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The following is a conversation with Natalie Cabral, an astrobiologist and scientist at the SETI Institute, directing the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe.
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She explores some of the harshest places on Earth, including free diving in volcanic lakes, all in the pursuit of understanding living organisms beyond Earth.
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For this, she holds the woman s world record for diving at altitude, both scuba and free diving.
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She s amazing.
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And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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Check them out in the description.
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It s the best way to support this podcast.
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We got True Classic Tees for t-shirts, Shopify for e-commerce, BetterHelp for mental health, and Athletic Greens for the best daily multivitamin.
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Choose wisely, my friends.
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And now, onto the full ad reads.
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Never any ads in the middle, I hate those.
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I try to make these interesting, but if you skip them, if you must, please still check out the sponsors.
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I enjoy their stuff.
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Maybe you will too.
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This show is brought to you by True Classic Tees.
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High quality, soft, slim fitted t-shirts for men.
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I happen to be wearing one now.
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In fact, I m wearing one every single day unless I m wearing a suit or a dress shirt.
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That s the go-to, comfortable, programming, coding outfit if I want to do work.
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For prolonged periods of time, that s what I m wearing.
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Is there anything better than a great black t-shirt?
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I m not sure if there is.
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And now I m reading through the t-shirt Wikipedia, which again is amazing that there s a Wikipedia article on all the basic objects and things and concepts in this world.
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So yeah, there s an interesting history based in undergarments in the 19th century, but now there s a big picture of Marlon Brando wearing a t-shirt.
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In the movie A Streetcar Named Desire, I guess there is a phase shift at some point where people started wearing them.
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By the Great Depression, that t-shirt was often the default garment to be worn when doing farm or ranch chore.
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Of course, it s the cowboy thing.
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So first you start at the farm or the ranch, and then that takes over, because that s where all the cool people are, and they define the fashion of the rugged American individual.
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and then it looks like in 1960s printed t-shirts gained popularity for self-expression as well as for advertisement protests and souvenirs of course in the 60s that s when people started getting creative it s not enough to have a plain t-shirt like i have on now anyway go to trueclassic.com and enter code lex to get 25% off
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This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere.
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The great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and tools to manage day-to-day operation.
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And I will likely be using it, or I should really use it, when I finally get my lazy butt to start doing merch.
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It s something that a bunch of people ask for, and I do myself enjoy wearing t-shirts for things that I m a fan of.
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And then when people notice, it s kind of like a nod of acceptance to each other.
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I was just wearing a Metallica t-shirt yesterday.
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Which one was it?
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I think it was Master of Puppets.
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And I used to have that t-shirt many years ago, and it got so worn out, because I would wear it everywhere, and it just got worn out.
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And I just saw it, I was somewhere, I think I was in Boston, it was a souvenir shop, and I saw that same shirt, but it was all crisp and nice, and I had to have it.
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But obviously Metallica s a giant band, but I think this applies to even small things like podcasts and so on.
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I m just a huge fan of podcast a huge fan of a Lot of things like audiobooks.
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I wish there was more merch for the individual audiobooks.
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Maybe that s what I ll do I ll do like merch for books have love You know like books on tape, but it ll be books on shirt
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Anyway, lots of ideas.
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If you have ideas and you want to launch a story, you can go to Shopify.
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Get a free trial and full access to Shopify s entire suite of features when you sign up at Shopify.com slash Lex.
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That s all lower case.
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This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp.
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It s spelled H-E-L-P, help.
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They figure out what you need to match with a professional licensed therapist in under 48 hours.
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As I look at the internet today, social networks like Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and YouTube, and I read some of the comments, there s a distant thought in my mind.
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How much better would it be if everyone put a little time to better help?
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Or not even better help, just talk therapy of any kind.
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Find a therapist of any kind.
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It just so happens that better help is the easiest way to do it, because you can just do it online.
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And for things like that, for therapy, I wish all difficult things, I wish going to the gym could be done.
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I mean, I guess it can be, but the actual working out, like I mean literally go to the gym, because what better help, you re literally getting therapy remotely, right?
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To be able to just do some bench press and squat remotely somehow.
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Maybe like inside a virtual world, but where it actually affects your physical body, like your muscles grow from you doing a workout remotely.
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Huh, a boy can dream.
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Anyway, check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month.
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This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and it s AG1 Drink, a drink that I just drank.
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What is it, 10 minutes ago?
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I drink it usually twice a day, once to break a fast and second time after a hard workout or a long run.
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It s an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance.
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It has almost become meme how much I love Athletic Greens.
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It just makes me happy.
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I love the taste of it.
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I like the psychological feeling of knowing I got my stuff together because at least I m taking care of that.
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When everything else is falling apart, when my life is a giant mess, at least I got some of the basic nutrients and vitamins into my body.
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And the rest, of course, you have to take care of sleep and exercise and all that, but at least this one thing, this is a place I go to for reassurance, for stability.
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They ll give you a one month supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens.com slash Lex.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
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To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, dear friends, here s Natalie Cabral.
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You are the director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute.
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SETI, of course, stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
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One of the things you do as part of that is travel to some of Earth s most extreme and dangerous environments in search of organisms that live in conditions analogous to those on Mars.
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First, let me ask what the job posting for the work you do looks like.
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Is it like Shackleton s ad in 1900 that said people wanted for hazardous journey to the South Pole?
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Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, and also where do I apply?
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That s funny because there was not really a job application.
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In fact, when you re a scientist, you have questions in your mind and you have hypotheses and you start to list the kind of thing you need to answer.
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And then when you see the kind of thing you have to answer, then you kind of know the places where you need to go to do that.
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As far as science is concerned, it started with analyzing data from the Mars missions
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And I had written a PhD about water on Mars, first looking at channels and the history evolution of water.
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But then, during my postdoc, I started to look where that water was ponding.
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Interestingly enough, everybody was about channels and water and whether catastrophic or whatnot or seepage.
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But when you are talking about ponding water like lakes or ocean, people started waving their arms a little bit.
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So it was a little bit of a battle, interestingly enough, yeah.
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But that got us on track with my husband.
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We were working together and we started developing the idea, the concept of lakes in impact craters.
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So why in impact craters?
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Just because the Viking mission at the time
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which is what we were working with, the resolution and the topography were so poor that there was really no way of telling where you had a real low in the topography.
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The only thing you knew was a hole in the ground was an impact crater.
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So when you saw valleys... What was the Viking mission?
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The Viking mission landed on Mars in 1976, and there were two landers and two orbiters.
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So they were really our first feet on the ground on Mars, but they were a lander.
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They were not moving.
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They were not going up.
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And that was the data you were looking at.
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It was already in the 90s, but we didn t have yet the Mars Global Surveyor and whatnot.
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We still work for 20 years.
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We worked on that.
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I did my master and my PhD thesis on Viking missions.
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You mentioned that the places you go to are defined by the questions you want to ask.
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Let s just step back.
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What questions have always tugged at your heart?
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Well, that s the thing.
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That s why I was looking at those images and saw some lakes.
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And then came time where we started talking about sending landers and rovers on Mars and looking maybe at the possibility that Mars was habitable.
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And lakes are particularly good places to look for those questions.
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So this is how it all ties up.
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So you were always curious about life out there.
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I have been always curious about life in the universe and about questions on how we got to be here and the bigger question.
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Now with 25 years more in that business, it s more about understanding the origin and nature of life rather than whether there is life or not on Mars.
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I mean, this was really for me a stepping stone to bigger questions, but they were definitely important because they helped me frame my way of thinking about those questions.
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And so looking at Mars, understanding what the conditions were,
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3.5 billion years ago or close to 4 billion years ago, then I knew the type of environment I needed to explore here on Earth as analogous to be able to understand what type of life still survives in those environment and what kind of instrument and what kind of resolution do I need.
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to actually detect it.
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So this is how the whole thing started.
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And it started with a small grant, literally 40K.
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It was a discretionary fund.
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And this is how I got started in my career.
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And so many of these questions you can answer by looking at life in extreme conditions here on Earth.
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But let s step back a little bit and look at Mars.
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and lakes on Mars, just going back to your PhD and before, and maybe today, what do we understand about life on Mars?
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What do we understand about lakes on Mars?
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Is there water on Mars?
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What do we understand about the conditions from four billion years ago on Mars?
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Well, we ve gone a long way.
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Remember from the Viking where we had no resolution, well, we had a little bit more resolution than with Mariner.
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What did you think at that time?
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Sorry to interrupt.
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Just take us back to that mindset.
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It was really the exploration, like your first look at a planet.
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You have to remember that the first mission that successfully snapped some pictures of Mars was Mariner 4.
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And then everybody at that time was still under the spell of, you know, H. Wells and the idea that Mars looked, with telescope, so similar to the Earth.
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Polar caps, we could see them with a telescope, and we knew it had season.
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the actual tilt is pretty much the same as the one for Earth.
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So when Mariner 4 left, everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people thought that we would see the crystal cities and domes and stuff, that another civilization might have evolved in parallel to us in the solar system.
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And of course, when the first images came back and Mars looked with that kind of resolution it had, like the Moon, it was a huge disappointment.
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Then Mariner 9,
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came, and that changed everything.
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There was a little bit of drama because Mars started one of the biggest dust storms it ever experienced.
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And so for three months, we had an orbiter circling around Mars and not seeing anything.
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But then, when the dust cleared, all of a sudden we started discovering volcanoes, valleys, ancient channels, dune fields, polar caps.
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And see, when I m talking to you, I don t need to invent any words to describe Mars.
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And although the myth of extraterrestrial civilization on Mars was gone, all of a sudden,
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the imagination of the scientists started to pick up because right away we re seeing something that was familiar, that we could describe.
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So right away, Viking would put on the fast track and the idea was, so Mars looks so much like Earth could have been, although it s arid and there is little atmosphere, et cetera.
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Could there be life?
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And of course, behind this, at the time, there were people like Klein and Sagan, Carl Sagan.
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just, you know, thinking about how can we test the idea of biology of life on Mars.
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So this is what Viking did.
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But of course, at the time when the two landers arrived on Mars, we didn t have the context of the geology of the environment, we didn t have much data at all.
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So the data that Viking
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sent back was very confusing.
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Some people still think today that we discovered life on Mars at the time because some of the experiment turned out to show a strange signal.
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But most of the community think that it can be explained by chemical reaction that we see today.
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So it was so confusing that NASA decided to say, okay, if we want to be serious about looking for life on Mars, we have to understand the environment because life and environment co-evolve.
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So, as cause or effect, a planet is going to give you the physicochemical environment for life to happen.
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These are the boundaries.
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But once life is here, it s going to change everything.
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One of the biggest impact of life was to inject oxygen into the atmosphere of the Earth two billion years ago.
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And that changed everything, including our signature in space.
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there is this co-evolution.
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So if you want to understand one, you have to remove the other from the equation.
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It s kind of a two or none equation.
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So even though oxygen changes our signature today, what if all life on earth died and now we fast forward a billion years, what would be the traces left?
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So the question I m trying to ask is,
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If life had existed on Mars, what would be the signs we would look for?
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That s a very good question.
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The thing is that if you draw the parallel with Earth, it took 82% of Earth s history, geological history, to go from very simple life, microbial life, to complexity.
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And when I m saying complexity, I m not even talking about us.
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I m talking about animals.
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So Mars is smaller, lost its magnetic field very fast and lost its atmosphere very fast.
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Life also appeared on Earth very fast.
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So the condition being quite similar at that time between the Earth and Mars, let s assume for a moment that life appeared on Mars.
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It would have been simple life.
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when conditions started to degrade, which was less than a billion years after the planet had formed.
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So everything at the surface would have disappeared, except maybe for morphological traces of the interaction between life and its environment.
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So on Earth, the best example are what we call stromatolites.
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These are rock formations that are built by microbes.
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So we know that, we know how to recognize them.
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You could have chemical traces as well.
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There are some interesting question marks right now
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about carbon isotopes at Gale Crater, because we found an abundance of C12, which normally is used by life on Earth, but it can be produced by other things.
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So it s not that it s a real biosignature in itself, but it s intriguing.
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We have now the C12 and we have methane.
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But going back, it s a time on Mars, 3.5 billion years ago, where you have lots of destructions, where you have lots of impact cratering, etc.
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But we still have very old rocks that survived from that time.
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So these are good places.
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That s why we re sending the rovers in those places, ancient lakes and impact craters, and places where you have very old rocks.
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So when you say ancient lakes and impact craters, the simple question, so impact crater is a crater created by a giant rock hitting the planet?
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Yes, a big rock that can be metal or rock or it can be a comet as well, mostly ice.
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So is that good for life or bad for life?
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for creating life and destroying life.
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Both, it s actually both.
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Interestingly enough, the building blocks of life, the bricks, the stuff we are made of, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus, they were included
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on our planet, they were built in, just because our planet is made of this kind of rocks, asteroids and comets coming together by what we call accretion.
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So they were built in.
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When an asteroid comes, there is a lot of destruction going on.
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But at the same time, those rocks, they bring with them those bricks of life, and they create lots of energy.
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And if the environment around
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is favorable, you might possibly have some seeding going on.
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That s one of the aspects of what we call panspermia, which is the fact that comets and asteroids have the building blocks of life embedded in them, and that given favorable conditions, they might be able to seed planets.
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This is a theory.
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What percent of you
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when you re looking up at the stars and wondering about this stuff, thinks that panspermia is what happened on Mars or on Earth, which is the building blocks of life came from elsewhere.
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Well, but you know, that s the thing.
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Panspermia is a vector, potential vector, which means that it actually distributes the stuff of life left and right, but it doesn t explain the origin of life.
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It s not the environment itself.
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It just promotes maybe, and we still have to prove this, but what we know is that the stuff we are made of
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is very abundant all over the place, including in interstellar medium.
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So it s all over, it s all over.
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The idea is that maybe it just waits to have the proper environment.
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And we know what it needs here on Earth.
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It needs water, it needs energy, shelter and nutrients.
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So you re fundamentally interested in the origin of life and the big leaps in evolutionary history that could be like an origin of something, origin of eukaryotes, origin of photosynthesis, origin of whatever.
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I just think if we re a civilization here on Earth and we survive another few hundred years,
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I think it would be a good idea to take a big gun and just shoot life out there, like a life gun.
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Basically try to create panspermia, that s a good backup solution.
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So one way is to actually copy our brains and actual humans, some complex information and send it out there.
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Another way to preserve life is just to like send the basic building blocks, send a bunch of bacteria, a bunch of,
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whatever the rugged organisms are on Earth, just send a bunch of those.
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These are not the building blocks, they are actual organism.
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Right, but isn t that a nice shortcut?
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Or do we wanna, because you said building blocks are everywhere.
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Yeah, the bricks of life, the carbon, hydrogen, etc.
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They were produced by the death of previous stars.
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So this is how they were produced.
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And stars like our Sun started to form 10 billion years ago.
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That doesn t mean that the Sun is the only kind of star that
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Produce you know life or animals life but actually was produced in ten billion years ago that what you re talking about is is a little different right now there are many.
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many efforts to do the type of thing you are talking about, which is to put our DNA on whatever kind of substrate and preserve it in vaults, either in different places on Earth or on the Moon.
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Some people are already thinking about putting DNA on the Moon.
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As far as brain is concerned, it s drawing towards transhumanism, which is the enhancement of who we are through AI and machine learning.
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Of course, having backups is a good thing.
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For me, I would say that taking care of our planets and going back to a place where we are in equilibrium with our environment would be also maybe the best backup possible.
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and let evolution do its things.
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Right now we are like teenagers with enough brain to create cool tools, but we don t have enough brain to understand yet the consequences of what we are doing.
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And right now we are paying for this.
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So the question is whether we are going to be able to move
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forward and learn from the mistakes we re making to become a mature civilization.
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You probably heard of the Drake equation, that would be the L at the very end, the duration.
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The duration of intelligent civilization.
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Exactly.
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Or at least
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the length of time a civilization remains detectable.
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It can disappear from the radar screen literally for a number of reasons.
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The first one is
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destroy itself or being destroyed by external events, or it can become so in tune with the universe and so advanced that it disappears because it melts really in the background and it s not visible anymore.
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There are some wild theories out there saying that civilization might be so advanced that you cannot distinguish them from physical processes.
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And that was an example.
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It doesn t say that this is the case, but some people say, imagine that, in fact, all the dark matter that we see or we theorized about is in fact some sort of a biological process.
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So you can think about a number of things.
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Personally, I believe that what you talk about, about preserving our information, is kind of what life does.
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We need to look at ourselves.
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as not different of what the little sail that started off was.
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And this is what tells you not about the origin of life, but in fact the nature of life, which is a lot more interesting to me.
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Because the nature of life is really what is going to give you some universal signature to look for it all over the place.
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And not only around ponds of water for life as we know it.
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But the nature of life is telling you that
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Life wants to get the most information possible around its surroundings.
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And complexity is in fact the ability to gather and exchange and preserve the most information possible.
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And so what you re saying is kind of preserving the kind of information we have.
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So in the things that we are doing, as life happened,
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And I say happened because we don t know what life is.
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We have 123 definitions of life and some people are saying we don t have any definition, we only have descriptions of life.
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And that s true.
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And that s true.
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So think about it for two minutes.
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We are looking for something we don t know it is.
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But we have a few clues about the nature of life.
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There are some really good theories.
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The first one was Schrodinger, right?
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In the 40s.
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Right now there is a guy named Jeremy England.
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It s another biophysical theory of life.
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It says life is the inevitable result of thermophysics.
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this is the best way to beat entropy, to fight entropy.
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But when you look at what we are doing, if you want to know what the nature of life is, look at our languages.
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And they can be very different languages, but they all have the same purpose, right?
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Exchange information, understand, store information, and also whether it is with somebody at the outside, or thoughts in yourself.
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That s the same thing the cell was doing.
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But now when you re looking at life and at the structure of our languages, life started with an atom.
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So it s an atom.
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They got together to create inorganic molecules.
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Then you have complex inorganic molecules.
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Then you get to organic molecules, complex inorganic molecules, and then you have RNA, DNA, et cetera.
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Look at the structure of our language.
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We created alphabets, letters.
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That s your atom.
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Then we put them together to create syllables, right?
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Those syllables get together to create words.
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Words tell you something, but they are nothing without a verb that gives the direction.
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That s RNA and DNA.
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And then you can put all the complements you want.
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Our languages are built exactly as life is built.
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We are repeating patterns.
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I call this the Mandelbrot universe and the fractal universe, because this is exactly what it is.
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I would say that as much as I do believe in sending probes to explore the universe, I say we should also look inward.
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to find the answer to some of the profound questions of who we are, what s life, what s the nature of life, because we are expressing life.
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So searching not for life, but for the nature of life.
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The nature of life, absolutely.
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I am more interested in that because the day we understand the nature of life, then we have a universal biosignature.
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And it doesn t matter whether this life respond to the same kind of biochemical processes as we do, although it makes sense.
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I told you about the generational aspect.
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of the bricks of life, the stuff we are made of.
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The sun is part of the youngest generation of stars, and the first two generations of stars didn t produce the kind of elements we are made of.
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They were stars that were either without metal, just made of helium and hydrogen, or poor in metals.
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So the stars died off,
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And stars like the Sun, we re born from those.
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And this is why we have elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, et cetera, now.
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And that s the life we re built on.
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I think it s not stupid to be looking for something that looks like us, because right now in the universe, this is the stuff that s the most abundant.
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And we see with the exoplanets, with Kepler, with TESS, and now with James Webb, we see that there are many, many different types of planets that may be habitable in the habitable zone of their stars.
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There are countless stars like the Sun.
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But more interestingly enough,
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There are other types of stars where you do have habitable zones as well, and where the duration of the stars is sometimes a thousand times more than our Sun.
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So you can imagine all sorts of things, and you can imagine what type of life would be around those stars.
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The biochemistry might be quite similar, in fact, and especially for the simple life, because simple life starts really quickly.
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on Earth.
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So my take on this is that the universe is full of cyanobacteria, but as far as intelligent life, it takes more time.
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So that can take different, you know, aspect.
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So you think it s possible that
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The universe is full of bacteria and even those stars that last a thousand times longer than the sun, even on the planets that orbit those stars may be bacteria for billions and billions and billions of years.
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We actually don t know what triggered the evolution to complexity on Earth.
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That s still a big question mark.
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Is that the most impressive invention on Earth to you?
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That Cambrian revolution is really what took us towards what we are.
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In the meantime, there were the dinosaurs, etc.
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The dinosaurs were wiped out, so the evolution could have taken a completely different turn.
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It s always, I would say, mass extinction that are going to drive what s the end game.
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But
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Yeah, you take two planets and you change, you know, those asteroid impacts or those big geological events that wipe out like 90% of life at any time.
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The thing that seemed to be interesting, there are two things.
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The first one is where you are located on our galaxy matters a lot.
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We actually are in the habitable zone of our galaxy.
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And if you are too close to the center, then it s a lot denser.
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And remember, we have the Oort cloud around our solar system.
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And if you are in the region of the galaxy that s too populated, then you re going to run interaction, gravitational interaction with all these stars.
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And since it s more dense, you will have more of the comets that are living in the Oort cloud being ejected from the Oort cloud and
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coming towards the inner solar system and collide with planets.
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So you will have more of these impacts if you are too close to the center of the galaxy, not to mention the radiation.
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There is a place in our galaxy where it s a really bad neighborhood.
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You don t want to be there.
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You wouldn t be able to have life.
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But what really matters is extinctions, but also the climate history.
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of a planet has a role to play.
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And it seems that it s a theory, it still has to be backed up by more observation, but there is a good correlation between not only the passage of the solar system towards the center of the galaxy, there is one place where we get hit by asteroid because of the interaction I was telling you about, but the other one is the climate with the Milankovitch cycles,
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Big jumps in life s evolution seem to be associated with snowball earth episodes.
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We don t know why yet.
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Snowball episode, intuitively you would think that they are connected to a decrease in life because the whole earth is covered in ice.
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But for some reason, there were big jumps in evolution right after.
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each of those episodes.
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And today, there are other things like why all of a sudden you have mutation that seems to be responsible for a big jump in evolution.
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We are not clear yet.
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So all of those things, when you re thinking about life elsewhere, are going to come into play.
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And I cannot tell you that a planet that remains habitable for much longer than the Earth will have an evolutionary path that s the same or different.
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Depends on extension, depends on climate, depends on
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It s a little bit surreal that we re two descendants of apes.
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I think that some people... Trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
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And I mean, we re very biased.
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We re biased as humans.
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You re less biased as a scientist.
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we still love Earth, we still don t know anything but this Earth.
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And so even though you try to get escape from thinking of what life is, in the search for the nature of life, we re still kind of connected to the way we understand the nature of life here on Earth.
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I think that it s a little different than that.
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We are biased when it comes to the origin of life because, well, we are the only model we know.
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And as I said, it makes sense because it seems that a lot of
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you know, stars like the Sun appeared 10 billion years ago.
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And there are lots of worlds that really resemble the Earth, and lots of water out there, and lots of conditions that could be a repeat of what we know.
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And we know that this biochemistry works.
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So, again, as I mentioned, what is going to change is really the evolution of a planet, extinction, geology, etc.
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But our model
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is probably very abundant.
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I m not saying that the endgame is going to resemble us because of all these extinctions, etc.
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But this is a good bias.
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It s one that has the number for it.
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You know, the principle of mediocrity.
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I think that in that case, it really applies where the earth is representative of an abundance of other worlds.
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Now, of course, there can be other biochemistry.
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We have some examples in our own solar system.
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Titan might be a representative of that.
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We are not very clear of the kind of biochemistry that can come out of a world where you have hydrocarbon lakes and rains and things like that, but we are going there.
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So we will learn something about this.
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So the bias is right there.
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The nature of life is different.
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If really life is the best way the universe has to fight entropy, there is no bias there, because physics is the same all across the universe.
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At least the universe we know.
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There might be other universes, but the one we know works with the same physics.
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So if life is the best way to fight entropy, you can imagine that life permeates the entire universe.
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And then the question might change to like flavors of ice cream.
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What are the flavors of complexity that this process, this nature of life leads to?
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And there we might have bias about what complexity looks like, what beautiful complexity looks like.
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We ll look at humans that operate a certain,
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physical scale and time scale, and we think this is intelligence.
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We have another problem.
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We don t know what life is, we don t know what intelligence is, and we don t know what consciousness is, but we are trying to tackle the big question.
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But do we know what complexity is also?
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No, I think that we have to be honest, and as a scientist, and I m gonna step back and talk about intelligence.
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For me, a bacteria that has survived, like cyanobacteria,
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that has survived just like us, four billion years in one incarnation or another, and actually they are very similar to the one that they were 3.5 billion years ago.
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It has some intelligence about its environment.
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So for complexity, it might be
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that we need to take the world literally, which is an assemblage or additional capacity to gather, collect, store information.
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Maybe this is something like that, or actually use that information to do something with it.
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But I do completely agree with you when you talk about flavor of ice cream.
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I think this is exactly it.
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And I have a basic,
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education about what physics is doing right now, and I look at quantum physics and what it says about the universe and about the connection about an atom here and an atom there, a photon here and a photon there, and I am starting to put maybe wrongfully two and two together, but in my mind,
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And of course, it s nothing until I can prove it.
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But in my mind, the universe is connected everywhere, in all different places.
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So this life connection is something that, as you said, permeates the universe.
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And the way to find life
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might be very different than to look for the origins of life.
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I think it s a good thing to go out there and look for the origin of life somewhere else, because it s the manifestation of the nature of life that all of a sudden becomes apparent, evident to our eye.
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But what I think
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would be our greatest achievement is that if we can find that process of life, because at that point, in my mind, the universe all of a sudden is going to illuminate itself with actually its living force, what I can only call a living force.
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To me, this is what we are looking at, a universe that becomes more and more complex with time, more and more able to gather information,
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And interestingly enough, why?
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To understand itself.
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So Sagan was right when he was telling, we are the universe trying to understand itself.
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And the more we go, the more the universe become alive, maybe intelligent, and maybe also conscious.
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Conscious, self-aware, through us.
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It does make me a little bit sad as a human,
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just watching all the breakthroughs on artificial intelligence side when applied to natural sciences, now more and more to physics, that the creatures that will solve the question of the origin of the nature of life, or just the process, the nature of life, will be AI systems.
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It makes me a bit sad to... I don t think so.
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I don t think so.
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You think humans will?
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At this point in time, remember who s behind AI?
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You know, I m not buying in the singularity thing yet.
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AI is not aware.
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AI is being built by humans.
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So AI is a tool, an extremely smart tool.
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As long as we build it, and as long as we use it as a tool, it remains a tool.
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And I think there is a lot of brouhaha, and of course, science fiction and movies, they don t help.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I gotta push back a little bit.
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Yes, I agree with you for the most part in terms of boo-ha-ha and sci-fi, but there is, like in the work of deep mind, we can look at chess or we can look at protein folding.
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So chess is a simple one to first look at.
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What AlphaZero, which is their game playing engine, was able to discover, and now Stockfish, about chess humbles the best human players.
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Not just it s better than them.
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It comes up with ideas that the humans don t understand.
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And so the AI now is telling you, even though it s programmed by humans, the AI is saying like,
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Sacrificing a pawn here is a good idea.
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Sacrificing a queen or a bishop here is a good idea.
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And then you start to kind of intuit as a human why, but you don t deeply understand.
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And you can say that AI is not conscious, it doesn t deeply understand the way humans do, but there s still a wisdom and a depth of knowledge in that chess playing program that humans
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don t have, and the same with alpha fold with protein folding, and now they re applying it to physics to simulating nuclear reactions and so on.
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SPEAKER_01
It feels like there might be a way to understand the nature of life that we can kind of intuit poetically as humans, but the true understanding will come from a system that s much more computationally sophisticated.
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Again, you know, I would push back on my turn because I still think that humans give themselves the ability to do that by building that tool.
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So the idea that the tool, you know, we are getting into the Kardashev scale and the dark forest and all of these things, we can see the world this way.
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At this point in time, for me, I still see a great tool.
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Now, whether the sci-fi scenario is going to happen, et cetera, I still think that we are far away from this.
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But if that tool is capable of giving me a new perspective, it s just that we are starting to jump into a deeper
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of what the universe is, whether it s through our brain or through a different way of gathering information, remember, this is what we do.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, humans are able to actually build tools and then integrate them into their way of thinking.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe another generation has to be born that is raised with those tools, but we seem to take for granted all the cool technologies you integrate into your way of thinking.
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SPEAKER_01
A lot of people that are growing up now, their mind is integrated with the internet.
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SPEAKER_01
You basically reconfigure the way you memorize things.
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You no longer have to memorize a lot of facts because you can look them up really quickly.
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SPEAKER_01
So you reallocate a lot of resources for thinking versus memory of things.
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just strict facts, that kind of stuff.
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And we integrate all of that.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and you know, there I would completely agree with you.
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SPEAKER_00
In fact, I wrote about this again in this new book that s coming out.
2
SPEAKER_01
When is the book coming out?
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SPEAKER_00
In January.
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It will be in French, actually, to start with.
2
SPEAKER_01
You wrote it in French?
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SPEAKER_00
Actually, I wrote it first in English and I translated it into French, so the English version is already pretty much ready to go if we find a publisher in the US.
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SPEAKER_00
But anyways, the point being here is that I looked at this as a relationship with technology
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as a complete change.
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To me, this is the singularity more than anything else, which is the co-evolution of human with technology, not anymore with their environment.
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SPEAKER_00
Why we are messing up the environment right now, why we don t respond to pandemic the way we should, because we are disconnected to the environment we are taking our information from and we were adapting from.
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SPEAKER_00
Right now, exactly as you said, we take the information from the web, from the phones, etc.
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We have no filter
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Over that information before you were out in the environment the information you get is the one the planet is sending you now this information is coming from different way you have no way of knowing information is correct or not you gotta push back on that no you look at this as an ecosystem and it explains a lot about behavior.
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SPEAKER_01
See, I like that you said teenagers.
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So the technology, I think, when we move past the teenager stage, enriches our ability to sense the earth, to understand what s going on with the environment.
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SPEAKER_01
It s just that we re very, so it s not that technology disconnects us from the environment.
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SPEAKER_01
it gives us more tools with which to understand what s going on with the environment.
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SPEAKER_00
That s true for the people who are building the tools and know how to use it.
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SPEAKER_00
Take those tools now, put them in the general public with no filter, which is happening with social media, which is happening with a lot of things, and you see the disaster.
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SPEAKER_01
This is creating.
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SPEAKER_01
It s not a disaster.
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SPEAKER_01
It is.
2
SPEAKER_01
You sound like a parent talking about a teenager.
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SPEAKER_01
Yes.
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It s the growing pains of a civilization that is becoming deeply connected.
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We can communicate all across the world, even through the pandemic.
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SPEAKER_00
That s the good thing about technology.
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SPEAKER_00
This is also something I wrote.
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It s not the tools we create that are bad.
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It s the way we use them.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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But we re learning.
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This is the cool thing about humans.
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And hopefully we ll do all the learning before it s too late, because our response to what s going on in the environment, our response to pandemics, is deeply connected to this disconnect we have with nature.
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SPEAKER_00
Anyways, we all agree that we are in growing pains and hopefully we can move forward because there is a fantastic universe, something absolutely magical around us.
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And I m talking as a scientist.
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I mean, there is magic, not in sense of trickery, but in sense of wonder around us.
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And there are so many signs where we are getting so close
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to revolutions in cosmology, in astrobiology, in astronomy, which I think to me, this is where the hope lies.
2
SPEAKER_00
And also an awakening of understanding that we need to be in equilibrium with a planet if we want to move forward.
2
SPEAKER_00
Because even though we have these big dreams of going on Mars and the moon, and listen, I am a planetary geologist, so I am all for exploration.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right now, the Moon or Mars is not going to save your butt because for the logistics will still depend very much on the Earth and for a long time.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think this time we are living in will be remembered as a pivot.
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SPEAKER_00
in our history for a number of reasons.
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A time where there is a growing consciousness, where we are creating tools that are going a little bit ahead of us, that we have some difficult time to catch up on, where we have to deal with a population that s way too big for the planet we have.
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we need to really learn a sense of balance and maturity as a civilization.
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SPEAKER_00
So how is this going to unfold?
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SPEAKER_00
Right now I have no clue.
2
SPEAKER_01
I draw a lot of optimism from the similar things that happened many decades ago when nuclear weapons were developed.
2
SPEAKER_01
Boy, it was that, at the time, even more terrifying.
2
SPEAKER_01
You just now created weapons that could destroy the entirety of life on Earth.
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SPEAKER_01
Or, not entirety, but a lot of it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And we somehow found a balance.
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SPEAKER_01
and that the threat constantly is out there.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that threat has been made more visceral in recent times because of the war in Ukraine.
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But we find a balance somehow.
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I have a thread of optimism for human civilization that we figure it out.
2
SPEAKER_01
We re clever teenagers, I think.
2
SPEAKER_00
We are clever teenagers.
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SPEAKER_00
There is definitely a thread of optimism, but I think it s thin.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s thin because something that has changed as well is the mentality of humans.
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SPEAKER_00
Although the threat was terrifying when nuclear weapons were created, there was a sense of
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SPEAKER_00
limits you were willing to push in the threats, there was a sense of decency, of moral values.
2
SPEAKER_00
It was not perfect, but it was at least a time where people could come together from very different perspectives and agree that something was more important than destroying everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
But that s so hilarious you say that.
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SPEAKER_01
Yes, you re talking about a small slither of humans, which is the scientists in the Manhattan Project, perhaps.
2
SPEAKER_01
That was also the time when over 100 million people were tortured or murdered in China and in Europe.
2
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00
I m not talking about scientists here.
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SPEAKER_00
Actually, I m talking about politicians.
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SPEAKER_00
We ve gone beyond that point now.
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This is what I m worried about.
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Torture, et cetera.
2
SPEAKER_00
Unfortunately, well, we are apes, exactly what you said.
2
SPEAKER_00
So I think that there is a lot to be, not to blame grandpa for that, but because we can always get better.
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SPEAKER_01
Grandpa was a wild man.
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SPEAKER_00
But we have to improve a lot on that side before we can claim that we are a mature civilization.
2
SPEAKER_01
When you, just because you mentioned the magic, when you look out there, perhaps this is not a scientific question,
2
SPEAKER_00
You don t have to be scientific all the time.
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SPEAKER_01
There s a magic to magic that is in part scientific and in part, I don t know, whatever fills us with awe as humans when we look up at the stars.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you think the universe is full of life or not?
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SPEAKER_01
You know, when you re sitting, drinking some wine, looking up at the stars and wandering as a human, do you think we re alone or do you think life is everywhere?
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SPEAKER_00
I am going to make such an unmagical response to that.
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SPEAKER_00
My response is, that s the scientific response, that if we are alone, then the universe is a statistical absurdity.
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SPEAKER_00
And I have no doubt in my mind, and that is an unscientific response as well, but I have no doubt in my mind that the universe is teeming with life.
3
SPEAKER_01
What if it keeps dying?
3
SPEAKER_00
This is what life does, unfortunately.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that extinction, as a process, as a part of the process of life, extinction seems to be a fundamental, both negative and positive component.
3
SPEAKER_01
So what if all the complex life out there just keeps dying and not making way for, like we re actually a statistical anomaly in us being able to survive that L in the Drake equation, being able to survive long enough to form complex organisms.
3
SPEAKER_01
of the kind like mammals are, things with brains, things that are able to... L is not about that.
3
SPEAKER_00
L is about how long a civilization is capable of being detectable, which means that rich technologies and, you know, being detectable.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so there s more nuanced things to L, because you can have intelligent civilizations that are not very detectable.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we had civilization for thousands of years.
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SPEAKER_00
We started to be detectable 150 years ago.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s about technology, technology that we can actually capture from space.
3
SPEAKER_00
You become visible to your neighbours.
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SPEAKER_00
And this is all about the Fermi paradox, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
It takes time.
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SPEAKER_00
Obviously, if we re taking, again, ourselves as a model, but this is the only one we have, to get to the point where we become detectable.
3
SPEAKER_00
But look at the age of the universe.
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SPEAKER_00
Even if life as we understand it, not saying even as we know it, but as we can understand it, started 10 billion years ago.
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And it takes four billion years to get to the point where it becomes detectable.
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SPEAKER_00
That means that the first planet where those civilizations started off, starting to be detectable when we were still cyanobacteria in pond.
3
SPEAKER_00
So they were, you know, throwing messages that were passing above our heads at that point.
3
SPEAKER_00
And those civilization, when you look at them now, close to 10 billion years after the start,
3
SPEAKER_00
So their son would be dead.
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SPEAKER_00
In the best case scenario, they move somewhere else.
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SPEAKER_00
And what that means is that civilizations are going to rise, die, or move and transform themselves.
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SPEAKER_00
We can see ourselves changing.
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We know that humans are still changing as a species.
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SPEAKER_00
The human being in
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in a thousand or even 500 years from now might not be looking a lot like we are doing right now.
3
SPEAKER_00
Who knows where we will be.
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SPEAKER_00
We might be migrating into our planetary system.
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SPEAKER_00
We might be migrating somewhere else.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, you said migrating, but it seems when you look at life, it doesn t necessarily migrate, it expands.
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SPEAKER_01
So it s not
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or place A or place B. It s place A and place B. It seems to expand.
3
SPEAKER_00
It could be.
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SPEAKER_00
We are talking about the human civilization here.
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SPEAKER_00
So there are different factors.
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SPEAKER_00
If you are a cyanobacteria or any type of even a mammal that doesn t have the technology to escape,
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the planet we were born on, then it s plan A, it s right there.
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SPEAKER_00
Whatever happens to your planet, you are tied to it, you cannot escape it.
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SPEAKER_00
For humans, it s a little different.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s A and B, or whatever we can.
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SPEAKER_00
So we have to expect that a number of the civilizations
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SPEAKER_00
extraterrestrial civilization that might be technologically advanced, a number of them will have disappeared just because they were on the course of their evolution, or because their sun ran out of fuel and they didn t have a way to escape, or they were wiped out by any kind of event.
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SPEAKER_00
And then there will be those that survive.
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SPEAKER_01
everything I ve seen from life, it seems obvious that there s life everywhere out there.
3
SPEAKER_01
In fact, maybe I don t understand the jump from bacteria enough, but it seems obvious that there s intelligent civilizations out there.
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SPEAKER_01
Now, I don t know how to define intelligence, but there s beautiful complexity.
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SPEAKER_01
I ve looked at enough cellular automata, which is a very primitive mathematical construction that when you run, complexity emerges.
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SPEAKER_01
I ve looked at that enough to know that it just seems like there s complexity everywhere out there.
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SPEAKER_01
That s why I m deeply puzzled by the Fermi paradox.
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SPEAKER_01
It makes no sense to me.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, they have trivial answers to it.
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SPEAKER_01
Why haven t aliens at scale not shown up?
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SPEAKER_01
I think the two possible options for me is either we re too dumb to see it, they re already here, they ve been talking to us through processes we just don t understand.
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SPEAKER_01
What we experience as life here on Earth is actually, they re everywhere.
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SPEAKER_01
Aliens could be consciousness.
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SPEAKER_01
That when we feel love for one another, that could be aliens.
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SPEAKER_01
When we, I don t know, or feel fear or whatever, that could be aliens.
3
SPEAKER_00
I have to agree with you.
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SPEAKER_00
None of this is scientifically provable right now.
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SPEAKER_00
We talked a little bit already about that.
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SPEAKER_00
But I would say that I do not adhere to the Fermi paradox because it s very anthropomorphic.
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SPEAKER_00
It s an interesting exercise, let s put it that way.
3
SPEAKER_00
But it s a typical example of seeing the universe through our own eyes.
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SPEAKER_00
And this is where the limitation is.
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SPEAKER_00
Understanding what s going on with complexity, as you said, and looking at the biophysical model and theories for the nature of life, I would agree that probably this extraterrestrial message is all around us.
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SPEAKER_00
We re not yet capable of picking it up.
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SPEAKER_01
But I think, unfortunately, even though that makes me sad, the way to pick it up is by studying life here on Earth, doing some of the science you re doing, better understand the nature of life until you realize, holy crap, the thing I was looking for all along has been here all along, right under my nose.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, you know, a good example of that, and it doesn t need to be an extraterrestrial civilization, look at something that I really, you know, whether or not it s,
3
SPEAKER_00
Real, I don t care because in terms of intellectual exercise, I think it s fantastic.
3
SPEAKER_00
Look at the shadow biosphere.
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SPEAKER_00
The idea that life didn t appear only once on Earth, but there were many different pathways of it.
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SPEAKER_00
And today we know and we study the tree of life that led to us, from Luca to us.
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SPEAKER_00
And the shadow biosphere is telling us that there is, or there are, other pathways that came up at the time where life originated, but they are so different that we cannot recognize them.
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SPEAKER_00
as being living and we cannot pick them up in our test because our tests are being built to recognize life as we know it.
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SPEAKER_00
And for me, again, I don t know if this theory will be verified or it would be discredited, but what I like about it is that it forces me to think on how do I look for life?
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SPEAKER_00
I don t know.
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SPEAKER_00
So that starts here on our planet, not even with little green men.
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SPEAKER_00
It starts with very simple life that can be so different that it might be just right in front of our nose and we don t see it.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that probably starts with the scientific humility of.
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SPEAKER_00
Always.
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SPEAKER_01
realizing that we might be too biased in our understanding of what is the phenomena we re trying to study.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I don t like the term bias because it involves some moral connotation.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I understand the bias in terms of scientific pathway, intellectual framework, definitely.
3
SPEAKER_01
What do you think about the UFO sightings?
3
SPEAKER_01
So the widespread experiences that people have in seeing different phenomena that are mysterious, that people project ideas about whether it s aliens or not, but they can t explain it, and there s pictures and data, and then the government is involved.
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SPEAKER_01
releasing footage and all that kind of stuff.
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SPEAKER_01
And it seems to captivate the public.
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SPEAKER_00
The imagination.
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SPEAKER_00
It always do.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, you know, there are a number of things that captivate people, especially children, actually, dinosaurs and aliens.
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SPEAKER_00
I m still a child.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, we are all still child at heart.
3
SPEAKER_00
So about UFOs.
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SPEAKER_00
I am a scientist and I m a citizen.
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SPEAKER_00
So I m going to tell you a couple of things.
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SPEAKER_00
First, I don t mind talking about that at all, because I think as a scientist, this is extremely interesting.
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SPEAKER_00
Because the thing I don t know, I want to learn about it.
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SPEAKER_00
This is more knowledge.
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SPEAKER_00
So we all know the statistics about UFOs.
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SPEAKER_00
95% of them are just natural phenomenon or things that are being misinterpreted.
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SPEAKER_00
We know that.
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SPEAKER_00
Then you have the 2% that might be secret programs by whatever government it s out there.
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SPEAKER_00
Another percent say is about natural phenomenon that
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SPEAKER_00
we don t know about yet and we cannot explain.
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SPEAKER_00
And then there is this tiny percentage that don t fall into all these categories of things.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think that the report about the UAPs falls into the same kind of scheme, except that now they have at least some patterns of speed of other things that were in the report.
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SPEAKER_00
Today, we don t know if these sightings are
3
SPEAKER_00
part of military program or actual UFOs?
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SPEAKER_00
I always run into that question because, of course, as the director of the Carl Sagan Center at the Study Institute, I received a number of emails about the subject.
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SPEAKER_00
People actually
3
SPEAKER_00
confused about what the study institute is.
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SPEAKER_00
We are not studying UFOs.
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SPEAKER_00
We are actually looking for messages.
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SPEAKER_00
The way I put it usually is that we are studying extraterrestrials in their natural habitat.
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SPEAKER_00
And the UFO people are trying to understand whether they invaded our aerial space.
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SPEAKER_00
So this is two very different things.
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SPEAKER_00
And unfortunately, over the years, I actually respect very much people who are trying to go to the bottom of what UFO are following some very
3
SPEAKER_00
scientific ways of doing this.
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SPEAKER_00
There are very, very credible agencies doing this.
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SPEAKER_00
Unfortunately, there is a folklore around UFOs.
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SPEAKER_00
And this has been a huge disservice to the scientific community.
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SPEAKER_00
And this is why you have been having that much pushback for a long time by the scientific community, because no congressman in the world
3
SPEAKER_00
wants to tell their taxpayer that they are supporting something, that looking for flying saucers, and you know, when you see what s happening, it s terrifying.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I am actually concerned, you know, about that relationship that people do between folklore and real search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
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SPEAKER_00
In fact, it s been so bad that until today,
3
SPEAKER_00
There is no government agency that is actually funding the SETI search.
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SPEAKER_00
It is a private funded endeavor.
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SPEAKER_00
What NASA funds right now, which is a progress, is a search for techno-signature, which means that when you are looking at the atmosphere of a planet, you look for some disequilibrium that could tell you that something is there, but it s not going to fund
3
SPEAKER_00
an institute or whatnot that is looking for messages or other things like that.
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SPEAKER_01
Is that just have to do with a taboo associated with the folklore, as you said?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think there was a pushback from the political arena
3
SPEAKER_00
decades ago about that, at the time where all the flying saucers were coming out, and then the SET Institute got it started.
3
SPEAKER_00
But now, there is more of a willingness to look at the UAP UFO phenomenon from a scientific standpoint, so much so that the government is actually seeking
3
SPEAKER_00
some help from a scientific institution.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there are programs to start looking into those phenomena.
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SPEAKER_00
And as a scientist, I am interested.
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SPEAKER_00
What I m not interested in, again, Carl Sagan comes back here, I don t want to believe.
3
SPEAKER_00
I want to know.
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SPEAKER_00
And so, to know, you have to have a real experiment, you have to have observation, and you have things that are done the right way.
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SPEAKER_00
I don t want to have somebody that starts with, what if, as a question, and then turns this what if into the only argument, and the only conclusion there is, you understand what I m saying?
3
SPEAKER_01
But still, I think it s valuable to appreciate the mystery, and not deny the mystery.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, the mystery is there, but what I don t want is people taking advantage of the public and making money out of folklore.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, let me flip that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I understand.
3
SPEAKER_01
So there s a folklore in the stuff I do, AI and robotics, for example.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s a clear fear terminator in movies and all those kind of stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
You could say that I m very concerned about this miscalibrated understanding of the public of what robots  role are in society.
3
SPEAKER_01
Or you could see it as a, let s use a metaphor of a wave.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can say this giant wave,
3
SPEAKER_01
that we ll call folklore, is a really bad idea, we need to avoid it, we need to hide, we need to build dams, or you can be a surfer and ride the wave as a scientist.
3
SPEAKER_01
To me, the fact that people are wondering about the mystery of UFOs, it means they re wondering.
3
SPEAKER_00
No, they are, but the thing, I will stop surfing that wave when it comes back to bite an entire scientific discipline.
3
SPEAKER_01
When it hurts the science, sure.
3
SPEAKER_00
For now, the past 60 years,
3
SPEAKER_00
we were not able to raise money from the government, no grants.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a discipline that has no postdoc or very little postdoc, just because there is a fear of that folklore on the political arena.
3
SPEAKER_00
People don t want to be associated with that because they confuse the two.
3
SPEAKER_00
So I stopped
3
SPEAKER_00
There, and as the director of the Carl Sagan Center, I am just very happy to see now that there is a course correction.
3
SPEAKER_00
in the government seeking scientific investigators for this kind of issues, and hopefully that will right the ship there.
3
SPEAKER_01
I love it, I love to see it, but I want, and I love our little disagreements, I m doing so obviously respectfully and with love, and it makes for a fun conversation, but I think, you know, just like with surfing a wave, there s some level of, the more you resist it, the worse it is, so.
3
SPEAKER_00
We didn t resist it.
3
SPEAKER_00
It didn t come from us and we paid the price.
3
SPEAKER_01
I just think that the role of scientists, in part, in the 21st century, when we talk about social media,
4
SPEAKER_00
It s to direct this sense of wonder that people have.
4
SPEAKER_00
into a direction of the rigors of science.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think we do that pretty well.
4
SPEAKER_00
I would disagree.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t think so.
4
SPEAKER_01
SETI does much better, but there s other places in science where- The search for life is a fairly easy place to, you know, draw the wonder of people.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yes, 100%.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because it s a profound question that pretty much everybody has.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I think, I just want to highlight the fact that I think a lot of scientists, my colleagues, friends, think that all you need to do is science.
4
SPEAKER_00
All you need to do is the scientific process, the peer review process, the data, and so on.
4
SPEAKER_00
But I think communication is actually a fundamental part of the process.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because it has to do with funding, but it also has to do with like we re a bunch of humans trying to ask big questions, trying to figure this whole puzzle out.
4
SPEAKER_00
And curiosity is beautiful.
4
SPEAKER_00
I totally agree.
4
SPEAKER_01
We do have more public presentation at the Institute than peer reviewed articles.
4
SPEAKER_01
And believe me, we have lots.
4
SPEAKER_01
of peer-reviewed articles.
4
SPEAKER_01
So our scientists are out there and they are sharing the wonder of discoveries.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s so easy these days.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there is not one day.
4
SPEAKER_01
Tell me about writing a book right now about the search for life in the universe.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s almost every single day I had to correct something in the chapters I was writing.
4
SPEAKER_00
So SETI, in terms of both signatures and signals, is a pretty active field.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s getting better right now.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s getting better.
4
SPEAKER_01
But remember that the SETI Institute is not only about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is the historical root of the Institute.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it s about 10% of what we do.
4
SPEAKER_01
In fact, we are searching for life in the universe from the origins of life to extraterrestrial intelligence.
4
SPEAKER_01
So 90% of everything else is exoplanet.
4
SPEAKER_01
For instance, we have a good chunk of the Kepler team that is actually with the SETI Institute and they are working with TESS right now.
4
SPEAKER_01
Some already have some time on the GEMS web.
4
SPEAKER_01
We have astrobiologists, we have astronomers,
4
SPEAKER_00
And those are looking for data, for signals, for planets out there outside of our solar system.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, go to analog places to try and understand the type of life that survive in planetary type environments.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, people are always surprised when I tell them, you know, whatever flies in the solar system has flown or will be flying
4
SPEAKER_01
we are involved.
4
SPEAKER_01
So this is not something that pops in everybody s mind when they are thinking about the SETI Institute, because we started off as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the Institute has really bloomed into the search for life along the Drake equation, all the terms of the Drake equation.
4
SPEAKER_00
Just to clarify, because by the way, you re saying a bunch of terms sometimes, it s good to return to the basics.
4
SPEAKER_00
When you re saying whatever s flown
4
SPEAKER_00
SETI is a part of the things that are flown.
4
SPEAKER_00
So we, because we re using we elusive, sometimes we say we humans, and sometimes we SETI.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the SETI is really broadly involved.
4
SPEAKER_00
A lot of the fingertips reaching out there towards the stars.
4
SPEAKER_01
Think about Mars involved in landing site selection in instrument that are actually on board some of the mission in science teams, for instance, Cassini, New Horizons, also missions that will be coming.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s the search for life.
4
SPEAKER_01
We do this all across the Drake equation.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, SETI is part of it, and it s our route, and it s expanding a little bit right now.
4
SPEAKER_01
We hope it will continue to expand.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, this is a good time for the Institute.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it also, in my mind, was the very first Astrobiology Institute, because we have this multidisciplinary approach.
4
SPEAKER_01
where I can bring many of the scientists from different domains and disciplines to think about a question.
4
SPEAKER_01
And as you know, discoveries happen at the nexus of disciplines.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s really a privilege when you are in an institute like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
You ve dived in volcanic lakes at high altitudes to study the creatures within.
4
SPEAKER_00
Can you tell me the technical, the fun, the human story of that effort?
4
SPEAKER_01
The image that is associated with a scientist is the person with the white coat in the lab.
4
SPEAKER_01
In fact, a number of us at the Institute are athletes doing extremes, what would be considered extreme stuff.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I mean, it s fun, it s a little dangerous too, but it s to get data and more knowledge.
4
SPEAKER_01
So there are so many stories.
4
SPEAKER_00
I don t even know where- What was the first time you did a dangerous thing with a volcano?
4
SPEAKER_01
So the first one associated to the search for life, understanding, was in 2002, where I started climbing those high volcanoes in the Andes that are 20,000 footers.
4
SPEAKER_01
The view out there is just beautiful.
4
SPEAKER_00
You re so hilarious at spending almost no time on some epic things.
4
SPEAKER_00
I love this.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, how tall are these volcanoes?
4
SPEAKER_00
What are you doing with a volcano?
4
SPEAKER_00
What s required to prepare for that?
4
SPEAKER_00
What does a mission like that look like?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that is true that this is science embodied.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s like athletics and it s science and you re studying the extreme conditions of life on Earth, extreme beauty.
4
SPEAKER_00
of life on Earth in those conditions.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, what are we talking about with this volcano?
4
SPEAKER_00
How big is it?
4
SPEAKER_01
So, remember when we were talking about how do I understand how I search for life on Mars?
4
SPEAKER_01
This is how it started for me.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then I looked at environment, in my head started, you know, going through the environments on Earth that would be good analysis.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then you only have a few.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the Andes in that case are some of the best in the world, just because of the aridity of the place.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the higher you go, the least atmosphere you have, the more UV radiation you have.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the Andes are volcanic, hydrothermal, plus you have the climate change that s coming, you have evaporation.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a picture of Mars 3.5 billion years ago.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so, now you are actually entering a time machine, basically.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, remember I m a diver.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the first time I got in 2002 to the places we wanted to explore, all of a sudden I was standing at 14,000 foot looking at 20,000 feet and saying, okay, well, I need to get up there.
4
SPEAKER_00
Are you scared?
4
SPEAKER_00
No.
4
SPEAKER_01
No, because we are prepared.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the only thing I didn t know is if I was going to be able to make it to the top, because now you re dealing with high altitude, you can deal with high altitude sickness, you can deal with a number of things.
4
SPEAKER_01
And for God s sake, these are volcanoes and they are dormant, they are not extinct.
4
SPEAKER_01
That can bite us a couple of times.
4
SPEAKER_00
What was your preparation for that kind of thing?
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, this is... There is a lot of, you know, hiking and trekking at high altitude around here, but not so high because we don t have anything closer to those elevations around here in the US.
4
SPEAKER_01
But in volcanic environment, climbing volcanoes here, we have plenty of those.
4
SPEAKER_01
Diving as well, I am a free diver.
4
SPEAKER_01
So this is where it s going to be hilarious because I started with a complete irrational fear of pressurized vessels that comes from an incident in my childhood.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I became a free diver to avoid having to carry oxygen tanks on my back.
4
SPEAKER_01
Free diving is diving without anything, just your lungs, right?
4
SPEAKER_00
That was, that started from childhood.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, it was to the point where when I saw a pressure vessel, like a methane tank or anything, I would be, you know, going around and put a lot of distance between me and that tank.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I was not going to carry any oxygen tank.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the first time I actually dived at the summit of that lake was free diving.
4
SPEAKER_01
People look at me like I m nuts.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, maybe I am a little bit.
4
SPEAKER_00
The people that work with you as well?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that seems kind of nuts.
4
SPEAKER_00
It s a risk.
4
SPEAKER_01
Actually, it s a lot less of a risk than getting with conventional air, and I can explain that.
4
SPEAKER_01
But ultimately, what decided me to certify SCUBA,
4
SPEAKER_01
and go over my fear was that as a scientist, I needed more time at the bottom of the lake to sample, you know, rationally, take my time to think, and I can stay quite long enough as a freediver underwater.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the last thing you want to do at 20,000 feet is to come up at the surface with empty lungs because there is not much you can breathe out there to replenish your oxygen.
4
SPEAKER_01
So definitely your time in the water is cut short.
4
SPEAKER_01
just for safety.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I realized that it was not a good trade-off for me at some point.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I certified scuba and after three years of exploring that lake free diving, we finally came up with a full scuba diving expedition, but we were diving with rebreathers, which means that we dived with pure oxygen.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, rebreathers give you a bag with stuff that looks like catalyters in it, which is basically to absorb the CO2 that you are expelling when you re breathing, and they re recycling oxygen this way.
4
SPEAKER_01
So basically, you are rebreathing your own
4
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
How long can you do that?
4
SPEAKER_00
So what s interesting about that technology?
4
SPEAKER_01
So it s very interesting because then that completely avoids the potential issues you may have with the binds.
4
SPEAKER_01
When you are diving, the risk of bubbles trapped in your lungs because of different pressures and different gases.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there s a complexity to the flow of oxygen
4
SPEAKER_00
underwater.
4
SPEAKER_01
When you are breathing regular air, when you are scuba diving here, you know that you have to do some different.
4
SPEAKER_01
When you re coming back, when you re diving deep and you have conventional air, then you need to stop so that you can equalize
4
SPEAKER_01
the gases in your lungs.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you come back too fast, then you can have air bubbles stuck, and then you can raise the binds, which means you can risk to be paralyzed, you can raise a number of nasty issues.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we wanted absolutely to avoid that.
4
SPEAKER_01
So diving with pure oxygen avoids this completely.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it has another benefit at high altitude is that, well,
4
SPEAKER_01
the greater risk when you are at high altitude is altitude sickness.
4
SPEAKER_01
What is altitude sickness?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s just you not having enough oxygen in your blood.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, this was a good benefit.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was a good trade-off.
4
SPEAKER_01
We were lucky enough to be also trained by the military.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, we came up with not the civilian rebreather, which is the big thing on the back that you carry on your back.
4
SPEAKER_01
We actually were given
4
SPEAKER_01
Navy SEALs commando, rebreathers.
4
SPEAKER_00
You worked with Navy SEALs for this?
4
SPEAKER_01
The director of military operations, yes.
4
SPEAKER_01
We were trained like astronauts for three months.
4
SPEAKER_01
I spent more time, I had a joke that if somebody wanted to reach me, they better put a phone line at the bottom of the swimming pool because this is where I was.
4
SPEAKER_01
So we trained and we trained and our manual about the safety was about that thick.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it was a real operation.
4
SPEAKER_01
That was three years into it because when you re free diving in the years prior, there is no risk.
4
SPEAKER_01
You don t have any other gas in your lung than what you re breathing.
4
SPEAKER_01
The only risk is come short of air and then you re in trouble, which happened to me one time, seriously.
4
SPEAKER_00
So- Tell me about that time.
4
SPEAKER_00
I got to ask you about free diving before we return to the rebreathers.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, all these lakes I had altitude, they are cold.
4
SPEAKER_01
They are the minimum temperature that you can have on bodies of water, clear bodies of water, which is four degrees C. It s very, very cold.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so you cannot... It s like an ice bath.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so you cannot just dive with a wetsuit.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the idea was to take a dry suit.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I learned how to free dive with a dry suit, which is really the worst thing you can do.
4
SPEAKER_00
What s a wet suit, what s a dry suit?
4
SPEAKER_01
So a dry suit, a wet suit is usually what you use in the ocean when it s not too cold.
4
SPEAKER_01
You can use also a dry suit.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the wet suit basically is going to keep you warm because water is getting into the suit.
4
SPEAKER_01
and the contact of your skin is getting to body temperature.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so for a while you can, you know, dive like that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in the ocean here, that s fine.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s fine.
4
SPEAKER_01
The dry suit is the opposite.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s completely closed, which means that you don t have any contact with the water outside and you keep your warmth.
4
SPEAKER_01
through your body temperature and even clothing that you can put into it.
4
SPEAKER_01
So these drysuits, they are used by divers who go really deep in very cold water and need to stay a long time underwater.
4
SPEAKER_00
So what s the bad part?
4
SPEAKER_01
The bad part is that when you have those drysuits,
4
SPEAKER_01
you have a lot of air that can be trapped in it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Usually we do what we call burping the suit.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s not very pleasant expression, but you get in the water and as soon as you get in the water, you can see the air pockets all over the place, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
So you burp the suit, you open the valve and the air comes out.
4
SPEAKER_01
Once you have done that, then you look with your lead belt and you know when you re ready to go down.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so what happened that day,
4
SPEAKER_01
is that I actually did burp the suit, but didn t realize I burped it completely.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so, I went down
4
SPEAKER_01
And immediately I felt an air pocket going to my legs.
4
SPEAKER_01
So basically air was trapped in the suit and went on my legs as I was diving like that.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I didn t pay too much attention to that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Because you re diving down?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I was diving down.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so I didn t pay too much attention about that as I was busy.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s just an awkward position.
4
SPEAKER_01
But then I wanted to turn and go up.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, no can do.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was just like a buoy.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I was like that, so the first time, I say, okay, I try a second time, and a third time, and by the fourth time, I kind of realized I was in trouble.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the fifth time, I say, okay, now you better give it your best try, otherwise it s gonna be big trouble.
4
SPEAKER_00
And- So this is free diving?
4
SPEAKER_01
I was free diving.
4
SPEAKER_00
And then you can t.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I cannot turn around.
4
SPEAKER_00
What were you feeling?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, is there a panic or not?
4
SPEAKER_01
No.
4
SPEAKER_01
There is no panic because you can t.
4
SPEAKER_01
You cannot afford to be panicking.
4
SPEAKER_01
In fact, you are always thinking because there is training and this is the best part about training.
4
SPEAKER_01
Your training allows you that space to keep you cool and composed, which you need to be in that kind of situation.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so finally, after the fifth time, I was able to rectify the position and get myself up.
4
SPEAKER_01
But when I got up, my lungs were empty.
4
SPEAKER_01
I had been in the water for quite some time and I knew what was going to happen.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I decided to just be the plank, you know, not move and don t do anything, just open my mouth and try to suck oxygen.
4
SPEAKER_01
But obviously oxygen at 6,000 meters, 20,000 feet, there is not that much.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s about a little, it s 48% of what you breathe at sea level.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, although it was noon at that time, the sky stayed pretty dark and starry for about a minute or two.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s the first time you experienced that kind of, I mean, do you, can you possibly train for that?
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, cause can you also pass out?
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, you could.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, the fact that I was already seeing dark was a real sign that my brain was starved of oxygen.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I had one of my friends or colleagues on the shore just telling me because I d been under for a little while and say, is everything okay?
5
SPEAKER_01
And I remember trying to say something and I was just like,
5
SPEAKER_01
That s I think the best lie I ever, ever.
5
SPEAKER_01
I get the thumb down.
5
SPEAKER_00
You were lying to the friend and maybe to yourself?
5
SPEAKER_01
No, because I knew I was going to be okay, but it took me to be still for a few minutes.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, can you talk about freediving?
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, what s the technical skill involved here?
5
SPEAKER_00
It just seems, it seems exceptionally difficult.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like for most people that swim, you go underwater.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s hard.
5
SPEAKER_00
So what s the skill there?
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, I think,
5
SPEAKER_01
You probably can get good or better at freediving by training.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you have different techniques.
5
SPEAKER_01
You can train in swimming pool and you can say, you know, frankly for me, I go at the bottom of the swimming pool and I sit there.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then you have relaxation techniques.
5
SPEAKER_01
Some people meditate.
5
SPEAKER_01
I can t.
5
SPEAKER_01
I am not a good person that can meditate.
5
SPEAKER_01
Or if I do, I don t know about it.
5
SPEAKER_01
But my way of doing things and taking my mind off the situation I m in
5
SPEAKER_01
is by singing in my head.
5
SPEAKER_01
I love music or hearing music, and in fact, knowing the kind of song I m singing, I know it by the length of time that I m staying underwater as well.
5
SPEAKER_01
So this is my own way.
5
SPEAKER_01
People have different ways.
5
SPEAKER_00
What kind of music are we talking about?
5
SPEAKER_01
All sorts of music.
5
SPEAKER_01
Can be classical, can be pop music, you know, just songs.
5
SPEAKER_01
When you really know that you are relaxed, and something I experienced actually at 20,000 feet, which was the greatest experience of my life in those terms, is when you forget that you have water around you.
5
SPEAKER_01
At that point, you cannot tell whether you are the water or water is you.
5
SPEAKER_01
There is actually no separation anymore.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I felt that when I was training in the swimming pool, I never could have imagined that I would feel that way once on top of that volcano.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it happened.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was absolutely amazing.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was, you know, we were talking about how life consciousness permeates the universe.
5
SPEAKER_01
At that point in time, on that volcano, that day,
5
SPEAKER_01
It took me by surprise.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was not expecting it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Everything around me, the lake was arctic blue with all the ray of the sun.
5
SPEAKER_01
You could tell them apart, every single one of them.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was surrounded by golden darts.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was the most incredible experience.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I don t know if it s that kind of environment that led me to just, you know, go into whatever state of meditation or whatnot, but all of a sudden there was no separation anymore between me, the water, the volcano.
5
SPEAKER_01
And if I came with questions, they didn t matter anymore because for that fraction of a second, it seemed that I had all the answers in the universe.
5
SPEAKER_00
Was it the connectedness with everything?
5
SPEAKER_01
You can call it that way.
5
SPEAKER_01
I still don t know what it means, you know, literally, but it is that moment where you feel that it doesn t matter.
5
SPEAKER_01
It really doesn t matter anymore.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was an absolute peace, absolute understanding, and it was incredible.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was an absolute awareness.
5
SPEAKER_00
Could you describe it as beautiful?
5
SPEAKER_01
That would go beyond that.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think that there is clearly in my mind today no words that can express how perfect this was.
5
SPEAKER_00
Does that start to speak to why you love diving?
5
SPEAKER_00
Or is there something special about that place, diving at such elevations and volcanoes?
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, I started diving pretty much, this is the first thing I did when I was near water.
5
SPEAKER_01
In fact, there is a very fun little incident with my parents, me being on the shore of a lake on vacation.
5
SPEAKER_01
I was three years old, maybe.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I had these little lifesavers, you know, on my arms and my parents were not watching.
5
SPEAKER_01
And in my little brain, I still can remember today saying, well,
5
SPEAKER_01
nothing bad can happen to me.
5
SPEAKER_01
I cannot drown if I go underwater.
5
SPEAKER_01
See, that s the logic of a three-year-old.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_00
It kind of works.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, that s pretty brilliant.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I removed
5
SPEAKER_01
the lifesavers that I had, and I just went in the water.
5
SPEAKER_01
My mom said before she could do anything, I was under.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was like a natural thing.
5
SPEAKER_01
And for me, I felt immediately at home.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you know, as little as I was, completely.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it goes beyond that.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, this sense of connectedness or oneness or whatever, I always felt
5
SPEAKER_01
good underwater.
5
SPEAKER_01
So, it doesn t matter really if it s 20,000 feet.
5
SPEAKER_01
The thing that matters at that point is that you need to get there.
5
SPEAKER_01
So, you need to get with all the gears, with your hiking, trekking equipment, high mountaineering gears.
5
SPEAKER_01
And when you get on top of that, you have to remove all that and don a suit.
5
SPEAKER_00
Is there something you can speak to the challenging aspects of that process?
5
SPEAKER_00
Or is it just like this rigorous process that s well-designed that you have to go through and you don t think one step at a time?
5
SPEAKER_01
This is where most of the risk is, because...
5
SPEAKER_01
you can be well prepared, but for one reason or another, you get sick, you know, and you can get sick not only because of high altitude sickness, it can be a number of things, or you can be tired, or you can catch a cold, and then of course you have the mountain itself.
5
SPEAKER_01
We had a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hitting one day when we were 50 meters away from the summit,
5
SPEAKER_00
So you can t obviously plan for that.
5
SPEAKER_01
No, you can t.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that s the axe of God.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, working with NASA, although I am the director of the SETI Institute, my grants are coming from NASA, so I m a NASA contractor.
5
SPEAKER_01
And every time we go to those environments, we have to go through the rigorous process of training with NASA and checking all the boxes for safety.
5
SPEAKER_01
So they are training and training and training us.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I have to thank them because a lot of those
5
SPEAKER_01
Trainings are the things that are in your brain when these kind of things happen.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know how to react and you are not freaking out.
5
SPEAKER_01
But in all of the things they are training us for, you have the green risk, the yellow risk, and the red risk.
5
SPEAKER_01
So the green risks are basically the don t be stupid and don t do the kind of thing you wouldn t be doing at home, like jumping on rocks that are not stable.
5
SPEAKER_01
tweak your ankle, you know.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then you have other risks like altitude sickness, how you prepare for that, how you recognize that.
5
SPEAKER_01
These are the yellow risks.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then the red risks.
5
SPEAKER_01
The red risks are what they call the acts of gods, the kind of thing that they can happen, you know there is nothing you can do about it and you accept that when you do that.
5
SPEAKER_01
So those are volcanic eruptions when you re in this kind of environment, earthquakes,
5
SPEAKER_01
And avalanches, for instance.
5
SPEAKER_00
So you re on this giant mountain, and it s shaking.
5
SPEAKER_01
No, it s not shaking.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s the interesting part of it.
5
SPEAKER_01
There was a whole background of things that happened that day when we started off, but we got to 50 meters from the summit and I have part of my logistics team that is at the foot of the mountain.
5
SPEAKER_01
And being so close to the summit, we have to go under overhang of lava.
5
SPEAKER_01
So it s just like we are just under this big vault of lava and it s actually beautiful.
5
SPEAKER_01
If you want something beautiful, it s the Altiplano seen from 20,000 feet.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s just absolutely stunning.
5
SPEAKER_00
What s the colors?
5
SPEAKER_00
What are we looking at?
5
SPEAKER_01
The colors are that of early Earth, which means primordial Earth.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s ochres, yellows, oranges, browns, with a dark blue sky.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so, you re just, you know, it s a time machine.
5
SPEAKER_01
You re just out there and you re climbing 42 degree slopes.
5
SPEAKER_01
So all of a sudden, I m right next behind the guide, and the guide has been with us, it s family, you know, we ve been together for 10 years, and he s starting to do that.
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t discuss when Macario do that, you know, I listen and I ask the team to do the same thing where maybe half a dozen.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then I went to talk to him and say, what s going on?
5
SPEAKER_01
He s on the radio.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then he gives me the radio.
5
SPEAKER_01
I m talking to my logistic chief officer who was at the bottom and he said, we re having a tremendous earthquake.
5
SPEAKER_01
He was saying that the, actually the ground was waving.
5
SPEAKER_01
It was so bad.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he was freaking out because he said, everything is avalanching and I m very puzzled because we are in a very dangerous part of the volcano, nothing s happening.
5
SPEAKER_01
I turned around and then this is when I realized there is dust absolutely everywhere.
5
SPEAKER_01
Everything that I saw two minutes before, it s gone, just disappear into a wall of dust.
5
SPEAKER_01
But nothing s happening where we are.
5
SPEAKER_01
And our friends down, they were freaking out because they were seeing everything avalanching.
5
SPEAKER_01
And especially the other side of the mountain we were on was avalanching.
5
SPEAKER_00
So they have no visuals.
5
SPEAKER_01
They have no visual, they thought that we are caught in the avalanche.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I said, no, but some, so at that point.
5
SPEAKER_00
So they thought you were screwed.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and I said, okay, so if this is what s happening, then I m taking everybody
5
SPEAKER_01
the summit, because we have a very large crater that will take care of avalanching, we ll be safe.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I m waiting for the aftershock, because this is what you do, you know, when you have earthquakes.
5
SPEAKER_01
So here we go, taking everybody in the crater, and now you have half a dozen scientists
5
SPEAKER_01
in the crater with the crater lake.
5
SPEAKER_01
And this is why we came for.
5
SPEAKER_01
So we just had a 7.8 earthquake.
5
SPEAKER_01
And what do you think they do?
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, of course they do the science they came to do.
5
SPEAKER_01
So the only thing is that I couldn t because my radio was only working when I was on the rim of the crater.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I had a little assistant with me, a young,
5
SPEAKER_01
Bolivian teenager had been shadowing me for three weeks, so he knew exactly what to do.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he said, Natalie, no problem.
5
SPEAKER_01
Give me your bags.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ll do the sampling for you.
5
SPEAKER_01
So I was monitoring the situation.
5
SPEAKER_01
Were you scared?
5
SPEAKER_01
I wasn t at that point.
5
SPEAKER_01
There was another moment, my friend downstairs, I could, you know.
5
SPEAKER_00
At the foot.
5
SPEAKER_01
At the foot, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
We ve known each other, as I said, we re family.
5
SPEAKER_01
This team is family.
5
SPEAKER_01
We ve known each other.
5
SPEAKER_01
I am the grandmother of kids, so we are close.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I could feel for the first time in my life that he actually was scared.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he was calling me every 30 seconds, telling me stuff.
5
SPEAKER_01
I say, you have to stop this now.
5
SPEAKER_01
just call me to give me information that is useful for me to make decisions.
5
SPEAKER_01
And so I say, okay, what s going on?
5
SPEAKER_01
All right.
5
SPEAKER_01
He tells me, you know, there is still avalanching, etc.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then a few minutes later, he calls me and says, I think that Lascar is erupting.
5
SPEAKER_01
So now I have to tell you, we are on a volcano.
5
SPEAKER_01
The next volcano, we share a slope with it, is a little lower, but that s the most temperamental volcano of the entire chain.
5
SPEAKER_01
And this one has a history of eruption.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then my friend is telling me that the volcano seems to be starting to erupt.
5
SPEAKER_01
If that volcano goes up, we have nowhere to go.
5
SPEAKER_01
That got my attention.
5
SPEAKER_01
So if you say scared, I would say that I got the realization that what that meant.
5
SPEAKER_01
I went cold for like a fraction of a second, but that meant that just my adrenaline started to kick in.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it was a very, very strange experience because now you have tunnel vision.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s about survival.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I say, okay, now you are going to tell me what I need to know, you know,
5
SPEAKER_01
Tell me, what do you see? 
5
SPEAKER_01
He said, I see smoke.
5
SPEAKER_01
I said, what kind of smoke?
5
SPEAKER_01
He said, it s white.
5
SPEAKER_01
I said, no big deal.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s water vapor.
5
SPEAKER_01
Okay, where is it going?
5
SPEAKER_01
It s going to Argentina.
5
SPEAKER_01
That was the opposite direction of where we are.
5
SPEAKER_01
I said, okay, I m staying where I am because right now there is no, you know, no danger.
5
SPEAKER_01
And there was still the issue of the aftershock.
5
SPEAKER_01
I didn t want to have the team caught in the gully, in the central gully of the volcano, with an avalanche coming at us.
5
SPEAKER_01
So we stayed there.
5
SPEAKER_01
And he called me after that and said, well, you know, it s still going to Argentina.
5
SPEAKER_01
Fine, okay.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then a little later, he calls me and said, Natalie, things are changing here.
5
SPEAKER_01
I said, okay, what s going on?
5
SPEAKER_01
I said, well, the cloud is a little yellow.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I was thinking myself, shit.
5
SPEAKER_00
What does it mean when it s yellow?
5
SPEAKER_01
Sulfur.
5
SPEAKER_01
And then when you have sulfur mixed with the water vapor or the water in your lungs, this turns into sulfuric acid.
5
SPEAKER_01
Then you re really screwed.
5
SPEAKER_01
And I say, okay, where- Thank you for the information.
5
SPEAKER_01
Where is the cloud going?
5
SPEAKER_01
He said, the wing is shifting, it s coming your direction.
5
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, that was a day like that, you know, and I am talking to him on the radio and I m turning around.
5
SPEAKER_01
And as I turned around, I see the clouds starting to pop on the opposite side of the rim, you know.
5
SPEAKER_01
So at that time we had no choice anymore because now you have to figure out what s going to kill you first.
5
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And so there was the risk or the potential of an avalanche, but at least you can see the rocks.
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the gas is going to kill you before you can see it.
5
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So I called everybody back.
5
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We gather our stuff.
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I didn t give too much detail, but I say it s time to go downhill and fast.
5
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So, which we did.
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We stopped only when we were at mid-camp.
5
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And then at that point we saw the cloud just completely covering the summit where we were.
5
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So we did well to bail out.
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But that was 500 meter.
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500 meter higher than we were, so we are safe.
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I was just making sure that it would not go down the slope where we were safe.
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So we stayed and just rested for a little while.
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And after that, we descended.
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And it was all on adrenaline.
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I can tell you what, I had two of my crew with headaches.
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Part of one of them was because of the altitude, we climbed very fast.
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The other one was because of the cloud.
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She was the closest to the cloud when it happened.
5
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So we descended fast.
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Wow, that was close.
5
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That was close and it s interesting how the human body and mind works because I know that from the moment my friend told me that the volcano seemed to be erupting, I was going on adrenaline.
5
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But when we got close to them and I saw him, we were getting close to the cars, I saw him coming towards me and the slope all of a sudden, all the adrenaline went away.
5
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I was a mess.
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I had to find the first rock and sit down.
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It was gone.
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I mean.
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Fascinating.
5
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So you just basically physically and mentally collapsed once you saw.
5
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Absolutely.
5
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So interesting.
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There was nothing left of me.
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I got in the car and I felt in the car as we were heading back towards our camp, I could have passed out.
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I really fought back and I m not the kind of passing out really, you know, easy.
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But there was nothing left.
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I had no energy, no nothing.
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It s fabulous how you react and how this is embedded in your brain from eons of evolution, of reaction to a dangerous situation, basically.
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The drive to survive.
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Yeah, something like that.
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You just told us one heck of a story.
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And as you said, such story comes along with many of the diving expeditions that you do.
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But on the science side,
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What is that world that simulates, that travels back in time into the Martian landscape?
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What does the science reveal?
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So the science reveals that life is resilient.
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When I started that project, I told my husband, I said, this is going to be very fast.
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We are going in such nasty environment that we re not going to find anything.
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and we ll be back home fairly soon.
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So, 20 years later, we are still studying those environments.
6
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That was a gut feeling like not much can possibly survive in those conditions.
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Well, the UV environment is so nasty, but there you find the same microorganism
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that made the very first fossils on Earth 3.5 billion years ago.
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And they keep surviving, they developed an adaptation, Swiss Army knife if you prefer.
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And so you learn about that, you learn about what they are.
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how they adapt through times and through environmental changes, which is really important.
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What are their signatures?
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We learn to recognize them, we learn what kind of instrument we need, what kind of signature, whether it s chemical or morphological or whatnot.
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So basically, we learn how to explore.
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But I would say that to me, and this is a realization, interestingly enough, that came three years into the project,
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I really woke up literally one morning saying, you know, we have been coming here for three years now, trying to understand how to search for life on Mars.
6
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But what this place is showing us is what s happening right here, right now on our own planet.
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And by exploring those extreme environments, we are also reaching to places not too many people go.
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And so we are learning more about our own biospheres.
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and the diversity of our own life here on Earth.
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So these are the two main thing that I would say.
6
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What kind of life survives up there?
6
SPEAKER_01
On top of those volcanoes, it s about bacteria, you know, mostly.
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Is there something specific about that bacteria that s able to be so rugged?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes, they have adapted to very high UV radiation, and it s not only because they are at high altitude, it s because early Earth didn t have an ozone layer.
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So when those, the ancestors of those bacteria,
6
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originated.
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They have to survive a world where you had lots of short UV coming down at the surface, and also lots of hydrothermal environment, you know, volcanoes and hot water, lots of salt, and you see all this toolbox still
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embedded in those microorganisms today, four billion years later.
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It s just amazing.
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And depending on the environment, they are going to switch some of these defenses adaptation on or off.
6
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The UV situation there is so nasty that
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Here, you have bacteria like that, cyanobacteria, you find them everywhere.
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It s really something you find all over the place.
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But if you find them here in California, they will turn their protection against UV during the day in summer, and they will switch it off at the end of the day.
6
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There in the Andes, it s so nasty that that thing stays on all the time.
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But if you take samples and bring them back here,
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and start to culture them, like we did on top of a building, leaving them, you will see the second generation of this organism, they are starting to switch on and off again.
6
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So they are extremely adaptable, extremely rugged, and that s why they are still here.
6
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And probably that s why we re here, because life finds ways.
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is there some degree to which the harshness of the conditions enables the flourishing of life versus shuts it down?
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, it will shut down those that cannot survive.
6
SPEAKER_01
Obviously, you know, this is a statement that s kept in obvious right there, but it s also the survival of the fittest.
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SPEAKER_01
And this is what evolution is, right?
6
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So they are here because they were the most adaptable.
6
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And so evolution is going to show the path of the fittest.
6
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The one that cannot resist, they might have a good time for a little while, but then, you know, we ve seen this at much different scale and with complex life.
6
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Not so long ago, 100,000 years ago, Neanderthal.
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was side by side by Homo sapiens, but Neanderthal was completely adapted to a cold earth, to a glacial earth of the end of the Pleistocene.
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And when conditions change, it couldn t last.
6
SPEAKER_00
You think, I mean, there s still some mysteries around that, right?
6
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Like exactly what were the harshness of the conditions?
6
SPEAKER_00
I still really suspicious, what did Homo sapiens do?
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SPEAKER_00
I really wanna know.
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Some shady stuff that happened.
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Shady stuff happened, they met, they bred together, they fought against each other.
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What humans do, you had to expect that.
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But the thing is that Neanderthal was completely adapted for a very long time to live at the edge of those glaciers.
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They were probably in a weakened situation when Homo sapiens came and started to spread.
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So basically, this is what life does.
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It adapts, and if it cannot adapt anymore, it disappears and something else takes over.
6
SPEAKER_00
You hold the women s world record for diving at altitudes, both scuba and free diving.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I have to ask, can you describe the details of those records?
6
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I never looked for those.
6
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I m not after records at all.
6
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In fact, I didn t know I had broken those records when that happened.
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SPEAKER_01
We did that as part of our expedition, our scientific expedition.
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SPEAKER_01
So it s basically sport in the name of science versus... No, it s science in the name of science, and it s just a very physical thing that you have to do.
6
SPEAKER_01
So we train ourselves like athletes.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, to get the job done.
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To get the job done.
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SPEAKER_00
You re holding your breath underwater for a very long time, like with freediving.
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SPEAKER_00
What are we talking about?
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Do you think in terms of time, is there like layers where you know through training you re in a good place?
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Like I m sure you take time off and you get rusty.
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And I have not been diving in a while, so probably I need to go back to the drawing board at the bottom of the swimming pool.
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But having training from the past, I think it will pick up much more faster.
6
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Basically, I would never, at those altitudes, I would never go over three minutes.
6
SPEAKER_01
That would be suicidal.
6
SPEAKER_00
So the altitude is much tougher than the pool back at ground level?
6
SPEAKER_01
It is, but it s not.
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SPEAKER_00
Oh, it s because when you come up and you have to get out.
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Yes, that s not the going in the water.
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When I m underwater, I m fine.
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And if I wanted, I could stay longer, but it wouldn t be very wise.
6
SPEAKER_00
You ve written about the history of life on Mars.
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Like you said, you re kind of exploring that by looking at the lakes here.
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SPEAKER_00
Do you think there s been life on Mars?
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SPEAKER_00
Do you think there is life on Mars?
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SPEAKER_01
So when you re looking at the environment of Mars early on, it s fairly similar to that of early Earth.
6
SPEAKER_01
Never was exactly the same because Mars was always farther from the Sun than the Earth, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So it was always a little cooler, but you have to imagine maybe the Arctic during the summer, that would be early Mars with a lot going on for it in terms of environment, very favorable to even life as we know it.
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SPEAKER_01
We don t know how fast life happened on Earth.
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SPEAKER_01
There are signs right now showing that it might have actually originated only 200 million years after the crust cooled down.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, this still has to be verified, but that s the closest.
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SPEAKER_01
And these are indirect evidence, like carbon left by the activity of life, not life itself.
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SPEAKER_01
And there is a twist in the story for Mars.
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SPEAKER_01
is that it seems that Mars came together as a planet faster than the Earth and had water earlier than the Earth.
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SPEAKER_01
So it may be that Mars was habitable and might have seen the beginning of life.
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earlier than the Earth.
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SPEAKER_01
So, all of this is speculation.
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SPEAKER_01
Obviously, we haven t found any evidence or solid evidence yet.
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SPEAKER_01
I would say unambiguous evidence, but unambiguous evidence of life is going to be something interesting to prove because we don t know what life is, remember.
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SPEAKER_01
So, I always joke that the only way we would know that there is life on Mars if there was a rabbit jumping in front of the rover, but we might be
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, gathering, we have what we call a ladder of life detection, which is that you have a series of rungs that you need to go through.
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SPEAKER_01
that actually are not proving you that you discovered life, but are making the possibility that what you discovered was made only by the environment more and more improbable.
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SPEAKER_01
So we are trying to prove the contrary, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So this is what we have right now.
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And as far as I m concerned, considering all the unknowns we have, I think there was as much chance that life
6
SPEAKER_01
originated on Mars than it did on Earth.
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SPEAKER_01
And if it was at the surface, then it got in trouble after 500 million years because of the disappearance of the magnetosphere, the loss of the magnetosphere and the atmosphere.
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SPEAKER_01
But as we know, life doesn t only stay in one place.
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SPEAKER_01
As soon as it s out there, it s going to adapt, it s going to give itself more chance to survive.
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SPEAKER_01
And that to me means that if life appeared, I would say it s still there and probably on the ground where it can be in an environment that s more stable.
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SPEAKER_01
So I don t know how stability is good or not.
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It might not be so good, but they might be in a different type of metabolism through dormancy, waiting for different climate cycles.
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And there is the fact that Mars changes a lot faster
6
SPEAKER_01
than the Earth, and climate changes are a lot stronger in magnitude.
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SPEAKER_01
So there might be a place on Mars, we know that there is a place on Mars, deeper in the subsurface where temperature and pressure are good for liquid water to stay there.
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SPEAKER_01
So these would be good places for a stable habitat over time, no matter what happens at the surface.
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SPEAKER_01
But if life is also caught between that deep zone and the surface, there is an active layer.
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SPEAKER_01
There is a lot of ice in the subsurface of Mars.
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SPEAKER_01
And when the climate changes,
6
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when the obliquity goes beyond 30 degrees, then at that point you will have some activation of that zone.
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You have thawing of the ice.
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So all this region is reactivated and maybe that s a way where you have pathways for life to move from the deep zone.
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to closer to the surface.
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This is why I am one of those scientists who thinks that life might not be so far from the surface than we think.
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SPEAKER_00
So we don t have to dig very far to find it.
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We probably won t.
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That would be so amazing.
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I m thinking of that just because of this experience as well of extreme environments.
6
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You have to sit and look and listen, basically.
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The story of my life, if I want to understand where microbes are located on Mars, I have to become the microbe, right?
6
SPEAKER_01
This is the thought experiment.
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SPEAKER_01
And if I want to understand where E.T.
6
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is, then I have to become E.T.
6
SPEAKER_01
So it s a big stretch.
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SPEAKER_01
But in extreme environment, you sit in the desert for a while.
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SPEAKER_01
and you just try to understand where the wind s coming from, where the humidity, when it s showing up, and then you start to understand the patterns of those things.
6
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What are the useful signals that you need for survival?
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You need to know where water is, where the source of energy is going to be drawn from.
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You need to find shelters, and shelters don t mean that, for instance, you can have a water column of a lake or a river or whatnot, or the ocean.
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SPEAKER_01
It can be also a very thin,
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layer of dust, or it can be a translucent rock.
6
SPEAKER_01
And you see what we call Endolith.
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These are the same cyanobacteria, but a different version of them.
6
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They live inside the rocks, inside those crystals, because they have the best of life.
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SPEAKER_01
They are into translucent crystals, so that they receive the light from the sun, they can do the photosynthesis,
6
SPEAKER_01
But there is enough of that crystal so that the nasty UV is being stopped.
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SPEAKER_01
And they are in their little house.
6
SPEAKER_01
And when you are looking at temperature within those rocks, they tend to make it toastier than the outside temperature.
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So there is a lot of things going on.
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SPEAKER_01
So what I m saying for Mars is that, yeah, right now you don t have an atmosphere very much, 160 times thinner than the Earth.
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SPEAKER_01
Six millibars is really not much, but it s there.
6
SPEAKER_01
But you still have a lot of UV, the short UV, like the nasty one, UVA, UVB, UVC, that can really mess up your DNA and destroy it beyond repair.
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SPEAKER_01
But as soon as you have a little alcove into a rock or a cliff,
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you know, I d be looking at those places, but you have to understand Mars, or any other planet for that matter, at the level that matters for the microbe.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so then you need- Be one with the microbe.
6
SPEAKER_01
Be one with the microbes, which means that we have lots of orbital data, which is good to understand habitability at the planet level, or at the regional level.
6
SPEAKER_01
But we have very little data right now that is very useful to understand habitability at the scale that matters for the microbes at this point in time.
6
SPEAKER_01
So we need to do a better job with that.
6
SPEAKER_01
My idea is to have arrays of environmental stations that could have a lot of benefits.
6
SPEAKER_01
One would be to give us that vision for the microbes.
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SPEAKER_01
That would be good for us through biology.
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SPEAKER_00
And second- A collection of stations on Mars.
6
SPEAKER_00
On Mars, yeah.
6
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That give us a good map of the planet.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, high resolution.
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We can do that regionally.
6
SPEAKER_01
And on top of that, so that s good for us through biology, for the search for life on Mars.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s good about how to learn where microbes could be that can be a problem for contamination both ways.
6
SPEAKER_01
So that s good for planetary protection.
6
SPEAKER_01
And since those station would have communication
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capabilities on them that are excellent for human exploration because not only you have weather stations all over the place that can tell your astronauts, you know, learn the pattern when it s a good time to go out or not go out, and also help them communicate when they go and do sorties.
6
SPEAKER_01
So there are a number of things we can do that can tell you lots of information.
6
SPEAKER_00
Let s rewind the clock a little bit.
6
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You grew up in Paris.
6
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I was just there.
6
SPEAKER_00
Helen McDonald, in her New York Times amazing profile piece of you, writes that your teenage years were troubled.
6
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So how did the challenging early years make the human being the scientist that you are today?
6
SPEAKER_01
Everything.
6
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I think that this is what s taking me on top of those big mountains.
6
SPEAKER_01
And the irony is for me to be looking for the origin and nature of life because I was so close to losing it.
6
SPEAKER_01
But to me, that was a great lesson learned.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that helped me see through the beauty of life.
6
SPEAKER_01
Going on the other side of that, it became really what made me and helped me go through absolutely everything and anything in life.
6
SPEAKER_01
climb mountains and tell me there is something I want to know and I am going to give it my best and I won t give up.
7
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and I won t give in.
7
SPEAKER_00
And this is a message that I carried all my life and I m so very grateful that I did because all these things that I would have missed if I hadn t done that.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, this is something that I wrote in my first book and part of it is the reason why I wrote it, just because I felt that there were messages in my path.
7
SPEAKER_00
Oftentimes teenagers are troubled.
7
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It can be one way or another.
7
SPEAKER_00
Or if it s not a troubled teenage, you have times in your life where you doubt, where you just wave in your arm and say, what s the purpose?
7
SPEAKER_00
What s the reason?
7
SPEAKER_00
Why carry on?
7
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When I see all the things that I m doing, the dream that I was able to fulfill, what a waste it would have been, you know?
7
SPEAKER_01
So there s, there was a point in your life where you thought about suicide?
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh yeah, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I did more than thinking about it, but I was the lucky one.
7
SPEAKER_00
For some reason, I m still here.
7
SPEAKER_00
I still don t know why, but I m still here.
7
SPEAKER_00
And the lesson for me was that never ever again, because you have to give tomorrow a chance.
7
SPEAKER_00
You never can think about tomorrow in the terms of the present.
7
SPEAKER_00
You never know what can happen.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know what is going to happen if you go through
7
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what you want to do, tomorrow s never happening.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I had the other lessons came a few years later, where actually somebody was drowning and I went after that person.
7
SPEAKER_00
I almost died that day too, not that I wanted to, but it s just because the condition were very, very difficult.
7
SPEAKER_00
That person died from there, although we took him out of the water.
7
SPEAKER_00
But I had a lot of difficulty coming out.
7
SPEAKER_00
I came out, but then I thought a lot about that guy.
7
SPEAKER_00
He was in his 30s.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it was like a sort of echo from a few years before, telling me that person would never have a tomorrow.
7
SPEAKER_00
That person would never be able to fulfill his dream or even have dreams of any kind.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I was here and I was going to give myself the best chance to fulfill all the dreams I wanted to and go after all the questions I wanted to.
7
SPEAKER_00
And this is what kept me going now, you know?
7
SPEAKER_01
So the advice there is even if you don t see a why, an answer to the why question, why live today?
7
SPEAKER_00
Give tomorrow a chance, always.
7
SPEAKER_01
Do you think about your death today?
7
SPEAKER_01
Do you think about your mortality?
7
SPEAKER_00
Not really.
7
SPEAKER_01
You ve been so close with it so many times.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, you know, that s part of life.
7
SPEAKER_00
And you know what?
7
SPEAKER_00
If something happens to me while I m doing the stuff I love, what a way of going.
7
SPEAKER_00
This will happen wherever it catches me.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, I don t care.
7
SPEAKER_00
It will be what it will be.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I had the best of all masters for that.
7
SPEAKER_00
I had my husband.
7
SPEAKER_00
My husband and I were 44 years apart in age.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it was just a pure love story.
7
SPEAKER_00
And he never looked at his age, never thought about himself.
7
SPEAKER_00
or defined himself by his age.
7
SPEAKER_00
In fact, he reinvented a life for himself at an age where everybody retires.
7
SPEAKER_00
We met when he was 66.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that was a blessing and a curse, but a blessing, most of it, because we took every single day as if it was the last.
7
SPEAKER_00
So we enjoyed life.
7
SPEAKER_00
And right now,
7
SPEAKER_00
it s not so much, you know, I have to really think of him.
7
SPEAKER_00
He just passed away this August, last August.
7
SPEAKER_00
And for me, it s more like I have to draw from his example, on him always telling me, look forward, trust life, be happy, live.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, today, every single day, I have to remind several times a day of this.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s not easy, but he had the recipe.
7
SPEAKER_00
He never thought about death, because when you start thinking too much about death, that prevents you from living.
7
SPEAKER_01
Do you miss him?
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh gosh, we were so close.
7
SPEAKER_00
I think we were, it s more like one spirit in two bodies.
7
SPEAKER_00
We were that close.
7
SPEAKER_00
So missing him doesn t even cut it.
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I mean, it s the toughest mountain I ever climbed.
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What s the role of love in the human condition?
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I think, I hope, that this is the force that drives the universe, although we might be experiencing the other side of it, maybe just to learn how important love is.
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That might be it.
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my experience with my husband where I never had to wake up every single morning ever wondering if I was loved.
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I had to look in his eyes and him looking back at me to know it.
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So when you get to that point where you don t question it anymore, I would hope for humanity to reach that point where you can feel the same love for the person that is unknown in the street.
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that you feel for the people you love, I think that at that point we are going to be reaching the maturity of that civilization we are hoping for.
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And seeing the universe through love, that doesn t run spacecrafts, of course, but
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putting love into our intent of going into and settling into another planet instead of, oh my God, we need to escape because we are freaking, messing up with our own planet.
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I think that this is the answer to so many things.
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Is there a part of you that maybe just a little bit wants to step foot on Mars, like you personally?
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Oh yeah, of course, I m curious.
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I m a scientist and I ve been working on Mars.
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I was actually privileged to be working on Gusev Crater and deciding for the landing site of the Spirit rover, which means that I worked on that landing site for 15 years and I got to see it from the ground.
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That s the closest, you know, to being there and exploring.
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Of course, that s not physically be present there.
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If you were giving me the opportunity, of course I would go, but I know one thing.
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I would want to come back.
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So given the option of dying on Mars or dying on Earth, you d visit Mars, but you would like to spend your last days here.
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Yeah, because of a number of things.
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I think that
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First, we re not ready to set on Mars, regardless of what s being said.
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It will happen.
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It will happen because we re explorers.
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Humans, you know, they re explorers.
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So this will happen.
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And it s a good thing.
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Depending on how we go about this, it can be a very good thing.
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You know, with time, as much as I ve been exploring, continue to explore the big questions of origin and nature of life, or exploring of a planet, the love, you were talking about love, the love for my own planet,
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has grown deeper, and my concern about it has grown deeper.
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So the data that I m collecting to learn about other planets, I m also using it to understand better our home planet and trying to make it a little better for the next generation.
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So if you were talking about love, this is love that would drive me back here.
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Yeah, this planet, it s just, sometimes I just pause and am in awe at the incredible thing we have here.
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And just, I have deep gratitude for all the life forms here.
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The beautiful complexity.
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Of course, there s darkness behind it.
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All the death, all the extinction that led up to us two descendants of apes sitting here today.
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I feel that s a responsibility.
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We re the fittest that survived.
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Exactly right.
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As the dominant species, at least technologically, maybe not the wisest one, but the dominant species, we have a responsibility towards the entire biosphere.
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Because the decisions we are making now
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not only affect us, they re affecting the entire biosphere.
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And right now the choices we are making are leading to the disappearance of 150 species every single day.
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All the big mammals on this earth today are on the brink of extinction.
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We are within the sixth greatest mass extinction.
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It s unfolding before our eyes.
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I would strongly suggest that we use our smart to help a little bit this situation.
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And we can do this.
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I think we can do this.
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We just need to redirect our energy.
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In the name of love.
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This was an incredible conversation and I m really honored that you sit with me.
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I ve been a fan of your work for a long time now, so this is really awesome.
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Thank you so much for talking to me.
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You re very welcome, thanks.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Natalie Cabral.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now, let me leave you with some words from Stanislav Lem and Solaris.
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How do you expect to communicate with the ocean when we can t even understand one another?
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.