The 3 Body Problem, Aliens & How The World Ends - Dr David Kipping

dude I love your YouTube channel the number of airplane flights that I've been on delays sat somewhere where I wish that I wasn't listening to your YouTube channel has been insane so thank you very much for what you do likewise I've been listening to your podcast for a while and you have so many great guests so much wisdom on the channel as the name suggest so I really appreciate being on here as well you got tenure congratulations yeah that's a big big deal for me personally to hit this Landmark yeah I don't know if too many people know what it means though I think tenure is a is a term which may be outside of Academia it's unclear what that really means yeah but it's like uh you're allowed to research whatever you want now and no one can tell you know right ultimate Freedom that's kind of one way to think about it it's yeah it's supposed to be I think ideally that it gives you the ability to pursue much more high-risk Endeavors so maybe as a 10e track faculty which is what I was before you're kind of living like day-to-day like you each project has to deliver something within the next quarter the next year and everything is kind of very short term which is how a lot of Corporations work of course but when you get tenure you get to think about going truly long term for something which is 10 20 years for the rest of your career and that's exciting I'm I'm still trying to figure out exactly what I want to do with my tenure but it's an amazing gift to have speaking of high-risk explorative conversations did you listen to Terrence Howard on Joe Rogan I did I was actually listening this morning I was in the gym and I was listening to NE degrass Tyson's video which was a response to it and and I think Neil did a great job in being very respectful and thoughtful and polite but at the same time forcefully pushing back about many of the things which uh were questionable in in this tree ties that that Terren had come up with what did you make of the conversation with Joe because there's been a lot of uh I think it caused a lot of ripples uh a lot of people were very excited and you know it seems like it's upended some people believe that it was able to upend mathematics and you know this sort of a narrative it's personified they're keeping the real information from us type thing what did it feel like as someone who kind of lives in the world of maths and and physics listening to that conversation yeah i' I only saw Snippets of the conversation but I will say that it's not unusual to see a reaction like this I know it's kind of blown up on social media and in in the social media World perhaps it's unusual but in my world I receive letters every day coming through my through my post box with theories and ideas I get of course many many blind emails cold emails saying here's my theory of everything please check it out you know I've proved that Einstein is wrong this kind of stuff it's very very common to not just myself but many academics we are used to this and I think Neil is in the same boat I'm sure he gets tons of those kinds of pet theories sent to him as well and so you know they range from a from some of them are just a complete crapshoot to some of them there's some serious thought in it and I think ter actually did did try to put some thought into it despite the fact there was many missteps and uh misrepresentations of of other information that that predates his ideas however I think it is true what Neil said that it is really important that we don't kill that that idea that that love and that passion because I was that person once I remember when I was probably 11 years old I wrote a theory uh and I sent it to my I gave it to my physics teacher at school and I said to him I think I've proven there's like a new relativity theory that I've proven and it was something about clocks ticking at different rates to different observers and it was kind of like a Proto relativity so I hadn't actually I'm not claiming I I you know independently invented relativity or anything but I wasn't aware of Relativity and it just struck me that somebody approaching a clock close to the speed of light would see the rate at which it ticks be very different to someone flying away from the clock and so does that have some in interesting implications about time and so I wrote one of those crazy not crazy but you know not not well-informed say speculative theories down because I wasn't crazy and I don't think Terence Howard's crazy and I think you write down these ideas and it gets you impassioned and excited about physics and part of me is a little bit embarrassed about doing that as a kid but I also think uh whether whether you're a kid where you're an adult whether you're whatever stage you're coming it when you first start diving into this world it's natural to have lots of ideas and questions and want to put them down into paper and have other people look at them and want to talk about them so you know physics and science is like being in love like when you're in love you just want to sing it to the world and I think that's just where he is right now he's just at that stage where he's like getting really thick and heavy into it and enjoying it but uh hopefully we can direct him towards towards some other truths along the way as well and peer review uh guides a combination of guides and beats it out of you and sort of moves you toward what's more accurate it can do you know per perview is not a perfect system I mean and I think this is why people like teren are gaining traction because we all recognize that having one or two people who are you know so-called experts in that field sway judgment about whether your idea is right or wrong has its own flaws there are you know political reasons why someone might want to squash your ideas or simply because uh they might not like it because it's so uh fundamentally different to everything they're used to hold this isn't what I was taught in the textbook I don't like this because it's going to force me to have to reteach the way I've been taught everything for years and years so there is there is resistance to new ideas and I think you know that came up in the podcast with Joe and that's right there is definitely resistance to new ideas however if you have a great idea and it disseminates to the community which is you know the way it works these days you can put it on social media you can put it on an archive posting is how scientists typically do this or on Twitter or on X you can put it out there and hopefully if it's a good idea it will sustain it will survive that process of not just academic peers but me a much broader peer Community looking at it so peer review I mean it it's kind of obvious that that has to be the way you do it you have to have lots of people look at an idea and it's like a meme if it if it hits if it's if it if it tracks with people if there's something in it which which appeals and see and and explains phenomenon a way which we previously couldn't explain then it's going to survive in a darwinian Evolution sense uh persist and hopefully the key with science is that we we're using evidence and to to make that assessment as to whether the assment criteria yeah obviously not just not just an emotional appeal how sexy is this yeah which is the thing which is which has its own aspects and there certainly scientists are also appeal to that as well there's definitely Multiverse well perhaps perhaps in a physical sense too but I was really thinking about just the the ideas can be attractive and alluring and I think when people talk about for example the Multiverse that's something very alluring about that idea that there could be other versions of you who were more successful and or maybe less successful and kind of that imagination kind of runs wild and I think a lot of us get drawn into that idea as well and so it's hard to sometimes stop yourself and say hold on uh I think I'm getting deceived by what I want to be true rather than what is really true a pretty sexy idea that's been floating around continues to sort of resurface all the time is that quantum entanglement allows for faster than light communication what's the scientists perspective on that yeah it really doesn't work it it's it seems like it should work when you first hear about the idea let me try and just break this down a little bit so you can imagine that you have a pair of particles which are what we call quantumly entangled to each other and what that really means is that their their state is in a superp position together so the idea of superpositions in quantum theory is very familiar whenever you have a single particle whose spin could be up or spin could be down for example it until you measure it it really is in a super position of those two states we don't know and then once you measure it it collapses down makes makes a choice essentially to one of those uh variables with a pair of particles if they are created together in a certain set of conditions you can create them such that they are entangled which really means that they're the combined sum and combined nature of their of their state is entangled to one other so for example the total of their spins could be zero so in that case one would have to be up and one would have to be down but you don't know which one is which so this is very similar to having like a box of shoes so you can have a left shoe and a right shoe they're in the box and you you kind of blindfold yourself and you take one of the shoes and you give it to your friend he goes on an airplane he keeps himself blindfolded and you know you don't feel the shoe so you don't you don't break the illusion as to what it really is but then once you get to the other side one of you opens the box and when you open the box it collapses the uncertainty you might say and so the question is can that be used for communication and the answer is well no because if I open my box and I discover that it's a left footed shoe then that instantaneously tells me the other shoe must be right-footed and not only does it tell me that but in the quantum World actually does force that state to be right footed as well it really is a physical effect that it forces it into that state but nevertheless there's no way to use this for communication since I can't man I can't force my shoe to be left or right if I could then we could use it for communication if I could push it to be not just a 50/50 probability but rather a 6040 probability even just slightly nudge the probabilities there would be a way to use it for communication but as long as it's inherently random which it is from my perspective when I open that box is inherently random process all I can ever do is just get a string of if I had a whole box of these things many many boxes of just left right left right right left it' just be random SE quences there's no way we can use these shoe boxes to send a message to each other and manipulating the one that you have doesn't change the one that your friend has well there is no way to manipulate it all you can do the only manipulation you really have is that you can open the box you can measure it that's it that's the only manipulation you can do if someone could invent a way to manipulate the quantum State without measuring it which seems like an oxymoron to me then then there would be a path forward for communication because during the act of measuring causes it to collapse and then after that there is no such thing as changing it once the once the states have collapsed they're no longer entangled to each other so then so then there the link has been broken so once the measurements been made that's it they both collapse into their state and the entanglement is gone so it's it's not persistent past that point right that makes so much that that makes the quantum entanglement communication thing seem quite simple as it's not going to work it simple obviously the way I'm describing is a little bit simplified but in a nutshell that's kind of the basic principle I obviously I have a video if you want to go much deeper it gets into all the nuts and bolts of how this works and kind of looks at the superposition States and things but essentially that is the problem and it's a shame because in you know I think there's a game Mass Effect 2 which has a Quantum Communicator in it I actually use that a scene from that one of my videos about this and I think the the character comes up to this computer and it says you know I have a Quantum entangled State particle and as long as you know there's one back on Earth and there's one in the ship we can communicate with this particle but of course that doesn't make any sense the moment you interact with that particle and measure it the state collapses and so the the entanglement is gone entanglement is actually a very delicate State of Affairs it's hard to maintain entanglement and basically any interaction of the real world will collapse it including and especially you trying to measure that thing wow that's so interesting interesting well I I remember reading this was in college this must be nearly 20 years ago I read that uh gravity moves quicker than the speed of light is that true to gravitational waves if the sun disappeared now would we start flying off immediately or would it take us four minutes no it would take or eight minutes yeah it would take eight minutes it actually does turn out it in general relativity it is assumed that it travels at the speed of light it's kind of built into the theory and there have been some measurements um that have attempted to measure this or at least constrain it and although we don't have like a super precise measurement like we have for the speed of light where we can you know pin it down to fractions of a meter pers second for the spe for the speed of gravity it does appear to be at least consistent with the speed of light but one of the ways we can actually do better with this is is looking at the what we call electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational wave sources so there are these black holes which are smashing into each other and combining out there and we've been detecting those hundreds of them now using a telescope or really an instrument I should say called ligo it's not really a telescope in a conventional sense it's just kind of giant laser beams essentially but using these laser beams we've been able to detect as as gravitational waves Ripple past they squish and squash the Earth just a fraction of a proton in diameter it's a tiny tiny disturbance but these lasers are so sensitive they can tell when they've been squished and squashed by that tiny amount using a technique called interferometry so we've been able to tell there's these gravitational wav Source out there as black holes merge and in some cases we've even seen neutron stars merge so neutron stars are not black holes they're kind of like failed black holes if you like they didn't quite have enough Mass to collapse all the way down to a black hole but and the sun will also not turn into a neutron star it's not heavy enough to get into that regime either but some massive stars will collapse down to a neutron star these are things which are about the same size as New York City Manhattan even and they're almost the same mass as the sun maybe a little bit heavier so incredibly dense objects and these because they're not black holes when they collide with each other they shine they do produce a huge amount of energy so we have two things there like a race happening right you have the gravitational wave racing towards you from that collision and you also have the the light that was it is literally like a race yeah so we can actually time when those two events arrived and we can use that to test how similar they are and for all accounts so far they've been pretty consistent but it's still fairly early days we only have a handful of neutron stars most the events we deected have been black holes but we're getting to the point where we should have hundreds of these things coming online the next few years so I expect we'll be able to pin that number down really precisely it's going forward would there be anything special or would it be unbelievably shocking if the speed of gravity was less than the speed of light would that cause some Oddities for sure I mean it would basically mean general relativity was wrong so we'd have to we'd have to go back to the drawing port a little bit with the with the ideas of generativity so I think you'd have to speak to some theorists about the wild ideas about what that could mean but it might imply some kind of uh foam or some kind of resistance to SpaceTime itself for the propagation of gravitational waves in a way that is not expected in simple general relativity so it would be a very exciting result and you know it's important to remember that despite scientists for one aspect not being often resistant to new ideas on the other hand they love new ideas and so I think if we discovered that theorists would be very very excited because it kind of gives theorists at least and observers an excuse to do a lot more science right because now we've got this this mystery to explain so we can plan either more observations to try and explain that mystery or we can come up with lots of ideas and speculations about what might be going on and see how it lines up hypothesize about what future observations will make so scientists do actually really enjoy a mystery and so I think if we discovered that most of us will be celebrating right yeah lots of work to do lots of research and grants and new exciting things to focus on yeah I think the most boring outcome is that we understand everything that's like that's actually what put me off when I was studying uh physics at school I remember being kind of put off physics because it kind of the way it's taught at schools feels like everything's been figured out like here's Newton's laws of gravity here's the the atomic structure here's the electromagnetism how that works and it kind of feels like what's left to do I wish I was born 200 300 years ago when it felt like back then all you to do is throw you know some wood and water and pointed it and say it floats you could get a Nobel Prize or something now it's so hard like what's happened and uh it does feel like that but then that's why I got attracted to astronomy because in astronomy it re it really is like an an an a multitude of things that we can discover out there the Galaxy alone has a hundred billion stars in it and there's a 100 billion at least galaxies out there so like there's only 10,000 astronomers on Earth we are never going to run out of stars and planets and galaxies to study there'll be Millions each for us so that was always the appeal for me is that it's just like if I'm going to choose a subject to study and I don't want to run out of things to be surprised and amazed about astronomy has got to be the one wow you're hopelessly outnumbered stars to astronomers it's a for now for now we're going to we're going to try and pull it back yeah I seem to remember uh reading an article about how the number of kangaroos that exist on the planet compared to the population of like Czechoslovakia and it was like that it would result in each Czech citizen having to fight 11 Kangaroos and that that was a really important uh stat that we weren't talking about it's kind of the same with you and the as I can't believe there's only 10,000 astronomers where did you go to school what was your academic uh comeuppance so I grew up in the UK and people get confused about that because my accent I think I've been in the US for a while and sometimes even people get confused about where I grew up but I grew up in warshire in the UK I went to a little school near near Twi cross it was called um and then eventually I went to Cambridge University and I studied physics there well really Natural Sciences was the name of the degree but primarily I studied physics they're kind of like a little bit pompous that way they won't let you have a Physics degree no this is Cambridge it has to be called something else so it's called Natural Sciences and then once I got that I decided to go to London and study astronomy for my PhD and eventually came stat side during that process so I I really loved being in the UK I miss the UK quite a lot um but I do feel the direction especially scientifically uh the you know with the brexit and the the the reduction in science funding the state of the economy it doesn't feel like the future is bright at least for me here in the US and there's problems in the US for sure as well but certainly looking at what's going on in the UK there's nothing about that's drawing me back in a career perspective but I I'm very fond of the UK I love the people I love have so many great friends there my family is still all there I love the countryside and uh there's something special about being back in the UK I feel the same it's uh an odd sort of push and pull where you go somewhere because it's a better environment for the work that you do and there's more opportunity and then there's sort of this wistful cultural uh like departure that you make from uh from the place that you know so well seea I feel you with that uh just as a side point totally unrelated I just got before we started talking an email from Dominic Cummings remember Dominic Cummings yes so I'm going to bring him on just after the results of the general election in July okay great and uh I think that's going to be a really fascinating insight about exactly what's going on not I I don't really care that much about politics but I'm very interested in the social dynamics of what's happening and why people behave the way that they do and I think that he has some he has some amazing insights uh regardless of what you think about sort of how he contributed to anything uh he just knows what white hle is like from the inside out so I'll have a I'll have some interesting interesting stuff to go that yeah uh going back a crazy world over there yeah I I think with everything going with the election right now I know everyone in the UK keeps asking everyone on the phone they're like what do you think of what's going on in the election I'm like I don't know I'm my head's pretty exploding with what's going on in November over here right now so let's I don't know if I can handle all the elections happening in the world right now it's pretty distracting as a scientist actually to try and like sit down and focus on doing some serious work and then you open your phone and it's just crazy headline after crazy headline you think and yeah I think I'm starting to think I need to unplug as November approaches yeah I wonder how many people smart people are having their precious mind cycles captured by stuff that is sexy and interesting and newsworthy but totally unrelated to their primary Pursuit and I wonder how much that's holding back human progress across the world I would guess an awful lot massive massive I I've never felt personally so distracted by what's going on in the world and I'm trying to be you know I feel like there's a responsibility to be a good citizen and be engaged because this is a democracy and this nation and and the world will be what we make it as participants in it and so it feels wrong to just stick your head in the sand and ignore what's going on but at the same time my Effectiveness and my productivity crashes the more I I open that you know New York Times up or CNN or Twitter or X whatever it is like just it's you're being bombarded with these these headlines that just take you down these rabbit holes and before you know it it's 2 p.m. and you haven't done anything yet so I think I'm seeing with lots of people I've seing with lots of my colleagues that students and um young people especially I think are really being heavily affected by what is happening and their studies and their focus is being almost stolen from them because of the state of the world especially for you being captured by things that's happening on Earth when the entirety of your job occurs outside of Earth like the only place that you shouldn't be looking really is like here everything is up there yeah it it's kind of um you know we we do lots of work in looking out in the universe but in a way that's almost like a reflection of us as well there's people say this often beautifully about seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence that the things that we choose to worry about and look for so for instance there ideas that we should look for planets which are undergoing nuclear war because we're on the precipice of that potentially and so you could make the argument that other civilizations will do this and therefore it's our responsibility and our opportunity to detect them using you know neutrinos or using you know bright flashes from this from the from the explosions on these other planets and so that really is a reflection not so much of what aliens are doing but of our of ourselves it's it's a inner it's a mirror of of us a dark mirror of our own fears and hopes for the future and I think that's very much true in seti but I think when you look expansively out even Beyond searching for aliens just trying to get a sense as to who we are in the universe is still very much an inward Journey as much as is an outward one of trying to figure out what is the point of my life if the universe is so vast and so big where do I fit in it where do where do our lives cue into this line and so for me you know looking answers out in deep space is as much a process of looking for answers inward as as Beyond did you get to watch the three body problem yeah I did and I'd read the couple of the first couple of books and I thought the show was really intriguing um it was pretty well done actually I thought I like all the actors from the game because it's kind of the Game of Thrones M version two or something right just put into like the modern world or something with aliens so I kind of enjoy seeing one those actors again doing well and getting jobs cuz I thought they did a great job with Game of Thrones and the story the story was done well obviously the physics is a bit spoofy I mean the idea I think like one of my biggest gripes with it was the idea that the nearest star because they they never actually Nam the star but they keep saying it's four light years away so there's only one star that's four light is way and that's proximus centuri there is a triple star system there but it's nowhere near compact enough to have this chaos that they have in in the story so they've taken some some some license there to Artistic license to make things a little bit more interesting um but I think the idea that the nearest star system would have an intelligent civilization on it is a little bit contrived because if the nearest one has it then basically every single star should really have intelligent civilizations on it and then that just that just seems very curious because for the vast majority of Earth's history 4 and a half billion years there was basically no intelligent species on this planet until very very recently so it would seem an enormous coincidence that all the planets which have completely different ages some were born you know very recently some were born uh billions and billions of years before the sun was and yet they all just happen to line up so that Civilization is just kind of queue up at the same time so that that's always a little bit contrived to me that every single star system is going to have civilizations on it but you know I can let that go when I watch when I watch a show be it you know fantasy or sci-fi I can I can let go of those things just to sit down and enjoy it a bit of artistic license can you explain it to me can you explain the three body problem so yeah the physical idea of the three body problem it's essentially it's it's a chaotic system so if you have a single particle it's obviously fairly trivial to predict its path in the future if you know it's what direction it's moving and you know its current location then you should be able to predict at any point in the future where it will be it'll just basically travel along a straight line however if you have two particles it's a little bit more complicated and they have mass and they're going to gravitationally interact with each other and circle around one another but it was shown by Newton and many others that this is also a completely determinable system as well so if you give me the starting positions of those two particles and you give me the momenta in which they're moving then again we should be able to calculate for a billion years into the future to exact Precision where there will be but this all kind of breaks down when we get to three bodies so when you have three same situation just three particles you know their initial positions you know their initial trajectories now you can predict where they will be but if you very very slightly deviate one of those particles so you just say I'm going to shift one of those particles a millimeter over to the left and redo that calculation you will get a wildly different answer for the final outcome so this is kind like the butterfly effect so if you you know butterfly flaps its wings and you think what difference does that make but if you propagate it over a long enough time it can have enormous implications and you know people you know playfully say it could cause like a hurricane right the flaps of buttery that's maybe a little bit exaggerated but in this case certainly a very slight nudge to one of these these particles will give a wildly different answer so whenever you have a system like this we call it a chaotic system because it basically means we cannot make predictions that are reliable about their final position in a million years a billion years from now because we can never know the position of a planet to Absolute Precision there's always going to be some slight uncertainty and if you nudge it within that uncertainty you get a very different answer so it's not the same as being random because there's not Randomness it's still fully determined but so chaotic and complex that it's unpredictable is that a way to say it yeah I think unpredictability is the key word it's it's that you can't forecast with any meaningful accurate prediction where it will be you can actually make distribution so you can say I'm going to run this simulation a thousand a million times over and over again and just slightly nudge it around and see what the spread of results are and then that can kind of help you to like place your bets as to where you think is most likely to land like kind going to the casino and gambling where you think the B will land on the roulette table so you can kind of make that kind of statistical analysis but you certainly can't make a a good prediction so even for the solar system this is true so for the solar system it's been shown that if you go forward about a billion years into the future Mercury is not necessarily stable so in about 1% of simulations I think it is and it was his work done by Constantine Bagan uh during his PhD he showed that about 1% of the time the solar system will become unstable so in 1 billion years that's before the sun actually will long engulf the Earth and what tends to happen is I think Mercury uh gets ejected from this from the solar system all together and Earth and Venus swap positions no so Earth Earth becomes the Venus and Venus gets gets a chance to cool down and could potentially become habitable I suppose if it was far enough away from the Star so it's pretty wild that even the solar system which we think of as incredibly ordered and structured and and long lived as not just a three body system but a many body system also has instability so the real question is for any multi system not whether it's chaotic or not they're all chaotic the the question is how long is that chaos time scale start to creep in and so for the solar system the chaos time scale it's called the Leon of number technically it's around about um you know 5 billion years or so whereas for some solar systems that we look at the chaos Time Square is very very short of what over 100 million years and so for those we reallying and thinking that thing might not even be around here much longer cuz it's just it just seems like it's bounced on a knife edge of instability dude that's so cool chaos time scale being how long will the current system remain uh similar in terms of what we would expect to see I think it's better to think of as as when do your predictions diverge so you know almost like in a in a Multiverse scenario living different lives if you you know like the film sliding doors whether you get on the train or don't get on the door over what time scale do the outcomes diverge meaningfully because presumably there's a not Point not 1% chance that mercury gets ejected tomorrow correct yeah there's a there's a definition of you know exactly what that means of how quantitatively large it has to be but typically it's of order of sort of um a an exponent number so that's like a power of about 2.5 in terms like the semor axis the orbital periods things like that so if they change by a a factor of two or three then that's a that's definitely a very major change to the order of the system how is it the case that there's so many bodies in the solar system and yet were relatively stable at least maybe for the next half billion to a billion years like why is the seems to be so much going on how is it that orbits get settled into kind of reliably why are we not why is there not more play in the system it is kind of a miracle right it's a miracle of stability that we should be thankful for because if it wasn't so then we wouldn't be here but on the other hand perhaps that's the answer right there that if it wasn't so we wouldn't be here to talk about it and it's not a guaranteed situation so when we look at other exoplanet systems which we have been cataloging now over the last 20 years it's actually quite rare that we see a solar system that looks like ours there's something not necessarily completely unique but rare about the structure and architecture of our solar system for example we we often see plants in highly elliptical orbit orits going around their star which if an as solar system if you had a PL like that if Jupiter entered a highly elliptical orbit for whatever reason it would completely destabilize the rest of the planets we also have lots of hot Jupiters these are Jupiter sized plants which are orbiting very very close to the star and again in order to get Jupiter which has to form far out in the star system to migrate inwards it's like a bulldozer coming through the planetary system it just knocks everything else out um but it's possible that the solar system had instabilities it's thought that at one point in the past there may have been another planet similar to Uranus and Neptune that we lost so there could have been What's called the fifth ice fifth gas giant in in the solar system and the reason why we think this is true is that when you do these simulations and you put the eight planets in and you let them kind of all interact with each other and you speed up over time you very often find that Uranus or Neptune get ejected out the solar system in like half of the simulations so therefore it seems odd you know how if if you're in a syet so unstable why are they so stable when we look at them today so the explanation for this and David nesia one of my colleagues at the Southwest Research Institute suggested this he said look if you put in an extra planet and the back end of that solar system it's the one that often gets ejected and it sacrifices itself to save Neptune and Uranus and then that all make and then everything makes sense if you do that so even though we don't have direct evidence for this fifth giant planet it kind of neatly explains why the outer solar system seems coherent and stable because it wasn't always coherent and stable and it's only got that way as a result of basically chucking out the unstable stuff so we don't just have a rare earth hypothesis we have a rare solar system hypothesis as well yeah I I I think about this a lot this is one of those thoughts that really bother me as exoplant scientist as understanding how special and unique we are I'd say it's like the driving question I have as a scientist is is our home is there something special about not just the Earth but maybe the Earth Moon system the solar system even our sun even our part of the Galaxy maybe even our galaxy itself like where which aspects of this are special and which AR um for example the sun is not a typical star only about 10% of stars in the universe look like the sun and amongst those our sun is unusually quiet most stars have lots of flaring and activity lots of star spots our sun is is curiously very very stable as well in terms of it Luminosity output so that's also kind of odd you look at the solar system we have a gas giant as far as we can tell just having one gas giant is kind of unusual certainly less than 20% of exoplant systems have that possibly as low as 10% so just having a Jupiter around your star is weird and Jupiter is thought to be potentially a good thing because it could Hoover up all the asteroids for instance that's been suggested and maybe that protects the Earth from getting bombarded you put something in uh in one of your videos when was it 200 when did Jupiter take one for the team recently the Shuma Levy that hit it B boy yeah that was a huge impact that that happened when I was a kid so yeah it wasn't when I was a professional astronomer I think this is when I was like 13 or 14 I think that was happening and I remember seeing in the news and seeing the images but that was yeah that was a situation that obviously happens very often if it happened in a human lifetime it's happening probably every few decades or so to a plan like that so that's not surprising and if that had hit the earth it would have definitely extinguish life on Earth no no doubt about it was a massive massive impact so having having Jupiter take that over a team was was one that we were pretty grateful for have we got any idea about the odds of life and intelligence that's something that that is definitely right up my street I've been thinking about my whole career I'd say um you know there something said there are two types of astronomers the ones who want to understand how the universe works they want to understand the mechanisms what you know what was the big bang how does SpaceTime work and there are astronomers who just want to have this itch are we alone and it's just it just drives you and you can't help thinking about it and I probably fall into that latter category I find both questions very interesting but that latter one really bothers me um calculating on odds is very difficult because there's only us that we know of so you have a 100 billion stars potentially and so a lot of people would say therefore the probability of Life somewhere in the galaxy is very high because if the probability is say .1% then that would mean there's you know millions and millions of civilizations out there in the galaxy fine but we don't know that the probability is 0.1% so there's 10 to the 11 100 billion stars let's say 100 billion potentially earthlike planets out there but if the probability of Life starting on each one of those earthlike planets is less than 100 billion then it's just us that's it and that's just life I mean then you could add on well what about multicellular life what about UK carots what about photosynthesis what about getting all the way up to intelligence and Technology even because intelligence in technology not the same thing you have intelligent species on Earth which do not have int which not have technology such as you know crows or humpback whales and dolphins and things so just just being intelligent isn't enough either we have no idea what what the outcome of of all those steps would be but what we do know is that life started pretty quickly on the Earth and and that's interesting so we can look at the time scan we can say it happened within about the first maybe 200 300 million years as evidence for life on Earth since the when the oceans formed whereas intelligent life took a lot longer it took intelligent life you know four four and a half billion years depending when you you make the start date that's a long time and the Earth will not be habitable that much longer I always think this is kind of an amazing fact the Earth will probably be uninhabitable to complex life in less than a billion years about 900 million years is the so if it had if it had taken only a little bit more we would have been just about getting to the stage of intelligence just about when we would be uninhabitable yeah yeah there's a really interesting idea called the hard locks idea that um Brandon Carter wrote about and his idea was um it's kind of odd that we have these major evolutionary transitions such as the development of uh comig Genesis which is sex the development of ukari cells photosynthesis all these major evolutionary developments they seem to be kind of uniformly spaced in time from the start date of Earth to the end date of Earth they seem to be kind of uniformly spaced and he said look that's actually similar to trying to pick a lock a very hard lock so imagine you had a sequence of doors in front of you and the lock on average would take let's say 100 hours to pick but I only give you 30 minutes to pick all six and you got to get through these six locks to get to the end now the vast majority of people of course will not get through the six locks and they will and we just never hear from them they never become an intelligent civilization in this picture but very very rarely someone will be fortunate enough just very lucky that they'll get through those six locks despite the fact the odds are against them and when you look at the distribution of how long it took them to get through those locks they end up being uniformly spread in time even if the locks are grossly different in difficulty so the first lock could take maybe an hour to break the next one could be a thousand hours the next one could be 10 hours and if as long as they could be completely different numbers as long as they're all as long as they're all hard the final distribution is always uniform which is what we see so he suggested this is consistent with each of these steps being incredibly unlikely events and that would naturally explain why they seem to be almost coincidentally evenly spread in time in evolutionary record which is obviously bad news if for intelligent life if that's true then there's people out there the uh hurdles to get over are all really really high yeah so I I'm I'm receptive to that argument the only real thing I feel confident saying anything about on this I've done a paper about this a few years ago where I said well let's just intelligent life is hard to deal with but let's look at the early life situation and despite the fact life did start early when when we did this full basing analysis of the timing and the chronology of Earth's history it is a good sign for Life starting again if we kind of reran the clock if we could go in a time machine and we did that and what we did for the chaos theory we kind of push things around a little bit we just nudg things around and we rerun the tape and we see how often would life start again and the outcome was that about nine out of every 10 simulations we would expect life to start again given that given that situation so that's just purely looking at the chronology and how fast life started but it's not a guaranteed it's not a guarante aned outcome so it is possible that you could have plants that do not form life as well whereas when it comes to intelligence we try to do the same thing for intelligence it actually slightly disfavored intelligence it said that you know when you look at the numbers it looks kind of unlikely that intelligence would happen again but it was a very marginal result and so we just really what that's telling us we need more data whenever whenever you come to a point where your statistical significance is kind of weak as a scientist that's a point to reflect that we need better data and certainly for intelligent life and for life as well we need more data and my analysis was only restricted to running the Earth's tape backwards I mean who knows if Earth is common either like the Earth might be special out there as well what are the planetary conditions required for life as far as we know it for Life as We Know It the basic condition is liquid water so every single living organism on this planet has to have living water in order to survive there are some animals and some creatures which can go without water for extended periods of time but they they can't go forever without liquid water so that seems to be a basic requirement you also need an energy source all all life metabolizes so there has to be some source of energy from most life on Earth that essentially comes from the sun obviously we get our food from eating animals and plants but all of that essentially still derives from the Sun if you go far enough back down the food chain and then there's some things which like chemat tropes which get the energy from chemical gradients or from deep down on you know ni near to the bottom of the ocean there are some volcanic vents that could be a source of energy so you have to have an energy source you have to have water and I think a lot of us think that you need some kind of information storage system as well so for us that's DNA some life uses RNA um whether there's other versions of that on other plants is an open question and something that's very interesting to explore RNA seems to be a a popular idea that it could be almost a common precursor for life out there that we might find it's very difficult to form RNA spontaneously so it doesn't seem like it's easy to make RNA but somehow it must have got started and once you get it it's autocatalytic so it can make more of itself it does reproduce but getting that first one is kind of the chicken and egg problem with life quite literally and then you probably also want to have some kind of cell structure something to bind the organism together it can't just be diffuse and just dilute across the entire ocean they probably needs some physical structure so that could be for instance like a an oil droplet can actually form almost a natural vessel without having to have an organism already around you could have the the the oil do that job for you it's also been suggested that in Clays uh they can form these little Bubbles as well if you have like wet clay and air cycling through it you can form these Bubbles and those those clay BS could also be potentially little pockets that form like Proto cells as well so there's lots of interesting ideas about getting the precursors to life going but of course that's just life on Earth it is possible that life elsewhere does not require liquid water but I think there are very good arguments as to why it probably would you want some kind of solvent and there are alternatives that you could imagine um such as you know kind of alcohols for instance but in in general it's difficult to argue that water is both extremely common in the universe it's one of the most abundant things out there we see it in many many plan atmospheres that we've been studying over the last couple of decades so we know this stuff is all over the place it's just hydrogen oxygen to the most obvious and common things in the universe and it has so many advantages for life so if you want to have liquid water as your as your basic requirement then that all comes down to the surface temperature or the subsurface temperature of the object you want to have it in that in that temperature range where it it's not too cold so it's not freezing to ice and not too hot that's boiling to steam why do you need the lubricant the solvent solvent yeah so you need the solvent to to to to basically carry nutrients around the organism if you have a completely solid object um it's difficult to imagine how it would transfer energy from different organel and different components of the cell so a solvent is just useful for for for keeping I mean I'm not a biologist but my understanding is it's just is just to keep keep a a way of moving stuff around inside the cell what else about the planet stuff like the magnetosphere and plate tectonics and a big moon and stuff like that what else is sort of rare about where we are I mean possibly the PA of the Galaxy could be rare as well people have suggested that where we live in the Galaxy may be itself special we live in a in a spiral arm and we live you know sort of like halfway to 2third of the way out from the from the center the Galaxy to its Edge yeah so the Suburban district and we certainly think that if you were to too close to the galactic center that would be bad as you get closer and closer towards the galactic core the density of stars increases there's more and more stars which means the spacing between Stars decreases now that's problematic because you can have exposure to supern noi and gamma ray bursts which can be essentially life extinguishing events so if you get too close that's a problem we also did some work in my team with moam MCA where we showed that actually the instability we talked about earlier the three body problem type effect also gets worse as you get closer in because Stars themselves often not collide with each other but come very close to each other and when that happens the gravity of a nearby star can actually rip off and destabilize the planets around you that you're trying to form so this is bad and we think that you know certainly once you get within that inner core you actually lose the majority of your plants this way this is why you always get a little bit b sometimes you'll hear astronomers say uh this a pet heave I have with my colleagues that locally we know this is is true nearby to the star that about um let's say 10% of sunlike stars have planets of similar kind of size to the Earth not necessarily habitable planets but similar size to the Earth therefore there are 100 billion stars therefore there's a billion of those 10 billion of those in the entire galaxy now the problem with that is that we just don't know that we can extrapolate what happens locally in our neck of the woods to the entire galaxy and especially to that gal IC core it seems very unlikely that the the inner region you know unlike Star Wars and Star Wars that inner region is where like all the activities going everyone wants to live in corusant which is like right in the center of the Galaxy in the real world you do not want to live in the center of the Galaxy that's actually a hell hole place to be living so I don't think um we can generalize these numbers elsewhere and so when you look out to the outer neck the suburbs of where we live there are some reasons why it seems useful we we're far enough away from all that behavior but we're in a region that's dense enough be forming stars and dense enough to be forming planets the metallicity gradient good um we also happen to move around the Galaxy uh orbit around the Galaxy is comparable to the speed at which the galactic arms themselves rotate round and so so we're not Crossing streams and other uh Lanes of traffic right exactly so we don't get these these the spiral arms are basically compression waves of of gas that that are moving through the Galaxy and those compression waves as they push through they get they lead to a star formation increases so you have this compression we've suddenly get more and more stars being born and that's generally hazardous to have lots of stars being born because that means you're going to have some Stars which are going to go supernova it's not common you know one in a thousand stars will go supernova but if you have a star forming surge a few of them will and that's going to be bad if you live in that neck of the neighborhood so it's like having a swarm of um I don't know like migrants or something swarming through your neighborhood and some of them just explode around as they come through or something you don't really want that you'd rather be in a place where it there's no visitors and it's a fairly stable place in Fr and that seems to be kind of the the neck of the woods that we live in so in that sense uh it may be fortuitous that we live where we are but this is an open question I don't think we've really established this but we have some ideas as to why it might be so but ultimately this is something we hope to test if we can detect planets right down the center of the Galaxy that would disprove what I'm saying prove that actually planets can form in these bizarre places and which would be again interesting to discover or maybe we'll even discover that there's earthlike plets in that region and life in that region which would again append a lot of what I'm saying so it's a testable Theory but it is the only idea we've got right now prior to having any data that there it does seem like there's some advantages to being where we are in the galaxy Rare Earth R solar system rest suburb it's so interesting to uh think about that number of this is how many billion stars there are and this is how many planets we think are on average around each star therefore if you run the numbers forward but what it doesn't account for is that not all star localities are created equal and presumably as you get closer toward the center of the Galaxy that accounts for a very large number of the number of stars but at a much lower um appropriateness the the environment within which those planets inhabit isn't sufficiently stable and longlasting to actually allow life yeah that's so cool yeah I mean one of the one of the strange things not just location but star type is the most common type of star in the universe is a red dwarf so 75% of all stars are red dwarfs and it immediately you might think well how come we don't live around one if they're so common but it gets even worse than that because as far as we can tell they seem to have more earth-sized planets around them than sunlight stars do and yet more we know that they live for far far longer so the Su as we talked about will eventually burn out and die it will probably take another 5 billion years before it turns into a giant but even within a billion years from now it will become hot enough that will make the Earth uninhabitable so this is climate change force from the sun over over billion year time scales that'll just basically mean there's no way for us to adapt to that and we will die um however these these red dwarfs it's like everything happens in slow motion for a red dwarf so their lives they're they're extended to trillions of years because they're so small it takes them a lot longer they're much less efficient at Burning that nuclear fuel in their Center and so that means that if you lived around a red dwarf you could have a civilization which lasts far far far longer than we ever will and so all of this kind of is intriguing you know you have there's more of them they have more Earths and they and they last for far longer so they seem to have everything going for them and yet we don't live around one and that has also kind of bothered me in the past and I called this the Red Sky Paradox like why don't we have a red star in our Sky rather than yellow star in our sky and one possible resolution is is that there is something wrong with red dwars that we don't yet understand maybe the radiation they spew out is just hazardous to forming life in the first place they have these very prolonged I say they do everything in slow motion that includes their adolescence so the sun went through its adolescence pretty quick in order of like 10 million years it kind of settled down it chilled out it stopped spewing flares out all the time what happens during adolescence it's just a very active star it's very instable it's it's very volatile its Luminosity is changing dramatically it's spewing out high energy radiation it is not a nice place to be living during that time for red dwarfs that that adolescence extends for a billion years in some cases so the the problem with that is that it actually eradicate the plets of their water so let's say the Earth happened to be a water-rich world born around a red dwarf but then it's being bombarded with this high energy radiation it can actually remove the atmosphere completely of the planet they're so powerful these events when you remove the atmosphere the water then just escapes it boils off it forms maybe clouds at a high at a high altitude but then the ultraviolet radiation which these Stars also produce splits water up into hydrogen oxygen so it's like fishing of the of the molecule into hydrogen oxygen and the hydrogen will escape into deep space so an earthlike planet does not have enough gravity to hold on hydrogen if you let out Hy in the air into a balloon or something um minus the weight of the of the film itself of the balloon the hydrogen will just float off into deep space and and not come back the Earth does not have enough gravity to hold onto it so once you lose your hydrogen you now just got Oxygen by itself you can't make water with just oxygen and so the planet loses all of its its water this way um this is thought to have happened to Venus actually in its past and so this is um which is a which is a very dry planet and we can see that so this is potentially an explanation as to why despite the fact red dwarfs are everywhere they may not be as hospitable as we hope but perhaps civilizations go there eventually there might be like the retirement homes like the Florida of the universe because I think a civilization like us would recognize that there's something here for our future right even though there's no water maybe we could bring water with us we could have a huge settlement program we eventually have huge ships and we can move over there bring everything we need and these Stars will be energy sources stable energy sources say for the future trillion years of the rest of the universe when all the other stars go out it will just be the red dwarfs left shining and so it seems obvious that that's where civilizations would be drawn to one day live it's a reliable retirement home reliable long-term good stable property prices throughout I I've seen uh Sunshine I've seen that movie how much truth is there in what we can do to stars to prolong them to control them yeah we we actually have an idea in my team where we've been working on some of these ideas if one immediate threat to in our solar system is of course the Sun so the sun is evolving which means as it's as it's maturing it's becoming more luminous over time when the sun when the Earth was first born the sun was about 20 to 30% less luminous than it is today so that's a that's a big drop off 30% less luminous over 4 billion years so if you go like another billion years into the future that's another sort of 10% % increase in Luminosity even a bit more than that and and then that will wreak havoc to the climate at this point so you have to do something one option that one of my colleagues suggested Greg llin was to try and push the Earth back into a wider orbit so what you could do is you could actually hurl an asteroid directly just off center of the earth and as it hurs towards it it will swing around it do like a a gravitational slingshot around the earth and it'll fling off in the other direction but every time that you have one of these gravitational interactions if it does a slingshot it basically steals a bit of speed and it will steal that speed and go off faster than it was before and that means the Earth will change speed it will lose speed so you can actually modify the orbit of the Earth by having these interactions so in this case we'd actually want to increase the Earth's angle momentum want to increase its speed and as you do so it would push it out into a wider orbit so you'd have to throw thousands and th millions of asteroids at the Earth to do this and every time you'd have to do very close but not just too close it's a highrisk strategy it seems like a very highrisk strategy a highrisk strategy for an advanced civilization that really knows what they're doing but that's where you could move the Earth back at the just the right rate to keep the temperature the same I guess you could do this for climate change as well in the near term but I wouldn't recommend it I think there's probably safer Solutions um the other solution there's I think uh more feasible uh or at least less risky to this is actually to remove Mass off the Sun but maybe this a bit more sci-fi uh even more sci-fi than throwing asteroids at the Earth you could actually you know have some kind of way you like either most simply like a ram scoop or something off the surface of the Sun but you can actually probably do it with lasers as well you can actually excite certain modes on the surface of the Sun and and get material to be ejected out this way if you if you make the sun lose mass that reduces its gravitational pressure in the center and so the the core of the Sun is where all the energy is produced and it's it's like a thermostat that the greater the gravitational pressure from the outside squeezing down in that core the hotter it gets so if we take some Mass off the top it'll reduce the pressure and the oven will cool down a little bit and so we can actually reduce that not cause it to expand if it's got less gravity it would it could cause it to slightly change in radius but it would it would not be a dramatic effect so when we when we're modifying the the radi of these sides it would actually end up probably overall um net decreasing the radius of the sun because as you cool down the the core of the Sun there's less um outward radiation pressure so that radiation pressure is basic if if that wasn't there the sun collaps into a black hole the sun wants to collapse into a black or or to a very small object maybe not a black hole because of electron degeneracy pressure but it wants to collapse all the way down the only thing stopping it from collapsing down is radiation pressure like energy spewing out in all directions and pushing back against that against that Force so if we reduce the power in the oven we make that core less powerful the the radiation pressure will decrease it will actually net shrink very slightly so actually that's why if you look at stars with lower masses they tend to have smaller radi they don't they don't actually get bigger as a result of of the lower gravity which you might think of so overall this would slightly decrease this the radius of the Sun and the net effect would be to decrease the Luminosity so we calculated a rate of doing this and it turns out to be trying to remember the number but it was about something like an one asteroid's worth like Vesta is like one of the largest asteroids there's one asteroids worth of material off the Sun every year so not very much that's how much you have to remove off the sun to basically keep it cooling down gradually over the next billion years such that it basically doesn't change temperature it'll basically stay exactly the same Luminosity as it is today so we did this calculation in my team and we think it's an intriguing idea and we think that if somebody was ever going to move to another star and potentially colonize it for trillion years this would be an obvious thing that they would do and there actually signatures that we could look for potentially to detect this so we call this star lifting star lifting I I was thinking about solar landscaping that like a solar landscaper would be a future job solar gardening almost yeah correct and another idea was that uh my my student had this idea that you know you could also use this in the neighborhood so we talked about supern noi being potentially dangerous like Beetle Juice is nearby and people are worried about Beetle Juice one day get supern noi and potentially you know it's too far away to actually really affect us to be honest but you could have a star like this nearby we could potentially or a civilization more advanced than us could potentially fly there do this Mass removal process almost as a pruning technique right so this star is kind of like a weed in your garden that you like a pest that you want to get rid of and so by stripping Mass off the top you could you could remove that threat and decl it and mean that your neighborhood is safe again so it's really fun to imagine this is all what physics allows right there's nothing there's nothing about the laws of physics which prevent somebody from doing any of this and so if the laws of physics allow it and there's a good motivation for why civilization might want to do it then it's interesting to ask whether somebody is actually trying this right now given the requirement for water that's needed for life in any form at least as far as We Know It uh what is the likelihood of underwater civilizations and if you have an underwater civilization I seem to remember learning that there's a few restrictions that those kinds of species would have like they can't smelt uh iron and and and materials that they would be able to use to build things in the same way to be able to go to other planets is that something you've considered yeah I mean it this is super intriguing I also one of the most interesting aspects of this is the communication aspect of of dolphins and whales as our as our sea intelligent companions that live in the ocean and for years and years we've been trying to just communicate with them right if we want to communicate with an alien civilization we should at least be able to communicate with dolphins and whales and have a conversation with them but we haven't really succeeded very well at that although there has recently been breakthroughs in this there was a a wonderful uh podcast on The Daily uh daily podcast New York Times does that talked about some recent breakthroughs in this area so there are there are some advances happening um but in terms of a whale or dolphin or anything analogous to that ever becoming a civilization it does seem like there's obvious hurdles my colleague Adam Frank has been thinking about this a little bit harder than I have and he point out that oxygen is not just um a problem in the ocean but it's a it could be a problem in the atmosphere as well you could be on an exoplanet that has no oxygen but you could still be a you know creature with thumbs and opposable thumbs and hands and things and a and a smart brain that you might have the idea of developing technology but similarly you wouldn't be able to really do any industry if you couldn't burn if you had if you didn't have access to combustion that seems to prohibit a huge range of technologies that were foundational to us getting started and then people often say about fossil fuels as well like fossil fuels are clearly a a poison to our atmosphere but had they had not been on our planet at all it's questionable whether we would have got to a point we would even be developing solar panels right because that requires some pretty advanced technology compared to Stone Age tools you can't go from stoneage tools to solar panels you need you need something in between to bridge that and and combustion was certainly a pivotal filling in step for us in our own development so we're getting a little bit speculative as to whether other civilizations could use other things I think Adam Frank has been interested in alternatives to oxygen for combustion I think he talks about hydr fluoride as a possible alternative but that's a very toxic uh molecule and so it's unclear if anything could actually survive and not be Intoxicated by having such a poisonous fume for it for its one combustion thing and also that doesn't just combust but it combusts way uh harsher than oxygen does so it would really explode basically every time you try to use it so it be very difficult maybe to imagine combustion so similarly it does seem like having an oxygen r atmosphere could be a requirement to potentially developing a technological civilization but subsurface intelligences and subsurface life more broadly is one of the most interesting things we can do in the near term to look for because we have Europa and we have Enceladus these moons in our solar system which almost certainly have liquid water beneath their icy crusts and we know we can visit them and we know we could think of ways of getting down into that surface and probing looking for life in them it's going to be very difficult to do so but I think the investment is worth it because we could answer this most profound question as to whether life started in a completely different environment to that of the earth I think if we found that there it would resolve the question I brought about earlier as to how often does Life start in general if there's two instantiations of it in the same solar system but under completely different independent circumstances that essentially proves that life is easy and life could therefore start everywhere so having that second data point will be incredibly important for us in our understanding of life in the universe even if it's not intelligent I doubt we're going to find in you know the city of Atlantis and the bottom of Europa I do imagine yeah we might we might find who knows we might have europan sushi in a few centuries and the billionaires would be shipping over some europan sushi and selling that at a at a premium I'm sure but uh it's uh it's it's a possibility that I think is to be taken very seriously that there could be life in our own solar system and for me that is the most likely place we're going to find it Bey on the earth I suppose the only or one of the potential push backs there would be what if there was some sort of cross-pollination how do you know that we're in the same solar system something hit us there was something carried on that which seeded this other moon or or or some other area of the solar system with the same uh original sort of Genesis of this yeah that's a great question and that's that's an idea called panspermia so panspermia is the idea that life couldn't transfer between planets between moons and spread out between within a solar system but potentially even Beyond into other solar systems as well so the nice thing about europian celus is that they're pretty much sealed behind this prison of this thick ice sheet which is at least a kilometer probably several kilometers thick for both of those objects and so it's very difficult to imagine let's say a rock got knocked off the Earth in in in an impact and on that rock was a tardigrade or a whole bunch of them a whole bunch of extreme arars clinging on for dear life and they somehow survive the Journey of space which I think is actually feasible they survive the impact but even so they unless that impact is is extremely massive it's not going to crack all the way through many kilometers of ice and penetrate through into that ocean water so I think the the CH and also not only this but it's also it's further out in the solar system so you're going from Imagine like a a a well you know that there's coin drops that you throw a coin it circles down it circles down it circles down circles down now you can have two coins hit each other fairly deep down in the well that's the earth the earth is pretty deep down in the gravitational well it's pretty close to the Sun Jupiter's pretty far out it's 5.2 further times out than the Earth is from the Sun and that's where the nearest one of these moons is Europa so you have to have a collision that is impactful enough that that Rock can then Circle all the way back up five times higher and then still have enough energy to strike your Roper and break through the ice it's not impossible I don't think but it it would be pretty unlikely that you would you would have the circumstances to create something like this for Mars for Venus and the Earth there we can imagine interchange of material much more readly and it is intriguing to ask maybe life started on Venus or maybe life started on Mars and moved over to the Earth and and there's some transfer between us but I think europan cadus they're they're almost like sealed boxes yeah that's exactly what but then that does raise the question that we might break that seal right because if we deliberately drill down into it we are going to in whether we want to or not some extreme fire is going to cling onto the side of that spaceship you can't it's basically impossible to completely clean sterilize your your spaceship out in space yeah there's always something and then it's going to penetrate into that ocean and potentially be a source of contaminant so you know you get that one chance of doing the experiment correctly and if you screw it up you've you potentially introduced an entire new biosphere that could be fairly dangerous in fact to an existing biosphere there talking about large impacts can we talk about the importance of the Moon and its creation and stuff yeah the the moon's a puzzle that we still wonder about today despite the fact it seems like it's a a sealed story we think the moon formed from a huge impact it's thought that there was a mars-sized planet which smashed into the Proto Earth billions of years ago for just after the solar system formed so the Earth would have been actually been larger than had this impact not had occurred it would have been maybe 50% more massive than it is today maybe twice as massive and this impactor came along smashed into the Earth it knocked off a huge amount of material and it's thought that that impactor which we normally give it the name Thea would have been almost completely obliterated in this and vaporized in this in this collision and then some chunk of the Earth was knocked off and that chunk of the earth is ultimately what formed the moon or maybe even multiple moons that then coales later into a single Moon so there's there's a huge amount of interest about why why you might come up with a speculative idea and and still people are challenging this idea the thing we know for sure is that the the moon rocks that were collected by the po astronauts have almost the exact same isotropic ratio of oxygen 18 to oxygen 17 I think it is as Earth rocks do and this is thought to be a fingerprint that the rocks formed in the exact same place around the sun we look at rocks from Mars we look at rocks from Venus these are basically meteorites we've collected that land in on the earth they have distinct isotropic ratios but the Moon and the Earth have exactly the same so that tells us that they formed from the same inherent plump of material that's challenging with this impactor with the impactor if this thing really did have its own unique origin this impact to Thea Why didn't it contaminate that then and have its own distinct signature that gets mixed in so that has been a challenge one idea that has been suggested to cter this is called sinesia I think I'm pronouncing that right ceser and that's when the impact happened it was so uh extreme that it formed basically one giant donut-shaped planet for a while so the Earth and the moon would have smashed together formed basically a ball of lava essentially that was shaped like a almost a donut in space spinning very rapidly because of all the anle momentum from the impact and then gradually have peeled off and formed a moon and the earth separately from this giant impact the reason why this is attractive because it allows for this material to mix in thoroughly so so this impact or whatever it was the and the Earth completely mix into one single object and then it separates out into the Earth and the moon separately that seems to uh explain some of the Mysteries but not everybody accepts that idea and there's still a lot of controversy about the moon like the moon's Far Side has a very different appearance and thickness to the near side if you ever seen a picture of The Far Side of the Moon it looks radically different to the near side the near side has these Maria these beautiful lava flows that happened millions of billions of years ago that kind of smooth out and then it has these more crated uh areas whereas The Far Side is almost completely crated there's very very few Maria that's because the crust the actual lithosphere of the moon is much thicker on the far side than the near side and again that's weird like why why should that be why is there a dichotomy like that and so one one idea of there is that actually Two Moons formed in this process and then one kind of Pancakes onto the back of the the moon we know today and that is that P pancaking that then formed like a thicker shell on The Far Side of the Moon so there's it's like I wish we had a time machine because this would have been like the greatest fireworks shown in in the universe to have seen the formation of the Moon and again it raises so many questions like how how unique was that does that happen in other exoplant systems are we special that this happened here we don't really have any observational evidence either way but obviously my team and I one of the things we've been trying to do over the last few years is to try and detect moons around other planets to try and ultimately answer this question because at the end of the day the moon has a huge influence on our planet it stabilizes the obliquity of the earth it gives us the tides it gives us you know the the rise and the fall of the tides which potentially are a useful thing for life they create Rock pools on the on the on the coastlines especially when the moon was closer in it would have formed o you know continent covering Tides basically the entire continent would have been covered in a massive tide that would have formed all these Rock pools all over the place um it also uh potentially stripped off the upper mantle the upper lithosphere of the earth and that could so basically the crust so the crust may have been much thicker of the earth when it first formed and then the impact could have ripped off some of that thick crust and had that not had happened the crust may have been too thick to have allowed for plate tectonics so plate tectonics we think are absolutely crucial for life as light life as as we have it on the earth because they allow for something called the carbon cycle so when an animal dies in the bottom of the ocean its carbon is locked up in its bones and its shell whatever it is and it settles down to the bottom of the ocean it just stays there and if there was no if that was just the way it was the the world would run out of carbon basically and there'd be no way for animals to grow on the surface anymore because there' be no carbon left but instead what happens is these these plates subduct and they go under each other and so that carbon recycles it comes back out in CO2 in volcanoes and that allows access for photosynthesis to to happen in plants for instance so without the carbon cycle it's difficult to imagine how we'd have the biosphere we have today and the moon may actually be the reason why we have a carbon cycle for if it had not stripped off that upper uh that Upper Crust the crust would have been so thick that would have formed what we call a stagnant lid a stagnant lid is what we is seems to be the case with Venus Venus seems to have a very thick uh lithosphere which basically prevents plate tectonics as we have them on the earth so yeah very intriguing like you look at all the things the moon does and you think wow are we are we a product of the Moon the idea of plate tectonics kind of tilling like doing Global tilling uh is so so fascinating and yeah I I mean the Moon being tily locked or rotationally locked locked what's that what's that called yeah tily locked yeah tidally locked yes so we only ever see how rare is that to have something that doesn't rotate at all that seems bizarre that's pretty that's actually pretty common so a lot yeah a lot of moons that's true of because they and we think we understand why this should happen whenever you get fairly close to a planet or a star the the gravitational effect obviously increases as you get closer and closer and it kind of locks in the the shape of that object to always have one side facing it so especially if you have some kind of uh fluids like the Earth does these Tides can be quite effective at slowing things down um it happens for many moons around Jupiter Saturn so we think this is pretty common it's thought that uh this should be common for exoplanets as well which is interesting but again unproven but we think that there are some Stars which have very close in planets and those planets are so close that they should tily lock to their star and we've me Ed many of these hot Jupiters and we've watched them whiz around their star and we can even see basically re thermal Maps we can kind of re thermally map the distribution of energy on these planets and they look indeed like they are tidy locked as we would expect them to be so everything about ex plant seems to support this idea that tide locking should happen but there are also mysteries of Tide locking we don't really know exactly when it stops the theories of tidle theory that we use are fairly primitive to be honest they kind of parameterize things in a very basic way ideally you would just simulate an entire planet like every single atom but we just don't have computers powerful enough to to simulate every single atom so we use these simplified models and we know these simplified models don't always work so for instance for mercury it was predicted that mercury should be tidy loot to the Sun but it's not it's in a pseudo synchronous orbit and probably the reason why that's happening is is because of general relativity um because actually there's generalistic effects that come into play when you get close to a star as well so it's thought that um tit locking should happen but in some instances it it's more complicated than just a simple formula and you really need to like think about the composition of the star the composition of the planet what it's made out of does it have a core what's its density profile like how how much gen relativity kicking in here so the calculation is quite non-trivial but it does seem like it's common in the solar system and expected to be common elsewhere are there any other interesting rotations of planets in our solar system yeah I mean one of the things I think is interesting is Uranus uh is tilted on it it side which is like kind of confusing so even though it's its spin isn't particularly unusual it's somehow been knocked over so it's just spinning in a sideways configuration so that kind like it's rolling forward it's it's like it's just it's its axis in which it spins like the Earth's axis is basically pointed um orthogonal to its to its orbital plane so normal to its orbital plane pointing up if you like whereas for Uranus it's kind of tilted so it's north pole is pointed at the sun rolling like it's like it's rolling forward on a surface that doesn't exist yeah kind of yeah and and as it as it goes around what's kind of weird is that the moons have also tilted over alongside it so this has been like Curious how we can imagine maybe the planet getting knocked over on its side but then why are all the moons also on its side as well we don't really understand what happened there so very strange to understand happened Uranus and then one of the one of the cool things we're thinking about a lot of my team at the moment in my research group the cool words lab is the rotation of Jupiter and Saturn which are rotating pretty fast once every 10 hours and we think this is uh to be expected pretty much for all giant planets once you get far enough away from the Star so if the if Jupiter came too close to the Sun that tiddle locking thing would cook in and it would slow Jupiter down it put the brakes on Jupiter spin and slow it down to days rotation rate basically whatever it orbit period was but Jupiter's far enough away that it still retains what we would call its primordial Spin and Jupiter and Saturn don't really have any way of getting rid of that spin for the sun it does loose spin it was probably spinning much faster when it was young and it's been losing it through its very strong magnetic fields Jupiter has magnetic fields but nowhere near strong enough that it can lose spin the same way that the sun does it's so far away from the Sun that it's not going to be slowed down by being closer yes correct so it doesn't really have any way to shed this spin in that's interesting because we are now we have some observations coming up with the James web Space Telescope in October where we're going to basically measure a Jupiter analog so a planet an exoplanet around a different star it's over a thousand light years away but we're going to measure very precisely its shadow as it passes in front of another star and we think that this planet should have simly a fast Spin and why that's interesting is that that fast spin causes Jupiter to bulge out at its equator more than its pole so it's actually 5% wider than it is tall and Saturn's 10% wider than it is tall through this spinning effect we think we can measure this it's never been measured before if we can measure it it will tell us basically what the plantet is made out of how fast it's spinning and even it's tilt angle so as I said Uranus is tilted right over Jupiter and Saturn are not very tilted compared to that but we should be able to actually measure that angle for the first time and really get a deeper insight as to how these plants are forming so I'm just excited that we might have access for the first time thanks to James web to a completely new observational technique learning about exoplanets we have their Mass we have their radius but now we can get their their spin their bulgin their their tilt angle and really just complete the picture as to how these things formed are most solar systems and galaxies on a kind of a plane like why why is why are things not spheres why is there not sort of three dimension of movement yeah that's a great question you might think of that as being an obvious possibility um and certainly there are actually some plants which do that Chris so it it does happen sometimes that you have plants in these wild chaotic orbits if you look at Jupiter as like a mini solar system it has these four four inner moons the Galilean moons as they're called that's IO Europa Kalisto ganim and they look like a Min solar system like a pizza like a like a flat disc but then around that you have this nebula of spherical orbits basically as you say like just stuff in all kind of crazy directions we think that all of that stuff in a the wild orbits is what we call irregular moons and the stuff that's close in and form like a disc we call a regular Moon so we think the regular moons formed basically from a disc of material that was around Jupiter when it first formed so as it was forming it was spinning and collecting material and just like spinning a pizza a piece of dough it naturally wants to form a disc through that angr momentum and then from that disc the Moon moons just coalesced and popped out but the irregular moons they kind of formed that way so we think those are probably asteroids and even minor planets that were captured by jup Jupiter's gravity so that's more like the three body problem type stuff that's instabilities that kicked in and then Jupiter got in the way and kind of dragged them into these wild orbits around themselves and we do see in some exoplanets planets doing very strange things like that there's even many cases of planets orbiting backwards around the star so the the Stars spinning say in a clockwise sense and the planet goes around sometimes even in a plane but in the complete opposite direction which is we don't have that in the solar system at all that's very very odd and that has been a big headache for lots of people trying to understand how these things formed how on Earth do you get a planet to go around in the complete opposite direction so is angular momentum the explanation for why most things seem to be on a plane yeah I mean discs happen all over the universe like think about Saturn Rings it's in a disc think about the Galaxy it's in a dis and think about you know when we look at young Stars we see discs around them they're actually we've taken photos of them we see these discs forming so essentially things as they as they spin that anglum wants to spread material out into a white disc is it possible to know the size of the universe outside of the observable universe is that something that we can answer that's a hard question to answer because of the that we can only see so far so when we look out into the universe the basically the greatest distance we can see is just how long light has had to travel given the age of the universe so you might naively think if the universe is about 13.8 billion years old the furthest distance we could see would therefore be 13.8 billion light years away however the distance actually much greater than that because the universe is expanding so during the time this distant object produced a a particle of light a photon towards you and it travels that distance that that origin Point has itself moved further and further away from you and so due to the rate at which we think the universe is expanding the most distant point that we could possibly see which would be 13.8 billion light years of travel would actually be probably something like 45 billion light years away due to that expansion effect so therefore you have 45 5 billion light years in One Direction you could do the other direction another 45 so that gives you a diameter of about 90 billion light years so we can say the universe must be at least this big because when we look out in that region we don't see repetitions so we don't see if the universe was like on a sphere and you just traveled round and around the sphere over and over again You' see the same stuff happening over and over but everything in the universe seems unique every patch seems a different patch to everywhere else so the universe seems to be at least 90 billion years in size but it's probably much larger than that because when we look out at that distant spec there's nothing fundamentally different about it and presumably from its perspective it could see another 45 billion light years again in the direction and so the question is how many times can this go before there is some kind of wrap around or perhaps there is no wraparound it just goes on forever so this really speaks to the curvature of SpaceTime like what is the shape of it is it indeed totally flat if it was perfect flat then the universe would essentially be infinite in every direction you could just travel and travel and travel and you never come back to the same point it doesn't mean necessarily that the the universe in terms of matter is infinite there may be a region where all the matter and energy lives and then eventually you just exit that region you're still in SpaceTime but there's just no stuff anymore and then eventually you might travel far enough away and you'd hit another Universe if you like another region of mass and energy that's completely separate from that of our own but generally I think we assume that that's not the case that it's just kind of homogeneous Everywhere by the cosmological principle as we call it we kind of assume that where we are is typical of everywhere else there are some measurements trying to constrain the curv of SpaceTime especially using Gaia you can essentially like draw triangles on the sky and add the angles up of those triangles and if you draw a triangle on a flat piece of paper the angles should add up to 180° but if you you imagine drawing a triangle on a balloon or on a football that's curved the angles will actually add to an angle greater than 180 and so you could therefore tell that there's some curvature based off that sum of those angles so we can do a similar kind of experiment in astronomy and as far as we can tell the angles do add up to 180 the the flatness of the universe is very very flat it may just be though that like you know our early ancestors who looked out at the Horizon and they saw what seemed to be Flat Earth right the UN the Earth does look flat but if you travel far enough and you you get a tower big enough you will eventually see the curvature so it may simply be that the curvature evades us and there is a curvature but we just are not able to see it yet but it does imply the universe is very very very large much larger than that which we see and it is potentially and mind-bogglingly infinite what would the implications of that be an infinite universe in a sense there's no implication in another sense there's a profound implication so in a sense there's no implication it doesn't really affect anything outside of the this barrier as far as we can see 13.8 billion years of light travel time or 90 90 billion years when you convert to the diameter of this physical scale anything outside of that Hubble volume as we call it can have no interaction or effect on us in any way so there's no way of there was a benevolent alien out there who could ever affect us there's no Supernova which could go off there's nothing which can ever happen there ever in the past or the future which can which can influence us and so in that sense it it doesn't really matter what's happening out there so it's like if a if a tree falls in a forest and no one's around to hear it does it really make a sound it's like does it even really matter does it philosophically does it matter whether this stuff is out there and if you think about Quantum interpretations of the universe they someon interpretations would basically say it doesn't even exist if you it's not observable its superposition is basically completely IL defined and you can't even talk about it being a physical object in a sense so there's that kind of perspective of it but another perspective it is profound because if the universe is infinite and not just infinite in scale but there's mass and energy all over the place then there would be an infinite number of Chris's and an infinite version of Davids out there and with enough like monkeys typing on a typewriter infinite opportunities everything will happen again and again and again and again an infinite number of times and sometimes they'll be slightly different sometimes they'll be exactly the same and that's a a strange concept it means none of us ever really die right there is someone who has the exact same life experience as you who is you in every measurable sense of the word down to the atom down to the electron they are the same as you and yet they could be offset 100 years into the future or 100 years into the past or whatever this really means in terms of time because we such wide separations at this point but uh we would all basically be alive forever somewhere so you can get into kind of like metaphysical philosophical aspects of it which are which are very strange to ponder as well yeah it's uh I'm right in saying that there is I don't know what the cubic meter space that I inhabit is but there's only so many uh ways that matter can be arranged inside of the space that I occupy and if you have an infinite Universe therefore there must be at least at some point this is this not um boltzman brains is this not something else as well that kind of ties in with that yeah it's a similar argument to the boltman brains the Bon brains argues that uh it's really thinking about the F the far future typically when people talk about Balon brains but if you imagine time running forever and ever into the distant future then random particles will sometimes coales in random ways to eventually form a conscious brain and what's kind of strange about that idea is that the conscious brain doesn't even have to exist for very long it could exist for just a microsc and then fall apart but in that microsc it could have all of your memories every experience you've ever had would be hardcoded into its wiring and so it would believe it it was in this room it had had all the experiences we had had and it would be indistinct there' be no way to disprove that and in fact when you really think about the Infinities involved there's far more Bulman brains than there are rational human brains it's far harder to have a a human go through all the steps of actually living a life than is just to just to emulate the life and so by that account it's much more likely you'd be a Bossman brain it's the original simulation hypothesis dear God right it is it is kind of like simulation hypo but a lot of a lot of astronomers have turned very sour to this idea and a lot of the arguments against it fall into like entropy camps and that you know if you really look at the far future of the universe and look at the heat death you you can't just have entropy reversed like this and even in spontaneous ways in in a probalistic sense it just it just really shouldn't happen once you get to these kind of extreme times where the particle density drops down so much that each particle eventually will just be in its own universe so it can't possibly coales into these B and brains if it's the only particle around so when you when you think about the Practical implications of the te olical model that we think is most likely answer for the future of the universe the bolman brains idea starts to fall over a little bit have you read the five ages of the Universe I haven't no that's the Fred Adams uh Greg Lin book and uh oh I know well I probably know I know the paper because they wrote a paper which is the the Deep time of the universe and uh That's a classic paper that I've given to my students many many times it talks about the the decay of the proton the the far future of the of how the last stars all go out and possibility for new Star so I know the paper quite well I haven't read the book this is this is like the Normie uh translation probably of of that paper uh it's just I think it's maybe 25 years old now uh it's in the ' 90s I think that the the book was written uh it's written accessibly but it's still heavy goinging for a muggle like me um but I love thinking about far Futures I absolutely there's something so or inspiring and sort of Dreadful about it and it's in the same way as spatially looking up at the the night sky makes you feel small and insignificant this is the same but doing it with time like you're temporally insignificant and uh yeah just thinking about how much further they go ahead you had that beautiful uh story I must have listened to it five or 10 times the one about the uh civilization that Waits until the very very final stars are going to die that stuff to me far Futures uh thinking is one of the coolest um thought experiments to do yeah it's it's a bizarre concept to think that we are at the beginning of the story it it kind of feels like everything is often presented to us as we should treat ourselves as mediocre so if you're born in a in a random country it's pretty unlikely you're going to be born in you know tiny country like the Virgin Islands or something because it's just the population is so tiny there versus being born in a country like United States or China or India or something you're much more likely to be born there so that's the mediocrity principle but when we apply the mediocrity principle to time it just doesn't work so the history of the whole universe should stretch out for trillions and trillions and trillions of years even you know 10 to the 10 to the 10 to the 10 type years we're talking about here and we live in the not just the first chapter and not just the first page but like the very first like letter of that whole story and that feels really odd it feels in congruous with our expectation that we should be typical and we shouldn't expect to be special and yet when we look at our timing it is clearly very special and there's no reason why in all of that in you know vast deep future we couldn't arrive much much later in the story you could imagine as I said these red dwarfs which will live for trillions of years why shouldn't they have planets and life around them for a very long time in that paper and I'm sure the book as well Greg llin talks about the idea of brown dwarfs colliding together and birthing new stars and that would be a very rare event but over the vast vast epic of time they actually form a significant population of stars which form and in all of that deep deep future bolman brains it seems odd that we would live right at the very very beginning of the story and I'm I'm I think about that a lot I'm trying to make sense as to what it means it seems to suggest that either our idea of mediocrity is fundamentally wrong that we should not assume we're in the middle that maybe it's okay to assume we're special in this sense which as strange as that sounds or or perhaps there is something about the Deep future which is which is inhospitable the UN there's two ways out the universe could just become inhospitable over time and it may be not necessarily through Stars cuz we think think there'll be plenty of stars but maybe a roaming civilization just just like a virus Hoovers up the Hoovers up all planets which could potentially have life that would actually natur that would actually work really well as an explanation if if a roaming AI went around the universe and just and and it happened you know spontaneously in many different parts of the universe at a certain amount of time an AI just arrives and it spreads off and it just knocks off everything and it just converts everything into computers yeah that would actually make sense as to why we lived when we did in history of the universe or if there was another catastrophic event like the universe went through like a false vacuum Decay event which essentially means the universe itself becomes unstable and we have almost like another big bang type event in the next 10 20 billion years it's kind of improbable when you do the math that should happen but that again would would rationally explain why we live when we live and so the mediocrity principle does seem in strong tension with this chronology and I think that's probably why you and many others and myself included get so uh you know so alluring this idea and so uh some something about it something profound here that's there there's a lesson and we just can't quite see what the lesson is but there's something here for us to pick apart and there's some deep truth that we're missing that this is telling us is there not something to be said about the rate at which new stars and therefore planets are being born that that will sort of drop off over time therefore being shunted toward the start is more likely it's kind of more fertile ground that's only true so suddenly star formation rate is already in decline in the G in our galaxy it's already in Decline so the peak of star formation rate has passed which is already kind of sad right the the good time the good times have peaked in terms of the the economy of the of the say we're in we're in a different we're in a stellar depression yeah right it's kind of depressing to think of it that way but despite that um there's just so much time ahead of us that even if you reduce the rate to 10% of that which is now that if you have a trillion times longer to go you're still going to have like a lot of stars so even though there is a peak it's not a symmetric Peak I guess that's the the thing to get your head around it's it's a very very long tailed Peak and it takes a long time to decline all the way down to zero star formation and so if you actually add up how many stars live in the tail of that distribution there's far more stars and planets born in the tail of the distribution then there are born at the peak of the distribution and so then then it gets then it gets really curious like why why therefore civilizations also be correlated in their birth rate to planets you'd might expect that naively to be true how right is it to say that we would be one of the first civilizations to come about assuming this sort of mediocrity principle but then also I've heard that you know stars and planets have been born lived and died many times over before ours was even created therefore we should see some civilizations out there that they've had chance to get to where we are and Way Beyond yeah it's only a way of resolving many puzzles like why do we not see a Galactic Empire spanning the Galaxy that has done this star lifting thing we talked about earlier or just converted Stars into giant machines or built infrastructure or have Starship Lanes across the Galaxy we don't see any of this we have been doing setti for 50 60 years and we don't hear any radio signals from other parts of the Galaxy either they I mean there's possible there's someone out there but they're very quiet it's not a chattery loud Galaxy out there and this raises a puzzle like it may be one explanation there's really the firmy Paradox we're talking about now is you know one explanation is that we are the first and Not only would we be the first would that would necessarily imply that intelligent civilizations are very very rare right because the Galaxy is already 13 billion years old almost the same age as the universe so that implies that it's a one per 13 billion year event which is incredibly unusual then if that if that was the case so it is possible with first I tend to lean more on the idea that I think lots of if there is life out there and civilizations out there I think getting to this point is not that hard I think it probably does happen but the real question is the future for us the future of humanity whether we can continue on this path that we've been continuing on in a in a this unsustainable trajectory that we've frankly been living in over the last few centuries certainly um it seems questionable that we can keep doing this uh one way to resolve this is to is to try and live in balance with your planet of course and try to be like a more sustainable civilization I think having you know I wor about nuclear weapons like having nuclear weapons is just immediately unsustainable because as long as there's a 0. whatever it is percent risk of someone clicking the the red button each year given enough time it will happen it's just same thing like given enough time there will inevitably be a nuclear war as long as nukes exist it's just a question of when not a question of if it's just going to happen so that's already kind of terrifying and really what we're doing to our planet is kind of similar we are affecting the the habitability of our planet by this huge experiment of modifying the chemical composition of our atmosphere and that's also kind of concerning it might not I don't think it's going to cause an Extinction event for Humanity I'm not a doist in that sense but I do think it would probably put pressure in our economy it'll mean we'll probably take resources away from science from devel you know exploring space and I think we'll become more and more ins and then you can kind of imagine why a civilization would never spread between the Stars cuz they get so distressed and so hung up on and just keeping alive basically and trying to maintain some level of um comfort level to what they're used to that the idea of spending 10% of your income on something which might seem frivolous like building a moon base or a Mars base just becomes a lower and lower priority and certainly that's happening with our own budgetary definitions over the last sort of you know five 10 years or so we're seeing less and less money go to basic Sciences in the United States and so this is also uh a worry that it could be that very very slow Decline and I think that could be a possible explanation you know for the firm Paradox that this happens quite often civilizations they're inherently unsustainable and they they run up into themselves and it's the it's themselves that are the ultimate threat to their own growth but if on the other hand that means that if someone cracks this and they do become sustainable we probably would never see them because someone who is completely sustainable would be invisible if you're in complete equilibrium with your planet then there's nothing to look for I mean if we want to look for a civilization what do we look for we look for the solar panels because that's in disequilibrium with the planet because that's not the natural material on the surface of the planet or you would look for um a nuclear bomb going off that's that's in D equilibrium with the with the natural state of the planet but if a civilization truly reaches a comp completely 100% sustainable State there is no signature to look for that would be indistinguishable from a natural Perfectly Natural biosphere so that's intriguing we may not be able to actually detect those civilizations because they're so good at looking like a like a natural Planet given the time that you spend thinking about potential futures for civilizations the ways that they may or may not be in equilibrium does it give you a an additional sense of seriousness and trepidation sort of about what whatever we do here on Earth the fact that you kind of can see cosmically galactically this sort of knife edge of just how easy it would be to not end up keeping going the way that maybe we would like to yeah I think it's such an awesome responsibility when you think about the pressure of just existing in a way as a a species it is you know I think about this my own life a lot and I'm maybe you do as well that if you've played computer games growing up well as I did it does feel sometimes that life is a bit like a computer game like it's kind of wild and in a computer game you realize there certain rules and you realize what you're allowed to do and what you're not allowed to do and once you know what you're allowed to do it's kind of sometimes a little bit crazy that you actually I could like complete the game I could basically finish the whole thing I could you know could build this massive City or massive Empire whatever it is you're playing in the game and life is kind of like that when you realize the rules of the game you realize there's nothing really stopping you from do from completing everything you want to complete in the thing and I think as a species it's wild to think that we have that as far as we can tell the rules of this game that we're playing do not prohibit us from one day colonizing the entire galaxy if we wanted to there's nothing in the game that prevents us from doing that as far as we can tell there's nothing that prevents us from having a ization which would last for a trillion years of building Wonders that would you know light up the universe essentially and yet none of that has happened and so it is it is interesting that we have this awesome power as we still have free will I believe I still believe in Free Will and and choice and so I believe that we have the opportunity if we decide to take our civilization wherever we want to take it and become that that dream civilization that maybe whatever it is we have for me maybe it is a civilization that spans the Galaxy maybe for you it's something else but whatever that dream is we can achieve it and so that just reframes for me a little bit the power we have I think we often feel powerless but when you realize it's just these rules and there's nothing in the rule that prevents this it it's exciting it means it's up to us what we do it's it's still our choice what we do with this planet what we do with our society it's all up to us there's a lot of responsibility that comes along with that yeah it can feel sometimes paralyzing and crushing the weight of that like wow I could you know if you were told you were a child predy and therefore you're expected to become the greatest genius since Einstein that could feel like an enormous pressure on your you only fail from there yeah to live up to your father's expectations as many of us have felt that that that pressure but there is no father that this is just us there's no no one's expecting us to do anything because it is just us it's it's we're we're in a game it's a one-player game it's just us in the game there's no one else out there as far as we can tell so we can do whatever the hell we want to do and if we want to destroy our planet we are totally capable of destroying our planet if we want to live in squalor and and have a terrible economy and and society and burn the burn the environment down it is within our power but it's equally within our power to do something completely different and have the future that we dream of I that's what I believe and so I've always found that uplifting actually that we have the agency that's the key word the agency to be whoever we want to be both personally as individuals I think but also especially as a civilization but it's a collective agency to work together to form whatever we want to form yeah that's the coordination problem right it it would be what a shame it would be if we jump through all of these evenly spaced insanely unlikely suburb of the the Galaxy into having the moon that's Tiddly locked into having the sun that's the right size and we the right distance and then the procaryotic life into the eukariotic life and then all all the way up all the way up all the way up and then tribal biases and ingroup outgroup signaling and and you know it just the f what feels like the final hurdle before you go because I'm going to guess this would be an interesting question I suppose that um if we were to get ourselves to something close to multiplanetary life how much of a how big of a step change in our long-term survivability odds do you think that that makes I think a significant one um it's hard to put a number on that I think that it would obviously save us from certain threats that we could we could either put ourselves into the Earth or could come from outward forces so an outward Force might be an asteroid impact most obviously um inward forces could be some kind of massive conflict or a virus or something like this so it certainly provides some fencing off of that kind of danger but of course there are other threats beyond that I mean we all know that with covid it wasn't self-contained to a single country right and so if there was a virus whether it's a mind virus or a physical biological virus it still would most likely have vectors to spread to uh neighboring colonies even in the solar system that would it seems quite plausible that the entire solar system would still be in danger of of suffocating by such a threat and of course an outward threat could be a supern noi or a gamma ray burst which would equally put the whole solar system at risk so it's definitely an advantage but it's not enough if if your sole priority is to prep uate you know the flame of Consciousness as musk would say then you'd want to not just be interplanetary but Interstellar to truly achieve that and even eventually Intergalactic to achieve that but then you have to question you know why hasn't a civilization done that because we we as we said we don't see evidence for for regions of the St guy which have been colonized in this way um although perhaps they're just doing it in such a way they don't want to be detected or hiding from us in some way but as far as we can tell this kind of Empire build doesn't seem to happen very often um but I would hope I would hope that we can continue to keep this this Consciousness going because I think there's so much there such a boring Universe without it and I think it lights up the universe to have some some thought and some agency in there yeah I agree I uh it again every time that I think of the potential farlong futures of what we could be really helps to give perspective it it really is kind of the um sort of philosophical imaginative equivalent of looking up at the night sky and making yourself feel small and and putting your problems into perspective and and realizing just how much you should probably be thinking over broader Horizons in all directions in all different types and uh It's oddly existentially reassuring I think in some ways at least I find it I find it is yeah yeah one of my colleagues says this about time a little bit as well and he said to me um I think with without lives sometimes as individuals who feel this way that I'll get to this point and then I'll be happy I'll get to this point and then I'll do this you know there's there's always like that thinking of the future as a point of rest or a point of achievement and one of my good friends he said to me you know this is it like you're you're in your 30s this is life right now like don't don't let life slip You by because you're so focused on the future and I think as astronomers I tend to live ESP in the future because we think about this deep time but don't live your whole life thinking about making sure obviously it's important to have enough money for a time and then be comfortable things like this but don't obsess your whole life about that because you you'll miss out on what's happening right in front of you and somehow being uh present and and seizing what's in front of you isn't is an equally important lesson because at the end of the day life is incredibly short and I'm turning 40 this year and that's like making me think like wow like where's the the last 10 years just gone like they just disappeared under under the abyss and you do start to realize that like this is it you only get this one life and it's going by pretty fast and you you you don't want to mess around you it's there should be a sense of urgency I think in your life that's how I try to live my life with a sense of urgency that every day is kind of precious and matters and you're not going to get a second chance at this yeah I love that can we talk about my new favorite uh pet Obsession which is T 618 is this this massive Galaxy or massive star it's a black hole oh the black hole Yeah I don't know too much about this black hole though to be honest I think it's the just the biggest one that's been logged but when you look at the size of this thing I think it's it's Event Horizon is larger than the orbit of it's basically larger than our entire solar system like this thing is just beyond beyond it's like gantan from Interstellar basically yes yeah yeah yeah yeah it's just beyond AB scene and uh the more that I learn about the again far Futures and then looking at um black holes in kind of the the very odd way that they break much of the intuitions that even someone that knows as little about me as me about physics has uh they're just so fascinating like the unanswered questions about black holes are just beyond fascinating well they're such bizarre objects I mean they really seem like a nightmare that's come to real life they're so strange like a hole in SpaceTime and many people including Einstein didn't believe they were possible until we really started to see more and more direct evidence for their for their real existence so they're very strange and I think the massive ones have been a puzzle mostly in context of what astronomers research astronomers are talking about the most common thing I hear about with massive black holes is the puzzle of how they got so big especially as fast as they seem to have got that big so when we look at the images from the James Space Telescope we do see evidence of massive black holes what we call quazar these active Galactic nuclei which basically being fed so there's material falling into the black hole and it forms these very powerful Jets and we can see these Jets and that allows us to kind of weigh how heavy the black hole likely is and we see evidence for black holes which are just so large in the early universe that it doesn't seem possible that there was time given the age of the universe then to have built something that big that massive and that has been a puzzle it's similar for Galaxies as well we you know galaxies and black holes tend to go together for the super massive black holes it's kind of an open question like a chicken egg problem as to what comes first is it the Galaxy that first forms and then the in the center you end up with a black hole or does the black hole come first and that leads to kind of like a seed to the rest of the Galaxy or maybe a bit of both maybe a bit of both is going on but certainly when we look at these early images we're seeing evidence of both unusually massive black holes and galaxies in the early universe and it's it's puzzling that the Universe can form stuff this fast there are some ideas around this that are maybe a bit more exotic that people are floating around like one idea as a primordial black hole so this is something which could have actually formed from essentially the conditions of the Big Bang itself so very soon after the big bang there's it's a very dense soup right the universe when it first form and it gets less and less dense as it expands and so maybe some of those densities are a little bit denser than others little pockets and those Pockets could collapse down and form black holes directly straight after no stars involved just from the raw material of what came out of the cosmic superp of the big bang and those things could be potentially both very big and very small they could even be Earth sized Earth Mass black holes or they could form things all the way up to like the kind of T 618 gargantuan style black calls as well so people are are struggling and they're reaching a little bit for some of these more exotic theories right now and you know we have many surveys still planned with jwst it's still only two years into its sort of 20-year Mission that's hopefully got ahead of itself and so this is definitely an area of active research right now and I don't really want to predict what the answer will be at this point because it's hard it's hard to tell I don't think I think a lot of people are saying we should rip up our models of cosmology and I don't don't agree with that I don't think the Big Bang Theory is fundamentally wrong or the models we use we call like the standard model of cosmology essentially is fundamentally an issue um I don't think you have to throw that out to explain these things at least not yet and I think astronomers have very good reasons to not want to do that because then how do you explain the fact it explains 999 other things perfectly like that's really how do you explain all that other stuff so well so perfectly well if you throw out this model so I think it's probably issues of you know some of the early galaxies especially that were being discovered um it was actually the star formation models were probably in error so we take the rate of how we think stars form and and we take look of the local star formation rate of of the what we see around us is kind of a proxy for that so you say if you have a certain amount of density a certain amount of gas you expect to form this number of stars and we see that around the solar system locally and then we take those models and we extrapolate them onto these very very distant galaxies in the other side of the universe and reasonably astronomers have pointed out that's probably not a good idea because why should we expect this the way in which stars form from this mature metal Rich uh you know very old glas Cloud to it all be similar to the way the very very first primordial stars formed and when you modify your models to account for those differences you actually can explain where these early galaxies came from so I think it's probably an issue of not the fundamental cosmology being wrong but the way in which we think that stars and black holes form within that cosmology probably being needing updating at least I hope that's the case because if we have to throw out cosmology completely you know it's both exciting but we we big problems it be a big headache to explain all the other stuff that it works so well for do you class yourself as an experimentalist is is that sort of the the camp within which you sit yeah you know what I don't like labels at all so maybe a bit controversial in the sense but that a lot of astronomers uh maybe astronomers a label I'm okay with but a lot of astronomers would would split themselves up into categories of theorist modeler or Observer there' probably be your three categories of of astronomer theorist modeler or Observer a modeler kind of sits in between those two the theorists who do like pen and paper math and their work and stuff out on the Blackboard The Observers who are going to the telescope collecting data and the modelers who are trying to connect the Two Worlds to each other and I do all three so that's why I don't really like a specific label and I also just think in general advice I give to students is that it's not useful or conducive to work with such a label if you tell yourself you're an observer then it's like someone saying I can't do math and I hear this all the time there's so many students who come into the classroom and say I've never been able to do math I can't do it's just it's all gobbly goop to me and if you approach uh you know the world with that mindset then of course you won't be able to do math it's a self-fulfilling prophecy you've predestined that you can't do math and so I think calling yourself an observer is can have negative connotations like that or NE negative self connotations that you think therefore I can't do X Y or Zed so I prefer personally to to to really not work with those labels not because I'm trying to be pretentious but just because I think it it doesn't serve any purpose for my for my for me thinking about the things that I can and can't do and even with astronomy like I'd prefer not even to really be an astronomer because I like a bit of philosophy I like thinking about astrobiology I like thinking about the connections to biology and the chemical world as well so I don't really want to be and statistics I write a lot of just almost pure statistics paper so I don't I don't want to be in any one camp and I think that's how it was in you know back in the day there was just these polymaths that just worked on everything and that was beautiful cuz they could see connections between things that you would miss and we live in a in an academic world right now that that really promotes extreme specialization you know not only are you an astronomer you are an exoplanet astronomer and only you an exoplanet astronomer you're an exoplanet atmosphere astronomer and only you an atmosphere astronomer you're a cloud astronom it gets like more and more Niche and like literally I'll bump into students at meetings and posts who will say you know oh I'm a I'm a you know a cloud specialist and that's great but you know don't you think about other aspects as well because how if you're not thinking about the chemistry on the surface how can you possibly connect that to the chemistry in the atmosphere there has all these things are connected to each other in some way so yeah a bit of a rant there but I I just don't think it's particularly useful personally to to operate with a label and I just it's kind of one of my pet Hees that in a in the world of Academia we have become overly specialized in niche in our interests yeah that's uh specialization being for insects it's I I spoke to Eric Weinstein twice about this I remember I spoke to Sabina hosen Felder a while ago about this too um it seems to me that the theoreticians less maybe so on the astronomy side but as as I'm hearing you speak today it's so evident that there's just tons of cool interesting stuff that's being found out that's being tested and you have a sort of vim and vigor about it's so cool your passion's infectious that's why I love your YouTube channel um but then I look over to kind of M Theory String Theory you know hardcore theoretician side of stuff and it just seems like I can say this because I'm not a physicist and I'm not getting you in trouble but it just seems like this weird boring Groundhog Day circle jerk of people not really making legitimate progress in any One Direction from what I know it's incredibly sort of tribal and and quite politically um kind of driven uh oddly the people that are trying to sort of transcend or helping us transcend Humanity some of the ones that are the most captured by it um it just must be of all of the different areas that you could have found yourself in in physics it seems like there's lots to do lots of new territory and ground to cover very much you're kind of like Captain cck new worlds sort of let's go find some cool stuff out over here mentality as oppos to yeah this very slow moving quicksand that maybe going backward maybe going in the wrong direction who knows on the like hardcore theoretician side yeah I I think Academia is littered with many issues many problems it is by far away from a perfect idelic system I mean when I was a kid I actually did want to be a professor I thought about that I never thought I'd be doing it to be honest I never thought I'd get to that point it seemed like you'd have to be like some kind of Super Genius or something to become a professor but um it seemed idic in that I imagine you just sat in your office and thought about this you know the universe all day and that's not really sometimes you get moments to do that but most of the job is not doing that and people don't act with pure intents people aren't all driven just by this pure scientific ideology like any industry like any Corporation any field there's personalities there's Co cultures there's people trying to you know play politics trying to protect their little area and try to shoot down your little area and that's that's distress it a lot of academics do become disenfranchised and disillusioned with the whole game and eventually leave the field and go on to become much more successful working in a hedge fund company or Finance especially my colleagues that's very popular to to basically just cash out right you got these math skills why not why not use it to make bank right because it's actually not hard to do so finding all these stupid planets we can't make money off the back of those yeah right and I think and I know very clearly there was a colleague of mine he was brilliant and he felt this way he said um like I wrote this package that everybody this software package a statistical package that everybody in the whole Community is pretty much using at this point they've been cited thousands of times there were entire conferences organized about his paper and about his work and yet he could not navigate his way to a successful faculty job despite that because people would say well you're just a software engineer in the field you're not re you're not a real astronomer and so there was that kind of pretentiousness of you're not doing the kind of Hardcore maybe String Theory M Theory pen and paper stuff that maybe people might imagine when they think about you know a physicist looking like um and so those stereotypes have been problematic it frustrated him enormously of course and he said I just don't know what I'm supposed to aim for I just want to know what is it that I am supposed to do is it supposed to get citations cuz I've got that is it because I'm supposed to you know be invited to talks because I get so what am I supposed to do and he was so frustrated and eventually said I'm done with this I'm and just left the field and I think that's it's a different example but software Engineers we are now trying to promote that actually so the Simons Foundation which is down the road from us here they're now starting up faculty two jobs that are supported privately just in software engineering in astronomy and other Sciences as well but they're really putting money to support these types of positions because they are so important um but even in my own little world of EX exomoons which like the most Niche thing in the world you could imagine working on and I I spend not all my time working on that but I spend a significant fraction of my time working on that but I said I don't want to do one thing but when in that little world there's probably only a few dozen of us on the planet who are thinking about exomoons in a in a professional setting and even within that little world it's been not always the most you know pleasant experience amongst colleagues because I think sometimes when it is a very small field people do get very competitive and if you're a if it is a small pond the Temptation is to have that we just have must have one big fish and where if it's a big pond people maybe play a little bit more easily together or maybe like a large collaboration tries to become the big fish that takes over but certainly if you're in a niche field and you know I think string theory and M Theory have become there's not many students we recruit now that are interested in working on that topic but uh I think it whenever you have a field that does become fairly insular politics and and human the darker side of human behavior does inevitably play out and that happens in all Fields it's not I don't think it's it's necessarily isolated to the theoretical physics M Theory String Theory I think I think happens in every aspect of science to just different degrees and it is something which I hate and I always try to avoid as much as I can but even doing stuff like this like doing YouTube videos podcasts even that will create friction right because people like well you're not doing real science you you know you should be just all your time should be dedicated to doing pure research which obviously I disagree with like if we don't talk about our research we talk about the universe and get people excited about what's out there what the hell is the point of this like no we're not training the Next Generation we're not inspiring anyone we're not you know ultimately bringing in funding to support our activities so and also it makes it makes me a better scientist when I when I do this kind of work but everything you do there's always going to be a side there's going to that side that like wants to downplay it and and pour pour cold water on it but I think just having a thick skin is probably the best advice I can give anyway like if you just get to a point where you just don't care which is kind of eventually what I've got to then you you just like I know this is the right thing for me I'm just going to do it I know this is the right thing and I think that's hard to get through but when there's politics playing out that's the only advice I have is just try to like keep your head down and just and just push through those headwinds yeah it's strange that Puritans and politics exists even in physics which we would hope are kind of above that or outside of that maybe in a different dimension I did want to ask about how your YouTube channel which is like nearly million subscribers all of the different things that you do uh how that how Balan that with tenure track I mean have you got people that just purposefully take your modules and your courses because they love your YouTube channel and they want to be near Professor Kipping um like how's how's how have those streams sort of crossed over has it helped you get access to really phenomenal grad students to come into your lab it must be a big usefulness there it has been yeah um it's always weird to me I when I make the videos I always make them assuming nobody watches them at least nobody I know watches them that's for sure I I kind of make them in a sense that I want them to be high quality and the highest product I can the best I can do with it but I always assume that no one in New York watches it and when I and and and so it's always very strange to me when someone talks to me about it and you know bumps into you because sometimes it's in the street someone will asking you about it um not that often I'm not super famous or anything but and and especially odd when I go to an astronomy conference and other astronomers say I watched your video video and that's always a surprise to me cuz I was like well I almost feel bad cuz that video wasn't meant for you like it's it's cool that you watch my video but that video was not meant for a professional astronomer not there's anything wrong in the video but you were just not the audience that I was like gearing that too when I made that video so I almost feel like bad when they watch my videos that they they see a a presentation style as a speaker which is not reflective of how I would give a colloquium or a seminar or something in a way um but it has been useful and uh we've been able to uh one of the one of the ma major ways it's been useful is actually through donations to the to my team so we have a a research account called the cool worlds lab research account here at Columbia University and people donate anywhere from five bucks a month up to I think our maximum is 500 bucks a month we have a few of those where can people go if they want to donate to your lab where should they go yeah it's cool worlds.com is the website and then there's a link called support in there you can hit so if you head over to there you can support us and the amazing thing is that you are you know this isn't money that I get so this isn't like a patreon where you get Golden Throne in your office somewhere at Columbia no no this I don't see any of this money directly it all just supports it all just supports research that's it so we're supporting like paying for um the students stipend to keep them to hire them to recruit them we're paying for supercomputer time cluster time for dis space uh publication costs travel cost to conferences we're supporting bridge program students so we're doing all this activity with it um and especially it's been great because it's allowed us to get off this academic wheel that we've sort of been alluding to of um how do you how do you pursue your research passions one of my research passions is as we talked about searching for life in the universe but believe it or not uh there's that's very hard to find funding for especially for intelligent life in the universe it's still kind of got a giggle Factor aspect a little bit to it and it's pretty hard to persuade NASA or the National Science Foundation to to hand over much money to do research in that area but it's I think one of the most interesting questions we can do and many people agree and so that the the funding we get from from the public has allowed us to basically pursue the questions that we think are the most interesting rather than the questions which we know are most likely to get funded right so that's typically when I'm writing a grant that's typically how we have to write grants you typically have to write the grant to be this isn't what I'm interested in this isn't even particularly interesting to anybody but I know this is the boring science that they will likely fund and it's usually boring because it's low risk to be H it's something that you just know you can do and anyone could frankly do it who's a professional astronomer it's just arduous and it's not even in my frankly half the time particularly that interesting half the stuff that you get done with these grants but you know it's kind of a guaranteed slam dunk hit that you will have a guaranteed science product at the end of this work whereas high-risk work is by nature you don't know like where it's going to go like what the product's going to be but you're asking much Bolder ambitious questions and if we stop if we just always you know cut short and just go for the simplest stuff with the guaranteed results we're never going to really Advance the field and invance our Ambitions in space so um I've been yeah very proud and honored to have the donations to support our work and that's been a big influence and of course it's has been useful for recruitment to some extent as well yeah what is this uh satellite time this observation time that I know that you just got a big uh allowance for I saw your video about it yeah so it's it's a telescope time on the James web Space Telescope so James web is the big one this is like playing glenbury right main stage oh yeah this is this is the pyramid stage yeah this is Big so the uh the James Space Telescope 6 and a half meter telescope is an infrared telescope it was launched uh a few years ago now it's in its second year of science operations and we proposed uh for each each the previous two years we had proposed as well to search an exoplanet for an exomoon we had previously claimed evidence tentative evidence of exomoons and two of the systems um but we hadn't really got to the point where the evidence was overwhelming and to do that you really want something with a Precision of the best H scope which is James web so we put in this pitch but the problem is I mean there's as I said there's hardly anyone working on exomoon so it's very unlikely this gets peer-reviewed that the peer-reviewer is going to be someone who's particularly fond of exom so there's a little bit of politics there in terms of like getting selected time and so I have to say we were very pessimistic we put in we had this planet that I actually discovered I discovered this planet myself in 2016 uh it's called Kepler 167e and um I knew it was the perfect planet to look for an exomoon just coincidence I guess that I found it but the planet is as similar to Jupiter as you could possibly want has the the same temperature as Jupiter the same mass within 1% the same radius the same orbital eccentricity everything about it is just Jupiter Jupiter Jupiter so if this planet is like Jupiter it should have the same kind of moons that Jupiter has and we could prove that jwst could detect those moons so this was why it was so exciting it was the only system this was true of so we actually went through 5,000 all 5,000 exoplanets that had been discovered to date and we calculated for each one of them what's the biggest moon it could have could jbst detect that and there was only about half a dozen or a dozen of planets that came out as potentially doable and this one was by far the best by far the best best at the top um but it only transits which is the event we use when it eclipses its star it only does that every 3 years so if we didn't get the telescope time in the next cycle which is in October we would have to wait three more years till 2027 just to have another shot at doing this again and did seem you know I hope it's still around it should still be around 2027 but you never know like it's been hit by a meteor already once and damaged one of the mirrors so we just don't know for sure we want to see this thing happen over and over again to get shored up evidence of its existence so we were surprised but very excited that they granted us a huge wallup of telescript time we asked for 60 hours of telescript time and they gave us it and we need 60 hours because this planet is so far from its star that it takes a long time for it to Eclipse over it start remember that the the lunar the total eclipse we had when the moon passed in front of the Sun that we had in America just recently that's a 4minute Transit basically whereas the event we're looking at lasts for about 20 hours I think so it's you know it's a 20 hour Eclipse that you have to stare at and then there's you want to have like 20 hours either side to sort of calibrate your data and look for the exomoons what would happen if what would happen if you found exomoons I think the hope is that this is just the start of what happened in the field of exoplanets so go back 25 years ago we 1995 a little bit 30 years ago you have the first exoplant being discovered 51 pegy B before that hardly anyone was working on exop Plants it was considered Fringe it was considered like looking for alien life and not a serious science and despite that most people thought well they should be out there it seems obvious that planets should be out there but it's intrinsically risky to try and claim you're the first person in anything in in a scientific discipline so I think with exom moons I see an analogy that we will hopefully be able to make the first one and now cycle forward 25 30 years after that first discovery you have 5,000 plus exop planets being used being found now exoplanets represents probably about a quarter of all astronomy funding depending on how you count it but about a quarter of all astronomers and astronomy funding goes to exoplanetary science 30 years ago that was zero so there's been a blossoming of an entire field and it's not just for the sake of a field we've learned so much about completely revolutionized our understanding of planetary systems we thought the solar system was the way it happened everywhere we thought that was it and that's totally wrong that's totally wrong the solar system is if anything like a weirdo on the Block it is just profoundly altered our our world view of who we are in the universe and it has now opened up the door to potentially detecting life in the next 10 years or so using these next Generations of telescopes exomoons will surely offer up so many surprises is that we can't even anticipate yet they may be seats for life in their own right as we've already talked about they may influence the possibility of life on the planets they orbit the Moon and the Earth remember there's a connection there as to how that could be could be in in interacting with one another and then finally if we want to eventually take a photo which I think we do we want to take a photo of an earthlike Planet one day we have to know about the moons around them because if I take a photo of a pale blue dot of light a distant image I will be able to resolve the planet from the star with these impressive next Generations of telescopes we're planning but I will not be able to resolve the moon from the earth they will be too close together for the telescript to resolve so that pale blue dot of light will actually be a pale blue gray blob of light it will be the mixture of light from the Moon and the Earth and when we look at that light if we don't understand there's a moon in there we're going to completely misinterpret what the hell that light even means if you don't recognize that there's a moon in there in fact it could even cause us to think we've detected life when we haven't so I think this is a very very important question to figure out both for our scientific goals but also for our goals of trying to understand our uniqueness and origins in this in the in the universe how exciting Man David I love your stuff I love your YouTube channel let's bring this one into l where should people go they want to check out everything that you do and follow you and support yeah so you can head to my YouTube channel that's called the cool worlds lab um cool worlds laab and you can find that channel over there we also have the cool worlds podcast which we started out over the last year again just grab that on YouTube or iTunes wherever you are and finally uh you can also just check out my Twitter handle davidor Kipping and head to my website cool wordss lab.com if you want to learn more hell yeah David I really appreciate you thank you thank you if you enjoy en that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give my watch