Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
constantine bategan
planetary astrophysicist at caltech
interested in
among other things the search for the
distant the mysterious
planet nine in the outer regions of our
solar system quick mention of our
sponsors
squarespace literati on it and
and i check them out in the description
to support this podcast
as a side note let me say that our
little sun is orbited by
not just a few planets in the planetary
region but trillions of
objects in the kuiper belt and the oort
cloud that extends over three
light years out this to me is amazing
since proxima centauri
the closest star to our sun is only 4.2
light years away
and all of it is mostly covered in
darkness
when i get a chance to go out swimming
in the ocean far from the shore
i'm sometimes overcome by the terrifying
and the exciting feeling of not knowing
what's there
in the deep darkness that's how i feel
about the edge of our solar system
one day i hope humans will travel there
or at the very least
ai systems that carry the flame of human
consciousness
this is the lex friedman podcast and
here's my conversation
with constantine bategan
what is planet nine planet nine
is an object that we believe
lives in the solar system beyond the
orbit of neptune it orbits the sun
with a period of about 10 000 years
and uh is about five earth masses
so that's a hypothesized object there's
some evidence
uh for this kind of object there's a
bunch of different explanations
can you give like an overview of the
planets in our solar system how many are
there
what do we know and not know about them
at a high level
all right that sounds like a good plan
so look the solar system
basically is comprised of two parts the
inner and the outer solar system
the inner solar system has the planets
mercury venus
earth and mars now mercury is about
40 percent of the orbital separation
of where the earth is is closer to the
sun venus
about 70 percent uh then mars is about
160 further away from the sun than is
the earth
these planets that we uh one of them
we occupy right are pretty small okay
they're
too leading order sort of heavily
overgrown asteroids
if you will um and this is
this becomes evident when you move out
further
in the solar system and encounter
jupiter which is 316
earth masses right 10 times the size
you know and saturn is another huge one
90 earth masses at about 10 times
uh the separation from the sun this is
the earth and then you have uranus and
neptune
at 20 and 30 respectively for a long
time
that is where the kind of massive
part of the solar system ended
but what we've learned in the last 30
years
is that beyond neptune there's this
expansive field of icy debris a second
icy asteroid belt in the solar system a
lot of people have
heard of the asteroid belt which lives
be between
mars and jupiter right like that's a
pretty common thing that people like to
imagine and draw on lunch boxes and
stuff but beyond neptune
there's a much more massive much more
radially
expansive field of debris pluto by the
way
it belongs to that second
you know icy asteroid belt which we call
the kuiper belt it's just a big
object within that population of bodies
oh pluto
the planet pluto the the dwarf planet
the former planet
you know why is pluto not a planet
anymore
i mean it's tiny were you used to size
matters when it comes to planets
100 100 it's a actually a fascinating
story
when pluto was discovered in 1930
the the reason it was discovered in the
first place because astronomers at the
time were looking for a seven earth mass
planet
somewhere beyond neptune it was
hypothesized that such an object exists
when they found something they
interpreted that
as a seven earth mass planet and
immediately revised its mass downward
because they couldn't resolve the object
with the telescope so it looked like a
just a point mass you know
star rather than a physical disk they
said well maybe it's not seven maybe
it's one
right and then so over the next um you
know i guess 40 years
pluto's mass kept getting revised down
downwards downwards downwards until
uh it was realized that's like 500 times
less massive than the earth i mean like
pluto's
surface area is almost perfectly equal
to the surface area of russia actually
and you know russia is big but it's not
a planet
well i mean actually we can we can touch
more on that that's that's another
discussion
uh so in some sense earlier in the
century pluto represented
kind of our ignorance about the edges of
the solar system
and perhaps planet nine is the thing
that represents our ignorance
about now the modern set of ignorances
about the edges of our solar system
that's a good way to put it by the way
just
imagining this belt of astero of debris
at the edge of our solar system is
incredible
can you talk about it a little bit what
is the kuiper belt and
what it what is the oort cloud yeah
okay so look the simple way to think
about it is that if you imagine
you know neptune's orbit like a circle
right
kind of uh maybe a factor of one and a
half 1.3
uh times bigger uh on a radius of
1.3 times bigger you've got a whole
collection of icy objects most of these
objects
are sort of the size of austin you know
maybe maybe a little bit smaller if you
then
zoom out right and
explore the orbits of the most long
period kuiper belt object these are the
things that have the
biggest orbits and take the longest time
to go around the sun
then what you find is that beyond a
critical
orbit size beyond a critical orbit
period which is about 4 000 years
you start to see weird structure like
all the orbits
sort of point into one direction and
all the orbits are kind of tilted in the
same
way by about 20 degrees with respect to
sun this is particularly pronounced
in orbits that are not heavily affected
by neptune
so there you start to see this weird
dichotomy where there are
objects which are stable which are which
neptune
does not mess with gravitationally and
unstable objects the unstable objects
are basically all over the place
because they're being you know kicked
around by neptune the stable
orbits show this remarkable pattern of
clustering
we back i guess five years ago
interpreted this pattern of clustering
as a gravitational one-way sign the
existence of
a planet in a distant planet right
something that is shepherding and
confining
these orbits together of course
right you have to have some skepticism
when you're
when you're talking about these things
you have to ask the question of okay how
statistically significant
is this clustering and there are many
authors that
have indeed called that into question we
have done
our own analyses and basically just like
with all statistics where
you know there's kind of like you know
multiple ways
to uh do the exercise
you can either ask the question if i
have a telescope
that has you know surveyed this part of
the sky
what are the chances that i would
discover this clustering
that basically tells you that you have
zero confidence
right like that's not that does not give
you
a confident answer one way or another
another way to do the statistics which
is what we
prefer to do is to take to say we have a
whole
night sky of discoveries in the kuiper
belt
right and if we have some object over
there
which has right tension and declination
which is a way to say it's
there on the sky and it has some
brightness
that means somebody looked over there
and discovered an object
of was able to discover an object of
that brightness or
brighter through that analysis you can
construct a whole map
on the sky of kind of where all of the
surveys that have ever been done
have collectively looked so if you do
the exercise this way
the false alarm probability of
the clustering on which the planet nine
hypothesis is built is about 0.4
wow okay so there's a million questions
here one when you say bright objects
why are they bright are we talking about
actual objects within the kuiper belt or
the stuff we see through the kupper belt
this is the actual stuff we see in the
kuiper belt the way
you go about discovering kuiper belt
objects pretty easy
i mean it's easy in theory right hard in
practice
yeah all you do is you take snapshots of
the sky
right choose that direction say and take
you know
the high exposure snapshot then you wait
a night
and you do it again and then you wait
another night and you do it again
objects that are just random stars in
the galaxy don't move
on the sky whereas objects in the solar
system will slowly move
this is no different than if you're
driving down the freeway
it looks like you know trees are going
by you faster than the clouds right this
is parallax
that's it it's just they're reflecting
light off
of the sun and it's going back and
hitting this there's a little bit of a
glimmer
from the different objects that you can
see based on the reflection from the sun
so like
there's actual light yeah it's not
darkness that's right these are just
big icicles basically that are just
reflecting sunlight back at you
it's then easy to understand why it's so
hard to discover them because
light has to travel to you know
something like 40 times the distance
um between the earth and the sun and
then get reflected back was it like an
hour
travel or yeah that's right that's
something like that because the
the earth to the sun is eight minutes i
believe um
and so something you know yeah yeah in
that
in that order magnitude so that's
interesting so you have to
like account for all of that and then
there's this huge amount of
data pixels that are coming from the
pictures
and you have to uh integrate all that
together
to paint a sort of like a high estimate
of the different objects
can you track them can you be like
that's bob like can you like
yes exactly in fact uh one of them is
is named joe biden i mean i'm not like
this is not even a joke
right is there a trump one or no no no
no
i don't know i haven't checked for for
for that but
uh like the way it works is if you
discover one
you right away get a license plate for
it okay
so like the first four numbers is the
first
year that this object has appeared on
you know
in the data set if you will and then um
there's like this code that follows it
which basically tells you where in the
sky it is
right so one of the really interesting
kuiper belt objects which is very much
part of the planet 9 story is called
vp113
because joe biden was vice president at
the time
you know got nicknamed biden
vp113 said yeah you got nickname button
beautiful
what's the fingerprint for any
particular
object like how do you know it's the
same one okay just kind of like
yeah from night to night you take a
picture how do you know it's the same
object
yeah so the way you know is it appears
in almost exactly the same part of the
sky except for the move but it moves but
this is why actually you need at least
three nights
because oftentimes asteroids
which are much closer to the earth like
will um
appear to move only
slightly but then on the third night
will move away so that third knight
is really there to detect acceleration
now
the the thing that i didn't really
realize until
you know i started observing together
with my partner in crime and all this
mike brown
is just the fact that for the first year
when you make these detections
the only thing you really know is
confidence is where it is on the night
sky
and how far away it is okay that's it
you don't know anything about the orbit
because over three days the object just
moves so little right the that whole
motion on the sky is entirely coming
from
motion of the earth right so the earth
is kind of the car
the object is the tree and you see it
moving so then
to get some confident information about
what its orbit looks like you have to
come back
a year later um and then measure it
again
interesting to do three nights then come
back a year later and do another three
nights
so you get the velocity the acceleration
from the three nights and then you have
the
maybe the additional the additional
formation
because an orbit is basically described
by six parameters
so you at least need six independent
points but in reality you need
many more observations to to really
pin down the orbit well and from that
you're able to construct for that one
particular object in orbit and then
there's
of course like how many objects are
there
there's like four-ish thousand now
but like the
in the future that could be like
millions
oh sure oh sure so in fact these things
are hard to predict but there's a
new observatory called the vera rubin
observatory which is coming online
maybe next year i mean with covet these
things are
a little bit more uncertain but they've
actually been making great progress
uh with construction and so that
uh telescope is gonna sort of scan the
night sky
uh every day automatically and it's just
it's such an efficient survey that it
might uh increase the census
of the distant kuiper belt the things
that i'm interested in
by a factor of 100 i mean that would be
that would be really cool
and yeah that's a that's an incredible
uh
maybe i mean they might just find planet
nine
i mean that's like almost like literally
pictures like visually
i mean sure yeah like the first
detection you make all you know is where
it is in the sky and how far away it is
if something is you know 500 times away
from the sun
as far away from the sun as is the earth
you know that's planet nine that's when
the story concludes
and then you can study it right now you
can study yeah by the way
i'm going to use that as like i don't
know a pickup line or a dating strategy
like see the person for three days and
then don't see them at all and then see
them again in
in a year to determine the orbit and
over time
you figure out if sort of uh
from a cosmic perspective this this
whole thing
i have no dating advice to give i was
good i was going to use this as a
metaphor to uh to somehow
uh map it on to the human condition okay
you mentioned the kuiper belt what's the
oor cloud
if you look at the neptune orbit as uh
one then the kuiper bell is like 1.3 out
there
and then we get farther and farther into
the darkness what
so okay you've got the kind of main
kuiper belt was about
say 1.3 1.5
um then you have something called the
scattered disc
which is kind of an extension of the
kuiper belt it's a bunch of these
long very elliptical orbits that hug
the orbit of neptune but come out very
far so
that the scattered disc
with the current senses like the some of
the
longest orbits we know of
um have a
semi-major axis so half the orbit length
roughly speaking of about a thousand
thousand times the distance between the
earth and the sun
wow now if you keep moving out okay
eventually once you're sort of you know
ten thousand to a hundred thousand
roughly that's where the oort cloud is
now the oort cloud is a distinct
population of
icy bodies and it's distinct from the
kuiper belt it's in fact it's so
expansive
that it ends roughly halfway between
us and the next star um it's it's edge
is just
dictated by to what extent does the
solar gravity reach
solar gravity reaches that far yeah so
it has to
wow yeah so in fact
imagining this is a little bit
overwhelming so there's like a giant
like vast
icy rock thingy it's like a sphere
it's like you know it's like it's an
almost spherical structure
that engulfs that encircles the sun
and all the long period comets come
from the oort cloud they come the way
that they appear
i mean for already i don't know hundreds
of years
we've been detecting occasionally like a
comet will come in
and it comes seemingly comes out of
nowhere
the reason these long period comets
appear
that very on very very long time scales
right
these oort cloud objects that are
sitting you know 30
000 times as far away from the sun as is
the earth
actually interact with the gravity of
the galaxy the tide
effectively the tide that the galaxy
exerts upon them and their orbits slowly
change and they elongate
to the point where once they their
closest approach to the sun starts to
reach
a critical distance where ice starts to
sublimate
then we discover them as comets because
then the ice comes off of them
they look beautiful on the night sky etc
but they're all coming from
you know really really far away so is
there
are any of them coming our way from
collisions like how many collisions are
there
or is there a bunch of space for them to
move around yeah there's zero it's
completely collisionless
out there the physical radii of objects
are so small compared to the distance
between them
right it's just it is truly a
collisionless
uh environment i don't know there i
think that probably in the age
of the solar system there have literally
been zero collisions in the word cloud
wow when you like draw a picture of the
solar
system everything's really close
together so that everything i guess here
is
spaced far apart do rogue planets
like flying every once in a while and
join not rogue planets but rogue objects
from
out there oh sure oh sure yeah join the
party
yeah absolutely uh we've seen a couple
of them um
in the last three or f or so years uh
maybe four years now
uh one the first one uh was
the one called it's been
all over the news the second one was
comet borisov
discovered by a guy named borisov
yeah so the way you know they're coming
from elsewhere is
unlike solar system objects which travel
on elliptical paths
around the sun these guys travel on
hyperbolic paths
so they come in say hello and then
they're gone
and the fact that they exist
is totally like not surprising
right the neptune is con constantly
ejecting
kuiper belt objects into interstellar
space our solar system itself
is sort of leaking icy debris and
injecting it so
presumably every you know planetary
systems around other stars do exactly
the same thing
let me ask you about the the millions of
objects that are
part of the kuiper belt and the part of
the ore cloud do you think some of them
have
primitive life it kind of makes you sad
if there's like primitive life there and
they're just kind of like lonely out
there in space
like how many of them do you think have
life like bacterial life probably a
negligible amount
zero you know like zero was like a plus
on top
uh right yeah
um if so you know if you and i
took a little trip to the interstellar
medium i think we would develop cancer
and die uh real fast right that's rough
yeah it's a pretty hostile radiation
environment
you don't actually have to go to the
interstellar medium you just have to
leave the earth's magnetic field too
and then you're not doing so well
suddenly
so you know this this idea of
you know life kind of traveling between
places it's not
it's not entirely implausible but you
you really have to
twist i think a lot of parameters one of
the problems we have is we don't
actually know how life originates
right so it's kind of a second order
question of survival in the interstellar
medium and how resilient it is because
we we think you require
water but and that's certainly the case
for the earth but you know we uh
we really don't know for sure that said
i will argue that the question of like
are there aliens out there
is a very boring question because
the answer is of course there are right
i mean like
we know that there are planets around
almost every star um
of course there of course there are
other life forms life is not some
specific thing that happened on the
earth and that's it
right just that's a statistical
impossibility yeah um
yeah but the the difficult question is
before even
the fact that we don't know how life
originates i don't think we even know
what life
is like definitionally yeah like
formalizing a kind of picture
of in terms of the mechanism we would
use
to to search for life out there or even
when we're on a planet
to say is this life is this rock that
just moved
from where it was yesterday life or or
maybe not even
rock something else i got to tell you i
want to know what life
is okay and i want you to show me
uh i think there's a song to basically
accompany every single
thing we talk about today and probably
uh half of them are love songs
um and somehow we'll integrate george
michael into the whole thing okay
so your intuition is there's life
everywhere in our universe
do you think there's intelligent life
out there i think it's entirely
plausible
i mean i it's entirely plausible um
i think i think there's intelligent life
on earth
um and so yeah taking that like say
whatever this thing we got on earth
whether it's dolphins or humans
say that's intelligent definitely
dolphins
i mean have you seen the dolphins
well they do some cruel stuff to each
other so if cruelty
is uh is the definition of intelligence
that they're pretty good yeah and then
humans are pretty good on that
regard then there's like uh uh pigs
are very intelligent i got actually a
chance to hang out with pigs recently
and they're um aside from the fact
they're trying to
eat me they're very uh
they're very they love food they love
food but there's an intelligence to
their eyes that was kind of
uh like haunts me because i also
love to eat meat and then to to me the
thing
i later ate and i was very intelligent
and uh almost charismatic with the way
it was expressing its uh
himself herself itself was uh was quite
incredible
so and all that to say is if we have
intelligent life here on earth if we
take dolphins pigs
humans from the perspective of like
planetary science
how unique is earth okay so earth is not
a com
common outcome of the planet formation
process
um it's probably a
something on the order of maybe a one
percent effect
and by earth i mean it's not just an
earth mass planet
okay i mean the architecture of the
solar system
that allows the earth to exist in in its
kind of
very temperate um
way one thing to understand
uh and this is this is pretty crucial uh
right it's that the
earth itself formed well after
the gas disk that formed
the giant planets
had already dissipated you see stars
start out
with you know the star and then a disc
of gas and dust that encircles it
okay from this disk of gas and dust
big planets can emerge and we have
over the last uh you know two three
decades discovered
thousands of extra solar planets as an
orbit of other studs
what we see is that uh many of them
are you know have these expansive
hydrogen helium
atmospheres the fact that the earth
doesn't is deeply connected to the fact
that
earth took about 100 million years to
form so we missed that
you know train so to speak to get that
hydrogen helium atmosphere
that's why actually we can see the sky
right that's why the
sky is uh well at least in most places
that's why the
the atmosphere is not completely opaque
um
with that you know kind of thinking in
mind i
i would argue that we're getting the
kind of emergent pictures that the earth
is
is not you know everywhere
right we there's sort of the sci-fi view
of things where we go to some other star
and we just land on random planets and
they're all earth-like that's totally
not true
but the even a low probability
event even if you imagine that earth is
a one in a million
or one in a you know one in 10 million
occurrence there are 10 to the 12 stars
in the galaxy
right so you just you always win by
by large numbers that's right by supply
they save you well
you've hypothesized that our our solar
system once possessed a
population of short-period planets that
were destroyed by the evil jupiter
uh migrating through the the solar
nebula can you explain
if i was to say what was the kind of the
key outcome of searches for extrasolar
planets
it is that most stars are encircled by
short period planets
that are you know a few earth masses
right so a few times bigger than the
earth um
and have orbital periods that kind of
range from days to
to weeks now if you go in
and ask the solar system what's in our
region
right in that region it's completely
empty right
it's just it's astonishingly hollow
and thank you from
the sun is not some you know special
star that decided that it was going to
form
the the solar system so i think you know
the natural thing to assume
is is that the same processes of planet
formation that occurred
everywhere else also occurred in the
solar system
following this logic it's not
implausible to imagine that the solar
system once possessed
a system of intra mercurian
like you know compact system of
of planets so then we asked ourselves
would
such a system survive to this day and
the answer is no
uh at least our calculations um suggest
it's highly unlikely because of the
formation of jupiter
and jupiter's primordial kind of
wandering through the solar system
would have sent this collisional field
of debris that would have pushed
that system of planets onto the sun so
was jupiter
this primordial wandering what did what
did jupiter look like
like why was it wandering it didn't have
the orbit it has today
uh we're pretty certain that giant
planets like jupiter when they form they
migrate
the reason they migrate is you know on a
detailed level perhaps
difficult to explain but you know if
just in a qualitative sense
they form in this fluid disk
of gas and dust so it's kind of like if
i
plop down a raft somewhere in the ocean
will it stay in where you plop it down
or will it
kind of get carried around it's not
really a good analogy because it's not
like jupiter is being
affected by the currents of you know gas
and dust but the way
it migrates is it carves out a hole
in the in the disk and then uh through
by interacting with the disk
gravitationally right it can change its
orbit the fact that the solar system has
both jupiter and saturn
here complicates things a lot right
because it's you have to
solve the problem of the evolution of
the gas disk the evolution of jupiter's
orbit in the gas disk plus
evolution of saturn's and their mutual
interaction
the common outcome of solving
that problem though is pretty easy to
explain
jupiter forms its orbit shrinks and then
once saturn forms
its orbit catches up basically to the
orbit of jupiter and then both come out
so there's this inward outward pattern
of jupiter's
early motion that happens sort of within
the firm within the last million years
of the lifetime of the solar system's
primordial disk
so do while this is happening
if our calculations are correct which i
think they are
you can destroy these in this inner
system of
you know few earth mass planets
and then in the aftermath of all this
violence
you form the terrestrial planets where
would they come from in that case so
so jupiter clears out the space and then
there's a a few terrestrial planets that
come in and those coming from
the from the disk somewhere like one of
the larger
yeah what actually happens in these
calculations is you leave behind
a rather mass depleted like
remnant remnant disk only a couple earth
masses
so then from that
remnant population annulus of material
over 100 or about 100 million years by
just collisions
you grow the earth and the moon and
everything else you said amulous
annulus and yours annulus yeah that's a
beautiful word what does that mean
well it's like it's like a disc that's
kind of thin it's like a
yeah it's something that is you know a
disc that's so thin it's almost
flirting with being a ring like
i was gonna say this reminds me lord of
the rings so like this the word just
feels like it belongs in a toll canal
okay uh
so that that's incredible and so that in
your senses you said like one percent
that's a rare
the way jupiter and saturn danced and
cleared out and you know cleared out the
the the short period debris and then
changed the gravitational landscape
that's a pretty rare thing too
it's rare and moreover like you don't
have to go to our calculations you can
just
ask the night sky how many stars
have jupiter and saturn analogs the
answer is
jupiter and saturn analogs are found
around only 10
of sun-mic stars so they are they
themselves like you kind of have to
score an a minus or better
on the test to you know on the planet
formation test to become
a solar system analog even in that basic
sense
and moreover um you know low lower mass
stars
which are uh very numerous in the galaxy
so-called m dwarfs think like zero
percent
of them well maybe like a negligible
fraction of them have giant planets
giant planets are a rare
you know outcome of planet formation one
of the
really big problems that remain
unanswered is why we don't actually
understand
why they're so rare how hard is it to
simulate
all of the things that we've been
talking about each of the things we've
been talking about
and maybe one day all of the things
we've been talking about and beyond
meaning like from the initial
primordial solar system you know a bunch
of disks with
i don't know billions trillions of
objects in them
like simulate that such that you
eventually get a jupiter
and a saturn then eventually you get the
jupiter and the saturn they clear out a
disc change the gravitational landscape
then earth pops up
like that whole thing and then be able
to do that
for every other system
in the uh every other star in the galaxy
and then
be able to do that for other galaxies as
well
um yeah so look maybe start from the
smallest simulation
like what is actually being done today i
mean even the smallest simulation is
probably super super difficult
even just like one object in the kuiper
belt is probably super difficult to
simulate
i mean i think it's super easy i mean
like it's
it's just not that hard um but um
you know let's let's ask the most kind
of
basic problem okay so the problem of
having a star
and something in orbit of it that you
don't need a simulation for like
you can just write that down on a piece
of paper this gravity
would like yeah i guess i guess it's
important to try to
uh you know one way to simulate objects
in our solar system is to build the
universe from scratch okay
we'll get to building the universe from
scratch in a sec um but let me just kind
of go through the hierarchy of
what you know what we do two objects two
objects
analytically solvable like we can figure
it out
very easily if you just you don't i
don't think you yeah you don't need to
know calculus
uh it helps to know calculus but you
don't necessarily need to know calculus
um three objects that are
gravitationally
interacting the solution is chaotic
doesn't matter
how many simulations you do you the
answer loses meaning after
um after some time i feel like that is a
metaphor for dating as well but go on
now look yes yeah so so
the fact that you go from analytically
solvable
to unpredictable you know when you are
when your simulation goes from two up
bodies to three bodies
should immediately tell you that the
exercise
of trying to engineer a calculation
where you form this whole
entire solar system from scratch and
hope to have some predictive answer
is is a futile one right we will never
uh succeed at such a simulation just to
clarify you mean like explicitly having
a clear equation that generalizes
the the whole process enough to be able
to make a prediction what do you mean
actually like literally simulating the
objects as a hopeless pursuit
once it increases beyond three the
simulating them is not a hopeless
pursuit but the
outcome becomes a statistical one
and what's actually quite interesting is
i think we have
all the equations uh figured out
right like you know in order to really
understand this
the formation of the the solar system it
suffices to know
gravity and magneto hydrodynamics i mean
like
the combination of uh maxwell's
equations and
you know navier-stokes equations for the
fluids you need to know quantum
mechanics to understand
opacities and and so on but we have
those equations in hand it's not that we
don't
have that understanding it's that
putting it all together
is a very very difficult and b if you
were to run
the same evolution twice
changing you know the initial conditions
by
some infinitesimal amounts i'm you know
minor change in your calculation to
start with you would get the or you'd
get a different answer
this is one this is part of the reason
why planetary systems are so diverse you
don't
have like a you know very predictive
path
for you start with a disk of this mass
and
it's around this star therefore you're
going to form the solar system
right you start with this and therefore
you will conform this huge
outcome a huge set of outcomes and some
percentage of it
will resemble the solar system you
mentioned quantum mechanics and
we're talking about cosmic scale
objects you've talked about that the
evolution of astrophysical disks can be
modeled with
uh schroedinger's equation i sure did
why it's like how does quantum mechanics
uh become relevant at when you
consider the evolution of objects in the
solar system yeah
well let me take a take a step back and
just say like i remember
being you know utterly confused
by quantum mechanics when i first
learned it and
the schrodinger equation which is kind
of the parent equation
of of that whole field you know seems to
come out of nowhere
right the way that the way that i was
sort of explaining it i remember asking
you know my professor is like but where
does it come from is that like well just
just like don't worry about it and just
like calculate the
hydrogen you know energy levels right so
it's like i could do all the problems i
just did not have any intuition for
for where this parent you know super
important equation came from
now down the line i was remember i was
preparing for my own
lecture and i was trying to understand
how waves
travel in self-gravitating discs so
you know again there's a very broad
theory that's already developed but i
was looking for some simpler
way to explain it really for the
purposes of teaching class
and so i i thought okay what if i just
imagine a disc as an infinite uh
number of concentric circles right that
interact with
the with each other gravitationally
that's a problem in some sense that um
i can solve using methods from like the
late 1700s right so i can write down
hamiltonian well i can write down the
energy function basically of their
their interactions and what i
found is that when you take the
continuum limit when you
go from discrete circles that are
talking to each other gravitationally to
a
continuum disk suddenly
this gravitational interaction among
them
right the the governing equation becomes
the schrodinger equation
and i had to think about that for a
little bit did you just unify
quantum mechanics and gravity no this is
not the same thing as like
you know fusing relativity and quantum
mechanics
but it did uh it did get me thinking a
little bit
so the fact that waves in astrophysical
disks
behave just like wave functions of
of particles kind of like an interesting
analogy because for me it's easier to
imagine waves traveling through you know
astrophysical disks or really just
sheets of paper and
the reason this is that analogy exists
is because there's actually nothing
quantum about the schrodinger equation
the schrodinger equation
is just a wave equation
and all of the interpretation that comes
from it
is quantum but the equation itself
is not a quantum being so you can use it
to model
waves it's way it's not turtles it's
waves all the way down
you can pick which level you pick the
wave at and so it could be at the solar
system level that you can use right
and also it actually provides a pretty
neat calculational tool
because um it's it's difficult so we
just talked about simulations but it's
difficult to simulate
the behavior of astrophysical disks on
time scales
that are in between a few orbits
and their entire evolution so it's
over a time scale of a few orbits you
have you do a hydrodynamic you know
simulation
right you do that basically that's
something that you can do
on a modern computer on a time scale of
say a week
when it comes to their evolution over
their entire lifetime you don't hope to
resolve the orbits you just kind of
hope to understand how the system
behaves in between
right you to get access to that as it
turns out it's pretty
um it's pretty cute you can use uh you
can use the schrodinger equation to get
the answer
rapidly so it's a calculational tool
that's fascinating by the way the
astrophysical disks how what are they
how broad is this definition okay so
astrophysical disks span
a huge uh huge amount of ranges
they start maybe at the smallest scale
they start with actually kuiper belt
objects some kuiper belt objects have
rings
so that's maybe the smallest example of
an astrophysical disc
we've got this little potato shaped
asteroid
you know which is you know sort of the
size of la or something and around it
is are some rings of icy matter that
object is a small astrophysical disk
then you have
saturn the rings of saturn you have the
next set of scale you have the solar
system itself when it was forming you
have
this then you have black hole discs
you have galaxies discs are super common
in the universe
and the reason is that stuff rotates
right i mean gravity works yeah so uh
and those rings could be the material
that uh composes those rings could be
it could be gas it could be solid it
could be anything that's right so
the disc that made from which the
planets emerged was predominantly
hydrogen helium gas on the other hand
the rings of saturn
are made up of you know icicles ice
little like
ice cubes this big about a centimeter
across
that sounds refreshing so that's
incredible hydrogen helium gas
so in the beginning it was just hydrogen
and helium
around the sun how does that lead to the
first formations of solid
objects in terms of simulation okay
here's the story um so you're like have
you ever been to the desert
yes i've been to the death valley and
actually it was uh terrifying just as
total tangent i'm distracting you but i
was uh
driving through it and i was really
surprised because it was at first
hot and then as it was getting into the
evening there's this huge thunderstorm
like
it was raining and it got freezing cold
like what the hell is
it was the apocalypse yeah i had to like
just sit there
listening to bruce springsteen i
remember and just thinking i'm probably
going to die
and i was okay with it because bruce
springsteen was on the radio look
when you've got the boss you know you're
ready you're ready to meet the ball
yeah so look i mean it's a good line
so i'm sorry that's true um
yeah by the way like to continue on this
tangent i
i absolutely love the southwest for this
reason just um you know i know during
the pandemic i
drove from la to new mexico a bunch of
times
the madness the weather yeah the the the
chaos of
weather the fact that you know it'll be
blazing hot one minute and then it's
just like
we'll decide to have a little
thunderstorm maybe you'll decide
to go back momentarily to like a
thousand degrees and then go back to the
thunderstorm
it's amazing it's it's that by the way
is chaos theory in action yeah
right um but let's get back to talking
about the desert yeah
so in the desert um tumbleweeds
have a tendency to roll because the wind
rolls them
and if you're careful you'll
occasionally see this family of temple
weeds where like there's like a big one
and then there's a bunch of little ones
that that kind of hide in its
wake right and are all rolling together
and still almost looks like
you know a family of ducks crossing a
street or something
um or for example you know
if you watch tour de france right you've
got a whole bunch of cyclists and
they're like cycling
you know within 10 centimeters of each
other they're not
bffs right yeah but they're not yeah
trying to be
trying to write together they are
writing together to minimize the
collective
uh you know air resistance if you will
that uh
that they experience turns out solids in
the protoplanetary disk do
just this there's an instability
wherein solid particles right things
that are
a centimeter across will start to hide
behind one another and form these clouds
why because cumulatively that minimizes
the solid
component of the disk aerodynamic
interaction with the gas
now these clouds because they're kind of
a favorable
energetic condition for the dust to live
in
they grow grow grow grow grow until they
become so massive that they collapse
under their own weight
that's how the first building blocks of
planets form that's how the
big asteroids got there that's
incredible yeah so that
is that simulatable or is it not useful
to simulate no no that's simulatable
um and people do these types of
calculations
it's it's really cool that's actually
that's
one of the many fields of planet
formation theory that is really really
active
right now people are trying to
understand all kinds of aspects of that
process because of course
i've explained it you know like as if
there's one
thing that happens turns out it's a
it's a beautifully rich dynamic but the
but qualitatively formation of the first
building blocks
actually follows the same sequence as
formation of stars
right stars are just clouds of gas
hydrogen helium gas that sit in space
and slowly cool and at some point they
you know contract to a point where their
gravity overtakes the thermal
you know pressure support if you will
and they collapse under their own weight
and you get a little baby solar system
that's amazing so do you think one day
it will be possible to
simulate the full history
that took our solar system to what it is
today
yes and it will be useless okay
so you don't think your story many of
the ideas that you have about jupiter
clear in the space
like retelling that story in high
resolution is not that important
i actually think it's important but at
every stage
you have to you have to simul you have
to
design your experiments your your
numerical computer experiments so that
they test some specific aspect of that
evolution
um i am not a proponent of doing
huge simulations because um
even if we forget the information theory
aspect of not being able to simulate in
full detail
the universe because if you do then
you you have made an actual universe
it's not
the simulation right by simulation is in
some sense a compression
of information so therefore you must
lose detail
but that point aside if we are
able to simulate
the entire history of the solar system
in excruciating detail
i mean it'll be cool but it's not going
to be
any different from observing it
right because theoretical understanding
which is what
ultimately i'm interested in um
comes from taking complex things and
reducing them down to something
that you know some mechanism that you
can actually quantify
um that's the that's the fun part of
astrophysics
just kind of simulating things in
extreme detail
is we'll cool we'll make cool
visualizations but that doesn't get to
doesn't doesn't get you to any better
understanding than you had
before you did the simulation if you ask
very specific questions then you'll be
able to uh
create like very highly compressed
nice beautiful theories about how things
evolved and then you can use those to
then generalize to other solar systems
to other stars and other galaxies and
say something generalizable about the
entire universe
how difficult would it be to simulate
our solar system such that we would not
know the difference
meaning if we are living in a simulation
is there a nice think of it as a video
game
sure is there a nice compressible way of
doing that or
just kind of like you intuited with a
three body situation
is just a giant mess that you cannot
create a video game
that uh will seem realistic without
actually
building it so i'm you know i'm
speculating but
one of the yeah i know i know like
you have a deep understanding of this
but like for me
i'm just gonna like speculate that for
um at least in the types of simulations
that we can do
today inevitably you run into the
problem of resolution
right you're doesn't matter what you're
doing it is discrete
now um the way you would go
about asking you know if what we're
observing is that a simulation or
uh or is that you know some real
continuous
thing uh is you you zoom in right you
zoom in and try and find
the you know the grid scale if you will
um yeah i mean
it's a it's a really interesting it's a
really interesting question
and because the
solar system itself and really you know
the double pendulum is chaotic
right pendulum sitting on another
pendulum
moves unpredictably once you let them go
um
you really don't need to like inject any
randomness into a simulation for it to
to give you stochastic and unpredictable
answers
weather is a great example of this
weather has a happen of time
of you know typical weather systems have
a happen of time of a few days
and there's a fundamental reason why the
force
forecast always sucks you know two weeks
in advance
it's not that we don't know the
equations that govern
the atmosphere we know them well their
solutions are meaningless though after a
few days
the zooming in thing is very interesting
i
i think about this a lot whether
there'll be a time
soon where we would want to stay in
video game worlds
whether it's virtual reality or just
playing video games i mean i think that
time
like came in like the 90s and it's been
that time well it's not just it's not
just games i mean
it's accelerated i just recently saw
that
wow and fortnite were played 140 billion
hours
and those are just video games yeah and
that's like increasing very very quickly
especially with the people
coming up now and being born now and
become you know becoming teenagers
and so on let's have a thought
experiment where it's just you and a
video game character inside a room
where you remove the simulation they
need to simulate sort of
a lot of objects if it's just you and
that character
how far do you need to simulate in terms
of zooming in
for it to be very real to you as real as
reality
so like first of all you kind of
mentioned zooming in which is
fascinating because
we have these tools of science that
allow us to zoom in
quote unquote in all kinds of ways
uh in the world around us but our
cognitive abilities like our perception
system as humans
is very limited in terms of situations
so we might be very easily fooled
some of the video games like on the ps4
yeah like look pretty real to me yeah
right uh i think
you would really have to interrogate i
mean i think even with what we have
today
like uh i don't know ace combat seven
that's a great example
right like i mean the way that the
clouds are rendered
uh it's i mean it
looks just like when you're flying you
know on a real airplane the
the kind of transparency i think that
the
you know our perception is limited
enough already
to not be able to tell some of the uh
you know some of the differences there's
a game called uh
skyrim it's an elder scrolls role
playing game
and i just uh i played it for quite a
bit
and i think i played very different than
others like
there'll be long searches of time where
i would just walk around and look at
nature
in the game it's incredible oh sure it's
just like the graphics is like
wow i want to stay there it was better i
went hiking recently
it was like as good as hiking so look i
know what you mean
not to go on a huge video game you know
tangent but like
the the third like witcher game was
astonishingly beautiful right especially
like playing on
on a good hardware machine it's like
this is pretty
this is pretty legit that said um
you know i i don't resonate with the i
want to stay
here you know like one of the things
that i love to do
is to go to my like boxing gym
and and box with a guy right like that's
there's
there's nothing quite like that physical
you know
experience like that's fascinating that
might be
simply an artifact of the year you were
born maybe because if you're born today
it almost seems like stupid to go to a
gym yeah
like you're going to a gym to box with a
guy why not box with mike tyson when you
yourself was like in his prime when you
yourself are also an incredible boxer
in the video game world for me there
there's a multitude of reasons why i
don't want to box with mike tyson
right like no no no no you enjoy teeth
and i want to have an ear no but your
your skills
in this meat space in this physical
realm is very limited
and takes a lot of work and you're
you're uh you're a musician
uh your incredible scientist you only
have so much time in the in the day
but in the video game world you can
expand your capabilities in all kinds of
dimensions
that you can never have possibly have
time in the physical world
and so that it doesn't make sense like
to
to be existing to be working your ass
off in the physical world
when you can just be super successful uh
uh in the video game world but i still
you enjoy sucking and stuff
yeah i i really struggling to get better
i sure do
i mean i think like these days with
music music
is a great example right we just started
you know
practicing live uh with my band again
you know after
not playing for a year and uh you know
it's just it was terrible
right which is just kind of a lot of the
nuance
you know a lot of the detail is just
that detail that takes you know
years of collective practice to develop
uh
it's just lost but it was just an
incredible amount of fun
way more fun than all the like studio
you know sitting around and playing uh
that i did you know throughout the
entire year
so i think there's something there's
something intangible
or maybe maybe tangible about being uh
being in person
i i sure hope you're wrong and that
you know we that's not something that
will get lost because i think there's
like such a large part of the human
condition
is to hang out if we were doing this
interview on zoom right
i mean i'd already be i'd already be
bored out of my mind
[Laughter]
exactly i mean there's something to that
i mean i'm almost playing devil's
advocate but at the same time
you know i'm sure people talk about the
same way at the beginning of the 20th
century about horses
where they're they are much more
efficient
they're much uh easier to maintain than
cars
it doesn't make sense to have you know
all the ways that cars break down and
there's not enough infrastructure in
terms of roads for cars
it doesn't make any sense like horses
and like nature you could do the nature
like where
you know you should be living more
natural life those are real you don't
want machines in your life they're going
to pollute your mind
and the minds of young people but then
eventually just cars took over so
in that same way it just seems uh going
back to horses
just you know well you can be you can
play uh
uh uh what is it red dead
red dead redemption redemption and uh
you can ride horses in the video game
more
so let me return us back to planet nine
uh-huh always a good place to come back
to so now that we did a big
historical overview of our solar system
what is planet nine
okay planet nine is a hypothetical
object that orbits the solar system
right at
an orbital period of about 10 000 years
and an orbit which is slightly tilted
with respect to the plane of the solar
system
slightly eccentric and the object itself
we think is five times more massive than
the earth we have never seen planet nine
in a telescope but we have gravitational
evidence for it
and so this is where all the stuff we've
been talking about this clustering ideas
maybe you can speak to the approximate
location that we
suspect and also the question i wanted
to ask is uh
what are we supposed to be imagining
here because he said there's certain
objects in the kuiper belt that
are kind of have a direction to them
that they're all
like like flocking in some kind of way
so that's the sense that there's some
kind of gravitational object
not changing their orbit but kind of
confining them
right yeah finding like grouping their
orbits together
see what would happen if planet nine
were not there is these orbits that
roughly share
a common orientation they would just
disperse right they would just become as
a mutually symmetric
point everywhere planet nine's gravity
makes it such that these objects stay
in a state that's that's basically
anti-aligned with respect to the orb
of planet nine um and
and sort of hang out there and kind of
oscillate on time scale of about a
billion years
that's one of the lines of evidence for
the existence of planet nine there are
others that's the one that's easiest to
maybe visualize just because it's fun to
think about orbits that all point
into the same direction but i should
you know emphasize that for example the
existence of
objects again kuiper belt objects that
are heavily out of the plane
of the solar system things that are
tilted by say 90 degrees that's not
we don't expect that as an outcome
of planet formation indeed planet
formation
simulations have never produced such
objects
without some extrinsic gravitational
force
planet nine on the other hand generates
them very readily so that
provides kind of an alternative you know
population of small bodies in the solar
system that also get produced by planet
9 through an
independent kind of gravitational effect
so they're kind of
there's basically five different things
that the uh that planet nine does
individually that are like kind of
maybe a one sigma effect where you would
say yeah okay if that's all it was
maybe it's not no reason to jump up and
down but because
it's it's mult it's a multitude of these
puzzles
that all are explained by one hypothesis
that's that's really the the magnetism
the attraction of the planet nine model
so can you just clarify so
most orbit most planets in the solar
system orbit
and approximately the same so it's flat
yeah it's like
one degree they the difference between
them is
about one degree so but nevertheless if
we looked at our solar
system it would look and i could see
every single object it would look like a
sphere
the inner part where the planets are
would look
like you know flat right the the kuiper
belt
and the asteroid belt have a larger
um it gets fatter and fatter yeah that's
kind of like becomes a sphere
that's right and if you look at the very
outside it's polluted by this
you know quasi-spheroidal thing
nobody's of course ever seen the oort
cloud
right we've only seen comments that come
from the oort cloud so
the oort cloud which is this right
population of distant debris
its existence is also inferred you could
say
alternatively there is you know there's
a big
cosmic creature that occasionally you
know sitting at 20 000 au and
occasionally throws an icy
rock towards the sound like that
spaghetti monster i think it's called
okay
i mean so it's a mystery in many ways
but you can kind of infer a bunch of
things about it
it's by the way both terrifying and
exciting that there's this
vast darkness all around us that's full
of objects that are just
throwing just there yeah it's actually
kind of astonishing right
that we have only
explored a small fraction of the solar
system
right that that really kind of baffles
me because
uh remember as a student you know
studying physics
you know you do the problem where you
put the earth around the sun you solve
that and
like it's one line of math and you say
okay well that
surely was figured out by newton so like
all the interesting stuff
is not in the solar system but that um
it's just plainly not true there are
there are mysteries in the solar system
that
are remarkable that we are only now
starting to just kind of scratch the
surface of
and some of those objects probably have
some information about the history of
our solar system
absolutely absolutely like a great
example is
uh you know small meteorites right small
meteorites
are melted right they have they're
differentiated meaning some of the
uh iron sinks you say
how can that be because they're so small
that they wouldn't have melted just from
the heat of their accretion
turns out the fact that the solar nebula
the
the disk that made the planets was
polluted by
aluminum 26 is in itself a remarkable
thing it means
the solar system did not form an
isolation it formed
in a giant cloud of thousands of other
stars that were also forming
some of which were undergoing you know
going through supernova explosions some
of
and releasing these unstable isotopes
that of which we now see kind of the
traces of
it's so cool do you think it's possible
that life from
other solar systems was injected and
that that was
what was uh the origin of life on earth
yeah defense permea idea um
that's seen as a low probability event
by people who studied the original life
but that's because
uh then they would be out of a job well
i don't think they'd be out of the job
because you just then say you have to
figure out how life started
and there but then you have to go there
we can study
life on earth much easier we could study
in the lab
much easier because we could replicate
conditions that are
from an early earth much easier
from a chemistry perspective from a
biology perspective
you can intuit a bunch of stuff you can
look at different parts of earth and
just
to an extent i mean the early earth was
completely
unlike the current earth right there was
no oxygen so
uh one of my colleagues at caltech uh
joe kirchnick is
certain right something like
100 certainty that life started on mars
and came to earth uh in on martian media
rights
um this is not a problem
that i like to kind of
think about too much like the origin of
life it's a fascinating problem
but you know it's not physics and i just
like
i just don't don't love it it's the same
reason you don't love
i thought you're a musician so music is
not physics either so why are you
showing 100
physics
[Laughter]
okay no no look uh in all seriousness
though i
uh there are a few things that i really
really enjoy
i genuinely enjoy physics i genuinely
enjoy music
i genuinely you know enjoy martial arts
and
i genuinely enjoy uh my family i should
have said that all in a reverse order or
something
but i like to focus on these things and
not worry too much
about about everything else you know
what i mean yes just because there is a
like you said earlier there's a time
constraint you can't
do it all there's many mysteries all
around us
so um and they're all beautiful in in
different ways
to me that thing i love is artificial
intelligence that uh
perhaps i love it because eventually i'm
trying to suck up to our future
overlords
the the question of you said there's a
lot of kind of
little pieces of evidence for this thing
that's planet nine
if we were to try to collect more
evidence
or be certain like a paper that says
like you drop it clear we're done
what what is that required does that
require us sending probes out
or do you think we can do it from
telescopes here on earth what are the
different ideas for conclusive evidence
for planet nine
the moment planet nine gets imaged from
a telescope on earth it's done i mean
it's just there
can you clarify because you mentioned
that before from an
image would you be able to tell yes so
from
an image the moment you see
something something that is reflecting
sunlight
back at you and you know that it's
hundreds of times as far away from
the sun as as the earth you're done
so you're thinking so basically if you
have a really far away thing that's big
yeah you know five times the size of
earth that means
uh that that's fine that is planet could
there be multiple objects like that i
guess
in principle yeah i mean there's no
there's no law of physics that uh that
doesn't allow you to have multiple
there's also no evidence at present for
there being multiple i wonder if
it's possible this is like just like
we're finding exoplanets
whether given the size of the or cloud
there's basically
it's rare and rare but they're sprinkled
planet nine
ten eleven twelve like these yeah
some got thirteen after that yeah i can
just keep counting
so like just something about the dynamic
system
like it becomes lower and lower
probability event but they gather up
like they they become would they become
larger and larger maybe
something like that and i wonder i
wonder if like discovering planet nine
will just like be almost like a
springboard it's like well what's
what's beyond that it's entirely
plausible the oort cloud itself
probably holds about five earth masses
or seven earth masses of material
right so it's not it's not nothing and
the it all ultimately comes down
to at what point will the observational
surveys
sample enough of the solar system to uh
kind of
reveal interesting things
there's a great analogy here with
neptune and the story of how neptune was
discovered
neptune was not discovered by looking at
the sky
right it was discovered by uh it was
certain mathematically
right so yeah the orbit of
uranus when uranus was found um
yes this was 1781. uh it's
the kind of tracking uh both the
tracking
of the orbit of uranus as well as the
reconstruction
of the orbit of uranus immediately
revealed
that it was not following the orbit that
it was supposed to
right the the predicted orbit deviated
away from where it actually was
so uh in the mid eighteen hundreds
right um a french mathematician by the
name of orban le verrier
did a beautifully sophisticated
calculation which said
if this is due to gravity of a
more distant planet then that planet is
there
okay and then they found it but the
point is the
understanding of where to look for
neptune came entirely out of celestial
mechanics
the case with planet nine is a little
bit different
because what we can do i think
relatively well is predict the orbit and
mass of planet nine we cannot tell you
where it is on its orbit
the reason is we haven't seen the kuiper
belt objects complete
in orbit their own orbit
even once because it takes four thousand
years but
you know i plan to live on as an ai
being
uh and you know i'll i'll be tracking
those
uh those orbits as solid takes four or
five thousand years i mean
it doesn't have to be ai it could be
longevity there's a lot of really
exciting genetic engineering research
so you'll just be a brain waiting for
the
for the your brain waiting for the orbit
to complete for the basic kuiper belt
objects
that's that's right that's like kind of
the worst
reason to want to live a long time right
just like can the brain like smoke a
cigarette
can you just like light one up while
you're waiting or
uh
[Laughter]
but you're making me actually realize
that the one way to explore
the the galaxy is by just sitting here
on earth and waiting
so if we can just get really good at
waiting it's like a more more or these
interstellar objects that
fly in you can just wait for them to
come to you same with the aliens you can
wait for them to come to you
if you get really good at waiting um
then
that's one way to do the exploration
because eventually the thing will come
to you maybe that's the entire
maybe the intelligent alien
civilizations
get much better at waiting and so they
all decide so
game theoretically to start waiting and
it's just a bunch of like
ancient intelligent civilizations of
aliens all throughout the universe
they're just sitting there waiting for
each other
look you can't just be good at waiting
you got to know how to chill
okay like like you can't just like sit
around and do nothing you got to be
you get you got to know how to chill i
honestly think that
as we progress if the aliens are
anything like us
we enjoy loving things we do
and it it's uh it's very possible that
we just figure out mechanisms
here on earth to enjoy our life and we
just stay here on our f
forever that exploration becomes less
and less of an interesting thing to do
and so you basically yes wait and chill
you get really optimally good at
chilling and thereby
exploring is not that interesting so you
know
in terms of 4 000 years would be nothing
for scientists we'll be chilling and
just
all kinds of scientific explorations
will become
possible because we'll just be here
you have a paper out recently because
you already mentioned some of these
ideas but
i'd love it if you could dig into it a
little bit yeah of course the injection
of inner
or cloud objects into the distant kuiper
belt by planet nine
what is this idea of
planet nine injecting objects into the
kuiper belt okay let me take a
brief step back and when we do
calculations of
planet nine we do the simulations
as far as our simulations are concerned
sort of
the uh neptune
like kind of the trans-neptunian solar
system
is entirely sourced from the inside
namely the kuiper belt gets scattered by
neptune and then planet nine does things
to it and aligns the orbits and
and so on and then we calculate what uh
what happens on the lifetime of the
solar system yada yada
during the pandemic one of the kind of
questions we asked
ourselves this is indeed something we
mike and i uh
mike brown whose partner in crime on
this and i
do regularly is we say how can
we a disprove ourselves and b
how can we improve our simulations like
what's missing
one idea that maybe should have been
obvious in retrospect is that all of our
simulations treated the solar system
as some isolated creature right but the
solar system did not form in isolation
right it formed in this cluster of stars
and during that phase
of forming together with thousands of
other stars
we believe the solar system formed this
almost spherical population of icy
debris
that sits maybe at a
few thousand times the separation
between
the earth and the sun maybe even a
little bit closer
if planet nine's not there that
population is completely dormant
and these objects just slowly orbit
the the sun nothing interesting had
happens to them ever but what we
realized that if planet nine is there
planet nine can actually grab some of
those objects and gravitationally
re-inject them
into the distant solar system so we
thought okay let's look into this
with numerical experiments do do our
simulations
does this process work and if it works
uh
what are its consequences so it turns
out indeed not only
does planet nine inject these distant
inner or cloud objects into the kuiper
belt
they follow roughly the same pathway as
the
um as the objects that are being
scattered out also there's this
kind of river two-way river of material
some of it is coming out from you know
by neptune scattering some of it is
moving in and if you work through the
numbers
you kind of at the end of the day that
it
it has an effect on the best fit orbit
for planet nine itself
so if you realize that the data set that
we're observing
is not entirely composed of things that
came out of the solar system but also
things that got
re-injected back in then turns out the
best fit planet nine slightly more
eccentric
that's kind of getting into the weeds
the the point here is that
uh you know the existence of planet nine
itself provides this
natural bridge that connects an
otherwise dormant population of icy
debris of the solar system
with things that we're starting to
directly observe so you can flow back so
it's not just the river flowing one way
it's
maybe a smaller stream go back and
backwash
you want a backwash you want to
incorporate that into the simulations
into your
understanding of those distant objects
when you're trying to make sense of the
various observations and so on exactly
that's fascinating
i gotta ask you some people think that
uh many of the observations you're
describing
could be described by a primordial black
hole
first what is the primordial black hole
and what do you think about this idea
yeah
so primordial black hole is a black hole
which is made
not through the usual pathway of making
a black hole
which is that you have a star which is
uh more massive
than you know 1.4 or so solar masses and
basically when it runs out of
fuel uh runs out of its nuclear fusion
fuel
it can't hold itself up anymore and just
the whole thing collapses on itself
right you create a um
i mean one i guess simple way to think
about it is you create an
object with zero radius that has mass
but zero radius
that singularity
now that's such black holes exist all
over the place in the galaxy there's in
fact
a really big one at the center of the
galaxy that's like yeah
that that one's always looking at you
when you're not looking
okay right and it's it's always talking
about you
and when you turn off the lights it's it
wakes up
that's right um but you know so such
black holes
are all over the place we when they
merge we get to see
you know incredible gravitational waves
that they emit etc etc
one kind of plausible scenario however
is that
when the universe was forming basically
during the big bang
you created a whole spectrum of black
holes
some with masses of five earth masses
some with masses of
10 earth masses like the entire you know
mass spectrum size
the amount some the mass of asteroids
now on the smaller end over the lifetime
of the universe
the small ones kind of evaporate and
they're not there anymore at least this
is what we
what the calculations tell us but five
earth masses is big enough to
not have evaporated so one idea is that
planet nine is not a planet and instead
it is a five
earth mass black hole and that's why
it's hard to find now
can we right away from our calculations
say
that's definitely true or that's not
true absolutely not we can't in fact our
calculations
tell you nothing other than the orbit
and the mass and that means the
black hole i mean it could be a five
earth mass you know
cup it could be a five earth mass
hedgehog or a black hole or
really anything that's five earth masses
will do because the gravity of a black
hole
is no different than the gravity of a
planet right if the sun became a black
hole tomorrow
it would be dark but or the earth would
keep orbiting it
and like this notion that oh black holes
suck everything in
it's it's not that's like a sci-fi
notion right it's just mass
what would be the difference between a
black hole and a planet
in terms of observationally uh
observationally the difference would be
that you will never find the black hole
right the truth is they're kind of um
i'm actually
not you know i never looked into this
very carefully
but there are some constraints that you
can
get just statistically say okay if the
sun
has a binary companion which is a five
earth mass black hole
then that means such black holes would
be extremely
common and you know you can sort of look
for lensing events and then you say okay
maybe that's not so likely
but you know that said i want to
emphasize that
there's a limit to what our calculations
uh
can tell you that's the orbit and the
mass so
i think there's a bunch like ed whitton
i think
wishes it's a black hole because i think
the one exciting things about black
holes
in our solar system is that we can go
there
and we can maybe study the singularity
somehow because that allows us to
understand some fundamental things about
physics
if um it's a planet so planet nine
we may not you know and we go there we
may not discover
anything profoundly new
the interesting thing perhaps you can
correct me about planet nine
is like the big picture of it the whole
big story of the kuiper belt and all
those kinds of things
it's not that planet nine would be
somehow fundamentally different
from um from i don't know neptune
in terms of um in terms of the kind of
things we can learn from it so i think
that
there's kind of a hope that it's a black
hole because it's an entirely new kind
of object maybe you can
uh correct me yeah i mean of course here
my own
biases creep in because i'm interested
you know
in planets around other stars and
i would say i would disagree that you
know we wouldn't find
things that would be truly you know
fundamentally new new because as it
turns out
the the galaxy is really good at making
five or three earth mass objects right
the most common type of planet that we
see that we you know discover orbiting
around other stars
there's a few earth masses in the solar
system there's no analog for that
right we go from one earth mass object
which is this one
and to skipping to neptune and uranus
which themselves are actually relatively
poorly understood
especially uranus from the interior
structure point of view
if planet nine is a planet going there
will give us the closest window and to
understanding what
other planets look like and um
i will you know i'll say this that you
know planets
kind of in terms of their complexity on
some logarithmic scale
fall somewhere between a star and an
insect
right an insect is way more complicated
than a star
right just there's all kinds of physical
processes and really
biochemical processes that occur inside
of an insect
that just make a star look like
you know somebody is like playing with
the spring or something yeah
right so the i i think
you know it would be you know arguably
you know more interesting to go to um
you know to go to planet nine if it's a
planet because black holes are simple
they're just kind of
they're basically macroscopic like
particles yeah right and so just like
you mentioned in terms of complexity so
it's possible that planet nine
as opposed to being like homogeneous is
like super
like heterogeneous is a bunch of cool
stuff going on absolutely
that could give us an intuition i never
thought about that that it's
basically earth number two in terms of
size
and gives us starts giving us intuition
that could be generalizable to
earth-like planets elsewhere in the
galaxy yeah pluto
is also in the sense like you know pluto
is a tiny tiny thing right just like
you would imagine there's just a tiny
ball of ice like who cares but the new
horizons
images of pluto reveal so much
remarkable structure
right they reveal glaciers flowing and
these are glaciers
not made out of water ice but you know
co ice
it turns out at those temperatures
right of like 40 or so kelvin water ice
looks like metal right it doesn't flow
at all but then
ice made up of carbon monoxide
starts to flow i mean there's just like
all kinds of really cool
uh phenomena that you otherwise just
wouldn't really even imagine that occur
so yeah i mean there's a reason why i
like planets
well let me ask you i find uh
as i read the idea that edwin was
thinking about this kind of stuff
fascinating so he he's a mathematical
physicist
who's uh very interested in string
theory won the fields
metal for his work in mathematics
so i read that he proposed a fleet of
probes
accelerated by radiation pressure that
could discover a planet nine primordial
black holes location
uh what do you think about this idea of
sending a bunch of probes out there
yeah look the way the the idea is a cool
one
right you go and you say
you know launch them basically
isotropically you track where they go
and uh if i understand the idea
correctly you basically measure the
deflection and then you say okay there
must be
something there since the the
probe trajectories are being altered oh
so the measurement
the basic sensory mechanism is the it's
not like you have sensors on the probes
it's more like you're
because you're very precisely able to
capture to measure the trajectory of the
probes you can then
infer the gravitational fields and i
think i think that's the basic idea
um you know back a few years ago we
had conversations like these with um
you know engineers from jpl they
more or less convinced me that this is
much more difficult than it seems
because
you don't at that level of precision
right
things like solar flares matter right
solar flares
right are completely chaotic you can't
predict which
where a solar flare will happen that
will drive radiation
pressure gradients you don't know where
every single asteroid is so like
actually doing that problem
i think it's possible but it's it's not
a trivial matter
right well i wonder not just about
planet nine i wonder if that's kind of
the future
of doing science in our solar system
is to just launch a huge number of
probes so like a
whole order of magnitude many orders of
magnitude larger
numbers of probes and then starting for
a bunch of different stuff
not just gravity but everything else so
in this regard
i actually think there is a huge
revolution that's
to some extent already started right the
standard kind of like
time scale for a nasa mission is that
you like
propose it and it launches i don't know
like
150 years after you propose i'm over
exaggerating but
yeah you know it's just like some huge
development cycle
yeah and it gets delayed 55 times
like that is not going away
yeah right the the really cutting edge
things
you have to do it this way because you
don't know what you're building so to
speak
but the cubesat kind of world
is starting to um you know provide an
avenue for like
you know launching something that costs
you know a few million dollars
and has a turnaround time scale of like
a couple years you can imagine doing
you know phd theses where you design the
mission
the mission goes to where you're going
and you do the science
all within a time span of five six years
that is has not been fully executed on
yet but i absolutely think that's on the
horizon and we're not talking
a decade i think we're talking like this
decade
yeah and the company is accelerating all
this uh
with uh blue origin and and uh spacex
there's a bunch of more cubesat oriented
companies that are pushing this forward
uh well let me ask you let me ask you on
that topic what do you think about
either one elon musk with spacex
uh going to mars i think he wants spacex
to be the first
to put a first human on mars and then uh
jeff bezos got to give him props
wants to be the first to fly his own
rocket
out into space so you know wasn't there
a guy who like
built his rocket out of garbage yeah
this was like a couple
years ago and somewhere in the desert he
launched himself
i'm not tracking this closely but i
think i am
familiar with folks who built their own
rocket to try to prove the earth is flat
yes that's the guy i'm talking about
yeah he was also like he also jumped
some limousine yeah
for truly revolutionary minds
uh greater men than either you or i
but yeah so look it's been
astonishing to watch how really over the
last like
decade the commercial sector
took over this uh you know
this industry that traditionally has
really been like
a you know a government thing to do um
motivated primarily by the the
competition between nations like the
cold war
sure and now it's motivated more
more and more by the natural forces of
capitalism yes
that's right so um okay here
i have i have many ideas about i think
on the one hand right
like what spacex has been able to do for
example phenomenal
um if that brings down
the price of spacex within that
turnaround time scale for space
exploration which i think it inevitably
will um that's a huge you know that's a
huge boost
to the to the human condition the same
time
right if we're talking astronomy right
there they're also
it comes at a huge cost right and the
starling satellites is a great example
of that cost right at one point uh
in fact i was just camping and the
mojave was a
with a friend of mine and they saw you
know
this uh the string of satellites just
kind of like
you know appear and then disappear uh
into nowhere so that
is beginning to interfere with you know
earth-based observations so
i think it's there's tremendous
potential there
it's also important to be responsible
about how it's executed
now with mars and the whole idea of you
know exploring mars
right i don't have like strong opinions
on whether a manned mission
is is required or not required
um but i do think you know
we need to focus the thing to keep in
mind is that
i i generally kind of
uh i'm not signed on if it will to the
idea that mars is some kind of a safe
haven that we can
uh you know escape to right
mars sucks right like living on mars if
you
if you want to live on mars like you can
have that experience
by going to the mojave desert and
camping and it's just like
it's it's just not a great well it's
interesting but there's something
captivating about that kind of mission
of
us striving out into space and by making
mars in some ways habitable
for at least like months at a time
i think would lead to engineering
breakthroughs that would make life
like in many ways much better on earth
like it would we'll come up with
ideas we totally don't expect yet both
on the robotics side
on the food engineering side on the
you know maybe like we'll switch from
what like there'll be huge breakthroughs
in insect farming as
as exciting as i find that idea to be
that in you know our in the ways we
consume protein maybe
uh it'll revolutionize we do factory
farming which is
full of cruelty and you know and torture
of animals will
revolutionize that completely because of
our like we don't
we shouldn't need to go to mars to
revolutionize life here on earth
but at the same time i shouldn't need a
deadline to get done
but i do need it and then the same way i
think we need
mars there's something about the human
spirit that loves that
longing for i i agree with that thesis
the going to the moon
right and the that whole
endeavor has you know
has captivated the imagination of so
many and it has uh
it has led to incredible kind of
incredible ideas really and and probably
in non-linear ways
right not like okay we went to the moon
therefore
some person here has thought of this and
yes in in that similar sense
i think you know space exploration is
there's something there's some real
magnetism about it
and it's on a genetic level right like
we have this
need to keep exploring right when we're
done
uh with a certain frontier we move on to
the next frontier all that i'm saying
is that i'm not moving to mars to live
there permanently
uh ever you know and i think that you
know i'm glad you paid
you you noted the kind of degradation of
the earth
right i think that is a true kind of
the leading order challenge of our great
engineering that's
a bunch of a bunch of engineering
problems i'm most interested in this
space because as i've read extensively
it's apparently very difficult to have
sex in space
and so i just want that problem to be
solved because i think
once we solve the sex and space problem
we'll revolutionize sex here on earth
thereby increasing the fun on earth and
um
the consequences of that can only be
good i mean you can
you've got a clear plan right and and it
sounds like uh yeah i'm submitting
proposals to nasa as we said that's
right
i keep getting rejected i don't know why
okay
uh you need better diagrams better
better pictures
i should have thought of that you a
while ago mentioned that
you know there's certain aspects in the
history of the solar system and earth
that resulted that it could have
resulted in an
opaque atmosphere but it didn't
we couldn't see the stars um
and uh somebody mentioned to me a little
bit ago
it's almost like a philosophical
question for you do you think
humans like human society would develop
as it did or at all if we couldn't see
the stars
it would be drastically different
just dr if it ever did develop so i
think some of the early developments
right of like fire and you know fire
you know first of all that atmosphere
would be so hot because you know if you
have an opaque
atmosphere the temperature at the bottom
is is huge um so we would
be very different beings to start with
we'd have it could be cloudy in certain
kinds of ways that you could still get
okay think about like uh like a
greenhouse right a greenhouse
is cloudy effectively uh but it's it's
super hot
um yeah it's hard to avoid having an
atmosphere if you have an
opaque atmosphere it's hard to right
venus is a great example
right venus is i don't remember exactly
how many degrees
and but it's hundreds in celsius right
it's not a hundred it's hundreds
uh even though it's only a little bit
closer to the sun that temperature
is entirely coming from the fact that
the atmosphere is thick so it's just a
sauna of sorts
yeah yeah you go there you know you feel
refreshed after you come back
you know but if you stay there i mean so
okay take that as an assumption
this is a philosophical question not a
biological one so you have a life that
develops under these
extremely hot conditions yeah so let's
see so much of
the early evolution of mankind
uh was driven by exploration yeah right
and the kind of interest and stars
originated in part as a tool
to guide that exploration right i mean
that in itself i think would be a huge
uh you know a huge differential in the
way that we
you know our our our evolution on this
planet
yes i mean stars is that's brilliant so
even in that aspect but even in further
aspects
uh astronomy just shows up in basically
every single development in the history
of science up until the 20th century
it shows up so i wonder without that if
we had we would have
if we would even get like calculus yeah
look that's a great
i mean that's a great point newton in
part developed calculus
because he was interested in
understanding
explaining kepler's laws right in
general
that whole mechanistic understanding of
the night sky
right replacing a religious
understanding where you interpret
you know this is you know this whatever
fire god
writing his you know uh little chariot
across the sky
as opposed to you know this is some
mechanistic set of laws
that transformed humanity and arguably
put us
on the on the course that we're on today
right
the entirety of the last 400 years and
the development of
kind of our technological world that we
live in today
was sparked by by that right
abandoning an effectively you know a
non-secular
view of the natural world and and kind
of thing okay
this can be understood and if it can be
understood it can be utilized we can
create our own
uh variants of this absolutely we would
be a very very different species
without astronomy this i think extends
beyond just astronomy right there there
are questions
like why do we need to spend money on
x right where x can be anything like
paleontology like right uh the mating
patterns of uh penguins yeah that's like
essential that's right um i think
you know there's a tremendous uh
underappreciation for the usefulness
of useless knowledge right i mean
uh that's brilliant i didn't come up
with this this was this is a little book
by the guy who started the institute for
advanced studies
but um you know it's
it's so true so much of the electronics
that are on this table
right work on maxwell's equations
maxwell weren't
wasn't sitting around in the 1800s
saying you know i hope one day
you know uh we'll make you know a couple
mics so
you know a couple uh you know a couple
guys can
have this conversation right that that
wasn't at no
at no point was that the motivation and
yet
you know it gave us the world that we
have today and the answer is if you
a purely pragmatic person if you don't
care at all about kind of the human
condition none of this
the answer is uh you can tax it
right like the useless things
have been have created way more capital
than useful things and the sad thing i
mean
first of all it's really important to
think about and it's
brilliant in the in the following
context
like neil degrasse tyson has this book
about the role
of military-based funding in the
development of science
and then so much of technological
breakthroughs in the 20th century
had to do with humans working on
different military things
and then the outcome of that had nothing
to do with military it had some military
application but
their impact was much much bigger than
the military the splitting of the atom
is is a kind of a canonical example of
this we all know the tragedy that
you know arises from splitting of the
atom and and yet you know
so much i mean the atom itself
does not care for what purpose it is
being split
so so i wonder if if we you take took
the same amount of funding as we used
for war
and poured it into like totally
seemingly
useless things like the mating patterns
of penguins
we would get the internet anyway i i
think so i think so
and uh you know perhaps more of the
internet
would have uh would have penguins you
know
so we're both joking but in some sense
like
i wonder it's not the the penguins
because penguins is more about
sort of biology but all useless kind of
tinkering and all kinds of
uh in all kinds of avenues
and also because military applications
are often
um burdened by the secrecy required
so it's often like so much uh
the openness is lacking and if we
learned anything from the last few
decades is that
when there's openness and science that
accelerates the development of science
that's right that's true
the openness of science truly
you know it benefits everybody the
notion that
if you know i share my science with you
then you're gonna catch up and like
know the same thing that is a
short-sighted viewpoint because if you
catch up
and you open you know
you you discover something that puts me
in a position to do
the next step right it's just so i
absolutely agree
with um with all this i mean uh
the kind of question of like military
funding versus non-military funding is
is obviously a complicated one but at
the end of the day i think we have to
get
over the notion as a society
that we are going to you know pay for
this
and then we will get that right that's
true
if you're buying like i don't know
toilet paper or something right it's
just not true in the intellectual
pursuit that's not how it works
and sometimes it'll fail right like
sometimes like
a huge fraction of what i do right i
come up with an idea
i think oh it's great and then i work it
out it's totally not great right it
fails immediately
failure is not a sign that the initial
pursuit
was worthless right failure is just part
of this kind of this whole exploration
thing and
we should fund more and more of this
exploration the variety of the
exploration
i think it was linus pauling or somebody
from you know that generation of
scientists and
you know a good way to have good ideas
is to have a lot of ideas right so
that's i think that's true um if you are
conservative in your thinking if you
worry about proposing something that's
going to fail and oh what if you know
like i there's no science police that's
going to come and arrest you for
proposing the wrong thing and you know
it's also just like why would you why
would you do science if you're
afraid of you know taking that step it'd
be so much better
to propose things that are that are
plausible that are interesting
and then for a fraction of them to be
wrong than to just kind of
you know make incremental progress all
your life right
speaking of wild ideas let me ask you
about
the thing we mentioned previously which
is this interstellar object a muamoa
could it be space junk from a distant
alien civilization
you can't immediately discount that
by saying absolutely it cannot
anything can be a space junk i mean from
that point of view can any of the kuiper
belt objects we see
okay you know be space beijing anything
on the night sky
can in principle be space junk and
kuiper belt would catch interstellar
objects potentially and like
force them into an orbit if they're like
small enough uh not the kuiper belt
itself but you can imagine like jupiter
family comets
being captured uh you know so so you can
actually capture things
it's even easier to do this very early
in the solar system
like early in the solar system's life
while it's still in a cluster of stars
um it's unavoidable that you
capture debris whether it be natural
debris or
unnatural debris or just debris of some
kind from
other stars that it's like a daycare
center
right like everybody passes their
infections on to other kids yeah
um you know or more and more there's
been a lot of discussion
about and there's been a lot of interest
in this over like is it is it
aliens or is it not but let's like if
you just kind of look at the facts
like what we know about it is it's kind
of like a weird shape
and it also accelerated yeah right like
that's the two those are those are the
two interesting
uh things about it there are
um there are puzzles about it and
perhaps the most uh daring resolution
to this puzzle is that it's not you know
aliens or it's not like a rock it's
actually a piece of hydrogen ice
so this is a friend of mine you know
daryl seligman greg laughlin came up
with this uh
idea where that in
giant molecular clouds that are just
clouds of hydrogen helium gas that
live in live throughout the galaxy
at their cores you can condense ice
to become these hydrogen you know
icebergs if you will and then
uh that explains many of the aspects of
uh in fact i think that explains all of
the
mystery how it becomes elongated because
basically the hydrogen ice sublimates
and kind of like a bar of soap
that you know slowly kind of elongates
as you
uh as you strip away the the surface
layers
uh how it was able to accelerate because
of a jet that is produced from
you know the hydrogen coming off of it
but you can't see it because it's
hydrogen gas like all of this stuff
uh kind of falls together nicely
i'm i'm intrigued by that idea truly
because
it's like if that's true that's a new
type of astrophysical
object and it would be produced by
what's the monster that produced
initially that kind of object
so this is giant molecular molecular
clouds they're everywhere
i mean they are the fact that they exist
is not are they rogue clouds or are they
part of like an
oort cloud no no they're not so clouds
yeah they're just floating about
yeah so if you go like a lot of people
imagine the galaxy
as being a you know a bunch of stars
right and they're just orbiting right
but the truth is if you fly between
stars you run into clouds uh they don't
have any large
object that creates orbits they're just
floating about just floating
but why are they floating together oh
they just flowed together for time and
not
well so these are the these eventually
become the nurseries of stars
so as they as they cool they contract
and uh you know then collapse into stars
or into
groups of stars but some of them they
the starless
molecular clouds according to the
calculations that daryl and greg
did can uh can create these like
icicles of hydrogen ice i wonder why
they would be flying so fast because
they seem to be
moving pretty fast
that's just because of the acceleration
due to uh due to the sun
if you stop i mean it's like
take something really far away let it go
and the sun is here
by the time it comes close to the sun
right it's moving pretty fast
so that's an attractive explanation i
think
not so much because uh it's cool but it
makes a clear prediction
right of when their rubin
observatory comes online next year or so
we will discover many many more of these
objects
right and they have um so i like i like
theories that are falsifiable right not
not just testable but falsifiable it's
good to have a falsifiable theory where
you can say that's not true
uh aliens is one that's
fundamentally difficult to say no that's
not aliens
the interesting thing to me if you look
at one alien civilization
and then we look at the things it
produces in terms of if we were to try
to detect
the alien civilization the
there's like uh say there's 10 billion
aliens there would probably be
trillions of dumb drone type things
produced by the aliens and then be many
many many
more orders of magnitude of junk
so like if you were to look for an alien
civilization in my mind
you would be looking for the junk that's
the more efficient thing to look for
so i'm not saying has any
characteristics of space junk but
it kind of opened my eyes like to the
idea that
we shouldn't necessarily be looking to
the queen
of the ant colony we should be looking
at i don't know
i don't know like the traces of alien
life that
doesn't look intelligent in any way may
not even look like
life it could be just garbage we should
be looking for
garbage just generically
garbage that's producible by uh
unnatural
uh forces i mean for me at least that
was kind of interesting because
if you have a successful alien
civilization
that we will be producing many more
orders and magnitude of junk and that'll
be
easier potentially to detect well so you
have to produce the junk but you have to
also lunch
launch it so this is the this is where i
mean
let's let's imagine disposal yeah but
let's imagine we are a successful
civilization that
you know has made it to space we clearly
have right um
and yes we're in the infancy of that
pursuit but
you know we've launched i don't know how
many satellites
um probably if you count
gps satellites it must be at least
thousands
it's it's certainly thousands i don't
know if it's over ten thousand yeah but
it's done that
but it's on that like a large order of
magnitude how many of the things
that we've launched will ever leave the
solar system i think two
two well maybe the voyager the voyager
one voyager two i don't know if the
pioneer
so maybe three like oh there's also a
tesla roadster out there
uh that that one it will never leave the
solar system it'll just
i think that one will eventually collide
with mars that can be
spacex's first mars destination
um but look so there's an energetic cost
to interstellar travel uh which is
really hard to overcome
and when when we think about you know
generically
what do we look for in an alien
civilization oftentimes we tend to
imagine that the
thing you look for is the thing that
we're doing right now
yeah right so i think that um you know
if i if i look at the future right i
mean for a while like
okay if aliens are are out there they
must be broadcasting and radio
right that radio um
you know the amount that we broadcast in
radio has
diminished tremendously in the last 50
years
but we're doing a lot more computation
right what are the signs of computation
like that's a good
that's an interesting question to ask
right
where i don't know i think something on
the order of a few percent
of the entire electrical grid last year
went
to mining bitcoin right uh you know well
yeah the there could be a lot of in the
future different consequences of the
computation which
i mean by unbiased but it could be
robotics it could be artificial
intelligence so we may be looking for
intelligent looking objects like that's
what i meant by probes like things that
move
in kind of artificial ways but the
emergence of ai is not an if
right it's it's happening
right in front of our eyes and the
energetic costs associated
with that are becoming you know a
tangible problem
so i think you know if you imagine kind
of extrapolating that into the future
right what are the you know
what becomes the bottleneck right the
bottleneck might be
powering you know powering the broadly
speaking not
one air but powering that entire ai
ecosystem
right so i don't know i think
you know space junk isn't is kind of
uh it's an interesting idea but it's
heavily influenced by like sci-fi of
1950s where
by 2020 we're all like flying to the
moon
um and so we produce a lot of space junk
i'm not
sure if that's the pathway that alien
civilizations take
i've also never seen an alien
civilization that's that's
true but if your theory of chill
turns out to be true and then we don't
you know we don't necessarily
explore we seize the exploration phase
of uh
like alien civilizations quickly sees
the exploration phase of their
um of their efforts then uh
then perhaps they'll just be chilling in
a particular space
expanding slowly but then using up a lot
of resources and then have to have a lot
of garbage disposal that
sends stuff out and the other you know
the other idea was that it could be a
relay
that uh you almost have like these gps
like markers these
sent throughout which i think is kind of
interesting it's uh similar to this
probe idea
of sending a large number of probes out
to measure gravitational um
to to to measure basically yeah the the
gravitational field
essentially i mean a lot of people at
cal tech and mit are
trying to measure gravitational fields
and there's there's a lot of ideas of
sending
uh stuff out there that
accurately measures those gravitational
fields uh to
have a greater understanding of the
early universe
but then you might realize that
communication through gravitation
through gravity is actually much more
effective than than radio waves for
example
something like that and then you send
out
i mean okay if you're an alien
civilization that's able to
have gigantic masses like basically
we're getting there as a as a
civilization no we're not not even close
well i mean yeah okay
i i mean like be able to sort of uh play
with black holes that kind of thing so
we're talking about a whole nother diff
order of magnitude and masses then it
may be very effective to send signals
via gravitational waves
i actually my sense is that all of these
things are
genuinely difficult to predict you know
and i don't mean like to to kind of shy
away i just i really mean if you think
if you take um imagination of what the
future
looked like from you know 500 years ago
right it's just it is so hard to
conceive
of the impossible right so um
[Music]
it's it's almost like um you know it's
almost limiting to try and imagine
things that are an order of magnitude uh
you know or two orders of magnitude
ahead in terms of progress
just because you know you mentioned cars
before
you know if you were to ask people what
they wanted
in 1870 is faster buggies
right so um so i think the whole like
kind of
you know alien conversation inevitably
gets gets limited by by our entire
kind of collective um astrophysical lack
of imagination
so to push back a little bit i find that
it's really interesting to talk about
these wild ideas about the future
whether it's aliens whether it's ai
with brilliant people like yourself
who are focused on very particular tools
of science we have today
to solve very particular like rigorous
scientific questions
and it's almost like putting on this
wild dreamy hat like
some percent of the time and say like
what are like what would alien
civilizations look like what would alien
trash look like well what would our own
civilization that sends out
trillions of ai systems out there like
hal 9000
but 10 000 out there what would that
look like and you're right
any one prediction is probably going to
be horrendously wrong
but there's something about creating
these kind of wild predictions
that kind of opens up there's a huge
magnetism to it
right and some of some of it um
you know i mean some of the jules verne
novels did a phenomenal job predicting
the future
right uh that that actually was a great
example of what you're talking about
like allowing your imagination to
run free i mean i just hope
i just hope there there's dragons that's
like
i love dragons yeah dragons are the best
but see the cool thing about science
fiction and these kinds of conversations
it doesn't just predict the future i
think some of these things
will create the future pla planting the
idea
this will help the humans are amazing
like fake it till you make it
humans are really good at uh taking an
idea that seems impossible at the time
and for one any one individual human
that idea
is like a it's like planting a seed yes
that eventually materializes itself
it's weird it's weird science fiction
can
create science drive some of it it
drives the science i agree with you
and uh and i think in this regard
you know i i'm like a sucker for for
sci-fi
um it's it's all i listen to like now
when i when i run
and um and some of it is completely
implausible
right and it's like i don't care it's
it's so
it's uh it's both entertaining
and uh you know it's just like it's
imagination
you know about the black clouds book i
think this by fred hoyle
this is like this has great connections
with sort of a lot of the advancements
that are happening in nlp
um right now right with
you know transformer models and so on
but uh you know it's this black cloud
shows up
in in the solar system and then you know
people try to
send radio and then it learns to talk
back at you
wow you know so anyway we don't have to
talk at all about it but it's just
it's something worth checking out with
that on the alien front with the black
claw to me and
exactly and the llp front and also just
explainability of ai
it's fascinating just a very question
stephen wolfram looked at this with the
movie arrival
it's like what would be the common
language that we would discover
the the reason that's really interesting
to me is we have aliens
here on earth japanese japanese is the
obvious answer
japanese yeah that would be the common
maybe it would be music actually
that's more likely it wouldn't be a
language it would be art
that they would communicate but you know
i i do believe that we have
i'm with stephen wolfram on this a
little bit that to me
computation like programs we write that
you know that they're kind of
intelligent creatures
and i feel like we haven't found the
common language to talk with them
like our little creations that are
artificial
are not born with the whatever that
innate thing that
produces language with us and like
coming up with mechanisms for
communicating with them
uh is um is an effort that feels
like it will produce some incredible
discoveries you can even think of
if you think that math is discovered
mathematics in itself
is a kind of um oh yeah it's an innate
construction
of of the world we live in um i think we
are
you know a part of the way there because
pre-1950 right
computers who were human beings that
would carry out arithmetic
right and i think it was ulam um
who worked in los alamos at the at the
time like towards the end
of the second world war wrote something
about
how you know in the future right
computers will not
be just arithmetic tool but will be
truly an interactive
you know thing with which you could
do experiments right at the time the
notion of doing an experiment
not like in the lab with some beakers
but uh
an experiment on a computer designing an
experiment
a numerical experiment was
a new one that's like you know 70
of what i do is i design com you know i
write
code terrible code to be uh clear like
but you know i write code that creates
an experiment which is a which is a
simulation
so in that sense i think we're beginning
to interact with the computer in in a
way that you're
saying not as just a you know fancy
calculator not as just a
you know call-in request type of
thing but but you know something that
can generate uh
generate insights that are otherwise
completely unattainable right they're
unattainable by doing
analytical mathematics yeah and there's
uh
like with the alpha fold two we're now
trying
we're now starting to crack open biology
so being able to
simulate at first trivial biological
systems and hopefully down the line
complex biological systems
right my hope is to be able to simulate
psychology
psychological like sociological systems
like humans
i've you know um a large part of my work
at
mit was on autonomous vehicles
and the fascinating thing to me was
about pedestrians
human pedestrians interacting with
autonomous vehicles and simulating those
systems without murdering humans
would be very useful but nevertheless is
exceptionally difficult
yeah i would say so when is my mustang
going to drive itself
right i'm not even joking it looks like
yeah yeah i it turns out it's much
difficult
it's much more difficult than we
imagined yeah and and i suppose that's
the kind of
the progress of science is
just like you know going to mars
it's probably going to turn out to be
way more difficult to imagine
sending out probes to investigate planet
nine at the edge of our solar system
might turn out to be way more difficult
than we imagined but we do it anyway
yeah and we figure it out in the end
it's actually more of a great i mean
going
sending humans to mars is way more
complicated than huma sending humans to
the moon
you'd think just like naively yeah both
are in space
who cares like if you go there why don't
you go there
um you know just
life support is uh is an extremely
expensive thing yeah there's a bunch of
extra challenges but i disagree with you
i would be one of the early people to go
i used to think not
yeah i used to think i'd be one of the
first maybe million to go once you have
a little bit of a society
i think i'm i'm upgrading myself to the
first like ten thousand yeah that's
right
from the front of the cabin not
completely front
but like it would be interesting to die
i'm okay
with uh death sucks
but i kind of like the idea of dying on
mars
of all the places to die i gotta say in
this regard like
i don't wanna die on mars i don't no no
i would much rather
die on earth uh i mean death
is is fundamentally boring right like
death is a very boring experience
but i mean i've never died before so i
don't know from first-hand experience as
far as you know yeah
it could be a reincarnation all those
kinds of things so you mean uh
where would you die uh if you had to
choose oh man
um okay so and you know i would
definitely
you know there's a question of who i'd
want to die with
you know i'd prefer not to die alone uh
but like
you know surrounded by family would be
uh would be preferable where i think
northern new mexico and i'm not even
joking like this is not
a random place it's just like would that
be your favorite place on earth
not necessarily like favorite place on
earth to
to to reside you know indefinitely but
it is
it is one of the most beautiful places
i've i've ever been to
uh so you know there's something i don't
know there's something attractive about
about going you know returning to nature
in a beautiful
uh place let me ask you about another
aspect of your life
that is full of beauty music okay you're
a musician
uh the absurd question i have to ask
what is the greatest song of all time oh
objectively speaking
the greatest song of all time i suppose
that could change
moment to moment day to day but if you
were forced to answer for this
particular moment in your life that's
something that pops to mind
this could be both philosophically this
could be technically as a musician like
what you enjoy
maybe lyrics like for me it's lyrics is
very important so absolutely i would
probably be my choice would be lyrics
based
i don't want to answer in terms of just
technical uh you know
technical prowess i think technical
prowess is
impressive right it's just like it's
impressive what can be done
i wouldn't place that into the category
of the greatest music ever written
some the classical music uh
that's that's written is undeniably
beautiful but i don't want to
consider that category of music
either uh just because you know so if i
if i have to
limit uh the scope of this
philosophical discussion uh to
you know the kind of music that i listen
to you know probably what's my age again
by blink 182. it's just you know it's a
solid one
it's got you know
said nobody ever that's a good song
i don't know if you're joking no i i i
am joking it's a good one but it's it
was
yeah i mean
what's my age you get yeah yeah no i
mean
it would probably you know
songwriting-wise i think the beatles
came
pretty close to the influential to you i
was like the beatles
yeah love the beatles i love the beatles
uh let it be yesterday yeah
like straw i think strawberry feels
forever is is one
you know what what one of my favorite
beetle songs is it's uh
you know in my life right that's not
it's it's hard to imagine
how whatever 24 year old
wrote that it is one of the most uh
introspective
pieces of music ever you know i'm a huge
pink floyd fan
and so i think you know if you were to
you can sort of look at the entire dark
side of the moon album
and as you know getting pretty close up
there to the pinnacle of what you know
can be
created so you know time's a great song
yeah it's a great song just the entirety
of
just the instruments the lyrics the the
the feeling
created by a song like pink floyd
can create feelings the entire
experience i mean you have that with the
wall
of just uh transporting you into another
place
songs don't not many songs could do that
as as
well not many artists can do that as
well as pink floyd did
there are a lot of bands that you can
kind of say oh yeah
like if you take blink 182 right if you
have
no idea like if you are listening to
sort of that type of pop punk for the
first time
it's difficult to differentiate between
blink 182 and like some 41
and the thousand of other like
lesser known bands that all sounded the
whole they all had that sparkling
production
uh feel they all kind of sounded the
same
right when with pink floyd
it's hard to find another band that
you're like well is this one
pink floor like you know yeah when
you're listening to that
what you're listening to that the
uniqueness that that's fascinating
you know in the calculation of the
greatest
song in the greatest band of all time
you could probably
you probably actually quantify this like
scientifically is like
how unique uh if you play different
songs how well are people
able to recognize whether it's this band
or not and that you know that's
probably a huge component to greatness
like if the world would miss it if it
was gone
yes yes so but there's also the human
story things like i would say output
johnny cash's cover of hurt as one of
the greatest songs of all time
and that has less to do with the song
but your interaction with the
interaction with it but also the human
the full story of the human
so like it's not just if i just heard
the song it'd be like okay
that but if it it's the full story of it
also the video component for that
particular song
so like that you can't discount the full
experience of it
absolutely you know i have no confusion
about not
about being you know anywhere uh
you know in in that league but i just
like i
sometimes think about you know music
that is being
uh produced today feels
oftentimes feels like like kind of
clothes like clothes that you buy
at like h m and you wear three times
before they rip and you throw away so
like so much of it is
it's not bad it's just kind of
forgettable right
like the fact that we're talking about
pink floyd
in 2021 is in itself an interesting
uh question why are we talking about
pink floyd and it's there's something
unforgettable about them and
unforgettable about the the art that
they created
that could be the markets that like so
spotify has created this kind of
market where the the
incentives for creating music that last
is much lower because there's so much
more music right you just want something
that shines bright for a short amount of
time
makes a lot of money and moves on and i
mean the same thing you see with the
news and all those kinds of things we're
just living in a
shorter and shorter shorter like uh time
scale in terms of our attention spans
and that um nevertheless when we look at
the long arc of history of music perhaps
there will be some songs from today
that will last as much as pink floyd
we're just unable to see it
yeah just the collected works of
nickelback
exactly you know you never know you
never know justin bieber
it could have yeah he could be a
contender i've recently started
listening to justin bieber just
understand what people are talking about
and
you know i'll just keep my comments to
myself on that one it's too good to
explain
in the words we're not
the greatness that is the biebs uh you
as a musician
so you uh you write your own music you
uh play guitar
you sing um maybe can you
give an overview of the role music is
played in your life you're
one of the you're a world-class
scientist
and so it's kind of fascinating to see
somebody
in your position who's also a great
musician and
and and uh still loves playing music
yeah well i wouldn't call myself a great
musician
like you know one of the best of all
time yeah
that's right like we were saying offline
confidence is like the most essential
thing about that's right
exactly it's the confidence and kind of
like
moodiness right yeah um yeah look i mean
music plays an absolutely
essential role in in everything i do
because
i lose if i stop playing for
one reason or another say i'm traveling
i notably
lose creativity in every other aspect of
my life
right there's something i don't
view you know playing music as a
separate endeavor from doing science or
doing doing whatever it's all
it's all part of that same creative
thing
which is distinct from i don't know
uh pressing a button or like you know so
it's not a break from science it's
a part of your science it's absolutely a
it's a part of
it's it's i would say you know it's a
thing that enables
the science right the science would you
know
suck even more than it does already uh
without the music
and that means like the creating of the
the writing of the music or is it just
even playing other people's stuff is it
is it all of it yeah it's it's
definitely both
um yeah and also just you know
i love i love to play guitar i love to
sing you know
my wife tolerates my uh
my screeching singing you know and uh
even kind of likes it
so yeah so people should check out your
stuff you have a great voice so i i love
your stuff
um is there something you're you're
super busy
is there something you could say about
practicing
uh for musicians for guitar for you're
also in a band
so like that whole how you can manage
that is there some tricks or
some hacks to um being a lifelong
musician
while being like super busy so i would
say
you know the way that i optimize
um my life is i try to i try to do
you know the thing that i'm passionate
about in a moment
um and put that at the top of the
priority list there are moments when
you know you just you feel inspired to
play music and if you're in the middle
of something if you can avoid
if that can be put on hold just do it
right there are times when you
get inspired about something scientific
um
you know i do my best to drop
everything go into that you know mode of
that isolated mode
and and execute upon that so
it's a chaotic you know i think i have a
pretty chaotic lifestyle
where i'm always doing kind of multiple
things and jumping between uh
between what i'm doing but at the end of
the day
it's it's not like um
you know those those moments of
inspiration
are actually kind of rare right like
most of the time
all of us are just doing kind of uh
doing the stuff that get that needs to
get done if you
do the disservice to yourself of saying
oh i'm inspired to
you know do this calculation figure it
figure this out
but i've got to answer email or just
like do something
something silly um you know that is a
um that is nothing more than the service
and also
like i have some social media presence
but i i mostly stay off of you know
social media
to you know just frankly because like i
don't kind of
i don't enjoy the mental cycles that it
uh yeah it robs you of that
the yeah yeah those those precious
moments
that could be filled with inspiration in
your in your other pursuits
um but there's something to maybe you
and i are different this like i i try to
play at least 10 minutes of guitar every
day
like almost on the technical side like
keeping that bass uh of
of basic competence going and
i mean the same way like writers will
get in front of a paper no matter what
that kind of thing it just feels like
that
for my life has been essential to to to
the daily ritual of it otherwise days
turn into weeks weeks or into months and
you haven't played guitar for
months no no i i i understand for me
i think it's it's been like if we have a
gig coming up
we'll definitely yeah that's right no
like we
we will uh we will sharpen up uh
definitely you know especially co coming
up to again it's like
you know we're not trying to make money
with this this is like just
for the uh for that satisfaction of
doing something doing something well
right um but overall
i would say most i play guitar most days
most days and you know when i put kids
to sleep
i i play guitar you know with them and
we like
just make up random songs about you know
about her a cat or something you know
like we just
do kind of random stuff but you know
music is always involved in that process
yeah keeping it fun you have russian
roots i sure do
were you born in russia i was yeah when
did you come here
so i came to the us in
very the very end of 99 but um
so i was like almost 14 years old
but along the way we spent six years in
japan so like we moved
from russia to japan in 94
and then to the us in 99 so like
elementary school
all interesting school in japan so
elementary school in japan
yeah so that's interesting that do you
still speak russian
sure okay
okay maybe i'll uh let me ask you in
russian
um
[Music]
is
[Laughter]
so for people who don't speak russian
constantine was uh
talking about basically his first in
1992 interaction with capitalism
which is pepsi and at first he
discovered pepsi and then he discovered
coke and he was confused how such
uh how such theft could occur
like an intellectual property theft and
remember pepsi
arrived to the soviet union first and
there's some
there's some complicated story which i
don't uh
quite understand the details of for a
while pepsi
like commanded submarines or something
yeah pepsi had like a fleet of soviet
submarines that
did they were sponsoring tanks and
this fascinating yeah and i and i
remember there's certain things that
trickled in like mcdonald's i remember
that was a big deal
oh yeah certainly for the west
absolutely so i mean we went to
mcdonald's
and we stood on i mean this is this is
absurd
right from kind of looking at it from
today's
perspective but we stood in line for
like six hours to get into this
mcdonald's
and i remember inside i was just like
a billion people and i'm just taking a
bite
out of that big mac like wow
what was it an incredible experience for
you so like
what is this taste of the west like uh
did you enjoy it
i enjoyed the fact that i mean this is
like
i was getting into the weeds but i
really enjoyed
the fact that the top of the bun had
those seeds you know like
and i remember how on the commercials
like the
big mac would kind of bounce i was like
the seeds how did they inject the seeds
into the bread like
amazing right so i think it was uh
artistry yeah you enjoyed the artistry
of the culinary
exactly it was the you know it was the
food art that kind of that is the big
mac
actually i still don't know the answer
to that how do they get the sesame seeds
on the better to not know the answer
you just wander at the mystery of it all
yeah i remember it being exceptionally
delicious but i
i'm with you i don't know you didn't
mention how transformative pepsi was but
to me basically sugar-based stuff
like like pepsi was uh or a coke i don't
remember which one we partook in but
that was an incredible experience yeah
yeah
yeah yeah no absolutely and uh
you know i think it's um
you know it was an important and and
formative uh formative period
i sometimes i guess rely on that a
little bit
uh you know in my daily life because uh
i remember like the early 90s were real
rough you know like my
parents were kind of on the on the
bottom
of the spectrum in terms of uh
you know in terms of financial
well-being so
um kind of like just when i
run into trouble not like you know
money trouble just any kind of trouble
these days it just kind of
is not uh particularly meaningful
when you compare it to that that
turbulent time of the
early 90s and the other thing is i think
there's there's like an advantage
to to being you know an immigrant which
is that
you get you go through the mental
exercise
of changing your environment completely
early in your life right you go
it's by no means you know pleasant in
the moment right but like going
into japanese elementary school right
like i didn't go to a
some like private you know
thing i just went to a regular like
japanese public elementary school and i
was the
non-japanese person in my class
so just like the learning japanese and
just kind of
so that's a super humbling experience in
many ways was when you like made fun of
all that kind of stuff oh
yeah being the outsider oh absolutely
but
you know you kind of do you kind of do
that
and then you kind of then you just
kind of are okay with with stuff you
know what i mean and so
like doing that again in middle school
in the us
it was arguably easy because i was like
yeah well i've already done this before
so
i think it kind of prepares you mentally
a little bit for
for switching up for whatever you know
changes that will come up for the rest
of
your life so i um i wouldn't trade
that that experience really for anything
it's a huge aspect of who i am and i'm
sure
you can relate to a lot of this yes is
there advice
from your life that you can give to
young people today
high school college you know about their
career
or maybe about life in general i'm not
like
a career coach but i like that's right
like i'm definitely not a life coach i
don't have it all figured out
but i think there's a um
there's a perpetual cycle of of
um you know thinking that
there is a um there's kind of like a
template for success
right maybe there is but i in my
experience i haven't seen it right um
you know i would say people in high
school
right so much of their focus
is on getting straight a's filling their
cv
with this and this and this so that it
looks impressive
right um that that is
not i think a good way to optimize your
life
right do the thing that fills your life
with passion
do the thing that fills your life with
with interest
and you know do that perpetually right
a straight a student you know
is really impressive but also you know
somewhat boring right so so i i think
you know injection of
more of that kind of um
interest into into the lives of young
people would go a long way
in in just both upping their level of
happiness
and then just kind of ensuring that
looking forward they are not suffering
from a
can you know perpetual condition of oh i
have to satisfy these like you know
check boxes
to to do well right because you can lose
yourself in that whole process for the
rest of your life
but it's nice if it's possible like max
tegmark was exceptionally good at this
at mit figure out how you can spend a
small
part of your percent of your efforts
that such that your cv looks really
impressive
yeah absolutely there's no like without
a doubt
like that's that's a baseline that you
need to have
um and then so like spend most of your
time doing like amazing things you're
passionate about
but such that it uh uh kind of like
planet nine produces
objects that uh that feed your cv
uh like slowly over time so getting good
grades in high school maybe doing
extracurricular activities
or or in terms of like you know for
programmers that's producing code that
you can show up on github
like leaving traces like um
throughout your efforts such that your
cv looks impressive to the rest of the
world
in fact i mean this is somewhat along
the lines of what i'm talking about
we see like getting like good grades is
important but
grades are not a tangible like product
like you cannot out you know show your
a and and have your a live a separate
life from you
code very much does right um music
very much takes on you know provided
somebody else listens to it right
right provide like takes on a life of
its own
that's kind of what i mean right doing
doing stuff that uh that can then
get separated from from you is is
exceptionally attractive right it's like
a it's like a fun
and uh and it's also very impressive to
others i think we're moving to a world
where grades mean less and less
like certifications mean less and less
if you look at
especially again in the computing fields
getting a degree
finishing your um currently just getting
finishing your degree whether it's
bachelor's or master's a phd
is less important than the things you've
actually put out into the world
right right and that's a fascinating
kind of that's a that's great that
in that sense the meritocracy is in its
richest most beautiful form is is
starting to win out
yeah it's weird because like you know my
understanding
and i'm not like i don't know the
history of science well enough to
to speak very confidently about this but
you know the
advisor of my advisor of my advisor
from undergrad uh like didn't have a phd
right so i think it was a more common
thing back in the day
even in uh the academic
sector to you know
not have you know faraday like faraday
didn't know algebra
when drew diagrams about you know
magnetic fields like
his faraday's law was derived entirely
from intuition
so uh it is interesting to to how
the world of academia has evolved into a
you got to do this and then get phd then
you have to post doc once and twice
and maybe thrice and then like you you
move on so
you know it does i do wonder you know if
we're
you know if there's a better i think
we're heading there
but it's a fascinating historical
perspective like that we might have just
tried this whole thing out uh for a
while where we put a lot more emphasis
on grades and certificates and
um degrees and all those kinds of things
i think the difference
historically is like we can actually
using the internet show off the
show off ourselves and our creations
better and better and more effectively
whether that's code or producing videos
or all those kinds of things that's
right
you can become a certified drone pilot
that's true of all the of all the things
you want to pick yeah for sure
or you could just fly make youtube
videos against hundreds of thousands of
views with your drone and
never getting a certificate um that's
probably illegal don't do it
what do you think is uh the meaning of
this whole thing so
you look at planets they they seem to
orbit stuff
um without without asking the why
question and
for some reason life emerged on earth
such that it led to big brains that
can ask the big why question do you
think there's an answer to it
um i'm not sure what the question is
like what meaning of life the meaning of
life um
it's 42. it's 42. yeah but
you know aside from that it's um you
know
why i think if the question you're
asking is like
why we do all this right
yeah um it's part of the human condition
right human beings are fundamentally
i feel like non like sort of stochastic
and fundamentally interested in in
kind of expanding our own understanding
of the world
around us and creating stuff to enable
that understanding
so we're like a stochastic
fundamentalist so like there's
just a bunch of randomness that really
doesn't seem like it has a good
explanation
and yet there's a kind of direction to
our being that we just keep wanting to
create and to understand
that's right i've met people that are
you know that claim to be anti-science
right um and yet
in their anti-science you know
discussion
like well like if you're so
you know scientific then how why don't
you explain to me how
i don't know this works and like it
always there's that fundamental
speed of curiosity and interest that is
common to
to all of us that is absolutely what
makes us
human right and and i
i'm in a privileged position of being
able to you know
to have that be my my job
right i think as uh you know as time
evolves forward you know when the kind
of
economy changes i mean we're already
starting to see
you know shift towards that type of you
know
creative uh you know enterprise as being
as emerging as taking over a bigger and
bigger chunk of the
sector it's not yet i think the dominant
uh portion of the economy by any account
but if we compare
this to like you know sometime when
the dominant thing you would do would be
to
you know go to a factory and do the same
exact thing
right i think you know there's a tide
there
and things are sort of headed in that
direction yeah life's becoming more and
more fun i can't wait
uh honestly what i can't wait to just
chill just just chill
terminal point of this chill and wait
for those kuiper belt objects to
complete one orbit
i'm gonna credit you with this idea uh i
do hope that
we definitively discover uh proof
that there is a planet nine out there in
the next few years so you can sit back
with a cigar a cigarette or vodka or
wine and
just uh say i told you so that's already
happening
i'm gonna do that later tonight as i
mentioned uh
confidence is essential to being a rock
star i really appreciate you uh
explaining so many fascinating things to
me today i really appreciate the work
that you do out there
and um i really appreciate you talking
with me today
thank you pleasure thanks for having me
on thanks for listening to this
conversation with constantine
botegan and thank you to squarespace
literati
onit and and i check them out in the
description
to support this podcast and now let me
leave you with some words from douglas
adams
in the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy
far out in the uncharted backwaters of
the
unfashionable end of the western spiral
arm
of the galaxy lies a small unregarded
yellow sun
orbiting this at a distance of roughly
92 million miles
is an utterly insignificant little blue
green planet
whose ape descendant life forms are so
amazingly primitive
that they still think digital watches
are a pretty neat
idea thank you for listening and hope to
see you
next time
you