twenty percent, twenty one percent of oxygen atmosphere. That's very unusual.
1:02:20 Lex Fridman? So would that be the most exciting thing to you from an alien perspective about Earth in terms of the tech, like analyzing the atmosphere? Like, what are the biosignatures of life on Earth, would you say, in terms of the contents of the atmosphere? Is oxygen, high amount of oxygen, pretty damn good sign?
1:02:36 Speaker 01 I mean, it's not as good as the TV signals we've been sending out. Those, those are slightly more robust than oxygen. Oxygen on its own has false positives for life, so there's still ways of making it. But it's, it's a pretty robust sign of life in the context of our atmosphere with the radiation that the sun produces, our position in relation to the sun, the other components of our atmosphere, the volcanic activity we have, all of that together makes the twenty percent of oxygen extremely robust sign of life. But outside that context, you could still produce oxygen without life.
1:03:16 Speaker 01 But phosphine, although better in the sense of it is much harder to make, it has lower false positives, still has some. So I'm actually against looking for specific molecules, unless we're looking for like CFCs. If we find CFCs, that's definitely aliens. I feel confident. Chlorofluorocarbons. And so, you know, if aliens had been watching us, they would have been going, oh, no, CFCs. I mean,
1:03:40 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:03:41 Speaker 01 they're not going to last long. Let's, you know, everyone is writing their theses on the end of, the end of the earth. And then we got together, we stopped using them. I like to think they're really proud of us. You know, they literally saw our ozone hole shrinking. They've been watching it and they saw it happen.
1:03:57 Lex Fridman? I think, to be honest, they're more paying attention to the whole nuclear thing.
1:04:01 Speaker 01 I don't think they care. It's not going to bother them. Oh, I mean, worried about us. Oh, yes.
1:04:05 Lex Fridman? No, worried about us. They, I mean, this is why the aliens have been showing up recently. It's like, if you, if you look at, I mean, there is, I mean, it's probably, there's a correlation with a lot of things, but what. The ufologists quote unquote often talk about is that there seems to be a much higher level of UFO sightings since like in the nuclear age. So like if aliens were indeed worried about us, like if you were aliens, you would start showing up when the the living organisms have first discovered a way to destroy the entire, the entire colony.
1:04:39 Speaker 01 Couldn't the increase in sightings not have to do with the fact that people now have more cameras?
1:04:47 Lex Fridman? It's an interesting thing about science, like with UFO sightings, it's, it's like either ninety nine point nine of percent of them are false or a hundred percent of them are false. The interesting thing to me is in that point zero one percent. There's a lot of things in science that are like these weird outliers. They're difficult to replicate. You have like, there's even physical phenomena, ball lightning. There's difficult things to artificially create in large amounts or observe in nature in large amounts in such a way that you can do to apply the scientific method. There could be just things that like what happened like a few times, like or once. And you're like, what the hell is that?
1:05:30 Lex Fridman? And that, that's very difficult for science to know to do it. I'm a huge proponent of just being open minded because when you're open minded about aliens, for example, is it allows you to think outside of the box in other domains as well. And somehow that will result, like if you're open minded about aliens and you don't, you know, don't laugh it off immediately. What happens is somehow that that's going to lead to a solution to a P equals NP or P not equals NP. Like in ways that you can't predict. The open mindedness has tertiary effects that will result in progress, I believe. Which is why I'm a huge fan of aliens because it's like, uh, because too many scientists roll their eyes at the idea of aliens, alien life.
1:06:14 Lex Fridman? And to me, it's one of the most exciting possibilities.
1:06:19 Lex Fridman? And the biggest, most exciting questions before all of human civilization. So to roll your eyes is not the right answer. To roll your eyes presumes that you know anything about this world as opposed to just knowing point zero zero zero one percent of this world. And so being humble in the face of that.
1:06:40 Lex Fridman? Uh, being open to the possibility that visiting Earth is a good idea. Not everything, though. I'm not so open minded to the flat Earth hypothesis. Is this a growing number of people believing in, but even then.
1:06:55 Speaker 01 Or the inner Earth. I've got shouted at at a public talk about it.
1:06:58 Lex Fridman? Inner, so like the Earth is hollow?
1:07:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, my understanding is that there's an, this conspiracy theory that as far as I can tell has no grounding in reality is that there's a slightly smaller Earth inside this one, which is just too cute as a concept.
1:07:14 Lex Fridman? That's awesome.
1:07:14 Speaker 01 And you can access it, I think, from Antarctica. And that's where we keep, and I quote, "the mammoths and the Nazis."
1:07:24 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I mean, that one is ridiculous, but like I do like.
1:07:26 Speaker 01 Hey, I thought you were keeping an open mind.
1:07:29 Lex Fridman? This is, this is.
1:07:30 Speaker 01 I genuinely think that's more likely than aliens visiting the Earth. And I say this as someone who has dedicated her life to finding like alien life. And, and so that's how improbable, I think, the visitations are. Because interstellar distances are so huge that it's just not really worth it.
1:07:50 Lex Fridman? See, I, I have a different view on this whole thing. I think the aliens that look like little green men are like extremely low probability event.
1:08:00 Speaker 01 Like mammoths and Nazis?
1:08:01 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah, that's similar. But, but other kind of ideas, like the sad thing to me, and I think,
1:08:14 Lex Fridman? in my view, if there's other alien civilizations out there and they visited Earth, neither them, or perhaps just us, would be even able to detect them. Like, we, we wouldn't be open minded enough to see it. Like, if, if, um, because our understanding of what is life? And I just talked to Sarah Walker, who's, um.
1:08:38 Speaker 01 You know Sarah.
1:08:38 Lex Fridman? Yeah, we talked for three hours about the question of what is life.
1:08:43 Speaker 01 Sarah's a good person to talk to about what is life.
1:08:46 Lex Fridman? But like, the whole point is, we don't really, we have a very narrow minded view of what is life. And when it shows up, and it might be already here, trees and dolphins and so on.
1:09:00 Lex Fridman? And, or, or mountains, or, I don't know, or the, or the molecules in the atmosphere, or, um.
1:09:08 Lex Fridman? Or like I, people make fun of me, but I do think that ideas are kind of aliens themselves, or consciousness could be the aliens, or it could be the method by which they communicate. We don't know shit about the way our human mind works. And the fact that this thing is-
1:09:22 Speaker 01 It could be a quantum process.
1:09:24 Lex Fridman? Please, no. I understand this. It's not woo woo. I'm not, I, but it very well could be. There could be something at the physics level, right? It could be at the chemical, at the biological level, things that are happening that we're just too close-minded. Because our conception of life is at the level of, like, us, like, at the jungle level of mammals. And on the time scale, that's the human time scale, we may not be able to perceive what alien life is actually like. What, the scale at which their intelligence realizes itself, we may not be able to perceive. And the other thing that's really important about alien visitations, whether it happened or not,
1:10:08 Lex Fridman? is especially after COVID in 2020, I'm losing a little bit of faith of our government being able to handle that well. Not our government, but us as a society, as a collective, being able to deal with new things in an effective way, that's inspiring, that's efficient, that, like, whether it's, if it's a dangerous thing to deal with it, to alleviate the danger, whether it's the possibility of new discoveries or something inspiring, to ride that wave and make it inspiring, all those kinds of things. I honestly think if aliens showed up, they would look around, everybody would ignore them,
1:10:49 Lex Fridman? and the government might like hide it, try to like, see, to keep it from the Chinese and the Russians if it's the United States, call it a military secret in a very close-minded way. And then the bureaucracy would drown it away to where, through paperwork, the poor aliens would just like waste away in a cell somewhere. Like, there's a certain-
1:11:08 Speaker 01 That would not happen, that would never happen. Part of the reason that I feel so confident that aliens have not visited, because they would have had to visit just to have a look remotely, you know, from Neptune or something. Which makes no sense, because interstellar travel is so difficult, that it would be quite a ridiculous proposition. But that's the bit that I think is technically possible. If they did come here and they were visible by anyone, detectable by anyone- The thought that any government, no matter, or any military could just contain them. These beings are capable of traveling interstellar distances when we can barely go to the moon, like barely go to the moon.
1:11:48 Lex Fridman? These things would be way, way, way.
1:11:49 Speaker 01 Way. And the fact that we think are puny military of any, even if all the military in the world got together. And the fact that they could somehow contain this, it's, that's.
1:12:01 Lex Fridman? It's like ants trying to contain a human that visited them.
1:12:03 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:12:04 Lex Fridman? But.
1:12:05 Speaker 01 And scientists, you would have to bring scientists on board. You've met a lot of scientists.
1:12:09 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:12:09 Speaker 01 How good are they at keeping secrets? Cause in my experience, they're absolutely appalling at keeping secrets.
1:12:16 Lex Fridman? Yeah, that's terrible.
1:12:16 Speaker 01 Even the phosphine on Venus thing, which was a pretty well kept secret.
1:12:20 Lex Fridman? Oh, this is true. You had a bunch of people that were.
1:12:22 Speaker 01 I told my dad.
1:12:23 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:12:24 Speaker 01 You know, my dad knew. And hopefully didn't tell anyone, but if it had been an alien visiting, he probably would have told them, mate, you know? And so these secrets could not be kept by any scientist that I know, and certainly not collaborative scientists, which would be needed. You would need all sorts of scientific teams. So between the pathetic power of any world's military compared to any civilization capable of traveling and our absolute inability to keep secrets. I, I, absolutely not. I will bet everything that we have not been visited because we are too pathetic to hold that.
1:13:04 Lex Fridman? Well, let me.
1:13:05 Speaker 01 To hold that true.
1:13:06 Lex Fridman? If we're doing, making like a $10 bet, the possibility here that the main, say there exists one alien, other intelligent alien civilization in the galaxy.
1:13:19 Lex Fridman? The, to me, the, if they visit Earth, was going to visit Earth is like the crappy, like the really crappy.
1:13:27 Speaker 01 Short straw. Yeah, yeah.
1:13:29 Lex Fridman? Like, like this, this like really dumb thing that's, I don't know, like the early Game Boys or something like.
1:13:36 Speaker 01 I think there's a cartoon about this. There's an alien that gets sent to Earth. Commander Spiff or something? And it's kind of a punishment or something. But that's not possible. That's the thing because interstellar distances are so hard to to cross.
1:13:51 Lex Fridman? You have to do it on purpose.
1:13:52 Speaker 01 You have to do on purpose. It has to be a big, big deal. And we know this because, yes, you're right. We don't know enough about galactic biology. We don't know what the universal rules of biology or biochemistry are because we only have the Earth. But we do know that the laws of physics are universal. We can predict behavior in the universe and then see it happen based on these laws of physics. We know the laws of chemistry are universal. We know the periodic table is all they have to choose from. So, yes, there may be some sort of unimaginable intelligence. But they still have to use the same periodic table that we have access to. They still have a finite number of molecules they can do things with.
1:14:35 Speaker 01 So they still have to use the resources around them, the stars around them, the universe around them. And we know how much energy is in these places. And so, yes, they may be very capable, capable beyond our wireless dreams. But they're still in the same universe. And we know a lot of those rules. We're not completely blind.
1:14:54 Lex Fridman? But there's a colleague of yours at Harvard, Kamaran Vafa. He's a theoretical physicist. I don't know if you know him.
1:15:02 Speaker 01 I've only joined Harvard about six months ago.
1:15:05 Lex Fridman? OK. It's time to meet all the theoretical physicists. So he's a string theorist. But his idea is that aliens that are sophisticated enough to travel interstellar, like those kinds of distances, will figure out actually ways to hack the fabric of the universe enough to have fun in other ways. Like, this universe is too boring. Like, you would figure out ways to create other universes. Like, you go outside the physics as we know it. So the reason we don't see aliens visiting us all over the place is they're having fun elsewhere. This is, like, way too boring. We humans think this is fun, but it's actually mostly empty space that no fun is happening.
1:15:49 Lex Fridman? Like, there's no fun in visiting Earth for a super advanced civilization. So he thinks, like, if alien civilizations are out there, they found... Outside of our current standard models of physics ways of having fun that don't involve us.
1:16:04 Speaker 01 And that that's probably true, but even the notion of visiting, that's so literally pedestrian. You know, of course, we want to go there because going there is the only thing we know. We see a thing we want, we want to go there and get it. But that is probably something they've no longer got need for. I specifically don't particularly want to go to space. Sounds awful, you know, none of the things I like are going to be there. And I, my whole work is my whole career is finding life and understanding the universe. So I care a lot, but I care about knowing about it. And I feel no need to go there to learn about it. And I think as we develop better tools, hopefully people will feel less and less a need to go everywhere that we know about.
1:16:50 Speaker 01 And I would expect any alien civilization worth assault have developed observation tools and and tools that allow them to understand the universe around them and beyond. Without having to go there, this this going is so wasteful.
1:17:05 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so more focused on the knowledge and the learning versus the colonization, like the the conquering and all those kinds of things.
1:17:12 Speaker 01 That's, you know, beneath them.
1:17:14 Lex Fridman? That's beneath them. That, I mean, that's a, do you think there's, um, in your hopeful search for life through phosphate and other gases? Do you, um, do you think there's other alien civilizations out there? First, do you think there's other life out there? First, do you think there's life in the solar system? Second, do you think there's life in the galaxy? And third, do you think there's intelligent life in the solar system or the galaxy outside of Earth?
1:17:45 Speaker 01 So intelligent life, I have no idea. It seems deeply unlikely, uh, possible, but I'm not even sure if it's plausible.
1:17:52 Lex Fridman? So that's the special thing to you about Earth is somehow intelligent life came to be?
1:17:56 Speaker 01 And it's only, you know, very briefly, probably extremely briefly.
1:18:01 Lex Fridman? Uh oh, you mean like it's always going to like, we're going to destroy ourselves?
1:18:05 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:18:06 Lex Fridman? Oh, boy.
1:18:07 Speaker 01 And life will continue on Earth happily, uh, probably more happily.
1:18:11 Lex Fridman? Trees and the dolphins will be here, I'm telling you.
1:18:14 Speaker 01 And the cockroaches and the incredible fungi, you know, they'll be fine. So life on Earth will be fine, was fine before us and will be fine after us. So I'm not that worried about intelligent life, but I I think it is unlikely, even on Earth is unlikely. Out of, what is it, five billion species across the history of the Earth?
1:18:34 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:18:35 Speaker 01 There's been one, an intelligent one, and for a blink of an eye, possibly not much longer than that. Uh, so I I wouldn't bet on that at all, though I would love it, of course. You know, I I wanted to find aliens since I was a little girl. And so of course, I initially wanted to find ones that I could be friends with.
1:18:57 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:18:57 Speaker 01 And I've had to let go of that dream because it's so deeply implausible.
1:19:01 Lex Fridman? But see, the nice, and sorry to interrupt, but the nice thing about intelligent alien civilizations, they may have more biosignatures than non-intelligent ones. So they might be easier to detect. That that would be the hope.
1:19:13 Speaker 01 On Earth, that's not the case, but it could be the case elsewhere.
1:19:16 Lex Fridman? Oh, it's not the case on Earth.
1:19:17 Speaker 01 Most of the biosignatures we have on Earth are created by quite simple life.
1:19:23 Speaker 01 If you don't count pollution. Pollution is all.
1:19:28 Lex Fridman? So you don't see, uh, polluting gases as a, as a possible, like?
1:19:34 Speaker 01 I look for polluting gases. I would love to find polluting gases. Well, you know, I'd be worried for them, of course. The same way I, I think about my alien colleagues all the time, looking at us, and I'm sure they worry about our pollutions. But it would be a really good, robust, unambiguous sign of life if we found complex pollutants. So I look for those too.
1:19:56 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:19:56 Speaker 01 I just don't have any hope of finding them. I think intelligent life in the galaxy at the same time that we're looking is deeply implausible. But life, I think, is inevitable. And if it is inevitable, it is common. So I think there'll be life everywhere in the galaxy. Now, how common that life is, I think will depend a lot on whether there's life in the solar system beyond Earth. So I'll adjust my expectations very much based on there being life in the solar system. If there's life in the Venusian clouds, if there's life in the, if there are biosignatures coming out of the plumes of Enceladus, if there's life on Titan.
1:20:40 Lex Fridman? Yeah, that's right. Enceladus, yeah, yeah, plumes of Enceladus. That's the, that's the Saturn one?
1:20:45 Speaker 01 It's the moon that has the geysers that come out. And so you can't see the, under the subterranean oceans, but.
1:20:51 Lex Fridman? It's supposed, so it would be in the atmosphere. I was gonna ask you about that one. Have you looked at that? Have you? Is that a hope for you to use the tools you're using with Rascal and other ways for detecting the 16,000 molecules that might be biosignatures to look at Enceladus?
1:21:14 Speaker 01 Yes, that's absolutely the plan.
1:21:16 Lex Fridman? Is that what's the limiting factor currently? Is it the quality of the telescopes? What's the, what's the, the quality of the data?
1:21:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, the quality of the data, the observational data, and also the quality of Rascal and other associated things. So we're missing a lot of fundamental data to interpret the data that we get, and we don't have good enough data. But hopefully, we will, in the coming decades, we'll get some information on Titan. We have dragonfly going over. We'll get the plumes of Enceladus. We will look at the clouds of Venus, and there's other places. And so if we find any life or any sign of life ever, like on Mars, then I'll adjust my calculations. And I'll say, life is not just inevitable and common, but extremely common. Because all of these places we've mentioned, the subterranean oceans
1:22:08 Speaker 01 on Enceladus, the methane oceans of Titan, the clouds of Venus, the acidic clouds of Venus, these are places that are very different from the places where we find life on Earth, even the most extreme places. And so if life can originate in all of these completely different habitats. Then life is even more resourceful than we thought.
1:22:30 Lex Fridman? Yeah, that's really.
1:22:30 Speaker 01 Everywhere.
1:22:31 Lex Fridman? That's really exciting if it's everywhere. If if there's life on just one, one of the moons, if it's on Mars.
1:22:38 Speaker 01 Anywhere, anywhere in the solar system, and I will bet everything I own that every solar system, every planetary system has a potential for habitability, you know, because even if they don't have a habitable planet, they'll have moons around other giant planets and there'll be so much life. So for me, that's the only thing to figure out now, whether life is inevitable and quite common throughout the galaxy or everywhere. But it's somewhere between those two. Intelligent life, I make no bets. And if I had to bet, I would be against.
1:23:15 Lex Fridman? See, to me, like, two discoveries in the 21st century would change everything.
1:23:22 Lex Fridman? One is, and maybe I'm biased, but one is the discovery of life in the solar system. I feel like that would change our whole conception of how unique we are in the universe. I I think I'm much more eager than you are to jump from basic life to intelligent life. I feel like if there's life everywhere, like, the odds are, there has, like, we cannot, like, you have, oh, I see, you're you're saying there could have been many intelligent civilizations out there, but they just keep dying out. It's like little.
1:23:56 Speaker 01 I was detecting them, you know, ships in the night.
1:23:58 Lex Fridman? Ships in the night. Oh, that's that's ultra sad, just like.
1:24:03 Speaker 01 Is it sad?
1:24:04 Lex Fridman? A graveyard.
1:24:05 Speaker 01 The earth is not better for having us. Is it? We, it doesn't owe us anything. Would you be sad to find alien giraffes? Would you be disappointed if you found alien giraffes? Because I would not.
1:24:17 Lex Fridman? No, well, giraffes, first of all, they look goofy with their necks and everything, but.
1:24:21 Speaker 01 But no, we do not shit on giraffes.
1:24:23 Lex Fridman? Okay.
1:24:23 Speaker 01 Giraffes are wondrous animals, are deeply understudied. We still know so little about them because no one does PhDs in giraffes. I am disappointed, I made a PhD in phosphine when people aren't doing PhDs in giraffes. We do not know enough about giraffes.
1:24:36 Lex Fridman? I think it was like Ricky Gervais that did a whole, like, long thing.
1:24:40 Speaker 01 You can't trust Ricky Gervais to talk about giraffes. That is not his expertise.
1:24:45 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but it's a stupid next. It doesn't make any sense. I, I mean, that's fine.
1:24:49 Speaker 01 Giraffes are very resourceful animals who do incredible things and can kick a lion in the face.
1:24:54 Lex Fridman? Why don't you climb the tree? Why don't you climb the tree? You don't need to grow through the lengthy evolutionary process.
1:24:59 Speaker 01 I think you're shitting on giraffes.
1:25:00 Lex Fridman? I, okay.
1:25:01 Speaker 01 Giraffes are wondrous animals.
1:25:03 Lex Fridman? I would very appreciate it. I take it back. I apologize. I trust, I trust your expertise on this. The, the thing that makes humans really fascinating, and I think the earth, but I'm a human, is we're, we create.
1:25:20 Speaker 01 A climber.
1:25:21 Lex Fridman? Yeah. We create things that are, yes, there's all the ugliness in the world. There's all the, on the, on the biological, on the chemical level, there's the pollution. But we create beauty. If you, if you even from a physics perspective, look at symmetry as somehow capturing beauty, the breaking of symmetries, stuff grounded in all the different definitions of symmetry. We're good at like creating things.
1:25:48 Speaker 01 So are spiders.
1:25:52 Lex Fridman? But not giraffes. Okay. But yes, this is.
1:25:54 Speaker 01 Spiders, there are spiders that create little bubbles of air so they can breathe in the water. They can literally scuba dive. There are spiders that can create parachutes so they can glide.
1:26:05 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:26:05 Speaker 01 And talk about symmetry? Look what spiders can do. And I just thought of spiders, but if I was an alien species coming to earth, there'll be plenty to wonder and we would just be one.
1:26:17 Lex Fridman? One of the things.
1:26:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, clunky.
1:26:21 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:26:21 Speaker 01 Naked monkey.
1:26:22 Lex Fridman? Yeah, the ants might be even more fascinating.
1:26:24 Speaker 01 The ants, ants can figure out exactly through some emergent consciousness, what the maximum distance between their trash, their babies and their food is just from, without any of them knowing how to do this. And collectively, they've learned how to do this. If I was an alien species, I'll be looking at that.
1:26:44 Lex Fridman? Well, so that was the other thing I was going to mention. The second thing is I tend to believe we can engineer consciousness, but at the, at the basic level, understand the source of consciousness. Because if consciousness is, is unique to humans and if we can engineer it, that gives me hope that it can be present elsewhere in the universe. That's the other thing that makes. It's an open question that makes humans perhaps special is not maybe the presence of consciousness, but somehow a presence of like elevated consciousness. It does, again, maybe human centric, but it feels like we're more conscious than giraffes, for example, and spiders.
1:27:24 Speaker 01 Yes, I won't deny that. There is something special about humans. They're my favorite species.
1:27:30 Lex Fridman? They are.
1:27:31 Speaker 01 They are. You know, some of my best friends are humans. I think highly of humans. It's great. I just don't have great hope for our longevity. And specifically, I don't have great hope, given that we're the only species that are five billion that did this cool consciousness trick. I just, I don't want to bet on finding a kinship elsewhere.
1:27:59 Lex Fridman? That's quite interesting to think about. I don't think I've even considered that possibility that there would be life in the solar system. So that indicates that very possibly life is like literally everywhere.
1:28:14 Speaker 01 Everywhere it can happen, it does.
1:28:16 Lex Fridman? Yeah. And like especially what we're discovering with the exoplanets now, how numerous they are, or Earth-like, habitable quote unquote planets, they're everywhere.
1:28:29 Speaker 01 The most common type of planet is rocky, it seems.
1:28:32 Lex Fridman? And so, but I didn't consider the possibility that life is like literally everywhere. And yet, intelligent life is nowhere long enough to communicate with each other, to form little clusters of civilizations that expand beyond the solar system and so on.
1:28:54 Lex Fridman? Man, maybe becoming a multi-planetary species is a less likely pursuit than we imagine.
1:29:01 Speaker 01 I agree.
1:29:02 Lex Fridman? But one of the things that makes humans beautiful is we hope.
1:29:06 Speaker 01 But I hope for humanity. And one of the things I hope for is that we become less obsessed with conquering, and we become less obsessed with spreading ourselves.
1:29:20 Speaker 01 I hope that we transcend that, that we're happy with the universe without having to go and take it. So you can hope for the species without hoping for a multi-planetary existence. That is only, I think, the drive of our most primitive instincts to go and take, to go and plant a flag somewhere. We love planting a flag somewhere. And maybe we could overcome that minor drive.
1:29:52 Lex Fridman? And once we do, the AI systems we build will destroy us because we're too peaceful and they will go and conquer and plant the flags.
1:30:00 Speaker 01 Best of luck to them. The cockroaches will be happy to keep to the business as they always have.
1:30:08 Lex Fridman? I tend to believe that robots can have the same elegance and consciousness and all the qualities of kindness and love and hope and fear that humans have.
1:30:19 Speaker 01 In principle, they could, yes. I don't really trust the people who make them.
1:30:27 Lex Fridman? This is about the giraffe comment, isn't it?
1:30:31 Speaker 01 Haven't forgiven you, shitting on giraffes. What have they done to you?
1:30:34 Lex Fridman? Just as a small tangent, your master's thesis is also fascinating. Maybe we could talk about it for just a little bit. It's titled Influence of a Star's Evolution on its Planetary System. So this interplay between a star and a planet, is there something interesting you could say about what you've learned about this this journey that a star takes and the planets around it?
1:31:00 Speaker 01 Well, when I was younger and I was told what would happen ultimately to the Earth as the sun expands towards a red giant and, you know, Mercury would just like fall in. And then, you know, Venus fall in and the sun doesn't care. And it just seemed So I felt so small. I felt like the earth and everything on it, it's just the universe doesn't care, even our sun doesn't care. And I think I felt like our sun should feel some sort of responsibility for its planets, you know?
1:31:34 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:31:34 Speaker 01 And it just felt like such a violent and neglectful parent.
1:31:39 Lex Fridman? It's like a parent eating its own children.
1:31:40 Speaker 01 It's horrible. It's just a horrible notion. But it made me think, what if this, there's some sort of generation? And so at the time, when I was doing my masters, there was a notion of the white dwarf cemetery, which is this idea that when stars become white dwarfs, that death is so horrible, that planets, potentially habitable planets that could have been habitable before, they're now gone. There's no, there's no chance for life. But then I thought, what if life returns? You know, now it's a white dwarf, it's calmed down, it's not going to go anywhere. White dwarfs are very stable across like universal time scales. And so could you have planets around a white dwarf that could themselves get life again? You
1:32:22 Speaker 01 know, life doesn't care. And so my work was basically killing dozens of planets thousands of times. I just ran thousands and thousands of end body simulations.
1:32:35 Lex Fridman? But you simulated this?
1:32:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I simulated the star.
1:32:38 Lex Fridman? Wow.
1:32:39 Speaker 01 Growing and just eating all these planets up and just absolute chaos. And the orbits of the planets would change as the star loses mass. So you would have like Jupiter planet, like planets just crashing into the other planets, throwing them into the sun early. It was terrifying to watch these simulations. It was absolute carnage. But if you run thousands of these simulations, some systems find new balance ways of staying alive. Some systems post star death find stable orbits again for billions of years, more than enough for life to originate again. And so that was my idea during that time, that thesis was trying to explore.
1:33:25 Speaker 01 This notion of life coming back and this idea of the universe doesn't care if you're here or not, and it will go about its business, you know, Andromeda will crash into us and doesn't care. No one cares if you're alive in the universe. And so letting go of that preciousness of life, I found very useful at that stage in my career. And instead, I just thought, what if, if life is inevitable, it doesn't matter that it came by four billion years ago, it can start again four billion years later. And maybe that is nice. Maybe that's where hope lies, the phoenix rising everywhere. Planet's been destroyed and created
1:34:08 Speaker 01 and we're here now and others will be more or less here-ish billions of years later.
1:34:14 Lex Fridman? So accepting the cycle of death and life and, uh, yeah.
1:34:19 Speaker 01 Not taking it personally.
1:34:20 Lex Fridman? Not taking it personally.
1:34:22 Speaker 01 The sun doesn't owe us anything. He's not a bad parent. It's not a parent at all.
1:34:26 Lex Fridman? Yeah. I was looking at the work of Freeman Dyson and seeing how it, how this universe eventually will just be a bunch of supermassive black holes before they also evaporate.
1:34:40 Speaker 01 A bunch of tiny black holes too.
1:34:41 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:34:42 Speaker 01 Absolute quiet. Everyone, all the black holes, a little too far away from one another to even interact until it's just silence forever. But until then, many, many cycles of death and destruction and rebirth.
1:34:57 Lex Fridman? And rebirth. You kept bringing up sort of coding stuff up. I wanted to ask two things. First of all, like what, what programming language do you like? And also what, because you're as a
1:35:16 Lex Fridman? Computational quantum astrochemist, no.
1:35:19 Speaker 01 No, that's correct.
1:35:20 Lex Fridman? That's right.
1:35:22 Lex Fridman? You're kind of, you could say you're, you're actually understanding some exceptionally complicated things with one of the things you're using is the tools of computation, of programming. Is there a device you can give to people? Because I know quite a few that have not practiced that tool and have fallen in love with a particular science, whatever it's biology and chemistry and physics and so on. And if they were interested in learning to program and learning to use computation as a tool in their particular science, is there advice you can give on programming and also just maybe a comment on your own journey and the use of programming in your own life?
1:36:05 Speaker 01 Well, I'm a terrible programmer. A lot of scientists, the programming is bad because we never learned formal programming. We learned science, physics, chemistry. And then we were told, oh, you can, you have to get these equations modeled and run through a simulation. And you're like, okay, so I'm going to learn how to code to do this. And you learn just as much as you need to run these simulations and no more. So they're rarely optimized. They're really clunky. Six months later, you can't read your own code. My variable names are extremely embarrassing. I still have error, error messages for different compilation errors. I say things like, at least your dad loves you, Clara. You know, it doesn't help me at all.
1:36:48 Lex Fridman? It's like humor.
1:36:48 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:36:49 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:36:49 Speaker 01 Just like you suck at coding, buddy. There's other things in your life. So I'm a bad programmer. And so, you know, if that will give hope to anyone else who's a bad programmer, I can still do pretty impressive science.
1:37:01 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:37:01 Speaker 01 But I learned, I think I started learning MATLAB and Java when I was in college. It did me no good at all. It has not been particularly useful. I learned some FORTRAN that was very useful, even though it's really not a fun language because so much of legacy code is.
1:37:19 Speaker 01 In Fortran. And so if you want to use other people's code who have now retired, Fortran will be nice. And then I used IDL to visualize. So that simulation and body simulation, those all Fortran and IDL. But thankfully, since I've left college, I've just learned Python like a normal person, and that has been much nicer. So most of my code now is in Python.
1:37:41 Lex Fridman? I should also make a few quick comments as well. So one is, you say you're sort of bad at programming. I've worked with a lot of excellent scientists that are quote unquote bad at programming. They're not. It gets the job done. In fact, there's a downside to sort of, especially getting a software engineering education. If I were to give advice, especially if you're doing a computer science degree and you're doing software engineering, is not to get lost in the optimization of the correct, there's an obsession, you can see it in Stack Overflow, of the correct way to do things. And I think you can too easily get lost in constantly trying
1:38:26 Lex Fridman? to optimize and do things the correct way when you actually never get done. The same thing happens, you have like, communities of people obsessed with productivity, and they keep researching productivity hacks, and then they spend like 90% plus of their time figuring out how to do things productively, and they never actually do anything. So there's a certain sense, if you focus on the task that needs to be done, that's what programming is for. So not over optimizing, not thinking about variable names in the following sense. Sometimes you think, okay, I'm going to write code that's going to last for decades. In reality, your code,
1:39:06 Lex Fridman? if it's well-written or poorly-written, will be very likely obsolete very quickly. The point is to get the job done really well. So there's a trade-off there that you have to make sure to strike. I should also comment as a public service announcement or a request, if there's any world-class Fortran or COBOL programmers out there, I'm looking for them. I want to talk to you.
1:39:31 Speaker 01 That will not be me. I'm a terrible Fortran programmer.
1:39:35 Lex Fridman? But it's fascinating, because so much of the world in the past and still runs these programming languages, and there's like no experts on it, so.
1:39:43 Speaker 01 They're all retiring.
1:39:44 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:39:45 Speaker 01 I I disagree slightly in that I think because I can get the job done, I'm a programmer. But because no one else can look at my code and know how I got my job done, I'm a bad programmer. That's how I'm defining it.
1:39:57 Lex Fridman? Yes, including yourself.
1:39:58 Speaker 01 Including myself six months later. I'm working with a new student right now and she sent me some messages on Slack being like, what is this, um, what is this file that you've got, um, with some, um, functions around? And I was like, I, I, this was from 2018. It wasn't that long ago and I can no longer remember what that code does. I'm going to spend now two days reading through my own code and trying to improve it. And I, I do think that's frustrating. And so I think my advice to any young people who want to get into astronomy or astrobiology or quantum chemistry is that I certainly find it much easier to teach the science concepts to a programmer
1:40:41 Speaker 01 than the programming to a scientist. And so I would much, much faster hire someone who knows programming, but barely knows where space is than teach programming to an astronomer.
1:40:55 Lex Fridman? Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah, okay. This is true. I mean, yeah, there's some basics. I'm, uh, I'm focusing too much on the silver lining because I've the people that write like MATLAB code. Yeah. Single variable, uh, single letter variable names, those kinds of things.
1:41:09 Speaker 01 It's accessibility, right? It's, I want my so, my code to be open source, but and it is, it's on GitHub. Anyone can download it. But is it really open source if it's written so cryptically, so poorly that no one can really use it to its full functionality? Have I really published my work? And that weighs on on me. I feel guilty for my own inadequacies as a programmer.
1:41:34 Speaker 01 But you can only do so much. So I've already learned quantum chemistry and astrophysics. So, you know.
1:41:39 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I mean, there's, there's, uh, there's all kinds of ways to contribute to the world. One of them is publication, but publishing code is a fascinating way to contribute to the world, even if it's very small, very basic element. Great code. I guess I was also kind of criticizing the software engineering process versus like, which is a good thing to do. It's code that's readable, almost like without documentation.
1:42:07 Speaker 01 Exactly.
1:42:07 Lex Fridman? It's readable. It's understandable. The variable names, the structure, all those kinds of things.
1:42:13 Speaker 01 That's the dream.
1:42:14 Lex Fridman? That's the dream. This is a dumb question. What do you?
1:42:19 Speaker 01 No, no, tell me a dumb question. I want to hear it.
1:42:22 Lex Fridman? Okay. I mean, okay, this is a question about beauty. It's way too gentle. It's very impossible. It's like asking, what's your favorite band? What's your favorite music band?
1:42:31 Speaker 01 Oh, I thought you meant wavelength band. I was like, I definitely have favorite wavelength bands, absolutely.
1:42:35 Lex Fridman? Well, it's hard to narrow it down, huh? Okay. What, uh, what to you is the most beautiful idea in science?
1:42:43 Speaker 01 It's not a dumb question. Do you want to try that question again proudly?
1:42:46 Lex Fridman? Okay.
1:42:49 Lex Fridman? I, I have a really good question to ask you.
1:42:52 Speaker 01 Okay, don't, don't oversell it. I've got an okay question to ask you, you know?
1:42:57 Lex Fridman? I've, uh, yeah. What, uh, what to you is the most beautiful idea in, uh, in science? Something you just find inspiring or just maybe the reason you got into science? Or the reason you think science is cool?
1:43:17 Speaker 01 My favorite thing about science is kind of the connection between the scales. So when I was little and I wanted to know about space, I really felt that it would make me feel powerful to be able to predict the heavens, something so much larger than myself that felt really powerful. It was almost a selfish desire. And that's what I wanted. There was some control to being able to know exactly what the sky would do. And then as I got older and I got more into astronomy and I didn't just want to know how the stars moved, I wanted to know how the planets around them moved. And then as I got deeper into that field, I really didn't care that much about the planets. I want to
1:43:59 Speaker 01 know about the atmospheres around the planets and then the molecules within those atmospheres and what that might mean. So I ended up shrinking my scale until it was literally the quantum scale. And now all my work, the majority of my work is on this insane quantum scale. And yet I'm using these literal tiny, tiny tools to try and answer the greatest questions that we've ever been able to ask. And this crossing of scales from the quantum to the astronomical, that's so cool, isn't it?
1:44:38 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it spans the entirety, the tiny and the huge. That's, that's the cool thing about, I guess, being a quantum astrochemist, is you're using the tools of the tiny to look at the heavenly bodies, the giant stuff.
1:44:52 Speaker 01 And the potential life out there, that this is the thing that connects us, that you can't escape the rules of the quantum world and how universal they themselves are, despite being probabilistic. And that makes me feel really pleased to be in science, but in a really humbling way. It's no longer this thirst for power. I, I feel less special the more work I do, less exceptional the more work I do. I feel like humans and the earth and our place in the universe is less and less exceptional. And yet I feel so much less lonely. And so it's been a really good trade off that I've lost power, but I've gained company.
1:45:37 Lex Fridman? Wow, that's a beautiful answer. I don't think there's a better way to actually end it. You're right. I asked a mediocre question and you came through. You made the question good.
1:45:46 Speaker 01 That's one of my favorite.
1:45:51 Lex Fridman? You're the Michael Jordan and I'm the, who's the Dennis Rodman? I'll be the Dennis Rodman. This is.
1:45:56 Speaker 01 I don't know enough about basketball. I mean, literally, you've reached the peak of my basketball knowledge. Because I know those people are basketball.
1:46:03 Lex Fridman? But that's it.
1:46:04 Speaker 01 Pros, I believe, but only because I watch Space Jam, I think.
1:46:07 Lex Fridman? Are there books or movies in your life long ago or recently? Do you have any time for books and movies? Had an impact on you? What ideas did you take away?
1:46:19 Speaker 01 I absolutely have time for books and movies. I try as best I can to not work very hard. And I mostly fail, I should point out, but I think I'm a better scientist when I don't work evenings and weekends. I'm, if I get four good hours in a day, I often don't. I often get eight crappy hours. You know, emails, meetings, bad code.
1:46:43 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:46:44 Speaker 01 Data processing, but if I can get four high-quality scientific hours, I just stop working for the day. Because I know it's diminishing returns after that. So I have a lot of time. I try to make as much time as I can.
1:46:57 Lex Fridman? Can you kind of dig into the, what it takes to be, one, productive, two, to be happy in, as a researcher? Because I think it's too easy in that world to, to basic, because you have so many hats you have to wear, so many jobs. You have to be a mentor, a teacher, head of a research group, do research yourself. You have to do service, all the kinds of stuff you're doing now with education and.
1:47:29 Speaker 01 Interviews.
1:47:31 Lex Fridman? Yeah. So as a, a public science, like being a public communicator, that's a job.
1:47:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:47:39 Lex Fridman? The, the whole thing.
1:47:40 Speaker 01 Very poorly.
1:47:44 Lex Fridman? I'll pay you in Bitcoin, okay?
1:47:46 Speaker 01 I'll take Bitcoin.
1:47:50 Lex Fridman? So is there some advice you can give to the process of being productive and happy as a researcher?
1:48:00 Speaker 01 I think sadly, it's very hard to feel happy as a scientist if you're not productive. It's a bit of a trap, but it's, I certainly find it very difficult to feel happy when I'm not being productive. It's become slightly better if I know my students are being productive, I can be happy. But I think a lot of senior scientists, once they get into that mindset, they start thinking that their student's science is theirs. And I think this happens a lot of senior scientists. They have so many hats, as you mentioned, they have to do so much service and so much admin, that they have very little time for their own science. And so they end up feeling ownership over the junior people in their labs and their groups. And that's really heartbreaking. I see it all the time.
1:48:44 Speaker 01 And, and that, I think I've escaped that trap. I feel so happy, even when I'm not productive, when my students are productive. I think that sensation I was describing earlier of, they only need to be half as productive as me for me to feel like I've done my job for humanity. So that has been the dynamic I've had to worry about. But to be productive is not clear to me what you have to do. You have to not be miserable, otherwise. I find it extremely hard when I'm having conflicts with collaborators, for example. Kind of very hard to enjoy the work we do, even if the work is this fantastical phosphine
1:49:29 Speaker 01 or things that I know I love, still very difficult. So I think choosing your collaborators based on how well you get along with them is a really sound scientific choice. Having a miserable collaborator ruins your whole life. It's horrible. It makes you not want to do the science. It probably makes you do clumsy science because you don't focus on it. You don't go over it several times. You just want it to be over. And so I think in general, just not being a douchebag can get so much good science done. Just find the good people in your community and collaborate with them. Even if they're not as good scientists as others, you'll get better science out.
1:50:12 Lex Fridman? Yeah, don't be a douchebag yourself and surround yourself by other cool people.
1:50:16 Speaker 01 Exactly. And then you'll get better science than if you had tried to work with three geniuses who are just hell to be around.
1:50:26 Lex Fridman? Yeah, I mean, there's parallel things like that. I'm very fortunate now.
1:50:32 Lex Fridman? I was very fortunate at MIT to have friends and colleagues there that were incredible to work with. But I'm currently sort of, I'm doing a lot of fun stuff on the side.
1:50:44 Lex Fridman? Like this little podcast thing. And I mentioned to you, I think robotics related stuff. I was just at Boston Dynamics yesterday checking out their robots.
1:50:58 Lex Fridman? And I'm currently, I guess, hiring people to help me with a very fun little project around those robots.
1:51:04 Speaker 01 Put an ad in?
1:51:05 Lex Fridman? No, I have more applications I can possibly deal with. There's thousands. So it's not, it's the opposite.
1:51:14 Speaker 01 We need to put an ad out for someone to help you go through the applications.
1:51:18 Lex Fridman? Well, that too is already there. That's over 10,000 people apply for that.
1:51:22 Speaker 01 An infinite Master Yashka doll of application management.
1:51:26 Lex Fridman? But the point is, it's not, it's not exactly.
1:51:31 Lex Fridman? The point is, like, what I'm very distinctly aware of is life is short. And productivity is not the right goal to optimize for, at least for me. The right goal to optimize for is how happy you are. To wake up in the day and to work with the people that you do because the productivity will take care of itself.
1:51:53 Speaker 01 Agreed.
1:51:54 Lex Fridman? And so like, it's so important to select the people well. And I think one of the challenges with academia as opposed to sort of the thing I'm currently doing is like saying goodbye is sometimes a little bit tougher because
1:52:09 Speaker 01 Really tough.
1:52:10 Lex Fridman? Your colleagues are there, or I mean, they're, goodbye hurts. And then if you have to spend the rest, you know, for many years to come, still surrounded by them in the community, it's tougher. It kind of adds, puts extra pressure to stay in that relationship, in that collaborative, you know, in that collaboration. And in some sense, that makes it much more difficult, but it's still worth it. It's still worth it to break ties if, if you don't, if you're not happy, if there's not that magic, that dance. I talked to, um, this guy named Daniel Kahneman.
1:52:48 Speaker 01 Oh, I know, Danny Kahneman.
1:52:50 Lex Fridman? Danny, yeah. Boy, did that guy make me realize like what a great collaborator is.
1:52:57 Speaker 01 Well, he had Twersky, right?
1:52:58 Lex Fridman? Yeah, but so they had, obviously they had a really deep collaboration there, but like, I collaborated with him on a conversation, uh, like, just like talking about, I don't know what we were talking about. I think cars, autonomous vehicles, but the brainstorming session, I'm like a nobody. And the fact that he would, with that childlike curiosity and that dance of thoughts and ideas and the push and pull and the, like, and the lack of ego, but then enough ego to have a little bit of a stubbornness over an idea and a little bit of humor and all those things. It's like, holy shit, that person, also the ability to truly listen to another human. It's like, okay, that's what it takes to be a good collaborator.
1:53:40 Lex Fridman? It like make me realize that I haven't been, I've been very fortunate to have cool people in my life, but there's like levels even to the cool.
1:53:48 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't think you can compete with Danny Kahneman on Cole. He's just incredible.
1:53:53 Lex Fridman? But it was like, OK, I guess what I'm trying to say is that collaboration is an art form. But perhaps it's actually a skill is allowing yourself to develop that skill. Because that's one of the fruitful skills.
1:54:07 Speaker 01 And praise it in students, you know, and I think it is something you can really improve on. I've become a better collaborator as the years have gone on. I don't have some innate collaborative skills. I think they're skills I've developed. And I think in science, there's this really destructive notion of the lone wolf, the scientist who sees things where others don't, you know, then that's really appealing. And people really like either fulfilling that or pretending to be fulfilling that. And first of all, it's mostly a lie. Any modern scientist, particularly in astronomy, which is so interdisciplinary, any modern scientist that's doing it on their own is doing a crappy job, most likely.
1:54:52 Speaker 01 Because you need an independent set of eyes to help you do things. You need experts in the subfields that you're working on to to check your work. But most importantly, it's just a bad idea. It's not, it doesn't lead to good science and it leaves you miserable. I was recently had some work that I was avoiding and I thought, maybe I shouldn't pursue a scientific project because I don't care enough about the outcome and it's going to be a lot of hard work. And I was trying to balance these two things. It can be really difficult. And the outcome is that maybe 10 people will cite me in the next decade because it's not, no one's asking for this question to be answered.
1:55:33 Speaker 01 And then I found myself working with this collaborator, Jason Dipman. And I spent a whole afternoon hours with him working on this and time flew by and. And I just felt taller and like I could breathe better. I was happier, I was a better person when it was done. And that's because he's a great collaborator. He's just a wonderful person that brings out joy out of science that you're doing with him. And that's really the trick. You find the people that make you feel that way about the science you're doing. And and you stop worrying about being the lone wolf. That's just a terrible dream that will leave you miserable and your science will be shit.
1:56:18 Lex Fridman? And since I'm Russian, just murder anybody who who doesn't fall into that beautiful collaborative relationship. We were talking about books.
1:56:29 Speaker 01 Books, yes.
1:56:30 Lex Fridman? Is there books, movies?
1:56:32 Speaker 01 Why was I talking about my productivity? Oh, you said I you maybe don't have time for books and movies.
1:56:36 Lex Fridman? And you said you must make time for books and movies.
1:56:39 Speaker 01 Make time to not work, make time to not work, whatever that looks like to you. But there's plenty. I, when I was younger, I found a lot of kind of my scientific fulfillment in books and movies. Now, as I got older, I have plenty of that in my work. And I try to read outside my field. I read about Danny Kahneman's work instead. But when I was little, it was Contact, the book, the Carl Sagan book. I really thought I was just like Ellie. And I was going to become Ellie. I really resonated with me, that character and the notions of life and space and the universe.
1:57:24 Speaker 01 Even the idea of then the the movie came out and I got to put, you know, Jodie Foster in that, which helped. But, you know, even the notion of if it is just us, what an awful waste of space. I found extremely useful as a concept to think, you know, maybe we are special, but that would suck. Is a really nice way of thinking of the search for life, that it's much better to not be special and have company. I got that from Carl Sagan. So that's what I always recommend.
1:57:59 Lex Fridman? Let me ask one other ridiculous question. We talked about the death and life cycle that is ever-present in the universe until it's not, until it's supermassive and little black holes too, at the end of the universe. What do you think is the why, the meaning of it all? What do you think is the meaning of life here on Earth? And the meaning of that life that you look for, whether it's on Venus or other exoplanets?
1:58:31 Speaker 01 I think there's none. I find enormous relief in the absence of meaning. I think chasing for meaning is a human desire that the universe doesn't give two shits about.
1:58:43 Lex Fridman? But you still enjoy...
1:58:48 Speaker 01 I enjoy finding meaning in my life. I enjoy finding where the morality lies. I enjoy the complication of that desire. And I feel that is deeply human, but I don't feel that it's universal.
1:59:06 Lex Fridman? It's somehow absolute, like we conjure it up. We bring it to life through our own minds, but it's not in any kind of fundamental way real.
1:59:16 Speaker 01 No. And the same way, the sun is not to be blamed for destroying its own planets. The universe doesn't care because it has no meaning. It owes us nothing. And looking for meaning in the universe is demanding answers. Who are we? We're nothing. We don't get to demand anything, and that includes meaning. And I find it very reassuring because once there is no meaning, I don't have to find it.
1:59:46 Lex Fridman? Yeah. Once there's no meaning, it's a kind of freedom in a way. You sound a bit like...
1:59:57 Speaker 01 I'm happy about it. This isn't a depressing outlook, as far as I'm concerned.
2:00:01 Lex Fridman? It's happiness. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, there's a, I don't know if you know who Sam Harris is, but he, despite the pushbacks from the entirety of the world, really argues hard that there's, that free will is an illusion, that, you know, the deterministic universe and it's all already been predetermined and, and he's okay with it. And he's happy with it that that... He's distinctly aware of it.
2:00:29 Speaker 01 The quantum world will disagree with him on the deterministic nature of nature.
2:00:34 Lex Fridman? Well, he's, uh, it's not the, he's not saying deterministic, but he's saying that the randomness doesn't help either. Like randomness does not help in the, in the experience of feeling like you're the decider of your own actions. That he kind of is okay with being a leaf flowing in the river, like, or being the river, right? As opposed to having, or being like a fish or something that can decide its swimming direction. He's okay just embracing the flow of life. I mean, in that same way, it kind of sounds like your conception of meaning. I mean, it just is. It doesn't, the universe doesn't care.
2:01:16 Lex Fridman? It just is what it is and we experience certain things and some feel good and some don't. And, uh, that's life.
2:01:25 Speaker 01 But I don't feel like that about life. I think life does have meaning and there's, and it's laudable to look for that meaning in life. I just don't think you can apply that beyond life and certainly not beyond Earth, that this notion of meaning is a human construct and so it only applies within us and the other life forms and planet types that suffer from our intrusions or rejoice from our interactions. But it's this, this meaning is ours to do as we please. We created it. We've created a need for it and so that's our problem to solve. I don't apply it beyond us.
2:02:08 Speaker 01 I think we as humans have a lot of responsibilities, but they're moral responsibilities and a lot of the responsibilities are much more easily fulfilled if you find meaning in them. So I think there's value to meaning, whether it's real or not. I just think we gain nothing from trying to anthropomorphize the entire universe. And also, that's the height of hubris. That's not for us to do.
2:02:32 Lex Fridman? Yeah, it also could be, just like duality in quantum mechanics. It could, uh, it could be both that there is meaning and that there isn't. And we're somehow, depending on the observer, depending on the perspective you take on the thing.
2:02:50 Speaker 01 I mean, even on Earth, that's true, but the, whether things have meaning or not depends a lot on who's looking.
2:02:58 Lex Fridman? Whether it's us humans, the aliens, or the giraffes.
2:03:03 Lex Fridman? Clara, this was an incredible conversation. I, I mean, I, I learned so much, but I also am just inspired by the passion you have in, um.
2:03:13 Speaker 01 Not finding meaning in the universe.
2:03:15 Lex Fridman? Yeah, right. For someone.
2:03:17 Speaker 01 I'm very passionate about not finding meaning in the universe.
2:03:21 Lex Fridman? You're the most inspiring nihilist I've ever met. I'm just kidding. This, you're, I mean, you are truly an inspiring communicator of everything from phosphine to life to quantum astrochemistry. I can't wait to see what other cool things you do in your career, in your, in your scientific life. Thank you so much for wasting your valuable time with me today. I really appreciate it.
2:03:47 Speaker 01 Uh, it was my pleasure. I'd already got my four hours of productivity before I got here, and so it's not a waste.
2:03:52 Lex Fridman? It's all downhill from there. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Clara Sousa Silva, and thank you to Onnit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Konstantin Zolkovsky. "The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever." Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
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