Alien Civilizations, Exomoons, and Cool, Habitable Worlds | David Kipping [Ep. 474]

Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 Could life exist on moons orbiting distant planets? Are We Alone? What if the key to understanding life's origins lies in the moons of distant worlds? Exoplanetary scientist David Kipping is here to answer these big questions. He is a professor at Columbia University, the leading mind behind exomoons, and also the host of the Cool Worlds Lab. He shares his groundbreaking research, including the discovery of Kepler-1708 b-i, a potential exomoon candidate. He explains why moons, like Earth’s, might be the unsung heroes in stabilizing conditions for life and how the latest tools, like the James Webb Space Telescope, are changing the game for astronomers. But that’s not all. You’ll hear about the role of panspermia (yes, life traveling between planets!), the fine-tuning of our universe, and what it takes to push the boundaries of scientific communication. If you’ve ever pondered the question, “Are we alone?” or simply love a good cosmic mystery, this is an episode you don’t want to miss. Tune in now for an eye-opening journey through the cosmos and beyond! — Key Takeaways: 00:00 Intro 01:58 David Kipping's background and motivation 05:09 The role of moons in the origin of life 10:59 Bayesian frameworks and panspermia 19:30 Exomoon detection and research strategy 32:40 JWST observations and data analysis 41:14 Balancing scientific communication and public engagement 50:48 Future missions and their impact on exomoon research 54:49 Advice for young scientists and final thoughts 57:32 Outro — Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about David Kipping: 📱 Website: https://www.coolworldslab.com/ ✖️ Twitter: https://x.com/david_kipping 🔔 YouTube Channel: Cool Worlds Lab ✍️ Kepler-1708 b-i Study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01539-1 ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/ 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow/subscribe so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:27Brian Keating?

  Welcome back to Into the Impossible with your host, Brian Keating. Today, we're going to journey through the galaxy and even beyond our solar system with a phenomenal educator, thinker and scientist, David Kipping. A professor at Columbia and host of the Cool Worlds Lab podcast and YouTube channels with nearly 1 million subscribers and close to 100 million views. David's a renowned exoplanet hunter and author of numerous groundbreaking papers on a subject he basically invented: exo-moons. We'll uncover his quest for Kepler-1708 BI, a giant moon candidate orbiting a distant world, and we'll explore how our moon and exo-moons may help solve the fine-tuning puzzle of extraterrestrial life.

• 2:10Brian Keating?

  Terrestrial life. David's a remarkable mind and you'll discover how Bayesian frameworks, birth to death ratio rates and ecological models can converge to challenge our understanding of life in the cosmos. Buckle up for an enthralling conversation on exo moons, A biogenesis, and the Fermi paradox and learn from David, one of the most renowned educators of our time, why your future cosmic perspective may cause you to see our moon in a very different light. Let's go. Welcome everybody to what promises to be an out of this world experience, a journey through the cosmos, through life, through meaning, and through the origin of it all. And I'm joined with a real, you know, kind of distant friend we just met, Professor David

• 2:52Brian Keating?

  Kipping at Columbia University, host of the Cool Worlds Laboratory podcast and on podcast platforms, obviously on YouTube as well, phenomenal channel, big inspiration. And he's out today to give a fascinating colloquium at the newly formed UCSD astronomy department.

• 3:09Speaker 04

  Well, David, honestly, it's a pleasure. I've been watching your podcast for a long time and I've been really looking forward to visiting and getting to chat to you about this.

• 3:15Brian Keating?

  We've been the number one guest after Elon. Everyone wants to have Elon. I had him on for 10 minutes.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  That's a high bar. Come on, dude. That's right. Well, you're here today to talk about something I

• 3:26Brian Keating?

  find really fascinating, which is moons and the exo-moons, which is, you know, kind of even one step before. I mean, when I started graduate school, there were no exoplanets known for sure, just around the time the first ones were discovered. And now we're talking about exo-moons. And I want to talk about life, especially today, so important to, you know, us as a species to contemplate if we're alone, if we're not. As Arthur C. Clarke, the namesake of this podcast, who coined the term into the impossible, said, "Both outcomes are equally terrifying." Yeah. I want to ask you the following question. If we knew for sure, if God, Mother Nature, Gaia, your chancellor, I don't know, if they came and said to you, "David, there's no life on exoplanets," is it still worth studying? Is it still a topic worth studying?

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, I think studying exoplanets, one major motivation is, is indeed to look for life, but it's not the only motivation for sure. And I'm going to steal from my graduate student, Who use this phrase a lot. He said, there's two types of astronomers, those who want to understand how the mechanics of how the universe works. Like, what are the rules by which the universe fundamentally plays out? And I think maybe you might fall into that category. And there's maybe astronomers more like myself, who are primarily driven by this question of are we alone? And that's, that's the itch that we've had since we were children, trying to learn to answer. Now, if we ruled out still that there was life anywhere in the universe, which by the way is kind of an absurd proposition, but I'll play with your idea, but it is, it is obviously, it's, it's almost impossible to prove an absence.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  That's kind of an interesting philosophical aspect of this whole search is is the idea of us being alone even a valid scientific hypothesis because it's unforcible? You know, that's an interesting question to ask, I think. But let's just say we played the game that we, we did get to that point. There's still all the questions we might ask that's still on that more mechanical aspect of how do planets form? How do they evolve? How do they change? What is the chemistry of different worlds? What are the rules by which this whole universe plays out? If we wanted to make a simulation of, you know, a simulated universe one day, we need to know how, how the rules of physics play out and build these things. So just understanding our story, I mean, when we try to understand why the big bang happened or how do galaxies form?

• 5:39Speaker 04

  We're not doing it because we're driven by the question of life. We're doing it because we want to understand the story of the universe. And planets are just as much of an equal part of that story as a galaxy is, as a supermassive star is. So I would say if you take that away, it just puts us on the same footing as all of the questions in astronomy. But the fact we have that on top is just like this giant extra cherry that you put there.

• 6:02Brian Keating?

  It is really fascinating. I mean, it's the top one or two questions I always get, you know, ask my guests, what's the most interesting thing in the universe, even those that don't study astronomy? And it's, you know, how did the universe come to be? And, and the second one, or the first one for some people, I assume you is, uh, yeah, is, are we alone? Is there life elsewhere?

• 6:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:20Brian Keating?

  What's fascinating about what you do is you, you really are thinking, you know, four moves ahead. You know, you're thinking about the role that moons might play. And in, um, you know, appreciation for you coming. Coming out, I actually brought a piece of the moon, the Earth's moon. This is actually for you. This is a fragment of the Earth's moon, which is not delivered by the astronauts at NASA, if you're listening. It's a felony. It's a class one felony. Actually get moon rocks from, uh, from the Apollo program. But this was delivered by gravity. So a meteor hit the moon, destroyed some, yeah, made a crater or two, and then that debris floated out and eventually congealed. That's for you.

• 6:53Speaker 04

  Oh, I get he does. Really? I'm armed. Thank you so much.

• 6:57Brian Keating?

  I gave one to Joe Rogan and I think he smoked it. I haven't seen it since. Anyway, um, but my question is, you know, knowing that the moon plays a crucial role, at least in life on Earth, and the hypothesis in which it formed is, is sort of coming together. We had James Arnold, who's a professor here, is one of the founding Apollo scientists who worked on the mission. The, the question of, you know, the, the role that giant collisions play in the formation of moons, and then the role that moons play in life. Can you walk us through that and how probable it might be or improbable that such an event would occur on the moons that you study?

• 7:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's this idea of how the moon formed, which has kind of become canonical at this point, but still people are legitimately questioning it. That's one thing I like about science is that nothing's ever set in stone. But the canonical idea is that there was this Mars sized object that crashed into the Earth. We normally give it the name Thera. And, uh, it's interesting just where that Mars sized planet actually came from itself. I mean, there were, the solar system wasn't in the process of forming planets. Turns out when you look at the, you know, you simulate these collisions, you can't have these collisions happen too dramatically, too, with too much kinetic energy. Otherwise you, it's too destructive and you can actually end up destroying both bodies. So we have to have a fairly gentle impact.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  So one of the ideas is that Thera may have formed in the same orbit of the Earth at one AU from the sun, but it formed in one of the Trojan points in a horseshoe orbit. So this means it's kind of, uh, liberating around this horseshoe position. And essentially, if it's more than about 10% the mass of the Earth, any object there, its vibrations will kind of compound and build larger and larger. And so eventually, this wobbling got so big that it basically grazed and struck the Earth. And that impact was still extremely energetic. It largely vaporized Thera, but it left the the Earth, which would have been larger in the past. It would have been, you know, a super Earth essentially at this point. It stripped some of that upper mantle away. That upper mantle then formed the moon.

• 8:58Speaker 04

  And that's why the moon doesn't really have a significant core. It's primarily just essentially mantle like material from the Earth. We also know from the Apollo rocks that it has the same oxygen isotope ratio as Earth rocks. That's how we know it really, you know, this used to be a part of the Earth.

• 9:13Brian Keating?

  That's right.

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Went up to the moon and now it's come back down to where it belongs, back on the Earth. So this impact was, um, you know, it has lots of interesting coincidences. Like it has to have this this Thera type object, has to be just the right mass, has to be a grazing impact, not too hard. And also just the right angle. If you change the angle, you can actually destroy both bodies as well. So a lot of people have tried to simulate these realizations of this impact. But it raises the obvious question as to how often does that happen? And that's one of the, that's one of the reasons we want to look for exumens is to hopefully fill out that question. And the presence of a large moon does seem to have some benefits. By that large impact, it's thought, for instance, you may have stripped off a lot of that thick upper lithosphere that was forming on the Earth.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  And had that not happened, rather than having like a roughly 10 kilometer crust around the Earth, it could be 100 kilometers crust. And that'd be so thick that you wouldn't be able to have plate tectonics. You would form a stagnant lid, which is what Venus has. And things did not go well for Venus with the stagnant lid. So, you know, you can't have carbon recycling. You can't have the nitrogen, stuff, things like this. So you would end losing subduction and the ability of the Earth to recycle materials, which seems kind of crucial for the longevity of a biosphere.

• 10:26Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  So that seems, you know, a possible, I mean, this is speculative because we can't really redo the experiment, but I think it's a reasonable argument. We also know the moon has a large tidal influence on the Earth. It would have raised very large tides on the early Earth. It used to be a lot closer to us than it is today. Probably would have formed, how big? Probably like maybe 50 times larger in the sky, I would have guessed. You know, it'd be much, much closer.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  But I'd guess it'd be thirty if I was going to do the math because it's sixty Earth radii away from us and it probably formed about two Earth radii except the Roche, the Roche limit around the Earth. So I reckon it'd be about thirty times larger in the sky and it would have created these large, large tides. And when the land and continents first formed, these tides would have covered the entire land continent with, with these, with these tides for a period of time. And so it's thought that could be conducive for the emergence of life because one of the possible places that life could have formed is these little rock pools that, you know, where essentially concentrate chemistry through the process of evaporation. You get, you get these organics forming them. So that could be maybe where life began. And then finally, a third reason to think a moon is useful is the stabilization of the Earth's tilt,

• 11:35Speaker 04

  which is the thing actually people normally would start with in this argument of three. But yeah, that's been shown in a paper by Jacques Laskar, I think it was nineteen ninety three, in a famous nature paper, very well cited. And he showed that, you know, if you were to take the moon away and evolve the Earth's obliquity, because of the influence of Jupiter and the other gas giant planets, it would cause the Earth's obliquity to wander over millions of years. And so you would end up with periods of time where the, you know, the North Pole was essentially points at the sun and then six minutes later, the South Pole was pointed at the sun. It would give you a very different climate. You could imagine maybe simple life persisting, but agriculture, a civilization, maybe complex landlife might be harder to imagine.

• 12:17Brian Keating?

  First of all, let me compliment you further because your writing is sort of unique for me as an outsider in this field in that it's incredibly accessible to, you know, simple experimental cosmology.

• 12:28Speaker 00

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• 12:54Brian Keating?

  Just okay. So one of the frameworks that I, you know, can kind of translate from, you know, when I went to Paris for the first time, I, you know, I couldn't speak French despite four years of, of, of high school French. And I remember coming out of the metro and seeing a kid and he was playing with his dog and he was calling the dog and the dog was doing, I was like, that dog knows a lot more French than I do. But I saw, I'm going to read point correct, because, you know, I understand relativity and I'm gonna, I'm gonna get this right, you know, so I can translate your work on Bayesian frameworks into my language as a cosmologist.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  Well, I got it from cosmologists. I, I taught, I learned Bayesian statistics from cosmology.

• 13:28Brian Keating?

  And I think, so, yeah. I think a lot of the early Bayesian stuff came from your past guest and my past guest, Adam Reece and their team, they kind of pioneered that. We kind of neglect the influence that they had in the supernova type one A search. But I, I influenced by you and inspired by you, I decided to do a little Bayesian framework. And of course, I, I utilized my, my research assistant, her name is ChatGPT. And I asked the following question. If we, we know that the moon and even a Mars rock, which I have, which when you come next time or I come out to visit you, I'll bring the Mars rock. A good reason to visit again. Just keep clicking all this. Well, there's one more piece of swag I'm about to give you. So we know that the, that, you know, this rock came from, from the moon and other rocks came from Mars. Given

• 14:12Brian Keating?

  the fact that that occurs in that direction, certainly occurs in the reverse direction, namely that the earth has been bombarded by objects like this. This is your second gift. Let me, before I give it to you. So these are, of course, meteorites, which I collect. This one's from Argentina. And I do give these out to any member of the audience in the, in the USA, USA.edu email address. And I give them out to other people too, at briankeating.com/edu or slash list. I give it to you or students who get someone I can visit you. So this material came from, from space, but the inverse process where earth gets bombarded and its material goes on to Mars, that surely has occurred even over the period of the bombardment periods that, that you know much more about than I do. And during the period of time in which earth had life on it, you've talked in recent videos about how, you know, Fasund and how

• 14:57Brian Keating?

  vital and how rapid life could have originated on earth, even if it was brought from elsewhere. So that means for billions of years, earth and Mars have been exchanging material. And in particular, life, and we know that extremophiles from, you know, past guest and friend, I'm sure you know Jill Tarter, life finds a way, you know, as Jeff Goldberg said in Jurassic Park. I'm asking the following question, or ask ChatGPT, I don't know. What's the probability that you wouldn't find life on Mars? Just given that life exists on Earth, we're in very similar orbits and both habitable zones roughly, right? I ask, and it's actually, it's, it's, it seemed to be fairly probable. Obviously, you're going to do a much better analysis than I do. But what do you make of that argument?

• 15:35Brian Keating?

  Is it possible, is it not possible to say that we should see, we should be able to use this to constrain a little bit of the prior on how likely life is to evolve once there is life in a solar system? Does that question make sense, or is it?

• 15:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so.

• 15:51Brian Keating?

  I know it's not going to be like, of course, you can't prove the negative, as you said, but doesn't it give us some, you know, Bayesian credence value narrowing?

• 15:58Speaker 04

  What is the probability that Mars does not have life? And that life would have shared a common ancestry with Earth?

• 16:06Brian Keating?

  Yes, it's stipulate that life originally on Earth. And then it's made its way through panspermia, which is, you know, sounds dirty, but it's not. Fred Hoyle, who used to come to this very office to visit Jeff, the question is, yeah, so that if life is so, you know, easy to spread and so, so rapidly proceeding, given that we've been exchanging, you know, we've been sending care packages to Mars for over an hour and a half million years with life on it. So what the fact that we don't see life on Mars, at least yet, we haven't searched all of it, but we don't see obviously technological it. Can we not set a bound on the prior that of how difficult it is to kick off life on another planet?

• 16:41Speaker 04

  Yes, I think, yeah, if you, if you were to prove a negative on Mars, then there's two interesting consequences. One, it's, it would basically mean, yeah, okay, sure, maybe panspermia, even between two neighboring planets, is not a very efficient process of this taking place. And I think there's lots of credible reasons why one might be skeptical of that being effective. These rocks don't necessarily do a direct route, right? It's not, you know, if you, if you fly on, you know, Starship or something, maybe it would be like an 18 month trip from Earth to Mars, which is about as fast as we can go, but you wouldn't, but that's, you know, a coordinated Hoffman transfer orbit. You wouldn't expect that a random rock knocked off would necessarily follow such an efficient path.

• 17:22Speaker 04

  So I, I don't know what the typical timescale would be, but I can imagine these rocks spending millions of years out in the abyss before they eventually make their way to one of these. Planets. And then the question is, how long could a spore of life truly survive in in the vacuum of space? Now, we've exposed things like tardigrades and bacterial spores to the vacuum of space, and they have survived days, weeks, I think even months in the vacuum of space and be reanimated. I I don't think we can do the experiment where you simulate what a million years of that of that environment would be like for such a such an entity. So I think it's an open question as to whether it's really plausible.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  And of course, if you go really long, if you go to billions of years, like potassium, which is a key part of, you know, a lot of our chemistry decays on a one point three billion year half life. So a lot of your elements will actually start to, and carbon, yeah, has a six thousand years, a carbon thirteen. So, you know, some of your actual elements, if you're if you're just hanging out for a long time, would actually start to degrade. So that there must be a time scale which, no matter how well adapted you are for space, and it's kind of, obviously, these things did not evolve to be well suited for space, they're just hardy. There must be a time scale over which they cannot survive that journey. And so I guess the real question would be, how long do these rocks typically spend in the environment of space?

• 18:48Speaker 04

  And then what fraction of those then can survive the impact, which is going to be another, you know, extreme event for the rock to experience and for any life forms to experience that are attached to it. And then, once it's done both of those things, it then has to actually have, you know, metabolism and a food source and the ability to to respirate and to survive on that planet. So I think there's several steps there where you need like three miracles almost to happen. I'm I'm using it kind of playfully a little bit there, but you need three things which are not obviously easy to happen to take place. And it may be, maybe those things take place quite frequently. We didn't have no evidence to support that.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Um, and I think I could very well believe that this process is not particularly common. I think one of the things I've been most fascinated with panspermia, which has changed track a little bit, is with like Oumuamua and these interstellar asteroids that we now like Borisov as well, that we recently detected. And They are super intriguing because we used to think the idea of interstellar panspermia was an incredibly remote and implausible thing to consider.

• 19:56Brian Keating?

  And we've seen two.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  And then with Ommomua, we're realising actually the rate of interstellar interlopers is orders of magnitude higher than we previously thought reasonable. And that really opens the door because, you know, if Ommomua is flying through the solar system, some of those Ommomua's probably hit the Earth in the past. And they could have transferred life from an entirely different solar system, which could have had a five billion year head start.

• 20:20Brian Keating?

  And yes, RNA.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Right, so, and that's intriguing. And I know folks have, you know, tried to rewind the clock of, um, there was a paper that I talked about in one of my videos on LUCA, the lowest universal common ancestor, which existed 4.2 billion years ago, they're able to date it to. And the Earth only really had oceans 4.4 billion years ago. So within 200 million years, you don't just have LUCA, they show that there's a strong evidence that was an entire biosphere at this point, there was a higher, there was a colony and many, many interacting genomes that were going under horizontal gene transfer with each other. So there was, there was not just one single thing even then. And so it does seem almost implausibly fast how life got started.

• 21:03Speaker 04

  And panspermia, be it interstellar or from maybe from Mars, it certainly removes some of that tension a little bit. It makes it maybe easier to believe how such a complex organism could have evolved so quickly. So it's very intriguing.

• 21:16Brian Keating?

  So in your recent, uh, you had a recent paper on these, what, 70 cool giant exoplanets?

• 21:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:21Brian Keating?

  And their possible, uh, moon surveys. So that was a paper, we'll link to it, Exo Moon Survey of 70 Cool Giant Exoplanets. And the new candidate, Kepler 1708-B1.

• 21:32Speaker 04

  Just rings off the.

• 21:33Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Just that was at the time.

• 21:34Brian Keating?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, don't, don't judge a book by its cover. So talk about that. What, what was the, you know, kind of science behind it? How did you obtain, you know, time and data? And what is the methodology and specific techniques that you, and don't be afraid, you know? My podcast maybe I'll say is the brightest in the multiverse. So don't be afraid to get super, super deep into the technology of what you used and how you did it.

• 21:55Speaker 04

  You know, I've been looking for moons for like 15 years now in my career. It's been, you know, something I'm well known for and it's haunted me to try and do this search.

• 22:04Brian Keating?

  And to stop you, you say something like that. I have to stop. What is about moons that is so fascinating to you? Is it our moon? Did you have some experience with our moon?

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, to back to, I got really fascinated into this because almost by chance, I think, you know, obviously when I was a kid, space and the planets were fascinating, like many kids to me. And I remember having this annual of the book of all the planets and all the moons. And just being astonished by, you know, these photos from Galileo and Voyager of these distant worlds that were so alien and so different. You look at a picture of Europa or Callisto or Saturn and you're just like, wow, like this is real? This is really out there in our own backyard. So I think, you know, for me, it's always been obvious that moons were kind of the most diverse and terrestrial like, and that made them more interesting to me. But yeah, I kind of stumbled into moons a little bit by chance.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  And that was really because I was writing a paper on the transit, I was calculating the transit duration. So how long does it take a planet to transit its star? And I was trying to come up with a closed form solution for this problem. It's just a geometry problem. I'd made the first attempt of doing this with an eccentric orbit. Before then, everyone had just a circular orbit, which seemed reasonable because the planets in the solar system were mostly circular. So everyone assumed exoplanets would be the same way. But we were starting to get hints that actually exoplanets can be quite eccentric. So I generalized the calculation. And then I think the referee asked me, or maybe I was thinking in my head at some point, like what could make this calculation be wrong? Like where would, where would the, one of my assumptions be false?

• 23:37Speaker 04

  And one of the assumptions was, you know, this Keplerian orbit. One way to get a non-Kuplerian orbit would be if something was wobbling it. And so that's where I started down this path of thinking about the moons and how that would change things. And that got me excited because whenever you, you know, find a way to basically prove your idea is wrong, that becomes a way of detecting that thing.

• 23:56Brian Keating?

  Right.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  I started down this path and I just

• 23:59Brian Keating?

  That's really why I have to pause again. You're giving me too many good nuggets here. So I was up to to kind of double click on things that are of interest to young scientific researchers and what David just explained, you know, as a general principle. When you see a flaw, you know, I would say a flaw can lead to a new law. And that's exactly what you did. I mean, with the earth is an anomaly, as I understand it, in our solar system. Certainly, it's the only planet with one moon, right? And so you're thinking there could be some wobble, there could be some, and that could come from the the fact that like most stars, maybe most planets have multiple moons.

• 24:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, and it's really just an extension. I mean, there's

• 24:30Brian Keating?

  In the planets.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  There's a looking for a flaw in your theory to pick up on that piece of like, this is a new thing we can look for. But then there's also analogizing. So you can take the analogy of, okay, we are detecting lots of planets by looking at wobbling stars. That was the prime primary method at the time people were detecting planets. And so this is really just an extension of that. It's saying, well, let's just take that same principle and apply it on a smaller scale and see what see what falls out. So yeah, there's the there's, you know, I really love talking to colleagues in other fields and other disciplines, cosmologists, but also you know, totally other disciplines like chemistry and biology, because you you hear about the way they are thinking about problems.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  And you see so often in science that the the way problems are solved are transferable. Maybe you change the scale, maybe you shift an axis, but it's it's a lot of the same things being discovered multiple times, which are really just mirrors of each other.

• 25:27Speaker 00

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• 25:53Speaker 04

  So yeah, I took that, I took that idea and kind of ran with it. And I think personally, I just realized, it wasn't, I was, I mean, I liked moons a lot, but I really just liked new ideas primarily. And I realized at the time that I had a choice, I had kind of a fork in the road. I could either keep working on new ideas, and I do keep working on new ideas, but I could just totally leave the moons behind and just let other people figure it out. Or I felt like I had head start, you know, you're in a race to find the first whatever. And by virtue of all this modeling work I did, I knew I was probably the person, you know, it sounds a little bit cocky, but I knew at the time I was probably the most, I'd probably thought about X means harder than anyone else. And so I had an intellectual head start.

• 26:36Speaker 04

  And so if anyone was gonna do it, I probably had an advantage, I had an ace up my sleeve to pull that off. So I thought, yeah, it's a bit of a risk. And I remember a colleague saying to me, I remember at a cocktail party, a professor, an esteemed professor at MIT said to me, um, David, why are you doing this? Like, why don't you look for hot Jupiters? They're everywhere, they're really easy to find, like you can write so many papers. Why do, why are you trying to look for, for moons? That's, you're not gonna publish any papers. And I knew rationally what he was saying made sense from a career perspective. But it just didn't excite me to do something that had been done a hundred times over just wasn't as exciting as doing something that had never been done.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  That fresh snow, you know, it's like going out to the pistes and you've got two tracks, you've got the heavily plowed track and you've got that fresh snow. I'm going down the fresh.

• 27:23Brian Keating?

  It's so funny because I, I made this point in my, in my first book about Galileo. So he didn't invent the telescope, we know that. He had an incredible amount of success like you, I'm gonna compare you to Galileo. With moons as well, he discovering the moons of Jupiter, which he decided to name after his funding agency. The Bedeche, he was, he was smart. But when he discovered it, he realized if I make these telescopes and give them away or even sell them, I'm gonna be out of business, you know, I won't be able to make all the discoveries on the fresh snow as, as David just spoke about. So instead he published the instruction manual without the equipment. So it's kind of the opposite of what we do now. Now we put out an iPhone, no instruction manuals needed. But he put out the Sidereus Nuntius and that just showed what you can see if only you had it. And he even denied it to Cap

• 28:03Brian Keating?

  You don't let them use it. So it's again, it's a very brilliant thing to do as a scientist to see when you can make a new contribution, even if your older, you know, gray haired colleagues don't recommend it, you know, right? So this is a way that you can make progress, being the first has a monopolistic advantage sometimes. So how do you know when you've seen an exo moon, for example?

• 28:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. So in this, in this, maybe to come back to this paper, the way, the way we are looking, I mean, there's many ways to look, but the way I think is the most plausible way of getting a success is to look for transiting moons. So transiting planets is the most successful method we have of detecting planets.

• 28:37Brian Keating?

  It's Kepler's.

• 28:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is things like the NASA Kepler mission. And before that, there was this European mission called Coro. There's also many ground based surveys called like WASP, PATNET, TRAYS before that. So there's a whole bunch of these surveys looking for planets. We're, we're using that same technique and we're piggybacking off that success because A, they've already taken huge amounts of data. So we don't have to build an exo moon telescope. The data's already been taken in all these, in all those telescopes. And B, we know this technique is incredibly precise. So the smallest exoplanet detected is about the size of the moon, transiting a star. So we know moon sized planets are detectable with this method. And if a planet has a moon, then as it transits in front of the star, it causes of course this dip in light, a very tiny dip in light.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  And if there's a moon, it will cause next to it either before or just after, or maybe on right on top, if you're unlucky, but it will cause an extra dip in light. And it's that extra dip we look for. And obviously that extra dip will be transient in its location. That makes it a little bit harder. I mean, with a, with a transiting planet, once you've got the period, you know exactly pretty much where it's going to be every time. So you go to the telescope, you can really predict and dial in exactly what it's going to be. And you can stack all your data and, you know, get this kind of binning effect to build it to signal to noise. We can't do that with exo moons. We can't stack data in the same way. And so that has been one of the challenges of looking for this type of signal. And of course, also it's a very small signal. I mean, you look at the moons in the solar system, the biggest moon is Ganymede.

• 30:07Speaker 04

  And Ganymede, I think is about 2% roughly the mass of the earth. So it's about 40% the size of the earth. But you know, even though that sounds good, point four, the transit signal goes as point four squared, because it goes as the as a square of the radius. So yeah, that's a that's a small, a point one six, that's a very small signal for us to try and grab.

• 30:26Brian Keating?

  What are some of the systematic or biases that you have? Do you have a bias effect that you're more sensitive to shorter period rotations or or you know, orbits of of the moons?

• 30:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, generally moons which are far away from their planet are best for us. All things being equal, so keep the mass equal, the size equal, everything else, the only if you just change the distance, the further away it is, the better. There's two reasons why. One, I mean, there's really two signals that we're looking for. One is the signal which I wrote about during my PhD thesis, which is this wobble. And that's what really inspired me into this journey of exo moons. And yeah, the the moon will gravitationally tug on the planet. And so as Kepler showed, things don't, you know, and really Newton showed more rigorously, things don't orbit a a single point, they orbit a common center of mass. And so the planet will undergo this slight oscillation around that center of mass. And

• 31:17Speaker 04

  that wobble will cause the times of transit to slightly vary. So we call these transit timing variations or TTVs. For the Earth moon system, it's about two and a half minutes. So I always think this is kind of fun, like an alien seeing the Earth transit the Sun would sometimes see the Earth transit two and a half minutes earlier and sometimes two and a half minutes later because of the moon. So they wouldn't know the moon was there. That's actually a pretty decent signal. Yet more, I think, you know, I'm probably the only person who thinks this, but when we do our sort of calendar of like when January, New Year's Eve, like when does the when does the clock strike 12? We should really account for that two and a half minutes. Yeah, moon minute. We should look at where the moon phases

• 31:58Speaker 04

  and adjust the the time. So yeah, maybe I'll do a New Year's party where we'll we'll ride the maserati and correct for that that barycentric motion. So yeah, this this effect is is in there. And then the other effect we look for is just the dip itself, which I talked about, the dip of the moon blocking out starlight. That so they give us different things. The dip gives us the size of the moon, physically how big it is, and the wobble gives us the mass. So once you've got mass and size or radius, then you can figure out the bulk composition. Position, the density. I forgot if it's icy moon, rocky moon, things like that. That's kind of the hope. So yeah, we took this, this sample of seventy exoplanets and we just scanned through them looking for these signals. And this, the reason why we did seventy, there's five thousand exoplanets out there. Like, why, why do these seventy?

• 32:40Speaker 04

  It's a very, it's a pretty small subset. We concluded they were pretty much the most likely to, to give us a success. Because they are really far from our star and they're really big. So they're basically the most Jupiter-like things that we have. And yes, Earth-like planets could have moons, but we can barely detect the Earths anyway. In fact, Kepler found zero true Earth twins. It's basically just impossible for Earth, for Kepler's precision to find true Earth twins. But Jupiter's, we have plenty of those. So, uh, well, plenty, we have about seventy. So we figured that would be a nice sample to go after. And amongst that seventy, we looked for all of these effects and we had this one object. Which, uh, really stood out and looked like potentially the real deal. Yes, Kepler seventy.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  That's Kepler seventeen oh eight B dash I.

• 33:26Brian Keating?

  And you talk about it as a good scientist should, you know, as still awaiting confirmation or needing it. What would confirmation come from? I mean, I'm not a Kepler right now. So what, what are you looking forward to in the future for confirmation potentially?

• 33:37Speaker 04

  For a particular object to confirm it, we would probably need J, J B S T to look at this object unfortunately. Or another Kepler, like you just build another Kepler as opposed to do it. We wrote a paper that actually proved that Hubble was not sensitive enough to detect it, which is surprising because Hubble is a big emirors, two point four meters. Kepler is one meter, but the difference is the systematics. So Hubble is in orbit of the Earth and thus it is corrupted. The data is polluted by many systematics such as thermal cycling, various sort of instrumental effects with these infrared detectors which, which creep in. Whereas, uh, Kepler was an optical CCD, so it's a much simpler instrument. Doesn't have any spectrograph or anything on board. So it's like, it's just a little rocket, super simple. And so you get really, really precise data and it does it for two hundred thousand stars simultaneously.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  So therefore you can use those other two hundred thousand stars to decorrelate and clean your data. So you can do a really nice job with Kepler data. So it's kind of amazing. Like Kepler actually is more precise for that, for that object at least than, than Hubble would be. So yeah, we would need to go back with J B S team. We have two exo moon candidates that we have proposed in literature so far. And both cases, you would probably need to go back with one of these super sized telescopes. And you would want to see the transit of of the moon.

• 34:48Brian Keating?

  The the ground based terrestrial telescopes like the giant Magellan or are you saying space?

• 34:54Speaker 04

  I think you probably, I mean, do from the ground is hard because both of these objects, they they take so long to transit their star. So the transit is, I think, around about 20 hours.

• 35:03Brian Keating?

  Wow.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  So you just can't do that.

• 35:05Brian Keating?

  0.1%.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  Unless you're unless you're in the North Pole or South Pole, right? You can't get a night that's that long. So, yeah, one of the reasons why we use space is because we can observe for more than a rotation period of the Earth. The JDST data that we collected in October was 60 hours. I mean, you can't do a 60 hour time series from from the Earth.

• 35:22Brian Keating?

  No way. All right. About what was it like to use JDST? I mean, you're one of the, you know, there are more people in the NBA than have actually gotten good months on JDST. So, yeah, so talk about that that process and and what you gleaned from it that, you know, was complimentary or perhaps, you know, in a way better than some of the previous data sets that you had.

• 35:42Speaker 04

  It's an honor to get to use this fantastic facility. It it's a huge responsibility in a way because it's $10 billion that that taxpayers have spent.

• 35:53Brian Keating?

  I would say it's $10 billion to to build it, to operate, it's a billion dollars.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Right, right. And then, of course, that's not even counting the launch cost, which the Europe, I think the Europeans or the Canadians ate that launch cost. So, yeah, it it's it's an expensive machine. I mean, it's kind of like going to CERN, right? And having full control over the Large Hadron Collider to do whatever you want for 60 hours. It's kind of ridiculous, like.

• 36:15Brian Keating?

  And not like your bona fide is. I mean, you're one of the most, you know, highly cited or recognized astronomers of the world. And they don't know who you are when you propose, right? It's it's like double blind or triple blind.

• 36:24Speaker 04

  It's double blind. I suspect they can figure it out because well, we the target we proposed for. This is not one of those two previous ex o moon candidates. And that was strategic. Both of those ex o moon candidates are Neptune sized moons around super Jupiter. And the reaction we got from the community was basically BS. Like, how could you have? They just couldn't believe that you can make a moon that big. Was even though theorists are very creative and have shown you could make moons that big. But you know, in retroactively.

• 36:54Brian Keating?

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• 37:34Brian Keating?

  And you can do me a great, huge and fast free favor by tapping on a rating of your own and leaving me that beautiful five star gleaming asterism that will make Orion's Belt shine with envy. Now back to the episode.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  But there was no prediction of such a moon.

• 37:49Brian Keating?

  And neither was there prediction of a hot Jupiter.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  Correct. That's, that'll be exactly my response. But you know, you just have to, we proposed several times with Hubble to go after those moon candidates. And persistently we were rejected. And not only rejected, but ranked very, very low in the rankings. They just really hated our proposal. So we, we realized we had to change strategy. And so instead of going after those two controversial moon candidates. I don't think they're controversial, by the way, but, but I have to concede that there is controversy around them. We went after a fresh planet and this planet was a planet I actually discovered myself back in, I think, 2018. And it's called Kepler 167 E. And it, I guess, you know, the best way to think about it is it is the most Jupiter like exoplanet we have found

• 38:36Speaker 04

  transiting another star. I would make that claim. It is within 1% the mass of Jupiter, within 10% the radius of Jupiter. It's on a circular orbit. It's on a three year period. So it's about two, two, two and a half AU from its star. And it has a multi-planet system and its orbit is perfectly circular, it's on the exterior of of three or four rocky planets on the inside. So it really just looks like, you know, this is as close to Jupiter as we could really hope for. And so our intuition and our claim was if anything's going to have a series of exo-moons, it's going to be this guy. And not only should this thing really, really have exo-moons, unless we totally don't understand how moons form, because both Saturn and Jupiter have a whole ton of these things. But not only

• 39:19Speaker 04

  that, but we really should detect them. And so we showed with the simulator of the James Webb data, that if you take the Galilean moon system, named after a gentleman here, and inject it into the fake data, there he is, 400 years, just over 400 years ago, he discovered the first moon, so we're trying to carry on his legacy, that Callisto and Ganymede, we should be able to detect. Io, Europa are a little bit too close, I mean, we talked about things too close are harder, so we probably couldn't get Io and Europa, at least not yet, with the current data. But we think that, yeah, Callisto and Ganymede, we really should detect, to 95% of injections, we get one of those moons back. So that was our confidence, right, 95% retrieval rate. So

• 40:01Speaker 04

  that was our pitch, and I think three other teams actually pitched to do the same thing. And so, yeah, they are all blind, but I would hope, I haven't seen any of the proposals, that ours was legitimately the best. And I think that's because we did a huge amount of that injection recovery work, of really proving the whole end-to-end simulation of what we think we can get and how we would analyze the data. And I think that's where you get to pull out your ace card, right, because I've been doing this for 15 years, so I know all the tricks, right, and I think you can show that off. I think that's probably why I would guess whoever you would know it was me, because there's not, there's not a huge number of exo-moon people. It's another benefit of being monopoly power. Yeah, and I talk about this on Cool World, there's also people who already know the fact that exo-moon skipping kind of goes together a little bit at this point. Yeah, I suspect they

• 40:45Speaker 04

  probably knew it was me, but in principle, the double-blind that is there to, yeah, stop biases against, you know, race, or gender, or seniority. And so, you know, that's, I'm all in favor of that, makes the process actually kind of easier for us in terms of preparing that proposal. And yeah, we got the time. We observed in end of October. I think it was over Halloween. We were observing like twenty seventh to thirty first, pretty much. It was sixty hours of data. So that's a profound thing. You're looking up at the sky and obviously you can't see those TV, you can kind of roughly see where it would be in the sky. And you can think to yourself like it's actually kind of profound that right now there is that little tiny telescope out there.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  Big by human standards, but tiny compared to the cosmos. That is, you know, ten billion dollars of human effort and labor. And I am, I am pouring all of my hopes and destiny into, into what it's going to find right now, others observing. It is, it's a strange thought to go to sleep at night thinking that. And so the first thing we did, we did a reaction video. We didn't, we haven't put on cool odds yet. We'll probably eventually show it. Uh, you know, we, we have this sort of plan as, as cool as listeners know, that we don't want to sort of live, um.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, we don't want to do live updates at every little minutia of, of things in the analysis. As we're doing it, because it's, when I'm working on science, I want to keep my, I want to be very objective and focused. And I think as much as I love social media, it can be a distraction when you're really focused on a scientific goal of trying to give people what they want or what they hope to see. And as objective as you can try to be, we all are human and we can all be seduced by that. So I don't want to get even risk getting pulled into that, uh, into that game. So I made the conscious decision that, yeah, we'll try and keep, um, you know, video logs and things of what's happening.

• 42:33Brian Keating?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:34Speaker 04

  But we'll show that at the end, once we know either way, what the answer is. So the reaction video we shot was getting the data for the first time. And, uh, you know, we, Ben was plotting the light curve and I could see the point, there was like, there's like a million points. Cause we take an image every one point six seconds of this star, right? Uh, over sixty hours, there's a huge number of points, hundreds of thousands of data points. And so you can see this like plot populating and we'd, and it's flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat. And we're like, oh God, is there, is there going to be a planet there? And then suddenly it dips down and we're like, oh, thank God. At least the planet is, we didn't, we didn't screw that up because.

• 43:09Brian Keating?

  You could blame Kepler.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, you blame them. Missed it, right? You know, you've got a three year orbit. Right. And you have to hit that 60 hour right in the nail. Yeah. What if you slightly miscalculated, right? That would, that's kind of the, um, the imposter syndrome fear that you have. But like, maybe I screwed up this like very simple calculation and wasted 10 billion dollars.

• 43:28Brian Keating?

  The man, yeah, exactly.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  So.

• 43:31Brian Keating?

  Well, unfortunately, it's only a fraction of it. Um, you, you mentioned the, you know, kind of that, that the dual.

• 43:38Speaker 00

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• 44:07Brian Keating?

  Now, a mission that you're on, which is, which is obviously, you know, primarily as a scientist, professor, researcher, uh, but also this, this secondary mission, which is of huge importance, probably reaches more people, um, you know, than the, you know, even the highest citation count that paper that you have, which is quite high. Um, how do you balance that? Um, my feeling is that I, I am more strident probably than you might be, but you know, it's kind of, I'm a born New Yorker, not a transplant immigrant New Yorker like yourself. Uh, but that's that. I, I think we scientists have a moral obligation to communicate what we do in terms of the public and understand.

• 44:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:40Brian Keating?

  Um, and we should do that frequently because any other person, you know, the, the carpenter who fixes the door in this office, if he were to come in, I said, oh, what are you doing? He said, oh, you can't understand what I'm doing. Like I'm doing something so specialized, took so much training and you want me just to do this? No, no, he'd be fired, right? So how do you react to that? Uh, a lot of, you know, our fellow YouTube, uh, there's like Sabina, uh, Hosenfelder, uh, who's a good friend, you know, she said, no, scientists should do what they do, stay in the lab. If they want to do it, they can do it. I say you're denying somebody the opportunity to give back to, you know, pay a moral debt in some sense, but also it's really fun to do it and it's good for the students and it's good for the, you know, scientists to get exposure to it. But what are your thoughts? I mean, do you think we should, you know, it should be part of your, uh, JST grant? You know, you should have some budget, not just you, but you're already doing it some reason to the choir. How do you react to that?

• 45:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there's two aspects that when I, before I directly answer your question, I'll sort of talk about my motivation for doing the channel. I sometimes got frustrated reading scientific articles or YouTube videos or whatever it was, or podcasts that were secondhand material, right? So I want to hear about the Human Genome Project or something. But rather than hearing from the scientists involved directly, you hear about it from a skilled journalist, but it's still, you've gone through a middleman. You've had some kind of Chinese whispers kind of taking place, the game of telephone, as they say. And so I got frustrated with that because I wanted to hear directly from the people in the trenches, what was happening and what it was like.

• 46:09Speaker 04

  And so when I started my channel, that was my inspiration, was I wanted to provide people the voice from scientists themselves. I think it's important that the people hear from the scientists themselves. Else, how else could the public have trust in what we're doing? If we're always detached and removed from them with several layers of protection in between. I mean, you know what it's like with YouTube? The audience builds a relationship with you by watching and they get to know that, you know, your doubts and your skepticism and your beliefs. And they get to feel a sort of level of trust that this person is credible and they're going to speak out when they see something wrong and they're going to tell you the way it really is. And that's very fresh and I think there's a real appeal and desire for that.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  I think that's why many, such as yourself and other YouTubers, have been so successful with what they're doing. In terms of the moral obligation to do that work, maybe I'm sort of in between you and Sabine in that sense. I would say that any large organization or team, I agree, does have an obligation to share their results and talk about it. But I don't believe that necessarily every single scientist in the team should do that work. There are some brilliant scientists and grad students I can think of who are very, very good at doing that detailed, technical calculation work. But maybe they're just very introvertous and they do not do well when put in front of a

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Camera and yes, you can, you know, train people and, and, and help them in that journey. But there are some people who just really don't want to do that. And why should they when the other person in the team is excelling at that thing? So I think as long as we have representatives from, uh, from the, from fields and from teams and from disciplines, then we're serving that, that goal of trying to share. And by having podcasts, especially that's a particularly great way because then you can really bring in people who maybe aren't. I hope maybe I'm not in that category, I hope, but not as skilled at science communication as usual. But you, as the host, can kind of guide them through it to make it a more organic and engaging experience.

• 48:16Brian Keating?

  Most popular, you know, videos are with, you know, people I, I totally out of the blue, you know, some extremely, you know, accomplished brilliant theoretical physicists who studies extra dimensions and graviton, you know, uh, uh, in wormhole. It's just like, no, it's gonna understand that, but they, they really shine and the audience really takes to it. They, my sense is there's, there's a thirst for it and, and part of the reason is because, uh, and I don't think they should, you know, every grad student should be on YouTube, but I was thinking more of blogs and, and just, you know, but public speaking is a very valuable skill, you know, as well as I do, that, you know, there's more to being a professor than just being smart, right? There's marketing, there's sale. I mean, Galileo was a master of this, like he, he sold his products, he sold his, his books, but he was also very, uh, very, very wise and, and knowledgeable and cunning in some ways.

• 48:59Brian Keating?

  One of the things that, that really appeals to, to me about YouTube is that it's two way. You know, we write a paper, yeah, the ref, two referees, you know, might read it if we're lucky. Uh, I've refereed nature papers where I'm the only referee, it's crazy. But, um, YouTube, we have our favorite, you know, section, the comment section. Hey, so, uh, it's a two-way avenue where they really feel like they can communicate with people. I feel like that is a service that we, you know, we, we do owe to the extent that we have the privilege of a platform to, to extend to, but.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. The, the other aspect that I, I want to touch on is, um, I know if, uh, interested to hear your thoughts on this, is the asymmetry it kind of creates when you become a successful public communicator of science. As I think, yeah, we, we both have had some success in that degree. And it creates then what can be, it obviously is like the lowest level, like jealousy and envy amongst your colleagues for the fact that you get to. Have this larger platform. So if I write a paper, uh, we did it in our last video. Our research videos never do as well. By the way, they never, I never make a research video. Less people are going to be interested in them when I talk about, you know, the universe or something. But it's, it's part of our brand that we always have that authentic connection to real research.

• 50:05Brian Keating?

  Real science.

• 50:06Speaker 04

  But it's, it's an incredible advantage that I have if you think about it. So every paper I get, I write in my team, we could in principle at least have a hundred thousand people uh, hear about it.

• 50:16Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  And that's just like by normal astronomy standards, that's ridiculous. Cause as you said, like maybe two people would normally hear about the paper. And so I do, maybe I overthink it too much, but I worry about the fact I'm creating like an unfair playing field for myself by having that advantage. And also it comes with responsibilities of um, being critical. So if I want to be critical of someone else's work, which is par for the course in academia, right? That's how academia works is science works by criticizing, by skepticism and by building upon other ideas and iterating. Right. That, that's how science works. But if you do that on a platform where you bring in hundreds of thousands of people every day,

• 50:55Speaker 04

  the scientists who you are criticizing, maybe not unreasonably, will feel very victimized by that process. And I've had that, I've experienced that. I've had academics write to me really like very upset and offended emails. Um, and I

• 51:10Brian Keating?

  They want to ask me to take down a video.

• 51:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And, and then, and then, yeah, how do you deal with that? What is the, that, that's where I struggle a little bit as a communicator.

• 51:18Brian Keating?

  You're right. I mean, it is, it is sort of this outsized, you know, magnifying glass, which is so funny because, you know, if you told your, your twenty year old self, you know, whatever twenty, twenty years ago, you know, that you'd be a podcaster, you'd be a U T P. What is this? Like, it didn't exist, right? Um, and let alone also as a professor, you knew what that was. But, you know, it's a privilege to have it and I, I guess the, the, you know, all we can hope is that we, we should be allowed, you know, one of my friends talks about an accuracy budget, like you should be able to talk in public and not be expected to be Wikipedia or Chat G P T in that, yeah, you might get some of your colleagues things, maybe not a hundred percent perfect. Yeah. I was talking about loop quantum gravity or whatever, but I'm talking about it with my expertise, which is as an experimentalist. You were looking at as a theorist in general and you can assess things, even if it's

• 52:02Brian Keating?

  outside your field, especially all the more so if it's inside your field. I think to be, I think for every, it's like, I think everyone should have a budget of how many complaint emails they write to airlines, but also how many compliments or emails or chocolates that they give to stewards, stewards, whatever they call them here, hosts. Because I think if it's only one way, it does present sort of a bias.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  But if you're only critical and you never raise anyone up, you just push people down.

• 52:27Brian Keating?

  And similarly, if I only champion my students and my research, it's kind of backhanded way of complimenting me. So I do try to highlight people in my collaboration rooms. Think they're the most brilliant people I get to spend my life with, a large part of my day with, rather. But I think, you know, we shouldn't feel so much pressure that we shouldn't be able to talk about it. A, because you're getting attention to their work and you're not criticizing it, you're not doing ad hominem attacks. I mean, I've seen those videos that you do, they're fabulous. And they bring in a whole host of people that would otherwise be completely ignorant of, again, what their tax dollars are supporting. I mean, again, the awesome responsibility that you felt when you're wielding this $10 bill that was paid for by taxpayers in different countries and I'm at a public university, but you're at a private, still you get public funding. So I think it's good to think that

• 53:12Brian Keating?

  way. And the last thing I'll say about it is it's good for the students and the scientists to learn how to communicate, to do a little bit of what we do, salesmanship and saleswomanship, whatever you want to call it. We have to be convincing, we have to make an argument, we have to have a certain amount of charisma, but yes, not abuse.

• 53:26Speaker 00

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• 53:55Brian Keating?

  Certainly not. I don't feel like we're in that field. There are people that do a lot of clickbait. Like I told you, I had Neil deGrasse Tyson on this and I asked my comment section, as I asked for you, what kind of questions that they want you to answer? And it's all about your stance on woke politics. But Neil, it was, yeah, I was like, when is he gonna get, you know, Apologize for being so what? And I'm like, I'm not gonna ask him like, that's not fair. I could ask him. We did get into it. I mean, I did ask him stuff about gender and his field, but I wanted to.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:22Brian Keating?

  I want him to express his opinion on Elon Musk going after. I mean, imagine like you feel this pressure going after, you know, rich academics, right? Imagine Elon Musk is like going after you and saying, you got this because of X, Y, and Z. I think the more you can use it to highlight science, to be a champion of science. We're all inspired by other scientists. We stand on the shoulders of giants. And I think what you do is just so commendable because it's, it's, it's well done. I was joking, you know, like people expect if the lights off or the videos off, like we're doing a Netflix special. You do Netflix. I mean, I legitimately thought some of your videos were in a, in a studio or, I mean, it's so the, the quality, the attention to detail. And then on top of that, the rigor of science, it's no wonder why it's become so popular. You're almost at a million.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  I know you asked me about the, the green screen. I'm sorry.

• 55:04Brian Keating?

  You don't.

• 55:06Speaker 04

  Dude, because I have these videos actually like, is that green screen? Like, no, that's just, that's just okay. Yeah.

• 55:10Brian Keating?

  That's what someone says like, oh, your hair. Do you, what, what do they use to color your hair? I'm like, nothing yet. You know, it's like, it's, it's a big, so one of the comments that I had, and I, we have to run to lunch with our colleagues in a few minutes, but I want to ask my panel the final four questions. But one of the questions came from a listener and I always solicit questions on my YouTube channel, Twitter, X. You can find both of us on those platforms. Is about will the upcoming missions Jupiter IC moons, a juice mission, the Europa Clipper, will those be informative at all to your research? Or are they just kind of be interesting to you as a, as a, as an astronomer, as a scientist, as a, as a human?

• 55:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's kind of in between those two. Obviously, the, the kind of information that Europa Clipper will catch, which is like in the early 2030s, is going to be incredibly detailed compared to what we get for exo moons, right? So for exo moons, I think all we can really realistically hope to measure is their mass, their radius, their orbit, the basic properties that we often have for exoplanets as well. We are starting, well, we have already collected the atmospheric data of many exoplanets. And I think we could expect to do similarly for large exo moons in the future. If these Neptune sized moons are real, they're certainly be quite suitable for that. But with Europa Clipper, I mean, you are, you are. Making images at sort of a meter scale, potentially with these close flybys,

• 56:29Speaker 04

  where you can see individual fragments of ice blocks, you know, moving and moving around. There's absolutely no way that that is comparable to what we can do, nor does it give us a huge amount of influence into our observations, because that's all just lost in the noise, I mean, that kind of level of detail. But I do think it informs us in terms of, you know, if we see an I6O moon, and we could probably tell that because of the mass and the radius, we'd be like, okay, this is likely something that looks consistent with Europa. Then we could look at the detailed information we have of Europa and say, okay, some of the predictions would be maybe you'd get a plume, for instance, now and again. Enceladus in particular has these large plumes quite often.

• 57:08Brian Keating?

  Yeah.

• 57:09Speaker 04

  And so that's interesting, because if you scale that up a little bit, and similarly, Io often has these volcanic outbursts. If you just scale those up by a factor of two or three, imagine a super Io, a super Enceladus, then we might start to have a chance of detecting those phenomena. Those plumes, as they come out, would create a cloud that we could detect spectroscopically. So I think we can, again, by analogy, say like, yeah, that what's happening there isn't detectable with our observations, but we can imagine a way of scaling it up that we could get it.

• 57:36Brian Keating?

  Oh, fascinating. Yeah, so that's another way of, you know, leveraging tools from another. It doesn't sound like it, but as you said, Kepler just had a photometer, it didn't have a spectrometer. Imagine if it had, you know, spectroscopy ability. Again, your dictate of kind of looking for tools from other dimensions, and even though to a layperson doesn't sound like another, spectroscopy is different from, you know, astronomy or, you know, the driven from photometry than, you know, chemistry is from gardening or whatever. David, we're running out of time. I always like to ask one final question, inspired by the namesake of this podcast, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, who said the following, he said, "The only way of determining the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible." I like to use that as a vehicle jumping off point. We have a lot of young people listening.

• 58:19Brian Keating?

  If you could go back, spend 20 minutes with your younger self, 20-year-old self, what would you tell him to give him the courage to go into the impossible as you've done?

• 58:27Speaker 04

  I think maybe stop messing around so much.

• 58:30Brian Keating?

  How do you mean?

• 58:31Speaker 04

  When I was young, I think I was a little bit, well, I was a naughty kid at school, that's for sure. I misbehaved a lot. I was not a very studious child. And I didn't really get serious about my academic studies until I was sort of like... Maybe eighteen nineteen. And so, yeah, I messed around a lot. And I kind of, yeah, I do regret that a little bit that I, you know, I feel like when you're young, your brain is a sponge. And I wish I was more well read and using an opportunity to just ingest as much as I could. I was reading the biography of Isaac Newton on the, on the plane ride over. And it was talking about how at age twenty four, you know, during the plague, he basically invented all of modern physics, you know, for like the classic classical one of physics.

• 59:17Speaker 04

  And I was thinking like, wow, when I was twenty four, I was, I was not nowhere near that level of seriousness. This guy was like, you know, and when he was a child, he was already, you know, building water mills in rivers and things at like age, you know, eleven, twelve to see how water flows and was studying it very detailed. And so, yeah, I kind of wish I'd, I'd applied myself a bit more. I regret, I regret those, the, you know, how much, I think it's important to have fun and to mess around. But, you know, I like, I think, I think Arnold Schwarzenegger said this once, that every time you're partying, you're horsing around, just remember there's someone out there who is working their butt off to try and get ahead of you. And it is, you know, when you look at graduate school

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  applications now and getting to Ivy League schools, it is so competitive that you really have to, you know, I feel an enormous sympathy for students who are applying to these schools these days. But you really do need to have that kind of, not all, all your time, but a fraction of your time, you need to be applied and thinking about your future in a more serious way than I think I did. And I think I would be probably more academically well rounded had I, had I done so. So, yeah, I kind of regret that a little bit. But at the end of the day, you are who you are and you can't go back in time and change things. So it is what it is.

• 1:00:37Brian Keating?

  Certainly had much of a negative impact on your career today. And I always point out, you don't want to emulate Newton too much because he died a virgin. And that was his, he called that his biggest accomplishment. We'll talk about that next time. David Kevi, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Brief, we have a million other questions from me and from my audience. We'll do a part two and you're out here again. I'd love to have you back. And I'm really looking forward to your colloquium today. I'm gonna be super nerded out. And I just love, I love diving deep into other fields and you're, thank you so much for what you do for science.

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  Hey, it's, it's great. And I hope to get you on my podcast when you come to New York.

• 1:01:09Brian Keating?

  That's a deal.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  January. Yeah.

• 1:01:10Brian Keating?

  Thanks a lot.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:01:11Brian Keating?

  If you enjoyed this interview, I know you're gonna love my conversation on how Kepler discovered 5,000 exoplanets with Jason Stephan, one of the leaders of the Kepler mission and its subsequent data analysis. See you next week on Into the Impossible.

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

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