Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
clara souza silva a quantum master
chemist at harvard
specializing in spectroscopy of gases
that serve as
possible signs of life on other planets
most especially
the gas phosphine she was a co-author of
the paper
that in 2020 found that there is
phosphine in the atmosphere of venus
and thus possible extraterrestrial life
that lives
in its atmosphere the detection of
phosphene was challenged
reaffirmed and is now still under active
research
quick mention of our sponsors onnit
grammarly
blinkist and indeed check them out in
the description
to support this podcast as a side note
let me say that i think the search for
life
on other planets is one of the most
important endeavors in science
if we find extraterrestrial life and
study it we may find
insights into the mechanisms that
originated at life here on earth
and more than life the mechanisms that
originated intelligence
and consciousness if we understand these
mechanisms
we can build them but more than this the
discovery of life on other planets
means that our galaxy and our universe
is teeming with life
this is humbling and terrifying but it
is also
exciting we humans and natural explorers
for most our history we explored the
surface of the earth
and the contents of our minds but now
with space-faring vessels
we have a chance to explore life beyond
earth their physics
their biology and perhaps the contents
of their minds
this is the lex friedman podcast and
here is my conversation
with clara souza since you're
the world expert in uh well in many
things but one of them is phosphine
would it technically be correct to call
you the
queen of phosphine
i go for dr faustine queen is an
inherited title
i feel but you still uh rule by
um love and power so
while having the doctor title kindness
kindness
kindness in september 2020
you co-authored a paper announcing
possible presence of phosphine in the
atmosphere of venus
and uh that it may be a signature of
extraterrestrial life big maybe big
maybe
there was some pushback of course
from the scientific community that
followed friendly loving pushback
then in january another paper from
university wisconsin i believe confirmed
the finding
so where do we stand in this saga
in this mystery of what the heck is
going on
on venus in terms of phosphine in terms
of aliens
okay let's try to break it down okay the
short answer is
we don't know um i think you
and the rest of the public are now
witnessing a pretty exciting discovery
but
as it evolves as it unfolds
um we did not wait until we had
you know years of data from 10 different
instruments across several layers the
atmosphere we waited until we had
two telescopes with independent data
months apart but still the data is
weak it's noisy it's delicate it's very
much at the edge
of instrument sensibility sensitivity
and so
we still don't even know if it is
phosphine we don't even
really know if the signal is real people
still disagree about that
and i think it at the most more
philosophical end of how this happened
i think it is a distinction and myself
and other co-authors were talking
about this it's a distinction between
hypotheses
generation and hypothesis testing now
hypothesis testing is something that i
think is the backbone of
you know the scientific method but it
has a problem which is
if you're looking through very noisy
data and you want to test the hypotheses
you may by mistake create a spurious
signal
the safest more conservative approach is
hypothesis generation
you see some data and you go what's in
there with no bias
now this is much safer much more
conservative and when there's a lot of
data
that's great when there isn't you can
clean the noise
and take out the signal with it the
signal with the
bath water whatever the equivalent of
the analogy would be
and so i think the healthy discourse
that you described is exactly this
there are ways of processing the data
completely legitimate ways checked by
multiple people and experts
where the signal shows up and then
phosphene is in the atmosphere of venus
and some where it doesn't and then we
disagree what that signal means
if it's real and it is an ambiguously
phosphine
it is very exciting because we don't
know how to explain it
without life but going from there to
the nutrients is still a huge jump and
so
so that would be the the title for the
civilization if it is
a living and thriving and venus is
venusians
until we know what they call themselves
and that that's the name yes
so this is the early analysis of data or
a data
analysis of early data
it was nevertheless you waited until the
actual peer-reviewed publication
of course and analysis of the two
different instruments months apart so
that's
alma and jcmt the two telescopes
and it's still i mean it's really
exciting what what did it feel like sort
of sitting on this data
like kind of anticipating the
publication and wondering
and still wondering is it um is it true
like
how does it make you feel that a planet
in our solar system might have phosphine
in the atmosphere
it's nuts it's absolutely nuts
i mean in the best possible way
i've been working on phosphine for over
a decade
before it was cool way before it was
cool
um before anyone could spell it or heard
of it and
at the time people either didn't know
what phosphine was or only knew it
for being just possibly the most
horrendous molecule that
ever graced the earth and so
no one was a fan um and i'd been
considering looking for it because i did
think it was an unusual and disgusting
but very promising sound
sign of life i've been looking for it
everywhere
i really didn't think to look in the
solar system i
thought it was all pretty rough around
here
for for life and so i wasn't even
considering
the solar system at all never mind next
door venus it was only the lead author
of the study jane greaves who
thought to look in the clouds of venus
and then reached out to me
to say i don't know phosphene but i know
it's weird
um how weird is it and the answer is
very weird
and so the telescopes were looking at
this is visual data
what do you mean by visual you wouldn't
see the phosphene well
but i mean it's uh well it's a telescope
it's remote
it's remote you're observing
you're what's zooming in on this
particular planet i mean what what
what does the sensor actually look like
how many pixels are
there what does the data kind of look
like it'd be nice to kind of
build up intuition of how little data we
have
based on which i mean if you look at
like
i've just been reading a lot about
gravitational waves and it's kind of
incredible
how from just very little like probably
the world's most precise
uh instrument we can derive some very
foundational ideas about our early
universe
and in that same way it's kind of
incredible how much data how much
information you can get from just a few
pixels
so what are we talking about here in
terms of
based on which this paper saw possible
signs
of phosphate in the atmosphere so
phosphine like every other molecule has
a unique spectroscopic
fingerprint meaning it rotates and
vibrates in
special ways i calculated how many of
those ways
it can rotate vibrate it is 16.8 billion
ways what this means is that if you look
at the spectrum of light
and that light has gone through
phosphine gas on the other end
there should be 16.8 billion tiny marks
left indentations left in that spectrum
we found one of those on venus one of
those 16.8 billion
so now the game is can we find any of
the other ones
yeah but they're really hard to spot
they're all in terrible places in the
electromagnetic spectrum
and the instruments we use to find this
one can't really
find any other one there's another one
of the 16.8 billion we could find but
it would take many many days of
continuous observations and that's not
really in the cards right now
i mean how do you there's all kinds of
noise first of all
yes there's uh all kinds of other
signal so how do you
separate all of that out to pull out
just this particular
signature that's associated with
phosphine
so the data kind of looks somewhat like
a wave
and a lot of that is noise and it's a
bass line and so if you can
figure out the exact shape of the wave
you can cancel that shape out and you
should be left with a straight line
and if there's something there an
absorption so a signal
so that's what we did we tried to find
out what was this baseline shape
cleaned it out and got the signal that's
part of the problem if you do this wrong
you can create a signal but that signal
is at 8.904 wavenumbers
and we actually have more digits than
that
but i don't remember by heart and an
alma in particular is a very very good
telescope array of telescopes and it can
focus on exactly that frequency
and in that frequency there are only two
known molecules
um that absorb at all so that's how we
do it we look at that exact spot where
we know fasting absorbs
the other molecule is so2
if there is extraterrestrial life
whether it's on venus
or on exoplanets where you looked before
how does that make you feel how should
it make us feel
should we be scared should we be excited
let's say it's not intelligent life
let's say it's
microbial life it's uh is it a threat to
us
are we a threat to it or is it only not
only but mostly a possibility to
understand something fundamental
something beautiful about life in the
uni
in the universe hard to know he would
have to bring
on a poet or a philosopher on the show
uh i you don't feel i feel those things
i just don't know if those are the right
things to feel
i don't certainly don't feel scared i
think it's rather silly to feel scared
definitely don't touch them um you know
sometimes in
movies you don't go near it don't
interfere
i think one of the things with venus is
because of phosphine now there is a
chance
that venus is inhabited and in that case
we shouldn't go there we should be very
careful with messing with them
and bringing our own stuff there that
contaminates it
and venus has suffered enough if there's
life there it's probably the
remains of a living planet the very last
survivors of
what once was potentially a thriving
world and so
i don't want our first interaction with
alien life to be
massacre so i definitely wouldn't want
to go near out of a
let's say galactic responsibility
galactic ethics
and i often think of you know alien
astronomers watching us and
how disappointed they would be if we
mess this up so i really
i really want to be very careful with
anything that could be life
but certainly i wouldn't be scared
humans are plenty capable of killing one
another we don't
you know we don't need extraterrestrial
help to destroy ourselves
scared mostly of other humans exactly
but these this life
if there is life there it does seem just
like you said it would be pretty rugged
it's like the cockroaches or or chuck
norris i don't know it's the
some kind of um it's something that
survived
through some very difficult conditions
that doesn't mean
it would handle us you know it could be
like war of the worlds
you come just because you're resilient
in your own planet doesn't mean you can
survive another
even our extremophiles which are very
impressive we should all be very proud
of our extremophiles
they wouldn't really make it in the
venusian clouds
so i wouldn't expect because you're
tough even chuck norris stuff
that you would survive on an alien
planet uh
and and then from the scientific
perspective you don't want to pollute
the the data gathering process but we're
showing up there
the observer can can affect the observed
how heartbreaking would it be if we
found life on another planet and then
we're like
oh we we brought it with us it was my
sandwich
but that's always the problem right and
it's certainly a problem with mars
because we visited the that
that if there is life on mars or like
remains of life on ours
it's always going to be a question of
like well maybe we planted it there
let's not do the same with venus
it's harder because when we try to go to
venus and things melt
very quickly yeah and so it's pretty
it's a little harder to
pollute venus um it's very good at
destroying
foreigners yeah well in terms of elon
musk and
terraforming planets mars is stopped
number one then
venus may be after that so
uh can we talk about phosphine a little
bit um so you mentioned it's a pretty
i love fossee what's your twitter handle
that's like dr phosphene it's dr faustin
yes
you will be surprised here it wasn't
taken already i could just i just
grabbed it
didn't have to buy it off anyone yeah
so what uh what is it what's phosphine
you already mentioned it's pretty toxic
and
um troublesome and what and
outside
so maybe what are some things that uh
make it interesting
chemically and why is it
a good sign of life uh one is present in
the atmosphere
like you've described in your paper uh
aptly titled the phosphine as a
biosignature gas in exoplanet
atmospheres
i suppose you wrote that paper before
venus i did yes
it did and no one cared you know in that
paper i said something like
if we find phosphine on any terrestrial
planet can only mean life and everyone's
like yeah that sounds about right let's
go
and then venus shows up and i was like
are you sure i'm like
i was sure before i was sure now
that it's right here um i'm less sure
now that my claims are being tested
so phosphine fascinating is a
fascinating molecule so it's shaped like
a pyramid
with a phosphorus up top and then three
hydrogens
it's actually quite a simple molecule in
many ways and
you know it's the most popular elements
in the universe
carbon hydrogen nitrogen oxygen
phosphorus sulfur
when you add hydrogen to them it makes
quite simple quite
famous uh molecules you know you do it
to oxygen you get water
you do it to carbon you get methane you
do it to nitrogen you get ammonia
these are all molecules people have
heard of but you do it to phosphorus
you get phosphine people haven't heard
of phosphene because
it's not really popular on earth um we
really shouldn't find it anywhere on
earth
because it is extremely toxic to life
it interacts with oxygen metabolism and
everything you know and love uses oxygen
metabolism
and it interacts fatally so it kills in
several very imaginative and very
macabre ways
so it was used as a chemical warfare
agent in the first world war and
most recently by isis so really bad
most life avoids it even life that might
not avoid it so life that doesn't use
oxygen metabolism anaerobic life
still has to put crazy amounts of effort
into making it it's a really difficult
molecule to make
thermodynamically speaking it's really
difficult to make that phosphorus want
to be together with that hydrogen
so it's horrible everyone avoids it when
they're not avoiding it is extremely
difficult to make you would have to put
energy
in sacrifice energy to make it and if
you did go through all that trouble
and made it it gets um reacted with the
radicals in the atmosphere and gets
destroyed
so we shouldn't find it anywhere and yet
we do it's kind of
weird molecule that seems to
be made by life and we don't even know
why life clearly finds a use for it
it's not the only molecule the life is
willing to sacrifice energy to make but
we don't know how or why life is even
making it so absolutely mysterious
absolutely deadly smells horrifically
when it's made it produces other kind of
diphosphines and
it's been reported as smelling like
garlicky fishy death
uh once someone referred to it as
smelling like the let me see if i
remember the
the rancid diapers of the spawn of satan
oh
very nice yeah very very vivid and so
you're a poet after all i didn't i
didn't call it that someone else did
and so it's just this horrific molecule
but it is produced by life
we don't know why and when it is
produced by life is done with enormous
sacrifice
and the universe does not sacrifice life
sacrifices and so it's this strange
contradictory molecule that we should
all be avoiding and yet
seems to be an almost unambiguous sign
of life on rocky planets
okay can we dig into that a little bit
so what on rocky planets
what uh is there biological mechanisms
that can produce it
and is there is there
you said the why is unclear why
life might produce it but is there an
understanding of what kind of mechanisms
might be able to produce it this very
difficult to produce
molecule we don't know yet the enzymatic
pathways of fossil production by life
are not yet known
this is not actually as surprising as it
might sound i think something like 80
of all the natural products that we know
of so we know biology makes them
we don't know how it is much easier to
know life produces something because you
can put you know bacteria in a petri
dish
and then watch and then that gas is
produced you go oh life made it
that actually happened with phosphene
but that's much easier to do of course
than
figuring out what is the exact metabolic
pathway within that life form that
created the
this molecule so we don't know yet
phosphene is really understudied um no
one had really heard of it until
nowish what you were presenting is the
fact that life produces
phosphate not the the process by which
it produces fasting
is there an urgency now like if you were
to try to understand the mechanisms
the what did you call enzymatic pathways
that produce phosphine how difficult is
that of a problem to crack
it's really difficult if i'm not
mistaken even
you know the scent of truffles obviously
a billion dollar industry
huge deal until quite recently it wasn't
known exactly how those
scents those molecules that create this
incredible smell were produced and this
is a billion dollar industry
as you can imagine there is no such
pressure there's no phosphine lobby
or anything that would push for this
research but i hope someone picks
picks it up and does it and it isn't
crazy
because we know that faucino is really
hard to make we know it's really hard
for her to happen
accidentally you know even lightening
and volcanoes that can produce small
amounts of phosphine
it's extremely difficult for even these
extreme processes to make it
so it's not really surprising that only
life can do it because life
is willing to make things at a cost
so maybe on the topic of phosphine what
uh again you're you've gotten yourself
into trouble with that i'm going to ask
you all these like
high-level poetic questions i apologize
no i would love it
okay what when did you first
fall in love with phosphine
it wasn't love at first sight it was
somewhere between
a long relationship and stockholm
syndrome
yeah yeah when when i first started my
phd
i knew i wanted to learn about molecular
spectra and how to simulate it
i thought it was really outrage
outrageous that we as a species
couldn't detect molecules remotely we
didn't have this perfect catalogue ready
of the molecular fingerprint of every
molecule we may want to find in
the universe and something as basic as
phosphine
the fact that we didn't really know how
it interacted with light
and so we couldn't detect it properly
you know in the galaxy
just i was so indignant and so initially
i just
started working on phosphine because
people hadn't before
and i thought we should know what
phosphine looks like
that was it and then i read every paper
that's ever been published about
phosphine
it was quite easy because there aren't
that many
and that's when i started learning about
where we had already founded
in the universe and what it meant um i
started finding out quite how little we
know about it
and why and it was only when i
joined mit and i started talking to
biochemists
that the that have been became clear
that fossen wasn't just
weird and special and understudied and
disgusting
it was all these things for oxygen
loving life
and it was the anaerobic world that
would welcome phosphine and that's when
the idea of looking for it on other
planets became crystallized
because oxygen is very powerful and very
important on earth but
that's not necessarily going to be the
case on other exoplanets most planets
are oxygen pole
overwhelmingly most planets are oxygen
poor
and so finding the sign of life that
would be welcomed by
everything that would live without
oxygen
on earth seemed so cool
and but ultimately the project the first
is born of the idea that you want to
find that molecular
fingerprint of any of a
molecule so and that this is just one
example
and that's connected
to then looking at for looking for that
fingerprint elsewhere in
in a remote way and obviously that then
at that time were exoplanets already
when you were doing your phd and you
by those should say your phd thesis was
on it wasn't it's all on phosphine 100
with a little bit of pneumonia i have a
chapter that i i did
where i talked about phosphine and
ammonia so i
got it but no phosphine is very much my
thesis um but at that
that at that time when you're writing it
there's already a sense that exoplanets
are out there
and uh we might be able to be looking
for bio signatures for
um on those exoplanets pretty much so i
finished my phd in 2015
we found the first exoplanets in the
kind of mid to late
90s so exoplanets were known it was
known
that some had atmospheres and from there
it's not a big jump to think well if
some have atmospheres
some of those might be habitable and
some of those may be
inhabited so how do you
detect you started to talk about it but
can we linger on it how do you detect
phosphine on a far away thing rocky
thing
rocky planet what uh what is
uh spectroscopy what is this molecular
fingerprint
what does it look like you've kind of
mentioned the wave
but what are we what are we supposed to
think about what are the tools
what are the uncertainties all those
kinds of things so the
the path can go this way you've got
light
kind of pure light you can crack that
light open
with a prism or a spectroscope or water
and make a rainbow that rainbows all the
colors
and all the invisible colors the
ultraviolet the infrared
and if that light was truly pure you
could consider that rainbow to just
cover continuously all of these colors
but if that light goes through a gas
we may not see that gas we certainly
cannot see the molecules within that gas
but those molecules will steal absorb
some of
that light some but not all each
molecule
absorbs only very specific colors of
that rainbow
and so if you know for example that
shade of green
can only be absorbed by methane then you
can watch
as a planet passes in front of a star
the planet is too far away you can't see
it
and it has an atmosphere that atmosphere
is far too small you definitely can't
see it
but the sunlight will go through that
atmosphere and if that atmosphere is
methane
then on the other side that shade of
blue i can't remember if i said blue
green but that color will be missing
because methane took it and so with
phosphene it's the same thing
it has specific colors 16.8 billion
colors that it absorbs it and nothing
else does
and so if you can find them and notice
them missing
from the light of a star that went
through a planet's atmosphere
then you'll know that atmosphere
contains the molecule
how cool is that that's incredible so
you can have this
fingerprint within the space of colors
and there's a lot of molecules and i
mean i would i wonder
that's a question of like how much
overlap there is how how
close can you get to the actual
fingerprint like
can phosphine unlock the iphone with its
lights on
he says 16.8 billion so
presumably this rainbow is discretized
into little segments somehow exactly how
many total are there
how how how a lot is 16.8 billion
it's a lot you we don't have the
instruments to
break these break any light into this
many tiny segments
and so with the instruments we do have
there's huge amounts of overlap
methane as an example a lot of the ways
it's detectable is because
the carbon and the hydrogens they
vibrate with one another they move they
interact
but every other hydrocarbon acetylene
isoprene has carbon and hydrogens
also vibrating and rotating and so it's
actually very hard to tell them apart
at low resolutions and our instruments
can't really cope with distinguishing
between molecules particularly well
but in an ideal world if we had infinite
resolution then yes
every molecule spectral features will be
unique
yeah like almost too uni like it would
be too trivial
at the quantum level at our level
uh there's huge overlap yeah but then
you can start to then
what try to disambiguate like what the
mis
the fact that certain colors are missing
what does that mean and hopefully
they're missing a certain kind of
pattern where you can say with some kind
of probability that's this gas not this
gas
or you're solving that gaseous puzzle
i got it okay we can go back to venus
actually and and show that
so with this i mentioned those two
molecules that could be responsible for
that signal at the resolution that we
have
it was phosphine and so2 um
sulfur dioxide and at that resolution
could really be one of the other but in
that same bandwidth so in the kind of
the same observations
there was another region where phosphine
does not absorb we know that
but so2 does so we just went unchecked
and there was no signal so we thought oh
then it must be phosphene and then we
submit to the paper
the rest is history i got it uh well
yeah
that's beautifully told
is there so the telescopes we're talking
about are sitting on earth
what can it help solving this
fingerprint molecular
fingerprint problem if we do a flyby
does it help if we get closer and closer
or are telescopes pretty damn good
for this kind of uh puzzle solving
subscripts are pretty good but the
earth's atmosphere
is a pain i mean i'm very thankful for
it but
it does interrupt a lot of measurements
and a lot of
regions where phosphine would be active
they are not available
the earth is not transparent
in those wavelengths so being above the
atmosphere would make a huge difference
then proximity matters a lot less but
just
escaping the earth's atmosphere would be
wonderful but then it's really hard to
stay very stable
and if there is phosphate on venus
there's very little of it
in the clouds and so the signal is very
weak
and the telescopes we can use on earth
are
much bigger and much more stable so it's
a bit of a trade-off
so is it
are you um with this kind of remote
observation
is it at all helpful to uh
strive for going over to venus and like
grabbing a scoop of the atmosphere
or is remote observation really a a
powerful tool
for this kind of job like the scoop is
not necessary
well a lot of people want to scoop i get
it
i get it inclination yeah i don't want
to scoop specifically because if it is
life
i want to know everything i can remotely
before i interfere
um so that's my i've got ethical reasons
against the scoop more than engineering
reasons against the scoop
but i have some engineering reasons
against the scoop scoop is not a
technical term but i feel like now it's
too late
thank you for going along with this it's
too late to take it back i appreciate it
we don't understand the clouds well
enough to plan the scoop
very well because it's not that uh
saturated like there's not that much of
it present
no and the place is nasty you know it's
not
it's not going to be easy to build
something that can do
the task reliably and can be trusted
the measurements can be trusted and then
passed that message on
so actually i'm for an orbiter i think
we should have orbiters around
every solar system body whose job is
just to learn about these places
i'm disappointed we haven't already got
an orbiter
around every single one of them a small
it can be a small satellite
schlotting data figuring out you know
how do the clouds move what's in them
how often is there lightning and
volcanic activity where's the topography
is it changing
is there a biosphere actively doing
things we should be
monitoring this from afar and so i'm for
uh
over the atmosphere hopefully around
venus
that would be that would be my choice
okay so now
recently venus is all exciting about
phosphine and everything is there
is there other stuff maybe before we
were looking at venus or now
looking out into other solar systems
is there other promising exoplanets or
other planets within the solar system
that might have phosphine or might have
other
strong biosignatures that we should be
looking for
like phosphine there's a few but
outside the solar system all are kind of
promising candidates
we know so little about them for most of
them we barely know their density
um most of them we don't even know if
they have an atmosphere
never mind what that atmosphere might
contain so we're still very much the
stage where
we have detected promising planets but
they're promising in that
they're about the right size about the
right density
they could have an atmosphere and
they're about the right
distance from their host star but that's
really all we know
near future telescopes will tell us much
more but
for now we're just guessing so you said
near future so
there's hope that there will be
telescopes that can see that far
enough to to determine if there's an
atmosphere and
perhaps even the contents of the
atmosphere absolutely jwst launching
later this year
will be able to get a very rough sense
of the main atmospheric constituents of
planets that could potentially be
habitable
and that's this here you know what's the
name of jwst
the james webb space telescope okay and
that's going to be out in space past the
atmosphere
yes is there something interesting to be
said about the engineering aspect of the
telescope
i mean it's an incredible beast but it's
a beast of many
burdens so it's going to do
it's good see you are a poet
yeah i love it this is very eloquent i
love
you're speaking to the audience which i
appreciate
uh so so yes it's a giant engineering
project
and uh is it orbiting something do you
know so it's going to be above the
atmosphere
um and it will be doing lots of
different astrophysics and so
some of its time will be dedicated to
exoplanets but there's an entire
astronomy field fighting for time
before the cryogenic lifetime of the
um instrument and so when i was looking
for
the possibility of finding phosphine on
distant exoplanets i used jwst
as a way of checking with this
instrument that we will launch
later this year could we detect
phosphine on an oxygen poor planet
and there i put very much a hard stop
where
some of my simulations said yes you can
totally do it but it will take
a little under the cryogenic lifetime of
this machine
so then i had to go well that that's not
going to no one's going to dedicate all
of jwst to look for my
molecule that no one cared about so
we're very much at that edge but
there'll be many other telescopes in the
coming decades
that will be able to tell us quite a lot
about the atmospheres of potentially
habitable planets
so you mentioned simulation this is
super interesting to me and
and this perhaps could be a super dumb
question but
no i just think i'm gonna prove you
wrong in that one
you simulate molecules to understand how
they look from a distance
is what i understand like what does that
simulation
look like so it's uh it's talking about
the the which colors of the rainbow will
be missing is that
the goal of the simulation that's the
goal but it's really just a very
very nasty schrodinger's equation so
it's a quantum
simulation it's simulating at the
quantum level yes so i'm a quantum
astrochemist
hi i'm clara i'm a quantum astrochemist
how we should have started this
conversation
can you describe the three components of
that
quantum astro and chemist and how they
interplay together
so i study the quantum behavior of
molecules
hence the quantum and the chemist
specifically so i can detect them
in space and see astro
so what i what i do is i figure out the
probability of a molecule being in a
particular state
there's no deterministic nature to the
work i do it so it's
every transition is just a likelihood
but if you get a population of that
molecule it will always happen
and so this is all at the quantum level
it's a stronger equation on
i think 27 dimensions i don't remember
it by hard
and what this means is i'm solving these
giant
quantum matrices and that's why you need
a lot of computer power
giant computers to diagonalize these
enormous matrices
each of whom describes a single
vibrational behavior of a molecule
so i think phosphine has 17.5 million
possible states it can exist in
and transitions can occur between pairs
of these states
and there's a certain likelihood that
they'll happen this is the quantum world
nothing is
deterministic there's just a likelihood
that it will jump from one state to
another
and these jumps they're transitions and
there's 16.8 billion of them
when energy is absorbed that corresponds
to this transition
we see it in the spectrum this is more
quantum chemistry than you had asked for
i'm sorry no
no i'm sorry brain is broken so when the
when the transitions happen between the
different states
uh somehow the energy maps the spectrum
exactly
energy corresponds to a frequency and a
frequency corresponds to a wavelength
which corresponds to a color
so there's some probability assigned to
each color then
exactly and that probability determines
how intense that transition will be
how strong and so you run this kind of
simulation for a particular
so that's 17.5 squared or something like
that exactly
17.5 million energies each one of whom
involves diagonalizing a giant matrix
with a supercomputer which i wonder what
the most efficient algorithm for the
diagonalization is but there there's
something there's many
depends on kind of the shape of the
matrix so they're not
random matrixes so some are more
diagonal than others and
so some need more treatment than others
most of the work ends up going in
describing the system this quantum
system in different ways until you have
a matrix that is
close to being diagonal and then it's
much easier to
clean it up so how how many uh how hard
is this puzzle
so you're solving this puzzle for
phosphine right
um is this are we supposed to solve this
puzzle for every single
molecule oh boy yes i calculated if i
if i did the work i did for phosphine
again for all the molecules for which we
don't have
spectra for which we don't have a
fingerprint it would take me
62 000 years a little over 62
000 years what time flies when you're
having fun okay
but you uh you write that there are
about 16 000 molecules we care about
when looking for a new earth or when we
try to detect alien biosignatures
if we want to detect any molecules from
here we need to know their spectra
and we currently don't solving this
particular problem
that's my job what was that that i mean
that's absolutely correct
yeah i could have could have not said it
better myself did you take that from my
website yeah i think i
stole it and your website is excellent
so it's
worthy place to steal stuff from how do
you solve this problem
uh of for the 16 000 molecules we care
about
of which phosphine is one yes and so
um so taking a step a little bit out of
fossil
is there uh but we were having so much
fun it was having so much fun no we're
not saying no no no
it's sticking around i'm just saying
we're joining more friends coming to the
party
how do you choose other friends to come
to the party that are interesting to
study
as we solve one puzzle at a time through
the space of 16
000. so we've already started out of
those 16 000
we understand water quite well methane
quite well ammonia quite well
carbon dioxide i could keep going and
then we understand molecules like
acetylene
hydrogen cyanide more or less
and that takes us to about four percent
of those sixteen thousand
we understand about four percent of them
more or less phosphine is one of them
but the other 96 we just really have
barely any idea at all of where
in the spectrum of light they would
leave a a mark
i can't spend the next 62 000 years
doing this work
um and i don't want to even if you know
somehow
i was able that that's not that that
wouldn't feel good
so one of the things that i try to do
now
is move away from how i did phosphene so
i did phosphine
really the best that i could the best
that could be done with the computer
power that we have
you know trying to get each one of those
16.8 billion transitions
mapped accurately calculated
and then i thought what if i do a worse
job
what if i just do a much worse job um
can i just make it much faster and then
it's still worth it
like how bad can i get before it's
worthless and then
could i do this for all the other
molecules so i created exactly this
terrible
terrible it's a system how about it so
how
what's the answer to that question that
fundamental question asks myself all the
time
in other domains how crappy can i be
before i'm useless before somebody
notices
turns out pretty crappy because
no one has any idea what these molecules
look like
anything is better than nothing and so i
thought
how long will it take me to create
better than nothing spectra
for all of these molecules and so i
created rascal
rapid approximate spectral calculations
for all um and
what i do is i use organic chemistry and
quantum chemistry
and kind of cheat at them both i just
try to figure out
what is the fastest way i could run this
and
i simulate rough spectra for
all of those 16 000 so i've managed to
get it to work
it's really shocking how well it works
considering how bad it is
is there any insights you could give to
like the
the tricks involved in making it fast
like what are the
um maybe some insightful shortcuts taken
that still result in some useful
information about the spectra
the insights came from organic chemistry
from decades ago
when organic chemists wanted to know
what a compound might be they would look
at a spectrum
and see a feature and they would go i've
seen that feature before
that's usually what happens when you
have a carbon triple bonded
to another carbon and they were mostly
right
almost every molecule that has a carbon
triple bonded to another one
looks like that has other features
different
that distinguish them from one another
but they have that that feature in
common
we call these functional groups and so
most of that work ended up being
abandoned because now we have mass
spectrometry we've got nuclear magnetic
resonance spectroscopy so
people don't really need to do that
anymore
but these ancient textbooks still exist
and i've collected them
all as many as i could and there are
hundreds of these descriptions where
people have said
oh whenever you have a
iodine atom connected to this one
there's always a feature here and it's
usually quite
sharp and it's quite strong and some
people go oh yeah that's a really broad
feature every time
that combination of atoms and bonds so
i've collected them all
and i've created this giant dictionary
of all these kind of
puzzle pieces these lego parts of
molecules
and i've written a code that then puts
them all together in some kind of like
frankenstein's monster of molecules so
you ask me for any molecule and i go
well it has
these bonds and this atom dangling off
this atom and
this cluster here and i tell you what it
should look like
and it kind of works so this creates a
whole uh
portfolio of just kind of uh signatures
that we can look for
very rough pictures but still useful
enough to analyze the atmospheres
the the telescope generated images of
other planets close right now
it is so complete so it has all of these
molecules
that it can tell you say you look at an
alien atmosphere and there's a feature
there it can tell you oh that feature
that's familiar it could be one of these
816 molecules best of luck yes
so i think the next step which is what
i'm working on is telling you something
more useful than it could be one of
those 816 molecules that's still
true i wouldn't say it's useful so i can
tell you
but only 12 percent of them also have a
feature in this region so go look there
and if there's nothing there it can't be
those and so on
it can also tell you things like you
will need this much accuracy to
distinguish between those 816
so that's what i'm working on but it's a
lot of work
so this is really interesting the like
the role of computing in this whole
picture you mentioned code
so like you as a quantum
astro chemist there is some role
of for programming in your life in your
past life in your current life
oh yeah almost entirely i'm a
computational quantum astrochemist
but that doesn't roll off the tongue
very easily so this is fundamentally
computational
like if you want to be successful in the
21st century and doing quantum master
chemistry you want to be computational
absolutely all quantum chemistry is
computational at this point okay
does machine learning play a role at all
is there some
extra shortcuts that could be discovered
through uh
like you see all that success with
protein folding right
a problem that thought to be extremely
difficult to apply machine learning to
because
it's um
i mean mostly because there's not a lot
of already solved
puzzles to train on i suppose the same
exact thing is true
with this particular problem but is
there hope for machine learning to help
out
absolutely currently you've laid out
exactly the problem the
training set is awful and because
there's so
a lot of this data that i'm basing it on
is literally many decades old the people
who worked on it and data that i get
often they're dead and the files that
i've used they
some of them were hand drawn by someone
tired in the 70s
yes so i could of course have yeah have
a program
training on these but i'll just be
perpetuating these mistakes without hope
of actually verifying them so my next
step is to
improve this training set um by hand
and then try to see if i can apply
machine learning on the full code of the
full 16 000 molecules
and improve them all but really i need
to be able to test the outcomes
with experimental data which means
convincing someone in a lab to spend a
lot of money
putting very dangerous gases in chambers
and measuring them
at outrageous temperatures so it's a
work in progress
and so collecting huge amounts of data
about the actual gases
uh so you see you so you
you are up for doing that kind of thing
too so
actually like doing the full
end to end thing which is like having a
gas collecting data about it
and and then doing the kind of analysis
that creates the fingerprint
and then also analyzing using that
library the data that comes from other
planets
so you do the full fall from birth to
death interesting um yes i worked in an
industrial chemistry laboratory when i
was
much younger in slovenia and there i
worked in the lab
actually collecting spectrum and and
predicting spectrum
what's it like to work with a bunch of
gases that are like not so human
friendly
it's terrifying it's horrific it's so
scary and
i love my job i'm willing to clearly
sacrifice a lot for it
you know job stability money
yes sanity but
i only worked there for a few months it
it was really terrifying
there's just so many ways to die you
know usually you only have a handful of
ways to die every day
you know but if you work in a lab
there's so many more
orders of magnitude more and i i was
very bad
at it i'm not a good hands-on scientist
i want a laptop connected to a remote
supercomputer
or a laptop connected to a telescope yes
i don't
i don't need to be there to believe it
and i am not good in the lab
yeah when there's a bunch of things that
can poison you a bunch of things that
could explode and they're gaseous and
they're often
maybe they might not even have a smell
or they might not be visible
it's like so many of them give you
cancer it's just so cruel
and some people love this work but i've
i've never enjoyed experimental work
it's so ungrateful
it's so lonely well most i mean so much
work is lonely
if you find the joy in it but you you
enjoy the results of it
yes i'm very thankful for all the
experimentalists in my life
but i i'll do the theory they do the
experiment and then we talk to one
another and make sure it matches
uh okay beautiful what are uh
spectroscopic networks those
look super cool are they related to what
we were talking about the picture look
pretty
oh and yes slightly so remember when i
mentioned the 17.5 million energy levels
yes there are rules for each molecule on
which
energy levels they can jump from and to
and how likely it is to make that jump
and so if you
plot all the roots it can take you get
this
energy network for which is like a ball
so these are the constraints of the the
transitions that could be taken
exactly for each molecule interesting
and no they're not so it's not a fully
connected
it's like it's it's sparse somehow yes
you get island sometimes you get
a molecule can only jump from one set of
states to another and it's trapped now
in this network
it can never go to another network that
could have been available to
other siblings is there some insights to
be drawn from these networks
like something cool that you can
understand about a particular molecule
because of it
yes some molecules have what we call
forbidden transitions
and which aren't really forbidden
because it's quantum there are no rules
no
there are rules it's just the rules are
very often broken in the quantum world
and so forbidden transitions doesn't
actually mean they're forbidden
low probability exactly they just become
deeply unlikely
yeah cool and so you could do all the
same like i'm
coming from a computer science world you
know i love graph theory
so you can do all the same like craft
theoretic kind of analysis of like
clusters or something like that
or all those kinds of things and draw
insights from me
they're unique for each molecule so
these the networks that you mentioned
that's actually not too difficult a
layer of quantum physics by then all the
energies are mapped so we've had high
school children work on those networks
and the trick is to not tell them
they're doing quantum physics until like
three months in when it's too late for
them to back out
and then you're like you're a quantum
physicist now and it's really nice
yeah okay but like the promise of this
even though
16 000 even just a subset of them that's
really exciting because then you can do
as the telescope data get better and
better especially for exoplanets
but also for venus you can then
start like getting your full like you
know how you get like blood work done or
like you get your genetic testing to see
what your ancestors are
you can get the same kind of like high
resolution information about
interesting things going on on a
particular planet based in the
atmosphere right exactly
how cool would that be if we could you
know scan an alien planet and go
oh this is what the clouds are made of
this is what's in the surface
these are the molecules that are mixing
here are probably oceans because you can
see these types of molecules above it
and here are the hadley cells here are
how the biosphere works we could map
this whole thing
wouldn't it be cool if the aliens like
are aware of these techniques and like
would spoof like
the wrong gases just like pretend that's
how they can be
it's like an invisibility cloak they can
generate gases that would throw you off
or like or do the opposite they pretend
they will
artificially generate phosphate and so
they like the dumb
the dumb apes on earth again like go out
like flying in different places
because it's just fun it's like some
teenager alien
somewhere just pranking yeah uh but i
was asked that exact question
this saturday by uh by a
seventy-year-old boy in
canada old seven seven years yes
[Laughter]
but it was the first time i'd been asked
that question this is the second in a
week
um we're kindred spirits him and i
we can um they can prank us to some
extent
but the this work of interpreting an
alien atmosphere
means you're reading the atmosphere as a
message and it's very
hard to hide signs of life in an
atmosphere because
you can try to prank us but you're still
going to fart
and breathe and somehow metabolize the
environment around you
yeah and call that whatever you call
that uh
and release molecules and so that's
really hard to hide
you know you can go very quiet you can
throw out some weird molecule to confuse
us further
but we can still see all your other
metabolites it's hard to fake
uh is there so you kind of mentioned
like water
what um what other gases are there
that we know about that are like high
likelihood
as bio signatures in terms of life i
mean what are your other favorites
inter so so we got phosphine but like
what
uh what else is a damn good signal to be
uh
that you think about that we should be
looking for if we look at another
atmosphere
is there gases that come to mind or are
there all sort of
possible bio signatures that we should
love equally
there's many so there's water we know
that's important for life as we know it
there's molecular
oxygen on earth that's probably the most
robust sign of life particularly
combined with small amounts of methane
and it's true that the majority of the
oxygen in our atmosphere is
a product of life and so if i was an
alien astronomer
and i saw earth's atmosphere i'm
i would get a nobel i think on you know
what would you notice i mean this is
really
i would be very excited about this about
the oxygen
about fighting 20 21 of oxygen
atmosphere
that's very unusual so would that be the
most exciting thing to you from an alien
perspective about earth
in terms of detect like analyzing the
atmosphere like what are the
biosignatures of life on earth would you
say
in terms of the contents of the
atmosphere is oxygen high amount of
oxygen
pretty damn good sign i mean it's not as
good as the tv signals we've been
sending out
those those are slightly more robust
than oxygen oxygen on its own has false
positives for life
so there's still ways of making it but
it's it's
a pretty robust sign of life in the
context or atmosphere with the
radiation that the sun produces our
position in relation to the sun
the other components of our atmosphere
the volcanic activity we have
all of that together makes the 20 of
oxygen
extremely um robust sign of life
but outside that context you could still
produce
oxygen without life but phosphine
although better in the sense of
it is much harder to make it has lower
false positives
still has some so i'm actually against
looking for
specific molecules unless we're looking
for like cfcs if we find cfcs that's
definitely aliens i feel confident
chlorofluorocarbons
and so you know if aliens had been
watching us they would be going oh
no cfcs i mean yeah
they're not gonna last long let's you
know everyone's writing their thesis on
the end of
the end of the earth and then we got
together we stopped using them
i like to think they're really proud of
us um you know they literally saw our
ozone hole shrinking
they've been watching it and they saw it
happen i think they'll be honest they're
more paying attention to the whole
nuclear thing
that's just i think they care it's not
gonna bother them oh i mean worried
about us oh yes oh no worried about us
they i mean this is why the aliens have
been showing up recently uh
it's like if you if you look at i mean
there is i mean it's probably
there's a correlation with a lot of
things but what the ufologists quote
unquote often talk about
is that there seems to be a much
higher level of ufo sighting since like
in the nuclear age
so like if aliens were indeed worried
about us like if you were aliens you
would start showing up
when the the living organisms have first
discovered a way to destroy the entire
the uh the entire colony can um
the uh increase in sightings not have to
do with the fact that people now have
more cameras
it's an interesting thing about science
like with ufo sightings
it's it's like either 99
of percent of them are false or 100 of
them are false
the interesting thing to me is in that
point zero one percent
there's a lot of things in science that
are like these weird outliers they're
difficult to replicate
you have like there's even physical
phenomena ball lightning
there's difficult things to artificially
create in large amounts or observe
in nature in large amounts in such a way
that you can do to
apply the scientific method that could
be just things that like
what happened like a few times like or
once
and you're like what the hell is that
and that that's very difficult
for science to know what to do it i'm a
huge proponent of just being open-minded
because
when you're open-minded about aliens for
example is
it allows you to think outside the box
in other domains as well
and somehow that will result like if you
open mind about aliens
and you don't comp you know don't laugh
it off immediately
what happens is somehow that that's
going to lead to a solution to p equals
np or p not equals np
like in ways that you can't predict the
open mindedness has
tertiary effects that will result in
progress i believe
which is why i'm a huge fan of aliens
because it's like
because too many scientists roll their
eyes at the idea of aliens
alien life and to me it's one of the
most
exciting possibilities uh in the
biggest most exciting questions
before all of human civilization so to
roll your eyes
is not the right answer to roll your
eyes presumes that you know
anything about this world as opposed to
just knowing point zero zero zero one
percent of this world
and so being humble in the face of that
uh being open to the possibility of is
uh visiting earth is a good idea not
everything though
i'm not so open-minded to the flat earth
uh hypothesis
is there's a growing number of people uh
believing in
but even then or the inner earth i've
got shouted out in a public talk about
it
so like the earth is hollow yeah my
understanding is that there's an
this conspiracy theory that as far as i
can tell has
no grounding in reality is that there's
a slightly smaller earth
inside this one which is just too cute
as a concept
um and you can access it i think from
antarctica and
that's where we keep and i quote the
mammoths and the nazis
yeah i mean that one is ridiculous but
like i do like hey i thought you were
keeping an open mind i am this is this
is
i genuinely think that's more likely
than aliens visiting the earth and i say
this as someone who has dedicated
her life to finding like alien life and
and so that's how improbable
i think the visitations are because
interstellar distances are
so huge that it's just not really worth
it
see i i have a different view on this
whole thing i think the
aliens that look like little green men
are
like extremely low probability event
like mammoths and nazis
yeah that's similar but
but other kind of ideas like
the the sad thing to me and i think
in my view if there's other alien
civilizations out there
and they visited earth neither them
or perhaps just us would be even able to
detect them
like we we wouldn't be open-minded
enough to see it
like if if
because our understanding of what is
life
and i just talked to sarah walker who's
uh
you know sarah yeah we talked for three
hours about the question what is life
there's a good person to talk to about
what is life
but like the whole point is we don't
really we have a very narrow-minded view
of what
is life and when it shows up and it
might be already here
um trees and dolphins and so on
and or or mountains or i don't know or
the
or the molecules in the atmosphere or um
or like i people make fun of me but i do
think that
ideas are kind of aliens themselves or
consciousness could be the aliens
or it could be the method by which they
communicate we don't know about the
way our human mind works
and the fact that this thing is a
quantum process
please don't i i understand this it's
not woo
i'm not i could but it very well could
be there could be something at the
at the physics level right it could be
at the chemical or the biological level
things that are happening that we're
just close too close-minded
because our conception of life is at the
level of
like us like at the jungle level
of mammals and on the time scale that's
the human time scale we may not be able
to perceive
what alien life is actually like
what on the scale at which their
intelligence realizes itself we may not
be able to perceive
and the other thing that's really
important about alien visitations
whether it happened or not is especially
after covet in 2020
i'm losing a little bit of faith of our
government being able to handle that
that well not our government but us as
a society as a collective being able to
deal with new things in an effective way
that's inspiring that's efficient that
uh
like whether it's if it's a dangerous
thing to deal with it
to alleviate the danger whether it's the
possibility of
new discoveries and something inspiring
to ride that wave and make it inspiring
all those kinds of things
i honestly think if aliens showed up
they would look around
everybody would ignore them and the
government might like hide it
try to like see to keep it from the
chinese and the russians if it's the
united states
call it a military secret in a very
close-minded way
and then the bureaucracy would drawn it
away to where uh
through paperwork the poor aliens would
just like waste away in a cell somewhere
like there's a certain that would never
happen part of the reason that i feel so
confident that aliens have not visited
because they would have had to visit
just to have a look remotely
you know from neptune or something which
makes no sense because interstellar
travel
is so difficult that it would be
quite a ridiculous proposition but
that's the bit that i think is
technically possible
if they did come here and they were
visible by anyone detectable by anyone
the thought that any government no
matter or any military could just
contain them these beings
are capable of traveling interstellar
distances when we can
barely go to the moon like barely go to
the moon these things be way way way
way and the fact that we think our puny
military if any even if all the military
in the world got together
and the fact that they could somehow
contain this
it's that it's trying to contain a human
that visited them
exactly but and scientists you would
have to bring scientists on board
you've met a lot of scientists how good
are they keeping secrets
because in my experience they're
absolutely appalling at keeping secrets
yeah that's terrible
even the phospho-non-venus thing which
was a pretty well-kept secret
this is true you had a bunch of people
that were i told my dad
yeah you know my dad knew and
hopefully didn't tell anyone but if it
had been an alien visiting he probably
would have told them mate you know
and so these secrets could not be kept
by
any scientist that i know and certainly
not collaborative scientists which would
be needed you need all sorts of
um scientific teams so between the
pathetic power of any world's
military compared to any civilization uh
capable of traveling
and our absolute inability to keep
secrets uh uh absolutely not
i will bet everything that we have not
been visited because we are too pathetic
to hold that
well let me hold that truth if we're
making it like a 10
bet there's a possibility here
that the main say there exists one alien
other intelligent alien civilization in
the galaxy
the pa to me the if they visit earth
was going to visit earth is like the
crappy
like the really crappy short straw yeah
yeah like
like this this like really dumb
thing that's uh i don't know like the
early game boys or something
and there's a cartoon about this there's
an alien that gets sent to earth
a commander spiff or something and it's
kind of a punishment or something uh
but that's not possible that's the thing
because interstellar distances are so
hard to
to cross you have to do it on purpose
you have to do on purpose it has to be a
big
big deal and we know this because yes
you're right we don't know
enough about galactic biology we don't
know what the universal
rules of biology or biochemistry are
because we only have the earth
but we do know that the laws of physics
are universal
we can predict behavior in the universe
and then see it happen
based on these autophysics we know the
laws of chemistry
are universal we know the periodic table
is all they have to choose from
so yes there may be some sort of
unimaginable
intelligence but they still have to use
the same periodic table that we have
access to
they still have a finite number of
molecules they can do things with
so they still have to use the resources
around them the stars around them the
universe around them and we know how
much energy is in these places
and so yes they may be very capable
capable beyond our wildest dreams but
they're still in the same universe
and we know a lot of those rules we're
not completely blind but
there's a colleague here at harvard uh
uh cameron vaffa he's a theoretical
physicist i don't know if you know him
i've only joined harvard about six
months ago okay
it's time to meet all the theoretical
physicists uh
so he's a string theorist but uh
his idea is that uh
aliens that are sophisticated enough to
travel into cells
like those kinds of distances will
figure out actually ways to hack
the the fabric of the universe enough to
have fun
in other ways like this universe is too
boring like you would figure out ways to
create other universes or
like you you go outside the physics as
we know it
so the reason we don't see aliens
visiting us all over the place is
they're having fun elsewhere
this is like way too boring we humans
think this is fun but it's actually
mostly empty space that not no fun is
happening
like there's no fun in visiting earth
for a super advanced civilization so he
thinks like
if alien civilizations are out there
they found
outside of our current standard models
of physics ways of having fun
that don't involve us but that's
probably
true but even the notion of visiting
that's so literally pedestrian you know
of course we want to go there because
going there is the only thing we know we
see a thing we want we want to go there
and get it
but that is probably something they've
no longer got need for i
specifically don't particularly want to
go to space
it sounds awful you know none of the
things i like are going to be there
and i my whole work
is my whole career is finding life and
understanding the universe so i care
a lot but i care about knowing about it
and i feel no need to go there to learn
about it
and i think as we develop better tools
hopefully people will feel less and less
a need to go
everywhere that we know about and i
would expect any alien civilization
worth their salt
have developed observation tools and and
tools that allow them to understand
the universe around them and beyond
without having to go there this
this going is so wasteful yeah so more
focused on the knowledge and learning
versus the colonization like the the
conquering and
all those kinds of things that's you
know beneath them
that's benito that i mean that said do
you think there's um
any hopeful search for life through
phosphate and other
gases do you um do you think there's
other alien civilizations out there
first do you think there's other life
out there first
do you think there's life in the solar
system second do you think there's life
in the galaxy and uh
third do you think there's intelligent
life in the solar system or the galaxy
outside of earth
so intelligent life i have no idea it
seems deeply unlikely
uh possible but i'm not even sure if
it's plausible
so that's the special thing to you about
earth is somehow intelligent life came
yes
and it's only you know very briefly
probably
extremely briefly uh oh you mean like
it's always going to be like we're going
to destroy ourselves exactly oh boy
and life will continue on earth happily
uh probably more happily um
so trees and the dolphins will be here
i'm telling you and the cockroaches and
the
incredible fungi you know they'll be
fine
uh so life on earth will be fine it was
fine before us and will be fined after
us so i'm not that worried
about intelligent life but i think it is
unlikely even on earth
is unlikely out of what is it five
billion species across the history of
the earth yes
there's been one an intelligent one and
for a blink of an eye
possibly not much longer than that so i
i wouldn't bet on that at all though i
would love it of course
you know i i wanted to
find aliens since i was a little girl
and so of course i
initially wanted to find ones that i
could be friends with
and i've had to let go of that dream
because it's so deeply implausible
but see the nice and sorry to interrupt
but the nice thing about intelligent
alien civilizations
they may have more biosignatures than
non-intelligent ones
so they might be easier to detect that
would be the hope
on earth that's not the case but it
could be the case elsewhere oh it's not
the case on earth
most of the biosignatures we have on
earth are created by quite simple life
if you don't count pollution pollution
is all well
so you don't see uh polluting gases
as a as a possible like i look for
polluting gases
i would love to find polluting gases
well you know
i'd be worried for them of course the
same way i
i think about my alien colleagues all
the time looking at us and i'm sure they
worry about our pollutions
but it would be a really good robust
unambiguous sign of life if we found
complex pollutants
so i look for those too i just don't
have any hope of finding them i think
intelligent life in the galaxy at the
same time that we're looking
is deeply implausible but life
i think is inevitable and if it is
inevitable
it is common so i think there will be
life
everywhere in the galaxy now how common
that life is
i think will depend a lot on whether
there's life in the solar system beyond
earth
so i'll adjust my expectations very much
based
on there being life in the solar system
if there's life in the venusian clouds
if there's life in the if there are by
singers coming out of the plumes of
enceladus
if there's life on titan oh yeah that's
right and yeah yeah plumes of enceladus
that's the um
that's the saturn one it's the moon that
has the geysers that come out and so you
can't see the
under the subterranean oceans but it's
supposed to
it's so it would be in the atmosphere i
was gonna ask you about that one
uh have you looked at that uh have you
is is that a hope
for you to use the tools you're using
with rascal
uh and other ways for detecting the 16
molecules that might be biosignatures to
look at enceladus
yes that's absolutely the plan is that
what's that what's the limiting factor
in currently is it the
the quality of the telescopes is what's
the what the the
the quality of the data yeah the quality
of the data the observational data and
also
the quality of rascal and other
associated things so we're missing a lot
of fundamental data to interpret the
data that we get
and we don't have good enough data but
hopefully we will
in the coming decades we'll get some
information
on titan we have dragonfly going over
uh we'll get the plumes of enceladus
we will look at the clouds of venus and
there's other places and so
if we find any life or any sign of life
ever like on mars then i'll adjust my
calculations
and i'll say life is not just inevitable
and common
but extremely common because all of
these places we've mentioned the
subterranean oceans on enceladus the
methane oceans of titan the clouds of
venus the acidic clouds of venus
these are places that are very different
from the places where we find life on
earth
even the most extreme places and so if
life can originate in all of these
completely different habitats then life
is
even more resourceful than we thought
yeah that's really
everywhere that's really exciting if
it's everywhere
if if there's life on just one one of
the moons
if it's on mars anywhere anywhere in the
solar system and i will
bet everything i own that every solar
system every planetary system has
a potential for habitability you know
because even if they don't have a
habitable planet they'll have moons
around other giant planets and
there'll be so much life so for me
that's
the only thing to figure out now whether
life is
inevitable and quite common throughout
the galaxy or
everywhere but it's somewhere between
those two
intelligent life i make no bets and if i
had to bet i would be against
yeah to me like two discoveries in the
21st century
would change everything one
is and maybe i'm biased but
one is a discovery of life in the solar
system
i feel like that would change our whole
conception of
how unique we are in the universe i i
think i'm much more eager than you are
to jump from
basic life to intelligent life i feel
like if there's life
everywhere like the odds are
there has like we cannot like you
oh i see you're you're saying there
could have been many intelligent
civilizations out there that but they
just keep dying out it's like
i was detecting them you know ships in
the night ships in the night
now that's that's ultra sad just like is
it sad
a graveyard the earth is not better for
having us
is it we it doesn't owe us anything
would you be sad to find alien giraffes
would you be disappointed
if you found alien giraffes because i
would not no well giraffes
first of all they look goofy with their
necks and everything but no we do not
on giraffes
okay giraffes our wondrous animals are
deeply understudied we still know so
little about them because no one does
phds and giraffes
i am there's a point i made phd and
phosphine
when people aren't doing pgs and
giraffes we do not know enough about
giraffes
i think it was like ricky gervais that
did a whole like a long thing about
your face to talk about giraffes that is
not its expertise
yeah but it's a stupid necks it doesn't
make any sense
i mean giraffes are very resourceful
animals who do incredible things and can
kick a lion why don't you climb the tree
why don't you climb the tree you don't
need to grow
through the the lengthy evolutionary
process shooting on giraffes
i do okay giraffe animals i would very
appreciate that
i take it back i apologize i i trust i
trust your expertise on this
uh the the the thing that makes humans
really
fascinating and i think the earth but
i'm a human
is where we create yeah
we create things that are yes there's
all the ugliness in the world
there's all the on the on the biological
and the chemical level there's the
pollution
but we create
beauty if you if you even from a physics
perspective look at symmetry
as somehow capturing beauty the breaking
of symmetries stuff grounded in all the
different definitions of symmetry
we're good at like creating things
so as fighters
but not giraffes okay but yes this is a
spider
yes there are spiders that crystals
bubbles of air so they can breathe
underwater they can
literally scuba dive there are spiders
that can create
parachutes so they can glide and talk
about symmetry look what spiders can do
and i just thought of spiders but if i
was an alien species
coming to earth there'll be plenty to
wander and we would just be
one one of the things yeah clunky
yeah naked monkey yeah the ants might be
even more fascinating
the ants ants can figure out exactly
through some
emergent consciousness what the maximum
distance between their
trash their babies and their food is
just from without any of them knowing
how to do this and collectively they've
learned how to do this
if i was an alien species i'll be
looking at that well so that was the
other thing i was going to mention the
second thing
is i tend to believe we can engineer
consciousness
but at the at the basic level understand
the source of consciousness
because if consciousness is unique to
humans
and if we can engineer it that gives me
hope that
it could be present elsewhere in the
universe that's the other thing that
makes
it's an open question that makes humans
perhaps special
is not maybe the presence of
consciousness but some kind
somehow a presence of like elevated
consciousness it does
again maybe human-centric but it feels
like we're more conscious than giraffes
for example in spiders
yes i won't deny that i i there is
something special about humans i
you know they're my favorite species
they are
they are you know some of my best
friends are humans
and i
i i think highly of humans it's it's
great
i just don't have great hope for our
longevity
and specifically i don't have great hope
given that we're the only species that
are five billion that did this cool
consciousness trick
i just i don't want to bet on finding um
a kinship elsewhere that's quite
interesting to think about
i don't think i've even considered that
possibility
that the that there would be life in the
solar system
so that indicates that very possibly
life is
like literally everywhere yeah
everywhere it can happen it does
yeah you know and like especially what
we're discovering with the exoplanets
now
uh they're how numerous they are or
earth-like
habitable quote-unquote planets there's
like they're everywhere the most common
type of planet is
rocky it seems yeah so but i didn't
consider the possibility that life is
like literally everywhere and yet
intelligent life
is nowhere long enough
to uh to communicate with each other to
form little clusters
of um civilizations that expand beyond
the solar system and so on
man maybe becoming a multi-planetary
species is uh
is a less likely pursuit than um than we
imagined
but one of the things that makes humans
beautiful is we hope
but i i hope for humanity
and one of the things i hope for is that
we become less obsessed
with conquering and we become less
obsessed
with spreading ourselves
i hope that we transcend that
that we're happy with the universe
without having to go and take it
so you can hope for the species without
hoping for a multi-planetary
existence that is only
i think the drive of our most primitive
instincts
to go and take to go and plant a flag
somewhere we love
planting a flag somewhere and maybe we
could overcome
that minor drive and once we do
the ai systems we build will destroy us
because we're too peaceful and they will
go and conquer and plant the flags
best of luck to them the cockroaches
will be happy to
keep their keep to the business they
always have
i tend to believe that robots can have
the same
uh elegance and consciousness and
all the qualities of kindness and love
and hope and fear
that humans have in principle they could
yes
i don't really trust the people who make
them
this is about the giraffe comment isn't
it okay
i haven't forgiven you on
giraffes what have they done to you
you um just as a small tangent your
master's thesis is also fascinating
maybe we could talk about it for just a
little bit it's uh titled
influence of a star's evolution on this
planetary system so
this interplay between a star and a
planet is there something interesting
you could say about what you've learned
about this
this journey that star takes
and the planets around it well when i
was younger and i was told what would
happen
ultimately to the earth as the sun
expands towards a red giant and you know
mercury would just like
fall in and then you know venus
fall in and the sun doesn't care and it
just seemed
so i felt so small
i felt like the earth and everything on
it it's just
the universe doesn't care even our son
doesn't care and i think i felt like our
son should feel some sort of
responsibility for his parents
you know yeah and it just felt like such
a violent
and neglectful parent it's like a parent
eating its own children it's horrible
it's just a
horrible notion but it made me think
what if this there's some sort of
generation and so
at the time when i was doing my masters
there was a notion of the white dwarf
cemetery which is this idea that
when stars become white dwarfs that
death is so horrible
that planets potentially habitable
planets that could have been habitable
before
they're now gone there's no there's no
chance for life
but then i thought what if life returns
you know now it's a white dwarf it's
calmed down it's not going to go
anywhere white dwarfs are very stable
across like universal time scales and so
could you
have planets around a white dwarf that
could themselves
get life again you know life doesn't
care
and so my work was basically killing
dozens of planets thousands of times i
just ran
thousands and thousands of n-body
simulations well you simulated this yeah
so i
simulated the star wow growing and just
eating
all these planets up and just absolute
chaos and
the orbits of the planets would change
as the star loses mass so you would have
like
jupiter plant like planets just crashing
into the other planets throwing them
into the sun
early it was terrifying to watch these
simulations it was
absolute carnage but if you run
thousands of these simulations
some systems find new balance ways of
staying
alive some systems
post star death find stable orbits again
for billions of years more than enough
for life to originate again
and so that was my idea during that time
that thesis was trying to explore
this notion of life coming back
and this idea of the universe doesn't
care if you're here or not
and it will go about its business you
know andromeda will crash into us and
doesn't care no one cares if you're
alive in the universe and so
letting go of that preciousness of life
i found very useful at that stage in my
career
and instead i just thought what if if
life is inevitable
it doesn't matter that it came by four
billion years ago it can start again
four billion years later
and maybe that is nice maybe that's
where hope lies the
phoenix rising everywhere planets being
destroyed and
created and we're here now
and others will be more or less here-ish
billions of years later
so accepting the cycle of death and life
and
uh yeah i'm not taking it personally i'm
not taking her personally the son
doesn't owe us anything
he's not a bad parent it's not a parent
at all
yeah i was looking at the work of
freeman dyson and
seeing how it how this universe
eventually will just be a bunch of
supermassive black holes
before they also evaporate tiny black
holes too
yeah absolutely quiet everyone all the
black holes a little too far away from
one another to even interact
until it's just silence forever
but until then many many cycles of death
and destruction
and rebirth and rebirth
you kept bringing up sort of coding
stuff up i just i wanted to ask
uh two things first of all like what
what programming
uh language do you like and also
what um because you're
as a computational quantum
astrochemist no yes no that's correct
that's right
uh you're kind of um
you could say you're you're actually
understanding some exceptionally
complicated things
with one of the things you're using is
the tools of uh
computation of programming is there a
device you can give to people
because i i know quite a few that have
not practiced that tool
and have fallen in love with a
particular science or whatever it's
biology and chemistry and physics and so
on
and if they were interested in learning
to program
and learning to use computation is a
tool in there
particular science is there advice you
can give on programming and also just
maybe
a comment on your own journey and the
use of
programming in your own life well i'm a
terrible programmer
a lot of scientists their programming is
bad because we never learned formal
programming
we learned science physics chemistry and
then
we were told oh you can you have to get
these equations modeled
and run through a simulation and you're
like okay so
i'm gonna learn how to code to do this
and you learn
just as much as you need to run these
simulations and no more
so they're rarely optimized and they're
really clunky six months later you can't
read your own code
my variable names are extremely
embarrassing i still have
error error messages for different
compilation errors i say things like
at least your dad loves you clara you
know
it doesn't help me at all it's like
humor yeah yeah just like you suck at
coding
but there's other things in your life so
i'm a bad programmer
and so you know if that will give hope
to anyone else who's about programmer
i can still do pretty impressive science
yes
but i learned i think i started learning
matlab and java when i was in college
it did me no good at all like it has not
been particularly useful
i learned some fortran that was very
useful even though it's
really not a fun language because so
much of legacy code
is in fortran and so if you want to use
other people's code who have now retired
fortran will
be nice and then i used idl to visualize
so that
uh simulation and body simulation those
all fortran and idl
but thankfully since i've left college
i've just learned python like a
normal person and that has been much
nicer so most of my code now
is in python i should also make a few
quick comments as well so one is uh
you say you're sort of bad at
programming i've
worked with a lot of excellent
scientists that are quote-unquote bad at
programming
they're not it gets the job done in fact
there's a
there's a downside to sort of
especially getting a software
engineering education if i were to give
advice
especially if you're doing a computer
science degree and you're doing software
engineering
is not to get lost in the
in the like optimization of the correct
there's an obsession you can see it in
like stack overflow
of the correct way to do things and
i think you can too easily get lost
in uh constantly trying to optimize and
do things the correct way when you
actually never get done the same thing
happens you have like
communities of people obsessed with
productivity and they
keep researching productivity hacks and
then they spend like 90 percent
plus of their time figuring out how to
do things productively and then never
actually do anything
so there's a certain sense if you focus
on the task that needs to be done
that's what programming is for so not
over optimizing not
not focus not thinking about variable
names
uh in this in the following sense
sometimes you think okay i'm going to
write code that's going to last for
decades in reality your code
if it's well written or poorly written
will be very likely obsolete
very quickly the point is to get the job
done
uh really well so there's a trade-off
there that you
you have to you have to make sure to
strike i should also comment
as a public service announcement or a
request
if there's any world-class 4chan or
cobalt
programmers out there i'm looking for
them i want to talk to you
because that will not be me i'm a
terrible foreign programmer
but it's fascinating because so much of
the world in the past
and still runs programming languages and
there's like no experts on it so
they're all retiring yeah i i disagree
slightly
in that i think because i can get the
job done i'm a programmer
but because no one else can look at my
code and know how i got my job done
i'm a bad programmer that's how i'm
defining it
including yourself including myself six
months later i'm working with a new
student right now and
she sent me some messages on slack being
like what is this
um what is this file that you've got um
with some um functions that run and i
was like
i i this was from 2018 it wasn't that
long ago and
i can no longer remember what that code
does i'm going to spend now two days
reading through my own code and trying
to improve it
and i i do think that's frustrating and
so i think my advice to
any young people who want to get into
astronomy
or astrobiology or quantum chemistry is
that
i certainly find it much easier to teach
the science concepts to a programmer
than the programming to a scientist and
so i would much
much faster hire someone who knows
programming but
barely knows where space is
than teach programming to an astronomer
oh that's fascinating
yeah okay this is true i mean yeah
there's some basics
i'm uh i'm focusing too much on the
silver lining because i've
the people that write like matlab code
yeah single variable
single letter variable names so those
kinds of things it is accessibility
right
it's i want my my code to be open source
but and it is it's on github anyone can
download it but is it really open source
if it's written so cryptically
so poorly that no one can really use it
to his full functionality
have i really published my work
and that weighs on on me i feel guilty
for my own inadequacies as a programmer
you can only do so much it's i've
already learned quantum chemistry and
astrophysics
so you know uh yeah
i mean there is there's uh there's all
kinds of ways to contribute to the world
one of them is publication
but publishing code is a fascinating way
to contribute to the world even if it's
very small
very basic element great code
i guess i was also kind of criticizing
the software
engineering process versus like which is
a good thing to do
is code that's readable almost like
without documentation
it's readable it's understandable the
variable names the structure all those
kinds of things and
that's the dream that's the dream this
is a dumb question
what do you uh no tell me a dumb
question i want to hear it
okay uh i mean okay this is the question
about beauty it's way too general it's
very impossible
it's like asking what's your favorite
band uh what's your favorite music
band oh i thought you meant wavelength
band i was like i definitely have
favorite
my fans absolutely well it's hard to
narrow down huh
okay uh what uh what to use the most
beautiful idea
in science that's not a dumb question
do you want to try the question again
proudly okay
i i have a really good question to ask
you
okay don't oversell it i've got an okay
question to ask you
ever yeah what
uh what do you is the most beautiful
idea
in uh in science something you just find
inspiring or
just maybe the reason you got into
science
or the reason you think science is cool
my favorite thing about science is kind
of the connection between the scales
so when i was little and i wanted to
know about space i
really felt that it would make me feel
powerful
to be able to predict the heavens
something so much larger than myself
that felt really powerful it was almost
a selfish desire
and that's what i wanted there was some
control to being able to know exactly
what the sky would do and then as i got
older and i got more into astronomy and
i didn't just want to know how the stars
moved i wanted to know how the planets
around them moved and
and then as i got deeper into that field
i really didn't care that much about the
planets i want to know about the
atmospheres around the planets and then
the molecules within those atmospheres
and what that might mean
so i ended up shrinking my scale until
it was literally
the quantum scale and now all my work
the majority of my work is on this
insane quantum scale and yet
i'm using these literal
tiny tiny tools to try and answer
the greatest questions
that we've ever been able to ask and
this
crossing of scales from the quantum to
the astronomical
that's so cool isn't it yeah it spans
the entirety
the tiny and the huge that's that's the
cool thing about
i guess being a quantum astrochemist
because you're using the tools of the
tiny to
look at the heavenly bodies the the
giant stuff and
the potential life out there that this
is the thing that connects us
that you can't escape the rules of the
quantum world and how universal they
themselves are despite being
probabilistic
and that makes me feel
really pleased to be in science but in a
really humbling way
it's no longer this thirst for power
and i i feel less special the more work
i do
less exceptional the more work i do i
feel like humans and the earth
and our place in the universe is less
and less exceptional
and yet i feel so much less lonely
and so it's been a really good trade-off
that i've lost power but i've gained
company
wow that's a beautiful answer i don't
think there's a better way to actually
end it you're right
i asked a mediocre question and you came
through uh
you made the question good by a
brilliant answer
um you're the michael jordan and i'm the
who's the uh dennis rod i'll be the
dennis rodman hey this is i don't know
enough about basketball i mean literally
you've reached the peak of my basketball
knowledge
because i know those people are
basketball but that's it
pros i believe but only because i watch
space jam i think
are there books or movies in your life
long ago or recently do you have any
time for books or movies
had an impact on you uh what ideas
did you take away i absolutely have time
for
books and movies i try as best i can
to not work very hard i mostly fail
i should point out but i think i'm a
better scientist when
i don't work evenings and weekends i'm
if i get four good hours in a day i
often don't i often get eight crappy
hours
you know emails meetings bad code
yes data processing but if i can get
four high quality scientific hours i
just stopped working for the day
because i know it's diminishing returns
after that so i have a lot of time
i try to make as much time as i can can
you kind of dig into
the what it takes to be one productive
two to be happy in as
a researcher because i think it's too
easy
in that world to to basic because
you have so many hats you have to wear
so many jobs you have to be
a mentor a teacher a head of a
research group do research yourself you
have to do
service all the kinds of stuff you're
doing now with education and
um interviews
yeah yeah so as a a public science like
being a public communicator that's a job
yeah
the the whole thing very poorly
i'll pay you in bitcoin okay i'll take
uh so uh
is that is there some advice you can
give to
to the process of being productive and
happy
as a researcher i think sadly it's very
hard to feel happy as a scientist if
you're not productive
it's a bit of a trap um but it's i
certainly find it very difficult to feel
happy when i'm not being productive
it's become slightly better if i know my
students are being productive
i can be happy but i think a lot of
senior scientists
once they get into that mindset they
start thinking that their student
science is theirs
i think this happens a lot of senior
scientists
they have so many hats as you mentioned
they have to do so much service and so
much admin
that they have very little time for
their own science and so they end up
feeling
ownership over the junior people in
their labs and their groups and
that's really heartbreaking i see it all
the time and
and that i think i've escaped that trap
i feel so happy even when i'm not
productive
when my students are productive i think
that sensation i was describing earlier
of
they only need to be half as productive
as me for me to feel like
i've done my job for humanity
so that has been the dynamic i've had to
worry about
but to be productive is not clear to me
what you have to do
you have to not be miserable otherwise i
find it extremely hard when i'm having
conflicts with um collaborators for
example
kind of very hard to enjoy the work we
do even if the work is this you know
fantastical
phosphine or things that i know i love
still very difficult so i think choosing
your collaborators based on
how well you get along with them is a
really sound
scientific choice having a miserable
collaborator
ruins your whole life it's horrible it
makes you not
want to do the science it probably makes
you do clumsy science because you don't
focus on it
you don't go over it several times you
just want it to be over
and so i think in general just
not being a douche bag can get so much
good science done
just find the good people in your
community and collaborate with them
even if they're not as good scientists
as others you'll get better science out
yeah don't be a douchebag yourself and
surround yourself by other cool people
exactly and then you'll get better
science than if you would
try to work with three geniuses who are
just hell
to be around yeah i mean there's
parallel things
like that i'm very fortunate now um
i was very fortunate at mit to have
friends and colleagues there
that were incredible to work with but
i'm i'm currently sort of
i'm doing a lot of fun stuff on the side
uh like this little podcast thing and
i mentioned to you i think robotics
related stuff
um i was at just the boston dynamics
yesterday
checking out their robots um
and i'm currently i guess hiring people
to help me with a very fun little
project around those robots
i have more applications i can possibly
deal with there's thousands
so uh it's not
it's the opposite it's like we need to
put an ad out for someone to help you go
through the application well that too
is already there that over ten thousand
people apply for that an
infinite matriarchal dollar of uh
application
yeah exactly punishment but the point is
it's not
it's not exactly the point is
like what i'm very distinctly aware of
is life is short
and productivity
is not the right goal to optimize for at
least for me the right goal to optimize
for is how happy you are
to wake up in the day and to work with
the people that you do
because the productivity will take care
of itself great
and so like it's so important to select
the people well and i think one of the
challenges with academia as opposed to
sort of the thing i'm currently doing is
like saying goodbye sometimes a little
bit tougher
because it's really tough your
colleagues are there
oh i mean they're goodbye hurts
and then if you have to spend the rest
you know for many years to come
still surrounded by them in the
community it's tougher it kind of
adds puts extra pressure to stay in that
relationship
uh in that collaborative you know in
that collaboration
and in some sense that makes it much
more difficult but it's still worth it
it's still worth it to break
uh ties if if you don't
if you're not happy if there's not that
magic that dance
i talked to um this guy
named daniel kahneman oh i know danny
kahneman danny yeah
boy did that guy make me realize like
what a great collaborator is well he had
tversky right yeah but so they had
obviously
they had a really deep collaboration
there but like
i collaborated with him on a
conversation
like just like talking about i don't
know what we were talking about
i think cars autonomous vehicles but the
brainstorming session
i'm like a nobody and the fact that he
would with that childlike curiosity
and that dance of thoughts and ideas and
the push and pull
and the like and the lack of ego but
then
enough ego to have a little bit of a
stubbornness over an idea and a little
bit of humor
and all those things it's like holy
that person
also the ability to truly listen to
another human
it's like okay that's what it takes to
be a good collaborator
if that makes me realize that i haven't
been i've been very fortunate to have
cool people in my life
but there's like levels even to the cool
yeah i don't think you can compete with
danny kahneman on cole he's
just incredible but he was like okay
i guess i what i'm trying to say is that
collaboration is an
art form but perhaps it's actually a
skill it's allowing yourself
uh to develop that skill because that's
one of the fruitful skills
and and praise it in students you know
and i think it is something you can
really improve on i've become a better
collaborator
as the years have gone on i don't have
some innate collaborative
skills i think their skills i've
developed and i think in science there's
this
really destructive notion of the lone
wolf
the scientists who sees things where
others don't you know then that's
really appealing and people really like
either fulfilling that or pretending to
be fulfilling that
and first of all is mostly a lie
any modern scientist particularly in
astronomy which is so interdisciplinary
any modern sciences do scientist says
doing it on their own is doing a crappy
job
most likely because you need an
independent set of eyes to help you
do things you need experts in the sub
fields that you're working on
to to check your work but most
importantly
it's just a bad idea it's not um
it doesn't lead to good science and it
leaves you miserable
i was recently had some work that i was
avoiding and i thought
maybe i should pursue the scientific
project because i don't
care enough about the outcome and it's
going to be a lot of hard work and i was
trying to balance these two things
to be really difficult and the outcome
is that maybe 10 people will cite me in
the next decade because it's not
no one's asking for this question to be
answered
and then i found myself working with
this
collaborator jason dipman and i spent a
whole afternoon
hours with him working on this and time
flew by and
and i just felt taller and like i could
breathe better
i was happier i was a better person when
it was done
and that's because he's a great
collaborator
he's just a wonderful person that brings
out
joy out of science that you're doing
with them
and that's really the trick you find the
people that make you feel that way about
the science you're doing and
and you stop worrying about being the
lone wolf
that's just a terrible dream that will
leave you miserable and
your signs will be and uh
since i'm russian just murder anybody
who who doesn't
fall into that beautiful collaborative
relationship
we were talking about books books yes
is there books why was i talking about
my productivity
oh you said i you maybe don't have time
for books and movies and you said you
must
make time for books and movies make time
to not work
make time to not work whatever that
looks like to you
um but there's plenty i
when i was younger i found a lot of kind
of my scientific fulfillment in books
and movies
now as i got older i have plenty of that
in my work
and i try to read outside my field i
read about danny kahneman's work instead
but when i was little it was contact the
book
the carl sagan book i
really thought i was just like ellie
um and i was going to become ali i
really resonated with me that character
and
the notions of life and space in the
universe
even the idea of then the the movie
came out and i got to put you know jodie
foster in that
um which helped but
you know even the notion of if it is
just us
what an awful waste of space i find
extremely useful as a concept to think
you know maybe we are special but that
would suck
is a really nice way of thinking of the
search for life
that it's much better to not be special
and have company
i got that from carl sagan so that's
what i always recommend
let me ask one other ridiculous question
we talked about the death
and life cycle that is ever present in
the universe until it's not
until it's super massive and little
black holes too at the end of the
universe
what do you think is the why the
meaning of it all what do you think is
the meaning
of life here on earth and the meaning of
that
life that you look for whether it's on
venus or other
exoplanets i think there's none i find
enormous relief
in the absence of meaning i think
chasing for meaning is
a human desire the universe doesn't give
two shits about
but you still enjoy i enjoy finding
meaning in my life
i enjoy finding
where the morality lies i enjoy the
complication
of that desire
and i feel that is deeply human
but i don't feel that it's universal
it's somehow absolute like we conjure it
up we we bring it to life through our
own minds but it's not
any kind of fundamental way real no
and the same way the sun is not to be
blamed for destroying
its own planets the universe
doesn't care because it has no meaning
it always is nothing
and looking for meaning in the universe
is demanding answers
who are we we're nothing we don't get to
demand anything
and that includes meaning and i find it
very reassuring
because once there is no meaning i don't
have to find it
[Laughter]
uh yeah
once there's no meaning it's a kind of
freedom in a way
you sound a bit like um
[Music]
i'm happy about it this isn't a
depressing outlook as far as i'm
concerned it's happiness yeah yeah so
i mean there's a i don't know if you
know who sam harris is but he
uh despite the pushbacks from
the entirety of the world really argues
hard that there's
that free will is an illusion that um
you know the the
the deterministic universe and it's
already been predetermined and
and he's okay with it and he's happy
with it that that
he's distinctly aware of it and that's
one of the moral will disagree with him
on the deterministic nature of
nature well he's uh it's not the he's
not saying it's deterministic but he's
saying that the
randomness doesn't help either like
randomness does not
help in in the experience of feeling
like you're the decider of your own
actions
that he kind of is okay with being a
leaf
flowing on the river like or being the
river
right as opposed to having or being like
a fish or something that can decide it's
swimming direction he's okay just
embracing the flow of life i mean in
that same way
it kind of sounds like your conception
of
meaning i mean it just is it doesn't
the universe doesn't care it just is
what it is and we experience certain
things
and some feel good and some don't and uh
that's life but i don't feel like that
about life i think life does have
meaning
and there's and it's laudable to look
for that meaning in life
i just don't think you can apply that
beyond life
and certainly not be on earth that this
notion of meaning is a human construct
and so
it only applies within us and
the other life forms and planet
types that suffer from our intrusions or
rejoice from our interactions but
it's this this meaning is ours to do as
we please
we created it we've created a need for
it and so
that's our problem to solve i don't
apply it beyond us
i think we as humans have a lot of
responsibilities but they're moral
responsibilities
and a lot of the responsibilities are
much more easily fulfilled
if you find meaning in them so i think
there's value to meaning
whether it's real or not i just think we
gain
nothing from trying to anthropomorphize
the entire universe
and also that's the height of hubris
that's not for us to do
yeah it also could be just like duality
and quantum mechanics
it could uh it could be both that there
is meaning
and then there isn't and we're somehow
depending on
the observer depending on the
the perspective you take on the thing i
mean even on
earth that's true but the whether things
are meaning or not depends a lot on
who's looking
whether it's us humans the aliens or the
giraffes
clara this was a incredible conversation
i i mean i i learned so much but i also
am just inspired by the passion you have
in um not finding meaning in the
universe yeah right
for someone i'm very passionate about
not finding meaning in the universe
you're the most inspiring nihilist i've
ever met i'm just kidding
uh this you're i mean you
are truly an inspiring communicator of
everything from phosphine to
life to quantum astro chemistry i can't
wait to see what other cool things you
do
in your career in your in your
scientific life thank you so much
for wasting your valuable time with me
today i really appreciate it
uh it was my pleasure i had already got
my four hours of productivity before i
got here
so it's not a waste it's all downhill
from there
thank you thanks for listening to this
conversation with clara souza silva
and thank you to onnit grammarly
blinkist and indeed check them out in
the description
to support this podcast and now let me
leave you with some words from
constantine silkowski
the earth is the cradle of humanity but
mankind cannot stay in the cradle
forever
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time
you