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The following is a conversation with Konstantin Batygin, planetary astrophysicist at Caltech, interested in, among other things, the search for the distant, the mysterious Planet Nine in the outer regions of our solar system.
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Quick mention of our sponsors, Squarespace, Litterati, Onnit, and Ni.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that our little sun is orbited by not just a few planets in the planetary region, but trillions of objects in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud that extends over 3 light years out.
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This to me is amazing, since Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our sun, is only 4.2 light years away.
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and all of it is mostly covered in darkness.
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When I get a chance to go out swimming in the ocean far from the shore, I m sometimes overcome by the terrifying and the exciting feeling of not knowing what s there in the deep darkness.
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That s how I feel about the edge of our solar system.
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One day, I hope humans will travel there, or at the very least, AI systems that carry the flame of human consciousness.
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As usual, I ll do a few minutes of ads now, no ads in the middle, I find those get in the way of the conversation.
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but it does highlight that there is things to be discovered in the other than human if we were sort of open our senses to them.
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They make AlphaBrain, which is a nootropic that helps support memory, mental speed, and focus.
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I use it as a kind of a boost for my mind when I m thinking about a difficult problem.
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So if a particular deep work session requires just like sitting there and thinking with a sheet of paper, usually that s kind of like the design stage for the idea, when it s purely thinking.
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That s usually when I, for a prolonged period of time, have to turn my mind to 11.
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So it s focused, but it s also like actively digging deep.
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That s how I think about thinking.
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It s like digging a hole searching for gold.
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And most of the times you come up with nothing.
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Speaking of digging there will be blood is an incredible movie not only is one of the greatest actors in history but he s also one of the most interesting actors in history.
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The few interviews with him that i ve seen you can tell it in his eyes there s brilliant there.
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I m not sure why I brought that up.
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I think it had to do with digging for gold.
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I love listening to podcasts, so I m excited that NI has a new podcast called Testing 123.
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In the parts of my work that involve software engineering, I love the process of testing.
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And that first few moments when you run into problems, into warnings, into errors.
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They also have a bunch of amazing articles on there, or you can get it basically anywhere podcasts are available.
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That s ni.com slash perspectives, and the podcast is called Testing123.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Konstantin Batygin.
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What is planet nine?
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Planet nine is an object that we believe lives in the solar system beyond the orbit of Neptune.
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It orbits the sun with a period of about 10,000 years and is about five earth masses.
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So that s a hypothesized object.
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There s some evidence for this kind of object.
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There s a bunch of different explanations.
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Can you give like an overview of the planets in our solar system?
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How many are there?
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What do we know and not know about them at a high level?
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All right, that sounds like a good plan.
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So look, the solar system,
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basically is comprised of two parts, the inner and the outer solar system.
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The inner solar system has the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.
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Now, Mercury is about 40% of the orbital separation of where the Earth is.
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It s closer to the sun.
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Venus is about 70%.
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Then Mars is about 160% further away from the sun than is the Earth.
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These planets that we, one of them we occupy, right, are pretty small, okay?
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They re two leading order, sort of heavily overgrown asteroids, if you will.
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And this becomes evident when you move out further in the solar system and encounter Jupiter, which is 316 Earth masses, right?
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10 times the size.
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You know, Saturn is another huge one.
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It s 90 Earth masses at about 10 times the separation from the Sun as is the Earth.
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And then you have Uranus and Neptune at 20 and 30 respectively.
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For a long time, that is where the kind of massive part of the solar system ended.
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But what we ve learned in the last 30 years is that beyond Neptune, there s this expansive field of icy debris, a second icy asteroid belt in the solar system.
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A lot of people have heard of the asteroid belt, which lives between Mars and Jupiter, right?
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Like that s a pretty common thing that people like to imagine and draw on lunchboxes and stuff.
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But beyond Neptune, there s a much more massive and much more radially
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expansive field of debris.
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Pluto, by the way, it belongs to that second icy asteroid belt, which we call the Kuiper belt.
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It s just a big object within that population of bodies.
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Pluto, the planet.
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Pluto, the dwarf planet, the former planet.
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Why is Pluto not a planet anymore?
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I mean, it s tiny.
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We used to- Size matters when it comes to planets.
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Oh, 100%, 100%.
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It s actually a fascinating story.
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When Pluto was discovered in 1930, the reason it was discovered in the first place is because astronomers at the time were looking for a seven-Earth-mass planet.
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somewhere beyond Neptune.
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It was hypothesized that such an object exists.
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When they found something, they interpreted that as a seven-Earth-mass planet and immediately revised its mass downward because they couldn t resolve the object with the telescope.
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So, it looked like just a point-mass star rather than a physical disk.
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They said, well, maybe it s not seven, maybe it s one.
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And then sort of over the next, I guess, 40 years, Pluto s mass kept getting revised downwards, downwards, downwards, until it was realized that it s like 500 times less massive than the Earth.
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I mean, like Pluto s surface area is almost perfectly equal to the surface area of Russia, actually.
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And Russia is big, but it s not a planet.
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Well, I mean, actually, we can touch more on that.
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That s another discussion.
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So in some sense, earlier in the century, Pluto represented kind of our ignorance about the edges of the solar system.
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And perhaps Planet Nine is the thing that represents our ignorance about now the modern set of ignorances about the edges of our solar system.
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That s a good way to put it.
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By the way, just imagining this belt of debris at the edge of our solar system is incredible.
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Can you talk about it a little bit?
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What is the Kuiper belt and what is the Oort cloud?
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Yeah, okay, so look, the simple way to think about it is that if you imagine Neptune s orbit like a circle, right?
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Kind of maybe a factor of one and a half, 1.3,
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times bigger, on a radius of 1.3 times bigger, you ve got a whole collection of icy objects.
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Most of these objects are sort of the size of Austin, you know, maybe a little bit smaller.
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If you then zoom out,
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right?
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And explore the orbits of the most long period Kuiper belt object.
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These are the things that have the biggest orbits and take the longest time to go around the sun.
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Then what you find is that beyond a critical orbit size, beyond a critical orbit period, which is about 4,000 years,
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you start to see weird structure, like all the orbits sort of point into one direction.
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And all the orbits are kind of tilted in the same way by about 20 degrees with respect to sun.
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This is particularly pronounced in orbits that are not heavily affected by Neptune.
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So, there you start to see this weird dichotomy where there are objects which are stable, which Neptune does not mess with gravitationally, and unstable objects.
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The unstable objects are basically all over the place because they re being kicked around by Neptune.
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The stable orbits show this remarkable pattern of clustering.
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We, back I guess five years ago, interpreted this pattern of clustering as a gravitational one-way sign, the existence of a planet in a distant planet, right?
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Something that is shepherding and confining these orbits together.
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Of course, you have to have some skepticism when you re talking about these things.
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You have to ask the question of, OK, how statistically significant is this clustering?
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And there are many authors that have indeed called that into question.
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We have done our own analyses.
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And basically, just like with all statistics, where there s kind of like, you know,
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multiple ways to do the exercise, you can either ask the question of if I have a telescope that has, you know, surveyed this part of the sky, what are the chances that I would discover this clustering?
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That basically tells you that you have zero confidence, right?
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That does not give you a confident answer one way or another.
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Another way to do the statistics, which is what we prefer to do, is to say, we have a whole night sky of discoveries in the Kuiper belt.
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right?
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And if we have some object over there, which has right ascension and declination, which is a way to say it s there on the sky, and it has some brightness, that means somebody looked over there and discovered an object of was able to discover an object of that brightness or brighter.
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Through that analysis, you can construct a whole map on the sky of kind of where all of the surveys that have ever been done have collectively looked.
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So if you do the exercise this way, the false alarm probability of the clustering on which the Planet 9 hypothesis is built is about 0.4%.
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Wow, okay, so there s a million questions here.
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One, when you say bright objects, why are they bright?
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Are we talking about actual objects within the Kuiper Belt or the stuff we see through the Kuiper Belt?
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This is the actual stuff we see in the Kuiper Belt.
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The way you go about discovering Kuiper Belt objects, it s pretty easy.
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I mean, it s easy in theory, right?
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Hard in practice.
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All you do is you take snapshots of the sky, right?
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Choose that direction and take, you know,
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the high exposure snapshot, then you wait a night and you do it again, and then you wait another night and you do it again.
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Objects that are just random stars in the galaxy don t move on the sky, whereas objects in the solar system will slowly move.
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This is no different than if you re driving down the freeway, it looks like, you know, trees are going by you faster than the clouds, right?
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This is parallax.
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That s it, it s just they re reflecting light off of the sun and it s going back and hitting this.
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There s a little bit of a glimmer from the different objects that you can see based on the reflection from the sun.
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So like there s actual light, it s not darkness.
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That s right, these are just big.
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icicles basically that are just reflecting sunlight back at you.
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It s then easy to understand why it s so hard to discover them because light has to travel to something like 40 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun and then get reflected back.
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Was that like an hour travel or?
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Yeah, that s right.
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That s something like that.
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Because the earth to the sun is eight minutes, I believe.
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And so.
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Something, you know.
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Yeah, hours.
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Yeah, in that order of magnitude.
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So that s interesting.
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So you have to like account for all of that.
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And then there s this huge amount of
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data, pixels that are coming from the pictures, and you have to integrate all of that together to paint a sort of like a high estimate of the different objects.
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Can you track them?
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Can you be like, that s Bob?
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Like, can you like,
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Yes, exactly.
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In fact, one of them is named Joe Biden.
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I m not like this is not even a joke.
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Right.
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Is there a Trump one or no?
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No, no.
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I don t know.
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I haven t checked for that.
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But
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The way it works is if you discover one, you right away get a license plate for it.
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The first four numbers is the first year that this object has appeared in the dataset, if you will.
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Then there s this code that follows it, which
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basically tells you where in the sky it is, right?
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So one of the really interesting Kuiper belt objects, which is very much part of the planet nine story is called VP 113.
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Because Joe Biden was vice president at the time, you know, got nicknamed Biden.
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VP113, you said?
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You got nicknamed by him, beautiful.
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What s the fingerprint for any particular object?
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Like how do you know it s the same one?
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Or it s just kind of like, yeah, from night to night, you take a picture, how do you know it s the same object?
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Yeah, so the way you know is it appears in almost exactly the same part of the sky, except for it moves by.
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And this is why actually you need at least three nights, because oftentimes,
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asteroids, which are much closer to Earth.
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will appear to move only slightly, but then on the third night will move away.
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So, the third night is really there to detect acceleration.
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The thing that I didn t really realize until I started observing together with my partner in crime in all this, Mike Brown, is just the fact that for the first year when you make these detections, the only thing you really know with confidence is where it is on the night sky and how far away it is.
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That s it.
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You don t know anything about the orbit.
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Because over three days, the object just moves so little, right?
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That whole motion on the sky is entirely coming from motion of the Earth, right?
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So, the Earth is kind of the car, the object is the tree, and you see it move.
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So then, to get some confident information about what its orbit looks like, you have to come back a year later.
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and then measure it again.
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Oh, interesting.
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So do three nights, then come back a year later and do another three nights.
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So you get the velocity, the acceleration from the three nights, and then you have the maybe- The additional.
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The additional information.
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Because an orbit is basically described by six parameters.
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So you at least need six independent points, but in reality you need
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many more observations to really pin down the orbit well.
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And from that, you re able to construct for that one particular object an orbit, and then there s, of course, how many objects are there?
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There s like four-ish thousand now.
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But in the future, that could be millions.
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Oh, sure.
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Oh, sure.
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In fact, these things are hard to predict, but there s a new observatory called the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is coming online maybe next year.
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I mean, with COVID, these things are a little bit more uncertain, but they ve actually been making great progress with construction.
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And so that,
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a telescope is gonna sort of scan the night sky every day automatically.
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And it s such an efficient survey that it might increase the census of the distant Kuiper belt, the things that I m interested in by a factor of 100.
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I mean, that would be really cool.
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And yeah, that s an incredible.
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I mean, they might just find planet nine.
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I mean, that s almost like literally pictures, like visually.
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I mean, sure, yeah, like the first detection you make, all you know is where it is in the sky and how far away it is.
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If something is, you know, 500 times away from the sun, as far away from the sun as is the earth, you know that s planet nine.
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That s when the story concludes.
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Then you can study it.
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Now you can study it.
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Yeah.
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By the way, I m going to use that as like, I don t know, a pickup line or a dating strategy, like see the person for three days and then don t see them at all.
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And then see him again in a year to determine the orbit.
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And over time you figure out if sort of, uh, from a cosmic perspective, this, this whole thing,
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Yeah, I have no dating advice to give.
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I was gonna use this as a metaphor to somehow map it onto the human condition.
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Okay, you mentioned the Kuiper Belt, what s the Oort Cloud?
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If you look at the Neptune orbit as one, then the Kuiper Belt is like 1.3 out there, and then we get farther and farther into the darkness, what
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So, okay, you ve got the main Kuiper belt, which is about, say, 1.3, 1.5.
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Then you have something called the scattered disk, which is kind of an extension of the Kuiper belt.
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It s a bunch of these
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long, very elliptical orbits that hug the orbit of Neptune but come out very far.
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So that, the scattered disk, with the current senses, like some of the longest orbits we know of, have
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a semi-major axis, so half the orbit length, roughly speaking, of about a thousand.
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A thousand times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
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Now, if you keep moving out, eventually, once you re at sort of, you know,
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10,000 to 100,000 roughly, that s where the Oort Cloud is.
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Now, the Oort Cloud is a distinct population of icy bodies and is distinct from the Kuiper Belt.
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In fact, it s so expansive that it ends roughly halfway between us and the next star.
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Its edge is just dictated by
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to what extent does the solar gravity reach?
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Solar gravity reaches that far.
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Yeah.
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So it has to.
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Wow.
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Yeah.
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In fact, imagining this is a little bit overwhelming.
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So there s like a giant, like vast
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icy rock thingy.
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It s like a sphere.
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It s like, you know, it s like it s almost spherical structure that engulfs, that encircles the sun.
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And all the long period comets come from the Oort cloud.
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They come the way that they appear.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean,
1
SPEAKER_01
for already, I don t know, hundreds of years, we ve been detecting occasionally a comet will come in and it seemingly comes out of nowhere.
1
SPEAKER_01
The reason these long-period comets appear on very, very long timescales, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
these Oort cloud objects that are sitting, you know, 30,000 times as far away from the sun as is the earth actually interact with the gravity of the galaxy, the tide, effectively the tide that the galaxy exerts upon them and their orbits slowly change and they elongate.
1
SPEAKER_01
to the point where once their closest approach to the sun starts to reach a critical distance where ice starts to sublimate, then we discover them as comets because then the ice comes off of them.
1
SPEAKER_01
They look beautiful in the night sky, et cetera.
1
SPEAKER_01
But they re all coming from really, really far away.
1
SPEAKER_00
So is there, are any of them coming our way from collisions?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like how many collisions are there?
1
SPEAKER_00
Or is there a bunch of space for them to move around?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there s zero.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s completely collisionless.
1
SPEAKER_01
Out there, the physical radii of objects are so small compared to the distance between them, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
It s just...
1
SPEAKER_01
It is truly a collision-less environment.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think that probably in the age of the solar system, there have literally been zero collisions in the Oort cloud.
1
SPEAKER_00
Wow.
1
SPEAKER_00
When you like draw a picture of the solar system, everything s really close together.
1
SPEAKER_00
So everything I guess here is spaced far apart.
1
SPEAKER_00
Do rogue planets like fly in every once in a while and join?
1
SPEAKER_00
Not rogue planets, but rogue objects from out there.
1
SPEAKER_01
Oh, sure.
1
SPEAKER_00
Oh, sure.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Join the party?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely.
1
SPEAKER_01
We ve seen a couple of them in the last three or so years, maybe four years now.
1
SPEAKER_01
One, the first one, was the one called Oua Moua Moua.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s been
1
SPEAKER_01
All over the news, the second one was Comet Borisov discovered by a guy named Borisov.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so the way you know they re coming from elsewhere is unlike solar system objects, which travel on elliptical paths around the sun, these guys travel on hyperbolic paths.
1
SPEAKER_01
So they come in, say hello, and then they re gone.
1
SPEAKER_01
And the fact that they exist is
1
SPEAKER_01
totally not surprising, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
Neptune is constantly ejecting Kuiper belt objects into interstellar space.
1
SPEAKER_01
Our solar system itself is sort of leaking icy debris and ejecting it.
1
SPEAKER_01
So, presumably planetary systems around other stars do exactly the same thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
Let me ask you about the millions of objects that are part of the Kuiper Belt and part of the Oort Cloud.
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you think some of them have primitive life?
1
SPEAKER_00
It kind of makes you sad if there s primitive life there and they re just kind of lonely out there in space.
1
SPEAKER_00
How many of them do you think have life, like bacterial life?
1
SPEAKER_01
Probably a negligible amount.
1
SPEAKER_01
Zero with a plus on top.
1
SPEAKER_01
Zero plus plus.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, if you and I took a little trip to the interstellar medium, I think we would develop cancer and die real fast, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
It s rough.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a pretty hostile radiation environment.
1
SPEAKER_01
You don t actually have to go to the interstellar medium, you just have to leave the Earth s magnetic field to, and then you re not doing so well suddenly.
1
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, this idea of, you know, life
1
SPEAKER_01
kind of traveling between places.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s not entirely implausible, but you really have to twist, I think, a lot of parameters.
1
SPEAKER_01
One of the problems we have is we don t actually know how life originates, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
So, it s kind of a second-order question of survival in the interstellar medium and how resilient it is because we
1
SPEAKER_01
We think you require water, and that s certainly the case for the Earth.
1
SPEAKER_01
But, you know, we really don t know for sure.
1
SPEAKER_01
That said, I will argue that the question of, like, are there aliens out there is a very boring question because the answer is, of course, there are.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, like, we know that
1
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there are planets around almost every star.
1
SPEAKER_01
Of course there are other life forms.
1
SPEAKER_01
Life is not some specific thing that happened on the Earth and that s it, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
That s a statistical impossibility.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, but the difficult question is, before even the fact that we don t know how life originates, I don t think we even know what life is, like definitionally.
1
SPEAKER_00
Like formalizing a kind of picture of,
1
SPEAKER_00
in terms of the mechanism we would use to search for life out there, or even when we re on a planet, to say, is this life?
1
SPEAKER_00
Is this rock that just moved from where it was yesterday life?
1
SPEAKER_00
Or maybe not even a rock, something else.
1
SPEAKER_00
I gotta tell you, I wanna know what life is, okay?
1
SPEAKER_00
And I want you to show me.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think there s a song to basically accompany every single thing we talk about today, and probably half of them are love songs.
1
SPEAKER_00
And somehow we ll integrate George Michael into the whole thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so your intuition is there s life everywhere in our universe.
1
SPEAKER_00
Do you think there s intelligent life out there?
1
SPEAKER_01
I think it s entirely plausible.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s entirely plausible.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think there s intelligent life on Earth.
1
SPEAKER_00
And... So yeah, taking that, like say, whatever this thing we got on Earth, whether it s dolphins or humans, say that s intelligent.
1
SPEAKER_01
Definitely dolphins.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, have you seen the dolphins?
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, they do some cruel stuff to each other.
1
SPEAKER_00
So if cruelty is a definition of intelligence, they re pretty good.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then humans are pretty good in that regard.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then there s like, pigs are very intelligent.
1
SPEAKER_00
I actually had a chance to hang out with pigs recently.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they re, aside from the fact they were trying to eat me, they re very,
1
SPEAKER_00
They re very, they love food, they love food, but there s an intelligence to their eyes that was kind of, like haunts me, because I also love to eat meat.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then to meet the thing I later ate, and it was very intelligent and almost charismatic with the way it was expressing himself, herself, itself, was quite incredible.
1
SPEAKER_00
So all that to say is if we have intelligent life here on Earth, if we take dolphins, pigs, humans, from the perspective of planetary science, how unique is Earth?
1
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so Earth is not a common outcome of the planet formation process.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s probably something on the order of maybe a 1% effect.
1
SPEAKER_01
And by Earth, I mean not just an Earth-mass planet, OK?
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean the architecture of the solar system that allows the Earth to exist in its kind of very temperate way.
1
SPEAKER_01
One thing to understand, and this is pretty crucial, right, is that the Earth itself formed well after the gas disk that formed the giant planets had already dissipated.
1
SPEAKER_01
You see, stars start out with, you know, the star and then a disk of gas and dust that encircles it, okay?
1
SPEAKER_01
From this
1
SPEAKER_01
disk of gas and dust, big planets can emerge.
1
SPEAKER_01
And we have, over the last two, three decades, discovered thousands of extrasolar planets, planets in orbit of other stars.
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SPEAKER_01
What we see is that many of them have these expansive hydrogen-helium atmospheres.
1
SPEAKER_01
The fact that the Earth doesn t
1
SPEAKER_01
is deeply connected to the fact that Earth took about 100 million years to form.
1
SPEAKER_01
So we missed that train, so to speak, to get that hydrogen helium atmosphere.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s why actually we can see the sky, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
That s why the sky is, well, at least in most places, that s why the atmosphere is not completely opaque.
1
SPEAKER_01
With that kind of thinking in mind, I would,
1
SPEAKER_01
argue that we re getting the kind of emergent pictures that the Earth is not everywhere, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
There s sort of the sci-fi view of things where we go to some other star and we just land on random planets and they re all Earth-like.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s totally not true.
1
SPEAKER_01
The even a low probability event, even if you imagine that Earth is a one in a million or one in a, you know, one in 10 million occurrence, there are 10 to the 12 stars in the galaxy.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you always win by supply.
1
SPEAKER_00
They save you.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, you ve hypothesized that our solar system once possessed a population of short-period planets that were destroyed by the evil Jupiter migrating through the solar nebula.
1
SPEAKER_00
Can you explain?
1
SPEAKER_01
If I was to say what was the key outcome of searches for extrasolar planets, it is that most stars are encircled by short-period planets that are a few Earth masses, so a few times bigger than the Earth.
1
SPEAKER_01
and have orbital periods that kind of range from days to weeks.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, if you go and ask the solar system what s in our region, right, in that region, it s completely empty, right?
1
SPEAKER_01
It s just, it s astonishingly hollow.
1
SPEAKER_01
And think, you know, from the
1
SPEAKER_01
The sun is not some special star that decided that it was going to form the solar system.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I think the natural thing to assume is that the same processes of planet formation that occurred everywhere else also occurred in the solar system.
1
SPEAKER_01
following this logic, it s not implausible to imagine that the solar system once possessed a system of intra-Mercurian, like, you know, compact system of planets.
1
SPEAKER_01
So then we asked ourselves, would such a system survive to this day?
1
SPEAKER_01
And the answer is no.
1
SPEAKER_01
At least our calculations suggest it s highly unlikely because of the formation of Jupiter.
1
SPEAKER_01
And Jupiter s primordial kind of wandering through the solar system would have sent this collisional field of debris that would have pushed that system of planets onto the sun.
1
SPEAKER_00
So was Jupiter, this primordial wandering, what did Jupiter look like?
1
SPEAKER_00
Why was it wandering?
1
SPEAKER_01
It didn t have the orbit it has today?
1
SPEAKER_01
We re pretty certain that giant planets like Jupiter, when they form, they migrate.
1
SPEAKER_01
The reason they migrate is, on a detailed level, perhaps difficult to explain, but just in a qualitative sense, they form,
1
SPEAKER_01
in this fluid disk of gas and dust.
1
SPEAKER_01
So, it s kind of like if I plop down a raft somewhere in the ocean, will it stay where you plop it down or will it kind of get carried around?
1
SPEAKER_01
It s not really a good analogy because it s not like Jupiter is being advected by the currents of gas and dust.
1
SPEAKER_01
But the way it
1
SPEAKER_01
it migrates as it carves out a hole in the disk, and then by interacting with the disk gravitationally, it can change its orbit.
1
SPEAKER_01
The fact that the solar system has both Jupiter and Saturn here complicates things a lot, because you have to solve the problem of the evolution of the gas disk, the evolution of Jupiter s orbit in the gas disk, plus evolution of Saturn s and their mutual interaction.
1
SPEAKER_01
The common outcome of solving that problem though is pretty easy to explain.
1
SPEAKER_01
Jupiter forms, its orbit shrinks, and then once Saturn forms, its orbit catches up basically to the orbit of Jupiter and then both come out.
1
SPEAKER_01
So, there s this inward-outward pattern of Jupiter s early motion that happens sort of within the last million years of the lifetime of the solar system s primordial disk.
1
SPEAKER_01
So, while this is happening, if our calculations are correct, which I think they are, you can destroy this inner system of, you know,
2
SPEAKER_01
few Earth-mass planets.
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SPEAKER_01
And then, in the aftermath of all this violence, you form the terrestrial planets.
2
SPEAKER_00
Where would they come from in that case?
2
SPEAKER_00
So Jupiter clears out the space, and then there s a few terrestrial planets that come in, and those come in from the disk somewhere, like one of the larger?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, what actually happens in these calculations is you leave behind a rather mass-depleted remnant disk, only a couple Earth masses.
2
SPEAKER_01
So then from that remnant population, an annulus of material, over 100 million years, by just collisions, you grow the Earth and the Moon and everything else.
2
SPEAKER_00
You said annulus?
2
SPEAKER_01
Annulus.
2
SPEAKER_00
Annulus.
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SPEAKER_00
Annulus, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s a beautiful word, what does that mean?
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s like a disc that s kind of thin.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like a, yeah, it s something that is, you know, a disc that s so thin it s almost flirting with being a ring.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, I was gonna say this reminds me of Lord of the Rings.
2
SPEAKER_00
The word just feels like it belongs in a Tolkien novel.
2
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so that s incredible.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so that, in your senses, you said like 1%, that s a rare.
2
SPEAKER_00
The way Jupiter and Saturn danced and cleared out the short period debris and then changed the gravitational landscape, that s a pretty rare thing too.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s rare, and moreover, you don t even have to go to our calculations.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can just ask the night sky, how many stars have Jupiter and Saturn analogs?
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SPEAKER_01
And the answer is, Jupiter and Saturn analogs are found around only 10% of sun-like stars.
2
SPEAKER_01
So they themselves, you kind of have to score an A minus or better on the planet formation test to become
2
SPEAKER_01
a solar system analog even in that basic sense.
2
SPEAKER_01
And moreover, you know, lower mass stars, which are very numerous in the galaxy, so-called M dwarfs, think like 0% of them, well, maybe like
2
SPEAKER_01
Some negligible fraction of them have giant planets.
2
SPEAKER_01
Giant planets are a rare outcome of planet formation.
2
SPEAKER_01
One of the really big problems that remain unanswered is why.
2
SPEAKER_01
We don t actually understand why they re so rare.
2
SPEAKER_00
how hard is it to simulate all of the things that we ve been talking about, each of the things we ve been talking about, and maybe one day all of the things we ve been talking about and beyond.
2
SPEAKER_00
Meaning, like from the initial primordial solar system, you know, a bunch of disks with
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t know, billions, trillions of objects in them, like simulate that such that you eventually get a Jupiter and a Saturn, and then eventually you get the Jupiter and the Saturn that clear out a disk, change the gravitational landscape, then Earth pops up, like that whole thing, and then be able to do that for every other system in the, every other star in the galaxy, and then be able to do that for other galaxies as well.
2
SPEAKER_00
Maybe start from the smallest simulation.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like what is actually being done today?
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, even the smallest simulation is probably super, super difficult.
2
SPEAKER_00
Even just like one object in the Kuiper belt is probably super difficult to simulate.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I think it s super easy.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, like, it s just not that hard.
2
SPEAKER_01
But, you know, let s ask the most kind of basic problem, okay?
2
SPEAKER_01
So, the problem of having a star and something in orbit of it, that you don t need a simulation for, like, you can just write that down on a piece of paper.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s gravity, like, yeah, I guess it s important to try to,
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, one way to simulate objects in our solar system is to build the universe from scratch.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, we ll get to building the universe from scratch in a sec, but let me just kind of go through the hierarchy of what, you know, what we do.
2
SPEAKER_01
Two objects.
2
SPEAKER_01
Two objects, analytically solvable, like we can figure it out very easily if you just, I don t think you, yeah, you don t need to know calculus.
2
SPEAKER_01
It helps to know calculus, but you don t necessarily need to know calculus.
2
SPEAKER_01
three objects that are gravitationally interacting, the solution is chaotic.
2
SPEAKER_01
Doesn t matter how many simulations you do, the answer loses meaning after some time.
2
SPEAKER_00
I feel like that is a metaphor for dating as well, but go on.
2
SPEAKER_01
I apologize.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
So,
2
SPEAKER_01
The fact that you go from analytically solvable to unpredictable, when your simulation goes from two bodies to three bodies, should immediately tell you that the exercise of trying to engineer a calculation where you form the entire solar system from scratch and hope to have some predictive answer is a futile one.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right, we will never succeed at such a simulation.
2
SPEAKER_00
So like I said, just to clarify, you mean like explicitly having a clear equation that generalizes the whole process enough to be able to make a prediction?
2
SPEAKER_00
Or do you mean actually like literally simulating the objects as a hopeless pursuit once it increases beyond three?
2
SPEAKER_01
The simulating them is not a hopeless pursuit, but the outcome becomes a statistical one.
2
SPEAKER_01
What s actually quite interesting is I think we have
2
SPEAKER_01
all the equations figured out, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Like, you know, in order to really understand this, the formation of the solar system, it suffices to know gravity and magnetohydrodynamics.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, like the combination of Maxwell s equations and
2
SPEAKER_01
you know, Navier-Stokes equations for the fluids, you need to know quantum mechanics to understand opacities and so on.
2
SPEAKER_01
But we have those equations in hand.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s not that we don t have that understanding, it s that putting it all together is A, very, very difficult, and B, if you were to run the same evolution twice,
2
SPEAKER_01
changing the initial conditions by some infinitesimal amount, some minor change in your calculation to start with, you d get a different answer.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is part of the reason why planetary systems are so diverse.
2
SPEAKER_01
You don t
2
SPEAKER_01
have like a very predictive path for you start with a disk of this mass and it s around this star, therefore you re gonna form the solar system, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
You start with this and therefore you will form this huge set of outcomes and some percentage of it will resemble the solar system.
2
SPEAKER_00
You mentioned quantum mechanics and we re talking about
2
SPEAKER_00
cosmic scale objects.
2
SPEAKER_00
You ve talked about that the evolution of astrophysical disks can be modeled with Schrodinger s equation.
2
SPEAKER_00
I sure did.
2
SPEAKER_00
Why?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like how does quantum mechanics become relevant when you consider the evolution of objects in the solar system?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, well let me take a step back and just say it.
2
SPEAKER_01
I remember being,
2
SPEAKER_01
you know, utterly confused by quantum mechanics when I first learned it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the Schrodinger equation, which is kind of the parent equation of that whole field, you know, seems to come out of nowhere, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
The way that I was sort of explaining it, I remember asking, you know, my professor, I was like, but where does it come from?
2
SPEAKER_01
He s like, well, just like, don t worry about it and just like calculate the hydrogen, you know, energy levels, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
So, it s like I could do all the problems, I just did not have any intuition for where this parent super important equation came from.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, down the line, I remember I was preparing for my own lecture and I was trying to understand how waves travel in self-gravitating disks.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, again, there s a very broad theory that s already developed, but I was looking for some simpler way to explain it really for the purposes of teaching class.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so I thought, okay, what if I just imagine a disc as an infinite number of concentric circles, right, that interact with each other gravitationally?
2
SPEAKER_01
That s a problem in some sense that I can solve using methods from like the late 1700s.
2
SPEAKER_01
I can write down Hamiltonian.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, I can write down the energy function basically of their interactions.
2
SPEAKER_01
And what I
2
SPEAKER_01
found is that when you take the continuum limit, when you go from discrete circles that are talking to each other gravitationally to a continuum disc, suddenly this gravitational interaction among them, right, the governing equation becomes the Schrodinger equation.
2
SPEAKER_01
I had to think about that for a little bit.
2
SPEAKER_01
Did you just unify quantum mechanics and gravity?
2
SPEAKER_01
No.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is not the same thing as like fusing relativity and quantum mechanics.
2
SPEAKER_01
It did get me thinking a little bit.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, the fact that waves in astrophysical disks behave just like wave functions of particles is kind of like an interesting analogy because for me, it s easier to imagine waves traveling through, you know,
2
SPEAKER_01
astrophysical disks are really just sheets of paper.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the reason that analogy exists is because there s actually nothing quantum about the Schrodinger equation.
2
SPEAKER_01
The Schrodinger equation is just a wave equation, and all of the interpretation that comes from it is
2
SPEAKER_01
quantum, but the equation itself is not a quantum being.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you can use it to model waves.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s not turtles, it s waves all the way down.
2
SPEAKER_00
You can pick which level you pick the wave at.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it could be at the solar system level that you can use it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right.
2
SPEAKER_01
And also it actually provides a pretty neat calculational tool because it s difficult.
2
SPEAKER_01
So we just talked about simulations, but it s difficult to simulate the behavior of astrophysical disks on timescales that are in between a few orbits and their entire evolution.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it s over a timescale of a few orbits, you do a hydrodynamic simulation, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
You do,
2
SPEAKER_01
Basically, that s something that you can do on a modern computer on a time scale of, say, a week.
2
SPEAKER_01
When it comes to their evolution over their entire lifetime, you don t hope to resolve the orbits, you just kind of hope to understand how the system behaves.
2
SPEAKER_01
In between, to get access to that, as it turns out, it s pretty cute.
2
SPEAKER_01
You can use the Schrodinger equation to get the answer rapidly, so it s a calculational tool.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s fascinating.
2
SPEAKER_00
By the way, astrophysical disks, what are they?
2
SPEAKER_00
How broad is this definition?
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so astrophysical disks span a huge, huge amount of ranges.
2
SPEAKER_01
They start maybe at the smallest scale.
2
SPEAKER_01
They start with actually Kuiper belt objects.
2
SPEAKER_01
Some Kuiper belt objects have rings.
2
SPEAKER_01
So that s maybe the smallest example of an astrophysical disk.
2
SPEAKER_01
You ve got this little potato-shaped asteroid, you know, which is, you know,
2
SPEAKER_01
sort of the size of LA or something, and around it are some rings of icy matter.
2
SPEAKER_01
That object is a small astrophysical disk.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then you have Saturn, the rings of Saturn.
2
SPEAKER_01
You have the next set of scale.
2
SPEAKER_01
You have the solar system itself when it was forming.
2
SPEAKER_01
You have a disk.
2
SPEAKER_01
Then you have black hole disks.
2
SPEAKER_01
You have galaxies.
2
SPEAKER_01
Disks are super common in the universe.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the reason is that stuff rotates.
2
SPEAKER_00
Gravity works.
2
SPEAKER_00
And those rings could be the material that composes those rings, it could be gas, it could be solid, it could be anything.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s right, so the disk that made from which the planets emerged was predominantly hydrogen and helium gas.
2
SPEAKER_01
On the other hand, the rings of Saturn are made up of icicle, little like
2
SPEAKER_01
ice cubes this big, about a centimeter across.
2
SPEAKER_00
That sounds refreshing.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s incredible, hydrogen and helium gas.
2
SPEAKER_00
So in the beginning, it was just hydrogen and helium around the sun.
2
SPEAKER_00
How does that lead to the first formations of solid objects in terms of simulation?
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, here s the story.
2
SPEAKER_01
So you re like, have you ever been to the desert?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, I ve been to the Death Valley and actually it was terrifying, just a total tangent, I m distracting you, but I was driving through it and I was really surprised because it was at first hot and then as it was getting into the evening, there s this huge thunderstorm, like it was raining and it got freezing cold, like what the hell, it was the apocalypse.
2
SPEAKER_00
I had to like just sit there listening to Bruce Springsteen, I remember, and just thinking I m probably going to die and I was okay with it because Bruce Springsteen was on the radio.
2
SPEAKER_01
Look, when you ve got the boss, you know, you re ready to meet the boss.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, look, I mean... That s a good line.
2
SPEAKER_01
So, anyway, sorry.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s true.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, by the way, like to continue on this tangent, I absolutely love the Southwest for this reason, just
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, during the pandemic, I drove from LA to New Mexico a bunch of times.
2
SPEAKER_01
The madness of weather.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the chaos of weather.
2
SPEAKER_01
The fact that, you know, it will be blazing hot one minute and then it s just like, we ll decide to have a little thunderstorm.
2
SPEAKER_01
Maybe we ll decide to go back momentarily to like a thousand degrees and then go back to the thunderstorm.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s amazing.
2
SPEAKER_01
That, by the way, is chaos theory in action.
2
SPEAKER_01
But let s get back to talking about the desert.
2
SPEAKER_01
So in the desert, tumbleweeds have a tendency to roll because the wind rolls them.
2
SPEAKER_01
And if you re careful, you ll occasionally see this family of tumbleweeds where there s a big one,
2
SPEAKER_01
And then a bunch of little ones that kind of hide in its wake, right, and are all rolling together and almost looks like, you know, a family of ducks crossing a street or something.
2
SPEAKER_01
Or, for example, you know, if you watch Tour de France, right, you ve got a whole bunch of cyclists and they re like cycling, you know, within 10 centimeters of each other.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re not BFFs, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Trying to write together.
2
SPEAKER_01
They are writing together to minimize the collective air resistance, if you will, that they experience.
2
SPEAKER_01
Turns out solids in the protoplanetary disk do just this.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s an instability wherein
2
SPEAKER_01
solid particles, things that are a centimeter across, will start to hide behind one another and form these clouds.
2
SPEAKER_01
Why?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because cumulatively, that minimizes the solid component of this aerodynamic interaction with the gas.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, these clouds, because they re kind of a favorable
2
SPEAKER_01
energetic condition for the dust to live in, they grow, grow, grow, grow, grow until they become so massive that they collapse under their own weight.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s how the first building blocks of planets form.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s how the big asteroids got there.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s incredible.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
So is that simulatable or is it not useful to simulate?
2
SPEAKER_01
No, no, that s simulatable.
2
SPEAKER_01
And people do these types of calculations.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s really cool.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s actually one of the many fields of planet formation theory that is really, really active right now.
2
SPEAKER_01
People are trying to understand all kinds of aspects of that process.
2
SPEAKER_01
Because, of course, I ve explained it as if there s one thing that happens.
2
SPEAKER_01
Turns out it s a beautifully rich dynamic.
2
SPEAKER_01
But qualitatively,
2
SPEAKER_01
formation of the first building blocks actually follows the same sequence as formation of stars, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Stars are just clouds of gas, hydrogen helium gas that sit in space and slowly cool and at some point they, you know,
2
SPEAKER_01
contract to a point where their gravity overtakes the thermal pressure support, if you will, and they collapse under their own weight, and you get a little baby solar system.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s amazing.
2
SPEAKER_00
So do you think one day it ll be possible to simulate the full history that took our solar system to what it is today?
2
SPEAKER_01
Yes, and it will be useless.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay?
2
SPEAKER_00
So you don t think your story, many of the ideas that you have about Jupiter clearing the space, like retelling that story in high resolution is not that important?
2
SPEAKER_01
I actually think it s important, but at every stage you have to,
2
SPEAKER_01
you have to design your experiments, your numerical computer experiments so that they test some specific aspect of that evolution.
2
SPEAKER_01
I am not a proponent of doing huge simulations because even if we forget the information theory aspect of not being able to simulate in full detail the universe because if you do,
2
SPEAKER_01
then you have made an actual universe, it s not a simulation.
2
SPEAKER_01
Simulation is in some sense a compression of information, so therefore you must lose detail.
2
SPEAKER_01
But that point aside,
2
SPEAKER_01
If we are able to simulate the entire history of the solar system in excruciating detail, I mean, it ll be cool, but it s not gonna be any different from observing it, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because theoretical understanding, which is what ultimately I m interested in, comes from taking complex things and reducing them down to something
3
SPEAKER_00
that some mechanism that you can actually quantify.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the fun part of astrophysics.
3
SPEAKER_00
Just kind of simulating things in extreme detail is, we ll make cool visualizations, but that doesn t get you to any better understanding than you had before you did the simulation.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you ask very specific questions, then you ll be able to create
3
SPEAKER_01
like very highly compressed, nice, beautiful theories about how things evolved.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then you can use those to then generalize to other solar systems, to other stars and other galaxies and say something generalizable about the entire universe.
3
SPEAKER_01
How difficult would it be to simulate our solar system such that we would not know the difference?
3
SPEAKER_01
meaning if we are living in a simulation, is there a nice, think of it as a video game, is there a nice compressible way of doing that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Or just kind of like you intuited with a three body situation, is just a giant mess that you cannot create a video game that will seem realistic without actually building it from scratch.
3
SPEAKER_00
I m speculating, but...
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I know you have a deep understanding of this, but for me, I m just going to speculate that for at least in the types of simulations that we can do today, inevitably, you run into the problem of resolution, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t matter what you re doing, it is discrete.
3
SPEAKER_00
The way you would go about asking, you know, what we re observing, is that a simulation or is that, you know, some real continuous thing, is you zoom in, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
You zoom in and try and find the, you know, the grid scale, if you will.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a really interesting question.
3
SPEAKER_00
And because the solar system itself and really, you know, the double pendulum is chaotic, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Pendulum sitting on another pendulum moves unpredictably once you let them go.
3
SPEAKER_00
You really don t need to like inject any randomness into a simulation for it to give you stochastic and unpredictable answers.
3
SPEAKER_00
Weather is a great example of this.
3
SPEAKER_00
Weather has a lapen of time of, you know, typical weather systems have a lapen of time of a few days.
3
SPEAKER_00
And there s a fundamental reason why the forecast always sucks, you know, two weeks in advance.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s not that we don t know the equations that govern the atmosphere.
3
SPEAKER_00
We know them well.
3
SPEAKER_00
Their solutions are meaningless though, after a few days.
3
SPEAKER_01
the zooming in thing is very interesting.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think about this a lot, whether there ll be a time soon where we would want to stay in video game worlds, whether it s virtual reality or just playing video games.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think that time came in the 90s, and it s been that time.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s not just came, I mean, it s accelerated.
3
SPEAKER_01
I just recently saw that Wow and Fortnite were played 140 billion hours.
3
SPEAKER_01
And those are just video games.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s like increasing very, very quickly, especially with the people coming up now and being born now and becoming teenagers and so on.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s have a thought experiment where it s just you and a video game character inside a room.
3
SPEAKER_01
When you remove the simulation, they need to simulate sort of a lot of objects.
3
SPEAKER_01
If it s just you and that character,
3
SPEAKER_01
how far do you need to simulate in terms of zooming in for it to be very real to you?
3
SPEAKER_01
As real as reality.
3
SPEAKER_01
So like, first of all, you kind of mentioned zooming in, which is fascinating because we have these tools of science that allow us to zoom in, quote unquote, in all kinds of ways in the world around us.
3
SPEAKER_01
But our cognitive abilities, like our perception system as humans, is very limited in terms of zooming in.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we might be very easily fooled.
3
SPEAKER_00
Some of the video games,
3
SPEAKER_00
like on the PS4 look pretty real to me.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think you would really have to interrogate.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think even with what we have today, like, I don t know, Ace Combat 7 is a great example.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the way that the clouds are rendered,
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it looks just like when you re flying on a real airplane, the kind of transparency.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think that our perception is limited enough already to not be able to tell some of the
3
SPEAKER_00
some of the differences.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s a game called Skyrim.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s an Elder Scrolls role-playing game.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I just, I played it for quite a bit.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think I played it very different than others.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like there ll be long stretches of time where I would just walk around and look at nature in the game.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s incredible.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, sure.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s just like the graphics is like, wow, I want to stay there.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was better.
3
SPEAKER_01
I went hiking recently.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was like as good as hiking.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, look, I know what you mean.
3
SPEAKER_00
Not to go on a huge video game tangent, but the third Witcher game was astonishingly beautiful, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Especially playing on a good hardware machine.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was like, this is pretty legit.
3
SPEAKER_00
That said,
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t resonate with the I want to stay here.
3
SPEAKER_00
One of the things that I love to do is to go to my boxing gym and box with a guy.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s nothing quite like that physical experience.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s fascinating.
3
SPEAKER_01
That might be simply an artifact of the year you were born, maybe, because if you re born today, it almost seems like stupid to go to a gym.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Like you go to a gym to box with a guy.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why not box with Mike Tyson when you yourself is like in his prime, when you yourself are also an incredible boxer in the video game world?
3
SPEAKER_00
For me, they re
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a multitude of reasons why I don t want to box with Mike Tyson.
3
SPEAKER_00
I enjoy teeth and I want to have an ear.
3
SPEAKER_01
No, but your skills in this meat space, in this physical realm is very limited and takes a lot of work.
3
SPEAKER_01
you re a musician, you re an incredible scientist, you only have so much time in the day, but in the video game world, you can expand your capabilities in all kinds of dimensions that you can never have possibly have time in the physical world.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so that, it doesn t make sense to,
3
SPEAKER_01
to be existing, to be working your ass off in the physical world when you can just be super successful in the video game world.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I still... You enjoy sucking at stuff?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I really do.
3
SPEAKER_00
And struggling to get better?
3
SPEAKER_00
I sure do.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I think like these days with music, music is a great example, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
We just started, you know, practicing live with my band again, you know, after not playing for a year.
3
SPEAKER_00
And
3
SPEAKER_00
It was terrible.
3
SPEAKER_00
A lot of the nuance, a lot of the detail is just that detail that takes years of collective practice to develop.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just lost.
3
SPEAKER_00
But it was just an incredible amount of fun, way more fun than all the studio sitting around and playing that I did throughout the entire year.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, there s something intangible or maybe tangible about being in person.
3
SPEAKER_00
I sure hope you re wrong and that s not something that will get lost because I think there s such a large part of the human condition is
3
SPEAKER_00
to hang out.
3
SPEAKER_00
If we were doing this interview on Zoom, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I d already be bored out of my mind.
3
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s something to that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I m almost playing devil s advocate, but at the same time,
3
SPEAKER_01
I m sure people talk about the same way at the beginning of the 20th century about horses, where they are much more efficient, they re much easier to maintain than cars.
3
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t make sense to have all the ways that cars break down.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s not enough infrastructure in terms of roads for cars.
3
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t make any sense.
3
SPEAKER_01
Horses and nature, you could do the nature.
3
SPEAKER_01
you should be living more natural life, those are real.
3
SPEAKER_01
You don t want machines in your life that are going to pollute your mind and the minds of young people.
3
SPEAKER_01
But then eventually just cars took over.
3
SPEAKER_01
So in that same way, it just seems.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m going back to horses.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m just, you know.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, you can be, you can play, what is it, Red Dead.
3
SPEAKER_01
Red Dead Redemption, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Redemption, and you can ride horses in the video game world.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s true.
3
SPEAKER_01
So let me return us back to Planet Nine.
3
SPEAKER_00
Always a good place to come back to.
3
SPEAKER_01
So now that we did a big historical overview of our solar system, what is planet nine?
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_00
Planet nine is a hypothetical object that orbits the solar system, right, at an orbital period of about 10,000 years.
3
SPEAKER_00
And an orbit which is slightly tilted with respect to the plane of the solar system, slightly eccentric.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the object itself, we think is five times more massive than the Earth.
3
SPEAKER_00
We have never seen Planet Nine in a telescope.
3
SPEAKER_00
but we have gravitational evidence for it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so this is where all the stuff we ve been talking about, this clustering ideas, maybe you can speak to the approximate location that we suspect.
3
SPEAKER_01
And also the question I wanted to ask is, what are we supposed to be imagining here?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because you said there are certain objects in the Kuiper belt that kind of have a direction to them, that they re all like flocking in some kind of way.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that s a sense that there s some kind of gravitational object not changing their orbit, but kind of... Confining them, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like grouping their orbits together.
3
SPEAKER_00
See, what would happen if Planet 9 were not there is these orbits that roughly share a common orientation, they would just disperse, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
They would just become azimuthally symmetric, point everywhere.
3
SPEAKER_00
Planet 9 s gravity
3
SPEAKER_00
makes it such that these objects stay in a state that s basically anti-aligned with respect to the orbit of planet nine and sort of hang out there and kind of oscillate on a timescale of about a billion years.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s one of the lines of evidence for the existence of planet nine.
3
SPEAKER_00
There are others.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s the one that s easiest to maybe visualize just because it s fun to think about orbits that all point into the same direction.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I should emphasize that, for example,
3
SPEAKER_00
the existence of objects, again, Kuiper belt objects that are heavily out of the plane of the solar system, things that are tilted by, say, 90 degrees, that s not, we don t expect that as an outcome of planet formation.
3
SPEAKER_00
Indeed, planet formation simulations have never produced such objects without some extrinsic gravitational force.
3
SPEAKER_00
Planet Nine, on the other hand, generates them very readily.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, that provides kind of an alternative, you know,
3
SPEAKER_00
population of small bodies in the solar system that also get produced by Planet 9 through an independent kind of gravitational effect.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, there s basically five different things that Planet 9 does individually that are like kind of maybe a one-sigma effect where you d say, yeah, okay, if that s all it was, maybe it s no reason to jump up and down.
3
SPEAKER_00
But because
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a multitude of these puzzles that all are explained by one hypothesis.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s really the magnetism, the attraction of the Planet Nine model.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, can you just clarify?
3
SPEAKER_01
So, most planets in the solar system orbit approximately the same, so it s flat.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s like one degree.
3
SPEAKER_00
The difference between them is about one degree.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, but nevertheless, if we looked at our solar system, it would look, and I could see every single object, it would look like a sphere.
3
SPEAKER_00
The inner part, where the planets are, would look like, you know, flat, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
The Kuiper belt and the asteroid belt have a larger,
3
SPEAKER_00
It gets fatter and fatter and fatter until it becomes a sphere.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
3
SPEAKER_00
And if you look at the very outside, it s polluted by this quasi-spheroidal thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
Nobody s, of course, ever seen the Oort cloud, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
We ve only seen comets that come from the Oort cloud.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, the Oort cloud, which is this
3
SPEAKER_00
right, population of distant debris, its existence is also inferred.
3
SPEAKER_00
You could say alternatively, there is, you know, there s a big cosmic creature that occasionally, you know, sitting at 20,000 AU and occasionally throws an icy rock towards the sun like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Okay, I mean, so it s a mystery in many ways, but you can kind of infer a bunch of things about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s, by the way, both terrifying and exciting that there s this vast darkness all around us that s full of objects that they re just throwing.
3
SPEAKER_00
Just there, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s actually kind of astonishing, right, that we have only explored a small fraction of the solar system.
3
SPEAKER_00
right?
3
SPEAKER_00
That really kind of baffles me because, remember, as a student, you know, studying physics, you know, you do the problem where you put the Earth around the Sun, you solve that, and like it s one line of math, and you say, okay, well, that surely was figured out by Newton.
3
SPEAKER_00
So, like, all the interesting stuff is not in the solar system.
3
SPEAKER_00
But that
3
SPEAKER_00
It s just plainly not true.
3
SPEAKER_00
There are mysteries in the solar system that are remarkable that we are only now starting to just kind of scratch the surface of.
3
SPEAKER_01
And some of those objects probably have some information about the history of our solar system.
3
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely, absolutely.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like a great example is, you know, small meteorites, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
Small meteorites are melted, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
They re differentiated, meaning some of the,
3
SPEAKER_00
iron sinks to corn.
3
SPEAKER_00
You say, well, how can that be?
3
SPEAKER_00
Because they re so small that they wouldn t have melted just from the heat of their accretion.
3
SPEAKER_00
Turns out, the fact that the solar nebula, the disk that made the planets, was polluted by aluminum-26 is in itself a remarkable thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
It means the solar system did not form in isolation.
3
SPEAKER_00
It formed in a giant cloud of thousands of other stars that were also forming, some of which were undergoing, you know,
3
SPEAKER_00
going through supernova explosions some of and releasing these unstable isotopes that of which we now see kind of the traces of
3
SPEAKER_00
It s so cool.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you think it s possible that life from other solar systems was injected and that that was what was the origin of life on Earth?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the Panspermia idea.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s seen as a low probability event by people who studied the origin of life, but that s because then they would be out of a job.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, I don t think they d be out of the job, because you just then have to figure out how life started there.
3
SPEAKER_01
But then you have to go there.
3
SPEAKER_01
We can study life on Earth much easier.
3
SPEAKER_01
We can study it in the lab much easier, because we can replicate conditions that are from an early Earth much easier, from a chemistry perspective, from a biology perspective.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can intuit a bunch of stuff.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can look at different parts of Earth and just
3
SPEAKER_00
To an extent, I mean, the early Earth was completely unlike the current Earth, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
There was no oxygen.
3
SPEAKER_00
So one of my colleagues at Caltech, Joe Kirshnick, is certain, something like 100% certainty that life started on Mars and came to Earth on Martian meteorites.
3
SPEAKER_00
This is not a problem that
3
SPEAKER_00
I like to kind of think about too much, like the origin of life, it s a fascinating problem, but it s not physics, and I just don t love it.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s the same reason you don t love, I thought you re a musician, so music is not physics either, so why are you so into it?
3
SPEAKER_00
It s 100% physics.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, no, look, in all seriousness, though, there are a few things that I really, really enjoy.
3
SPEAKER_00
I genuinely enjoy physics.
3
SPEAKER_00
I genuinely enjoy music.
3
SPEAKER_00
I genuinely enjoy martial arts.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I genuinely enjoy my family.
3
SPEAKER_00
I should have said that all in a reverse order or something.
3
SPEAKER_00
But I like to focus on these things and not worry too much about everything else.
3
SPEAKER_00
You know what I mean?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
3
SPEAKER_00
Just because there is a, like,
3
SPEAKER_00
said earlier, there s a time constraint.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can t do it all.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s many mysteries all around us.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they re all beautiful in different ways.
3
SPEAKER_01
To me, that thing I love is artificial intelligence.
3
SPEAKER_01
Perhaps I love it because eventually I m trying to suck up to our future overlords.
3
SPEAKER_01
The question of, you said there s a lot of kind of little pieces of evidence for this thing that s planet nine.
3
SPEAKER_01
If we were to try to collect more evidence, or be certain, like a paper that says you drop it, clear, we re done, what does that require?
3
SPEAKER_01
Does that require us sending probes out, or do you think we can do it from telescopes here on Earth?
3
SPEAKER_01
What are the different ideas for conclusive evidence for Planet Nine?
3
SPEAKER_00
The moment Planet Nine gets imaged from a telescope on Earth, it s done, I mean, it s just there.
4
SPEAKER_00
Can you clarify, because you mentioned that before, from an image, would you be able to tell?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes, so from an image, the moment you see something, something that is reflecting sunlight back at you, and you know that it s hundreds of times as far away from the sun as is the earth,
4
SPEAKER_01
you re done.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you re thinking, so basically, if you have a really far away thing that s big, you know, five times the size of Earth, that means that s planet nine.
4
SPEAKER_00
That is planet nine.
4
SPEAKER_00
Could there be multiple objects like that, I guess?
4
SPEAKER_01
In principle, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s no,
4
SPEAKER_01
There s no law of physics that doesn t allow you to have multiple, there s also no evidence at present for there being multiple.
4
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if it s possible, just like we re finding exoplanets, whether given the size of the Oort cloud, there s basically, it s rarer and rarer, but there s sprinkled planet nine, 10, 11, 12, like these some.
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SPEAKER_00
Got 13.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it goes after that.
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SPEAKER_00
I can just keep counting.
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SPEAKER_00
So like just something about the dynamic system, like it becomes lower and lower probability event, but they gather up, like they become, would they become larger and larger maybe?
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SPEAKER_00
Something like that.
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SPEAKER_00
I wonder if like discovering planet nine will just like be almost like a springboard.
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SPEAKER_00
It s like, well, what s beyond that?
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SPEAKER_01
It s entirely plausible.
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SPEAKER_01
The Oort cloud itself probably holds about five Earth masses or seven Earth masses of material.
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SPEAKER_01
Right, so it s not nothing.
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SPEAKER_01
And it all ultimately comes down to at what point will the observational surveys sample enough of the solar system to kind of reveal interesting things?
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SPEAKER_01
There s a great analogy here with Neptune and the story of how Neptune was discovered.
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SPEAKER_01
Neptune was not discovered by looking at the sky, right?
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SPEAKER_01
It was discovered by, it was discovered mathematically, right?
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SPEAKER_01
So, yeah, the orbit of Uranus, when Uranus was found, yes, this was 1781, it s, they kind of,
4
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tracking of both the tracking of the orbit of Uranus as well as the reconstruction of the orbit of Uranus immediately revealed that it was not following the orbit that it was supposed to, right?
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The predicted orbit deviated away from where it actually was.
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So, in the mid-1800s, right, a French mathematician by the name of Orban Le Verrier did a
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beautifully sophisticated calculation which said, if this is due to gravity of a more distant planet, then that planet is there.
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And then they found it.
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SPEAKER_01
But the point is the understanding of where to look for Neptune came entirely out of celestial mechanics.
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The case with planet nine is a little bit different because what we can do, I think, relatively well is predict the orbit and mass of planet nine.
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SPEAKER_01
We cannot tell you where it is on its orbit.
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SPEAKER_01
The reason is we haven t seen the Kuiper belt objects complete an orbit, their own orbit.
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even once, because it takes 4,000 years.
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SPEAKER_01
But, you know, I plan to live on as an AI being, and I ll be tracking those orbits as, you know, four.
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SPEAKER_00
It only takes four or 5,000 years.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, it doesn t have to be AI, it could be longevity, there s a lot of really exciting genetic engineering research.
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SPEAKER_00
So, you ll just be a brain waiting for the, your brain waiting for the orbit to complete for the basic Kuiper belt objects.
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SPEAKER_01
That s right, that s like,
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kind of the worst reason to want to live a long time, right?
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SPEAKER_01
Just like, can the brain like smoke a cigarette?
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SPEAKER_01
Can you just light one up while you re waiting?
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SPEAKER_00
But you re making me actually realize that
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The one way to explore the galaxy is by just sitting here on earth and waiting.
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SPEAKER_00
So if we can just get really good at waiting, it s like a muamua or these interstellar objects that fly in, you can just wait for them to come to you.
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SPEAKER_00
Same with the aliens, you can wait for them to come to you.
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SPEAKER_00
If you get really good at waiting,
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then that s one way to do the exploration, because eventually the thing will come to you.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe the intelligent alien civilizations get much better at waiting, and so they all decide, so game theoretically, to start waiting, and it s just a bunch of ancient intelligent civilizations of aliens all throughout the universe, they re just sitting there waiting for each other.
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SPEAKER_01
Look, you can t just be good at waiting, you gotta know how to chill.
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SPEAKER_01
Like you can t just like sit around and do nothing.
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SPEAKER_01
You gotta be, you gotta know how to chill.
4
SPEAKER_00
I honestly think that as we progress, if the aliens are anything like us, we enjoy loving things we do and it s very possible that we just figure out mechanisms
4
SPEAKER_00
here on Earth to enjoy our life and we just stay here on Earth forever, that exploration becomes less and less of an interesting thing to do.
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SPEAKER_00
And so you basically, yes, wait and chill.
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SPEAKER_00
You get really optimally good at chilling and thereby exploring is not that interesting.
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SPEAKER_00
So in terms of 4,000 years, it would be nothing for scientists.
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SPEAKER_00
We ll be chilling and just all kinds of scientific explorations will become possible because we ll just be here on Earth.
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SPEAKER_01
So chill.
4
SPEAKER_00
You have a paper out recently, because you already mentioned some of these ideas, but I d love it if you could dig into it a little bit.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, of course.
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SPEAKER_00
The injection of inner Oort cloud objects into the distant Kuiper belt by Planet 9.
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SPEAKER_00
What is this idea of Planet 9 injecting objects into the Kuiper belt?
4
SPEAKER_01
Okay, let me take a brief step back and when we do calculations of planet nine, when we do the simulations, as far as our simulations are concerned, sort of the
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SPEAKER_01
Neptune, the trans-Neptunian solar system is entirely sourced from the inside.
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SPEAKER_01
Namely, the Kuiper belt gets scattered by Neptune and then Planet 9 does things to it and aligns the orbits and so on.
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SPEAKER_01
Then we calculate what happens on the lifetime of the solar system, yada, yada, yada.
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SPEAKER_01
During the pandemic, one of the kind of questions we asked ourselves, and this is indeed something Mike Brown, who s a partner in crime on this, and I do regularly, is we say, how can we
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SPEAKER_01
A, disprove ourselves, and B, how can we improve our simulations?
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Like, what s missing?
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SPEAKER_01
And one idea that maybe should have been obvious in retrospect is that all of our simulations treated the solar system as some isolated creature, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
But the solar system did not form in isolation, right?
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SPEAKER_01
It formed in this cluster of stars.
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And during that phase of forming together with thousands of other stars, we believe
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solar system formed this almost spherical population of icy debris that sits maybe at a few thousand times the separation between the earth and the sun maybe even a little bit closer if planet nine s not there
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that population is completely dormant.
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SPEAKER_01
And these objects just slowly orbit the sun, nothing interesting happens to them ever.
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SPEAKER_01
But what we realized is that if planet nine is there, planet nine can actually grab some of those objects and gravitationally re-inject them into the distant solar system.
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SPEAKER_01
So we thought, okay, let s look into this with numerical experiments.
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Do our simulations, does this process work?
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SPEAKER_01
And if it works,
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what are its consequences?
4
SPEAKER_01
So, it turns out, indeed, not only does Planet 9 inject these distant inner Oort cloud objects into the Kuiper belt, they follow roughly the same pathway as the objects that are being scattered out.
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SPEAKER_01
So, there s this
4
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kind of river, two-way river of material.
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SPEAKER_01
Some of it is coming out from, you know, by Neptune scattering, some of it is moving in.
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SPEAKER_01
And if you work through the numbers, you kind of, at the end of the day, that it has an effect on the best fit orbit for planet nine itself.
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SPEAKER_01
So, if you realize that the data set that we re observing is not entirely composed of things that came out of the solar system, but also things that got re-injected back in,
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SPEAKER_01
then turns out the best fit Planet 9 is slightly more eccentric.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s kind of getting into the weeds.
4
SPEAKER_01
The point here is that the existence of Planet 9 itself provides this natural bridge that connects an otherwise dormant population of icy debris of the solar system with things that we re starting to directly observe.
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SPEAKER_00
so it s not just a river flowing one way, it s maybe a smaller stream going back.
4
SPEAKER_00
You want to backwash, you want to incorporate that into the simulations, into your understanding of those distant objects when you re trying to make sense of the various observations and so on.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s fascinating.
4
SPEAKER_00
I gotta ask you, some people think that many of the observations that you re describing could be described by a primordial black hole.
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SPEAKER_00
First, what is a primordial black hole and what do you think about this idea?
4
SPEAKER_01
So a primordial black hole is a black hole which is made not through the usual pathway of making a black hole,
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SPEAKER_01
which is that you have a star, which is more massive than, you know, 1.4 or so solar masses.
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SPEAKER_01
And basically, when it runs out of fuel, runs out of its nuclear fusion fuel, it can t hold itself up anymore.
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SPEAKER_01
And just the whole thing collapses on itself, right?
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SPEAKER_01
And you create a
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, one, I guess, simple way to think about it is you create an object with zero radius that has mass but zero radius, singularity.
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SPEAKER_01
Now, such black holes exist all over the place in the galaxy.
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SPEAKER_01
There s, in fact, a really big one at the center of the galaxy.
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SPEAKER_01
That one s always looking at you when you re not looking.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s always talking about you.
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SPEAKER_01
And when you turn off the lights, it wakes up.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s right.
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SPEAKER_01
But you know, so such black holes are all over the place.
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When they merge, we get to see, you know, incredible gravitational waves that they emit, etc, etc.
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SPEAKER_01
One kind of plausible scenario, however, is that when the universe was forming, basically during the Big Bang,
4
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you created a whole spectrum of black holes, some with masses of five Earth masses, some with masses of 10 Earth masses, like the entire mass spectrum size, the mass of asteroids.
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Now, on the smaller end, over the lifetime of the universe, the small ones kind of evaporate, and they re not there anymore, at least this is what the calculations tell us.
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SPEAKER_01
But five Earth masses is big enough to not have evaporated.
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SPEAKER_01
So one idea is that planet nine is not a planet, and instead it is a five Earth mass black hole.
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SPEAKER_01
And that s why it s hard to find.
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SPEAKER_01
Now, can we right away from our calculations say that s definitely true or that s not true?
4
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely not.
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SPEAKER_01
We can, in fact, our calculations
4
SPEAKER_01
tell you nothing other than the orbit and the mass.
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SPEAKER_01
And that means the black hole, I mean, it could be a five-Earth mass cup, it could be a five-Earth mass hedgehog or a black hole, or really anything that s five-Earth masses will do because the gravity of a black hole is no different than the gravity of a planet, right?
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SPEAKER_01
If the sun became a black hole tomorrow,
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SPEAKER_01
It would be dark, but the Earth would keep orbiting it.
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SPEAKER_01
This notion that, oh, black holes suck everything in, it s not.
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SPEAKER_01
That s like a sci-fi notion.
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SPEAKER_00
It s just math.
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SPEAKER_00
What would be the difference between a black hole and a planet in terms of observationally?
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SPEAKER_01
observationally, the difference would be that you will never find the black hole, right?
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SPEAKER_01
The truth is they re kind of, I m actually not, you know, I never looked into this very carefully, but there are some constraints that you can get just statistically say, okay, if the sun has a binary companion, which is a five Earth mass black hole,
4
SPEAKER_01
then that means such black holes would be extremely common.
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SPEAKER_01
And, you know, you sort of look for lensing events and then you say, okay, maybe that s not so likely.
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SPEAKER_01
But, you know, that said, I want to emphasize that there s a limit to what our calculations can tell you.
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That s the orbit and the mass.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think there s a bunch, like Ed Witten, I think, wishes it s a black hole.
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SPEAKER_00
Because I think one exciting things about black holes in our solar system is that we can go there and we can maybe study the singularity somehow, because that allows us to understand some fundamental things about physics.
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SPEAKER_00
If it s a planet, so planet nine, we may not, and we go there, we may not discover anything
4
SPEAKER_00
profoundly new.
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SPEAKER_00
The interesting thing, perhaps you can correct me about Planet Nine, is like the big picture of it.
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SPEAKER_00
The whole big story of the Kuiper Belt and all those kinds of things.
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SPEAKER_00
It s not that Planet Nine will be somehow fundamentally different from, I don t know, Neptune in terms of the kind of things we can learn from it.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think that there s kind of a hope that it s a black hole because it s an entirely new kind of object.
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe you can correct me.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, of course, here my own biases creep in because I m interested, you know, in planets around other stars.
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SPEAKER_01
And I would say I would disagree that, you know, we wouldn t find things that would be truly, you know, fundamentally new.
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SPEAKER_01
Because, as it turns out, the galaxy is really good at making five or three Earth-mass objects, right?
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SPEAKER_01
The most common type of planet that we see, that we discover orbiting around other stars is a few Earth-masses.
4
SPEAKER_01
In the solar system, there s no analog for that, right?
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SPEAKER_01
We go from one Earth-mass object, which is this one, to skipping to Neptune and Uranus, which themselves are actually relatively poorly understood, I would say, especially Uranus from the interior structure point of view.
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SPEAKER_01
If planet nine is a planet, going there will give us the closest window into understanding what other planets look like and, you know,
4
SPEAKER_01
I will, you know, I ll say this, that, you know, planets, kind of in terms of their complexity on some logarithmic scale, fall somewhere between a star and an insect, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
And the insect is way more complicated than the star, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Just all kinds of physical processes and really biochemical processes that occur inside of an insect that
4
SPEAKER_01
just make a star look like somebody is playing with a spring or something, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
So, I think it would be arguably more interesting to go to Planet 9 if it s a planet because black holes are simple.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re just kind of basically macroscopic particles.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, just like a star that you mentioned, there s a complexity.
4
SPEAKER_00
So it s possible that planet nine is supposed to being like homogeneous, is like super heterogeneous, there s a bunch of cool stuff going on that could give us an intuition.
4
SPEAKER_00
I never thought about that, that it s basically earth number two in terms of size and starts giving us intuition that could be generalizable to earth-like planets elsewhere in the galaxy.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, yeah, Pluto is also in the sense like, you know, Pluto is a tiny, tiny thing, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
Just like you would imagine that it s just a tiny ball of ice, like who cares?
4
SPEAKER_01
But the New Horizons images of Pluto reveal so much remarkable structure, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
They reveal glaciers flowing and these are glaciers not made out of water ice, but you know, CO ice.
4
SPEAKER_01
It turns out at those temperatures,
4
SPEAKER_01
right, of like 40 or so Kelvin, water ice looks like metal, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It just doesn t flow at all.
4
SPEAKER_01
But then ice made up of carbon monoxide starts to flow.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s just like all kinds of really cool phenomena that you otherwise just wouldn t really even imagine that occur.
4
SPEAKER_01
So,
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, there s a reason why I like planets.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, let me ask you, I find, as I read, the idea that Ed Witten was thinking about this kind of stuff, fascinating.
4
SPEAKER_00
So he s a mathematical physicist who s very interested in string theory, won the Fields Medal for his work in mathematics.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I read that he proposed a fleet of probes accelerated by radiation pressure that could discover a planet nine primordial black holes location.
4
SPEAKER_00
What do you think about this idea of sending a bunch of probes out there?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, look, the way, the idea is a cool one, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
You go and you say,
4
SPEAKER_01
you know, launch them basically isotropically, you track where they go, and if I understand the idea correctly, you basically measure the deflection and you say, okay, that must be something there since the probe trajectories are being altered.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the measurement, the basic sensory mechanism is the, it s not like you have sensors on the probes, it s more like you re, because you re very precisely able to capture
5
SPEAKER_00
to measure the trajectory of the probes, you can then infer the gravitational fields.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think that s the basic idea.
5
SPEAKER_01
Back a few years ago, we had conversations like these with engineers from JPL.
5
SPEAKER_01
They more or less convinced me that this is much more difficult than it seems because you don t, at that level of precision, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Things like solar flares matter.
5
SPEAKER_01
Solar flares are completely chaotic.
5
SPEAKER_01
You can t predict where a solar flare will happen.
5
SPEAKER_01
That will drive radiation pressure gradients.
5
SPEAKER_01
You don t know where every single asteroid is.
5
SPEAKER_01
So actually doing that problem, I think it s possible, but it s not a trivial matter.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, I wonder not just about Planet Nine, I wonder if that s kind of the future of doing science in our solar system is to just launch a huge number of probes.
5
SPEAKER_00
So like a whole order of magnitude, many orders of magnitude larger numbers of probes and then start to infer a bunch of different stuff, not just gravity but everything else.
5
SPEAKER_01
So in this regard, I actually think there is a huge revolution that s
5
SPEAKER_01
to some extent already started, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
The standard kind of like timescale for a NASA mission is that you like propose it and it launches, I don t know, like 150 years after you propose it.
5
SPEAKER_01
I m over-exaggerating, but, you know, it s just like some huge development cycle and it gets delayed 55 times.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like, that is not going away, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
the really cutting edge things, you have to do it this way because you don t know what you re building, so to speak.
5
SPEAKER_01
But the CubeSat kind of world is starting to provide an avenue for like
5
SPEAKER_01
launching something that costs a few million dollars and has a turnaround timescale of like a couple of years.
5
SPEAKER_01
You can imagine doing PhD theses where you design the mission, the mission goes to where you re going and you do the science all within a time span of five, six years.
5
SPEAKER_01
That has not been fully executed on yet, but I absolutely think that s on the horizon and we re not talking a decade.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think we re talking like this decade.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and the company s accelerating all this with Blue Origin and SpaceX.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a bunch of more CubeSat-oriented companies that are pushing this forward.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let me ask you on that topic, what do you think about either one?
5
SPEAKER_00
Elon Musk with SpaceX going to Mars, I think he wants SpaceX to be the first, to put a first human on Mars.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then Jeff Bezos, gotta give him props, wants to be the first to fly his own rocket out into space.
5
SPEAKER_01
You know, wasn t there a guy who like built his rocket out of garbage?
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
This was like a couple years ago and somewhere in the desert he launched himself.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m not tracking this closely, but I think I am familiar with folks who built their own rocket to try to prove the earth is flat.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes, that s the guy I m talking about.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, he was also like, he also jumped some limousine.
5
SPEAKER_00
a truly revolutionary mind.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have greater men than either you or I. But what do you think?
5
SPEAKER_01
So, look, it s been astonishing to watch how really over the last like decade the commercial sector took over this, you know,
5
SPEAKER_01
this industry that traditionally has really been like a government thing to do.
5
SPEAKER_00
Motivated primarily by the competition between nations, like the Cold War.
5
SPEAKER_00
And now it s motivated more and more by the natural forces of capitalism.
5
SPEAKER_01
Yes, that s right.
5
SPEAKER_01
So, okay, here I have many ideas about, I think on the one hand, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Like what SpaceX has been able to do, for example, phenomenal.
5
SPEAKER_01
If that brings down the price of space exploration, that turnaround timescale for space exploration, which I think it inevitably will, that s a huge boost to the human condition.
5
SPEAKER_01
The same time, right, if we re talking astronomy, right, it comes at a huge cost, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And the Starlink satellites is a great example of that cost, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
At one point, in fact, I was just camping in the Mojave with a friend of mine, and they saw, you know, this string of satellites just kind of like,
5
SPEAKER_01
you know, appear and then disappear into nowhere.
5
SPEAKER_01
So, that is beginning to interfere with, you know, Earth-based observations.
5
SPEAKER_01
So, I think there s tremendous potential there.
5
SPEAKER_01
It s also important to be responsible about how it s executed.
5
SPEAKER_01
Now, with Mars and the whole idea of, you know, exploring Mars,
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t have like strong opinions on whether a manned mission is required or not required.
5
SPEAKER_01
But I do think, you know, we need to focus... The thing to keep in mind is that I generally kind of... I m not signed on, if you will, to the idea that Mars is some kind of a safe haven that we can, you know, escape to, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Mars sucks, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Like living on Mars, if you wanna live on Mars, like you can have that experience by going to the Mojave Desert and camping and it s just like, it s just not a great.
5
SPEAKER_00
What s interesting, but there s something captivating about that kind of mission of us striving out into space and by making Mars in some ways habitable for at least like months at a time,
5
SPEAKER_00
I think would lead to engineering breakthroughs that would make life in many ways much better on earth.
5
SPEAKER_00
We ll come up with ideas we totally don t expect yet, both on the robotic side, on the food engineering side, on the, maybe we ll switch from, there ll be huge breakthroughs in insect farming.
5
SPEAKER_00
as exciting as I find that idea to be.
5
SPEAKER_00
In the ways we consume protein, maybe it ll revolutionize.
5
SPEAKER_00
We do factory farming, which is full of cruelty and torture of animals.
5
SPEAKER_00
We ll revolutionize that completely.
5
SPEAKER_00
We shouldn t need to go to Mars to revolutionize life here on Earth, but at the same time, I shouldn t need a deadline to get shit done, but I do need it.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then the same way, I think we need Mars.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s something about the human spirit that loves that longing for exploration.
5
SPEAKER_01
I agree with that thesis.
5
SPEAKER_01
The going to the moon, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
And that whole endeavor.
5
SPEAKER_01
has captivated the imagination of so many, and it has led to incredible ideas really, and probably in nonlinear ways, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Not like, okay, we went to the moon, therefore, some person here has thought of this.
5
SPEAKER_01
In that similar sense, I think space exploration
5
SPEAKER_01
is there s some real magnetism about it, and it s on a genetic level, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
Like, we have this need to keep exploring, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
When we re done with a certain frontier, we move on to the next frontier.
5
SPEAKER_01
All that I m saying is that I m not moving to Mars to live there permanently ever, you know?
5
SPEAKER_01
And I think that, you know, I m glad you noted the
5
SPEAKER_01
kind of degradation of the earth.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think that is a true kind of leading order challenge of our time.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s a great engineering, it s just a bunch of engineering problems.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m most interested in space because as I ve read extensively, it s apparently very difficult to have sex in space.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so I just want that problem to be solved because I think
5
SPEAKER_00
Once we solve the sex and space problem, we ll revolutionize sex here on Earth, thereby increasing the fun on Earth, and the consequences of that can only be good.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you ve got a clear plan, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
And it sounds like... I m submitting proposals to NASA as we speak.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
5
SPEAKER_00
I keep getting rejected, I don t know why.
5
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
5
SPEAKER_00
You need better diagrams.
5
SPEAKER_00
Better pictures.
5
SPEAKER_00
I should have thought of that.
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SPEAKER_00
You a while ago mentioned that, you know, there s certain aspects in the history of the solar system and earth that resulted, it could have resulted in an opaque atmosphere, but it didn t.
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We couldn t see the stars.
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And somebody mentioned to me a little bit ago, it s almost like a philosophical question for you.
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Do you think,
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humans, like human society would develop as it did, or at all, if we couldn t see the stars?
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It would be drastically different.
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If it ever did develop.
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So I think some of the early developments, right, of like fire, you know, fire, you know, first of all, that atmosphere would be so hot because, you know, if you have an opaque atmosphere,
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the temperature at the bottom is huge.
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So we would be very different beings to start with.
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We d have very different- But it could be cloudy in certain kinds of ways that you could still get- Okay, think about like a greenhouse, right?
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A greenhouse is cloudy effectively, but it s super hot.
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Yeah, it s hard to avoid having an atmosphere.
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If you have an opaque atmosphere,
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It s hard to, right?
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Venus is a great example, right?
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Venus is, I don t remember exactly how many degrees, but it s hundreds in Celsius, right?
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It s not a hundred, it s hundreds.
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Even though it s only a little bit closer to the sun, that temperature is entirely coming from the fact that the atmosphere is thick.
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So, it s a sauna of sorts.
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Yeah, yeah.
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You go there, you know, you feel refreshed after you come back, you know.
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But if you stay there, I mean, so, okay, take that as an assumption.
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SPEAKER_00
This is a philosophical question, not a biological one.
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So you have a life that develops under these extremely hot conditions.
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Yeah, so let s see.
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So much of the early evolution of mankind was driven by exploration, right?
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And...
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the interest in stars originated in part as a tool to guide that exploration.
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I think would be a huge differential in the way that we, our evolution on this planet.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, stars, that s brilliant.
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So even in that aspect, but even in further aspects, astronomy just shows up in basically every single development in the history of science up until the 20th century, it shows up.
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So I wonder without that, if we would have, if we would even get like calculus.
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Yeah, look, that s a great, I mean, that s a great point.
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Newton in part developed calculus because he was interested in understanding, explaining Kepler s laws, right?
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In general, that whole mechanistic understanding of the night sky, right?
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Replacing a religious understanding where you interpret, you know, this is, you know,
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whatever, fire god riding his, you know, little chariot across the sky, as opposed to, you know, this is some mechanistic set of laws.
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That transformed humanity and arguably put us on the course that we re on today, right?
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The entirety of the last 400 years and the development of kind of our technological world that we live in today was sparked by that, right?
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abandoning an effectively non-secular view of the natural world and kind of saying, okay, this can be understood.
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And if it can be understood, it can be utilized, we can create our own variants of this.
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Absolutely, we would be a very, very different species without astronomy.
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This, I think, extends
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beyond just astronomy, right?
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There are questions like, why do we need to spend money on X, right?
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Where X can be anything like paleontology, right?
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The mating patterns of penguins.
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Yeah, that s like- Essential.
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That s right.
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I think there s a tremendous underappreciation for the usefulness of useless knowledge, right?
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I mean- That s brilliant.
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I didn t come up with this.
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This is a little book by the guy who started the Institute for Advanced Studies.
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But
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You know, it s so true.
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So much of the electronics that are on this table work on Maxwell s equations.
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Maxwell wasn t sitting around in the 1800s saying, you know, I hope one day we ll make a couple of mics.
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So, you know, a couple of
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You know, a couple of guys can have this conversation, right?
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That wasn t at no point was that the motivation.
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And yet, you know, it gave us the world that we have today.
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And the answer is if you are a purely pragmatic person, if you don t care at all about kind of the human condition, none of this, the answer is you can tax it, right?
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Useless things have created way more capital than useful things.
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And the sad thing, I mean, first of all, it s really important to think about and it s brilliant.
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in the following context, like Neil deGrasse Tyson has this book about the role of military-based funding in the development of science.
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And then so much of technological breakthroughs in the 20th century had to do with humans working on different military things.
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And then the outcome of that had nothing to do with military.
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It had some military application, but
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their impact was much, much bigger than military.
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The splitting of the atom is a kind of a canonical example of this.
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We all know the tragedy that, you know, arises from splitting of the atom and yet, you know, so much, I mean,
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The atom itself does not care for what purpose it is being split.
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So I wonder if we took the same amount of funding as we used for war and poured it into like totally seemingly useless things like the mating patterns of penguins, we would get the internet anyway.
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I think so, I think so.
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And, you know, perhaps more of the internet would have penguins, you know?
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So we re both joking, but in some sense, like, I wonder, it s not the penguins, because penguins is more about sort of biology, but all useless kind of tinkering and all kinds of, in all kinds of avenues.
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And also because military applications are often,
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burdened by the secrecy required.
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So it s often like so much, the openness is lacking and if we learned anything from the last few decades is that when there s openness in science, that accelerates the development of science.
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That s right, that s true.
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The openness of science,
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truly it benefits everybody.
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The notion that if I share my science with you, then you re going to catch up and know the same thing, that is a short-sighted viewpoint because if you catch up and you
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open, you discover something, that puts me in a position to do the next step.
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I absolutely agree with all of this.
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The question of military funding versus non-military funding is obviously a complicated one.
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at the end of the day, I think we have to get over the notion as a society that we are going to, you know, pay for this and then we will get that, right?
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SPEAKER_01
That s true if you re buying like
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I don t know, toilet paper or something, right?
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It s just not true in the intellectual pursuit.
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That s not how it works.
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And sometimes it ll fail, right?
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Like, sometimes, like, a huge fraction of what I do, right, I come up with an idea, I think, oh, it s great, and then I work it out, it s totally not great, right?
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It fails immediately.
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Failure is not a sign that the initial pursuit was worthless.
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Failure is just part of this whole exploration thing, and we should fund more and more of this exploration, the variety of the exploration.
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I think it was Linus Pauling or somebody from that generation of scientists said that a good way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So that s, I think that s true.
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If you are conservative in your thinking, if you worry about proposing something that s going to fail, and oh, what if, you know, like,
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I there s no science police that s going to come and arrest you for proposing the wrong thing.
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And, you know, it s also just like, why would you what would you do science if you re afraid of, you know, taking that step, it d be so much better to propose things that are that are
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plausible, they re interesting, and then for a fraction of them to be wrong, then to just kind of, you know, make incremental progress all your life, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of wild ideas, let me ask you about the thing we mentioned previously, which is this interstellar object Amuamua.
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Could it be space junk from a distant alien
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civilization?
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You can t immediately discount that by saying absolutely it cannot.
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Anything can be space junk.
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I mean, from that point of view, can any of the Kuiper belt objects we see be space junk?
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Anything on the night sky can in principle be space junk.
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And Kuiper belt would catch interstellar objects potentially and like force them into an orbit if they re like small enough.
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Not the Kuiper belt itself, but you can imagine like Jupiter family comets being captured, you know, so you can actually capture things.
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It s even easier to do this very early in the solar system, like early in the solar system s life while it s still in a cluster of stars.
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It s unavoidable that you capture debris
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whether it be natural debris or unnatural debris or just debris of some kind from other stars.
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It s like a daycare center, right?
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Like everybody passes their infections on to other kids.
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Or more and more, there s been a lot of discussion about, and there s been a lot of interest in this over, is it aliens or is it not?
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But if you just kind of look at the facts,
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Like what we know about it is it s kind of like a weird shape and it also accelerated, right?
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Like that s the two, those are the two interesting things about it.
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There are puzzles about it and perhaps the most daring resolution to this puzzle is that
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it s not aliens or it s not like a rock, it s actually a piece of hydrogen ice.
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So this is a friend of mine, Daryl Seligman and Greg Laughlin came up with this idea that in giant molecular clouds that are just clouds of hydrogen helium gas that live throughout the galaxy at their cores, you can condense ice to become these hydrogen
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you know, icebergs, if you will.
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And then that explains many of the aspects of, in fact, I think that explains all of the Oumuamua mystery, how it becomes elongated, because basically the hydrogen ice sublimates and kind of like a bar of soap that, you know, slowly kind of elongates as you strip away the surface layers.
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uh how it was able to accelerate because of a jet that is produced from you know the hydrogen coming off of it but you can t see it because it s hydrogen gas like all of this stuff uh kind of falls together nicely i m i m intrigued by that idea truly because it s like if that s true that s a new type of astrophysical object
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And they would be produced by, what s the monster that produced initially that kind of object?
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So this is giant molecular clouds.
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They re everywhere.
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I mean, they are, the fact that they exist is not.
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Are they rogue clouds or are they part of like an Oort cloud?
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No, no, they re rogue clouds.
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They re just floating about?
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Yeah, so if you go, like a lot of people imagine the galaxy as being a, you know, a bunch of stars, right?
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And they re just orbiting, right?
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But the truth is, if you fly between stars, you run into clouds.
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They don t have any large object that creates orbits.
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They re just floating about.
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Just floating.
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But why are they floating together?
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Or they just float together for a time and not?
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Well, so these eventually become the nurseries of stars.
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So as they cool, they contract and then collapse into stars or into groups of stars.
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But some of them, the starless molecular clouds, according to the calculations that Daryl and Greg did, can create these icicles of hydrogen ice.
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It s super cool.
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I wonder why they would be flying so fast.
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They seem to be moving pretty fast at a quick pace.
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That s just because of the acceleration due to the sun.
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If you stop, it s like take something really far away, let it go, and the sun is here.
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By the time it comes close to the sun, it s moving pretty fast.
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So, that s an attractive explanation, I think, not so much because it s cool, but it makes a clear prediction, right, of when Vera Rubin Observatory comes online next year or so, we will discover many, many more of these objects, right?
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And they have
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So, I like theories that are falsifiable, not just testable, but falsifiable.
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It s good to have a falsifiable theory where you can say that s not true.
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Aliens is one that s fundamentally difficult to say, no, that s not alien.
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The interesting thing to me, if you look at one alien civilization, and then we look at the things it produces, in terms of if we were to try to detect the alien civilization, there s like, say there s 10 billion aliens, there would probably be
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trillions of dumb drone type things produced by the aliens.
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And there d be many, many, many more orders of magnitude of junk.
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So if you were to look for an alien civilization, in my mind, you would be looking for the junk.
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That s the more efficient thing to look for.
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So I m not saying Oumuamua has any characteristics of space junk, but it kind of opened my eyes to the idea that we shouldn t necessarily be looking to the queen of the ant colony.
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We should be looking at, I don t know,
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I don t know, like traces of alien life that doesn t look intelligent in any way, may not even look like life.
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It could be just garbage.
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We should be looking for garbage.
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Just generically, just generically.
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Garbage that s producible by unnatural forces.
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For me, at least, that was kind of interesting because if you have a successful alien civilization, that we would be producing many more orders and magnitude of junk and that would be easier potentially to detect.
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Well, so you have to produce the junk, but you have to also launch it.
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So, this is where, I mean, let s imagine... Garbage disposal.
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Yeah.
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But let s imagine we are a successful civilization that, you know, has made it to space.
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We clearly have, right?
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And yes, we re in the infancy of that pursuit, but, you know, we ve launched I don t know how many satellites.
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probably if you count GPS satellites, it must be at least thousands.
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It s certainly thousands.
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I don t know if it s over 10,000, but it s on that order.
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But it s on that large order of magnitude.
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How many of the things that we ve launched will ever leave the solar system?
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I think two.
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Well, maybe the Voyager, the Voyager 1, Voyager 2.
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I don t know if the Pioneer.
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So maybe three.
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There s also a Tesla Roadster out there.
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That one will never leave the solar system.
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I think that one will eventually collide with Mars.
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That can be SpaceX s first Mars destination.
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But look, there s an energetic cost to interstellar travel, which is really hard to overcome.
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And when we think about
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generically, what do we look for in an alien civilization?
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Oftentimes, we tend to imagine that the thing you look for is the thing that we re doing right now, right?
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So, I think that if I look at the future, right?
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And for a while, it was like, okay, if aliens are out there, they must be broadcasting on radio.
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Right?
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That radio, you know, the amount that we broadcast in radio has diminished tremendously in the last 50 years.
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But
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we re doing a lot more computation.
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What are the signs of computation?
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That s an interesting question to ask.
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I think something on the order of a few percent of the entire electrical grid last year went to mining Bitcoin.
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You don t worry.
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Yeah, there could be a lot of, in the future, different consequences of the computation, which, I mean, I m biased, but it could be robotics, it could be artificial intelligence.
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So we may be looking for intelligent-looking objects, like that s what I meant by probes, like things that move in kind of artificial ways.
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But the emergence of AI is not an if, right?
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It s happening right in front of our eyes, and the energetic costs associated with that are becoming a tangible problem.
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If you imagine extrapolating that into the future,
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right?
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What are the, you know, what becomes the bottleneck, right?
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The bottleneck might be powering, you know, powering the AI, broadly speaking, not one AI, but powering that entire AI ecosystem, right?
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So, I don t know.
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I think, you know, space junk is kind of,
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Yeah, it s an interesting idea, but it s heavily influenced by like sci-fi of 1950s, where by 2020, we re all like flying to the moon.
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And so we produce a lot of space junk.
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I m not
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sure if that s the pathway that alien civilizations take.
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I ve also never seen an alien civilization, I just don t know anything.
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That s true, but if your theory of chill turns out to be true and then we don t necessarily explore, we seize the exploration phase of a civilization,
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SPEAKER_01
like alien civilizations quickly seize the exploration phase of their efforts, then perhaps they ll just be chilling in a particular space, expanding slowly, but then using up a lot of resources and then have to have a lot of garbage disposal that sends stuff out.
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And the other idea was that it could be a relay.
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that you ll almost have like these GPS-like markers that you send throughout, which I think is kind of interesting.
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It s similar to this probe idea of sending a large number of probes out to measure gravitational, to measure basically, yeah, the gravitational field, essentially.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, a lot of people at Caltech or at MIT are trying to measure gravitational fields
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SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of ideas of sending stuff out there that accurately measures those gravitational fields to have a greater understanding of the early universe, but then you might realize that communication through gravitation, through gravity, is actually much more effective than radio waves, for example, something like that, and then you send out
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, okay, if you re an alien civilization that s able to have gigantic masses, like basically.
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We re getting there as a civilization.
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SPEAKER_01
No, we re not even close.
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SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean.
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Yeah, okay.
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I mean like be able to sort of play with black holes, that kind of thing.
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So we re talking about a whole nother order of magnitude of masses.
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Then it may be very effective to send signals via gravitational waves.
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I actually my sense is that all of these things are genuinely difficult to predict, you know, and I don t mean like to kind of shy away.
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I just I really mean if you think if you take imagination of what the future will look like from, you know,
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500 years ago, right?
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It is so hard to conceive of the impossible, right?
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So it s almost limiting to try and imagine things that are an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude ahead in terms of progress, just because you mentioned cars before.
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If you were to ask people what they wanted in 1870, it s faster buggies.
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So, I think the whole like kind of, you know, alien conversation inevitably gets limited by our entire kind of collective astrophysical lack of imagination.
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SPEAKER_01
So to push back a little bit, I find that it s really interesting to talk about these wild ideas about the future, whether it s aliens, whether it s AI, with brilliant people like yourself who are focused on very particular tools of science we have today to solve very particular, rigorous scientific questions.
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And it s almost like putting on this wild, dreamy hat some percent of the time and say, what would alien civilizations look like?
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What would alien trash look like?
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What would our own civilization that sends out trillions of AI systems out there, like Hal 9000, but 10,000 out there, what would that look like?
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SPEAKER_01
and you re right, any one prediction is probably going to be horrendously wrong, but there s something about creating these kind of wild predictions that kind of opens up.
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SPEAKER_02
No, there s a huge magnetism to it, right?
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And some of it, you know, I mean, some of the Jules Verne novels did a phenomenal job predicting the future, right?
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SPEAKER_02
That actually was a great example of what you re talking about, right?
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Allowing your imagination to run free.
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I mean, I just hope there s dragons.
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I love dragons.
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Yeah, dragons are the best.
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But see, the cool thing about science fiction and these kinds of conversations, it doesn t just predict the future, I think.
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Some of these things will create the future.
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Planting the idea.
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Humans are amazing.
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Like, fake it till you make it.
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Humans are really good at taking an idea that seems impossible at the time.
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And for any one individual human, that idea, it s like planting a seed that eventually materializes itself.
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It s weird.
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It s weird how science fiction can create science.
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SPEAKER_00
It drives the science.
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SPEAKER_00
I agree with you.
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And I think in this regard,
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You know, I m like a sucker for sci-fi.
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It s all I listen to, like, now when I run.
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And some of it is completely implausible, right?
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And it s just like, I don t care.
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It s both entertaining and, you know, it s just like,
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its imagination.
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You know about the Black Clouds book?
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I think it was by Fred Hoyle.
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This has great connections with sort of a lot of the advancements that are happening in NLP right now, right, with transformer models and so on.
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But it s this black cloud shows up in the solar system, and then people try to send radio, and then it learns to talk back at you.
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So, anyway, we don t
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have to talk at all about it, but it s just, it s something worth checking out.
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With that, on the alien front, with the black cloud, to me, exactly, on the NLP front, and also just explainability of AI, it s fascinating, just the very question, Stephen Wolfram looked at this with the movie Arrival, it s like, what would be the common language that we would discover?
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The reason that s really interesting to me is we have aliens here on Earth now.
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Japanese.
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Japanese is the obvious answer.
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SPEAKER_01
Japanese, yeah, that would be the common... maybe it would be music, actually.
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That s more likely.
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It wouldn t be language, it would be art that they would communicate.
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But I do believe that we have
6
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I m with Stephen Wolfram on this a little bit, that to me, computation, like programs we write, they re kind of intelligent creatures, and I feel like we haven t found the common language to talk with them.
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Like our little creations,
6
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that are artificial are not born with whatever that innate thing that produces language with us.
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And like coming up with mechanisms for communicating with them is a,
6
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is an effort that feels like it will produce some incredible discoveries.
6
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You can even think of, if you think that math has discovered, mathematics in itself is a kind of.
6
SPEAKER_02
Oh yeah, it s an innate construction of the world we live in.
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I think we are,
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a part of the way there, because pre-1950, computers were human beings that would carry out arithmetic.
6
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And I think it was Ulam, who worked in Los Alamos at the time, towards the end of the Second World War, wrote something about how, in the future, computers will not be
6
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just arithmetic tool, but will be truly an interactive thing with which you could do experiments, right?
6
SPEAKER_02
At the time, the notion of doing an experiment, not like in the lab with some beakers, but an experiment on a computer, designing a numerical experiment was
6
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a new one, that s like 70% of what I do is I design, I write code, terrible code to be clear, but I write code that creates an experiment, which is a simulation.
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So in that sense, I think we re beginning to interact with the computer in a way that you re saying, not as just a
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you know, fancy calculator, not as just a, you know, call and request type of thing, but but you know, something that
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that can generate insights that are otherwise completely unattainable.
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They re unattainable by doing analytical mathematics.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and there s with the AlphaFold 2, we re now starting to crack open biology.
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So being able to simulate at first trivial biological systems and hopefully down the line complex biological systems.
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My hope is to be able to simulate psychological, like sociological systems, like humans.
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A large part of my work at MIT was on autonomous vehicles.
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And the fascinating thing to me was about pedestrians.
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human pedestrians interacting with autonomous vehicles and simulating those systems without murdering humans would be very useful, but nevertheless is exceptionally difficult.
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Yeah, I would say so.
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SPEAKER_00
When is my Mustang going to drive itself?
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Right.
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I m not even joking, it looks like.
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Yeah, it turns out
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it s much more difficult than we imagined.
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And I suppose that s the kind of the progress of science is just like going to Mars,
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it s probably going to turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined.
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Sending out probes to investigate planet nine at the edge of our solar system might turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined, but we do it anyway, and we figure it out in the end.
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It s actually, Mars is a great, I mean, sending humans to Mars, way more complicated than sending humans to the moon.
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You d think, just like naively, both are in space, who cares?
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If you go there, why don t you go there?
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You know.
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This life support is an extremely expensive thing, yeah.
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There s a bunch of extra challenges, but I disagree with you.
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I would be one of the early people to go.
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I used to think not.
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I used to think I d be one of the first maybe million to go once you have a little bit of a society.
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I think I m upgrading myself to the first like 10,000.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s right.
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Front of the cabin.
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Not completely front, but like, it d be interesting to die.
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I m okay with, death sucks, but
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I kinda like the idea of dying on Mars.
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Of all the places to die, I gotta say, in this regard, I don t wanna die on Mars.
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SPEAKER_00
You don t?
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SPEAKER_00
No, no, I would much rather die on Earth.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, death is fundamentally boring, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Like, death is a very boring experience.
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I mean, I ve never died before, so I don t know from first-hand experience.
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As far as you know.
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Yeah.
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It could be a reincarnation, all those kinds of things.
7
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So, you mean, where would you die if you had to choose?
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Man, okay, so I would definitely, there s a question of who I d wanna die with.
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I d prefer not to die alone, but surrounded by family would be preferable.
7
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Where?
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I think northern New Mexico, and I m not even joking.
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This is not a random, it s just like.
7
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Would that be your favorite place on Earth?
7
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not necessarily, like, favorite place on earth to reside at, you know, indefinitely, but it is one of the most beautiful places I ve ever been to.
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So, you know, there s something, I don t know, there s something attractive about
7
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about going, you know... Returning to nature in a beautiful place.
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Let me ask you about another aspect of your life that is full of beauty, music.
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Okay.
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You re a musician.
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The absurd question I have to ask, what is the greatest song of all time, objectively speaking?
7
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the greatest song of all time.
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I suppose that could change moment to moment, day to day.
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But if you were forced to answer for this particular moment in your life, that s something that pops to mind.
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This could be both philosophically, this could be technically as a musician, like what you enjoy, maybe lyrics.
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Like for me, lyrics is very important.
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So I would probably, my choice would be lyrics based.
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I don t want to answer in terms of just technical prowess.
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I think technical prowess is impressive, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
It s just like, it s impressive what can be done.
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I wouldn t place that into the category of the greatest music ever written.
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Some of the classical music that s written is undeniably beautiful, but I don t want to consider that category of music either.
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So if I was to limit the scope of this philosophical discussion,
7
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to, you know, the kind of music that I listen to, you know, probably What s My Age Again by Blink-182.
7
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It s just, you know, it s a solid one.
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It s got, you know... Said nobody ever.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s a good song.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t know if you re joking.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, no, I am.
7
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I am joking.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s a good one, but it s... Yeah, I mean... I was going to come back as a close second.
7
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What s my age again?
7
SPEAKER_00
Oh, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, I mean, it would probably, you know, songwriting-wise, I think The Beatles came pretty close to... Were they influential to you?
7
SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
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Like The Beatles?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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Love The Beatles.
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I love The Beatles.
7
SPEAKER_01
Would it be yesterday?
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Yeah.
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Like, I think Strawberry Fields Forever is one of, you know what one of my favorite Beatles songs is?
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It s, you know, In My Life, right?
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That song, it s hard to imagine how whatever a 24-year-old wrote that.
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It is one of the most introspective pieces of music ever.
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You know,
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I m a huge Pink Floyd fan.
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And so I think if you were to, you can sort of look at the entire Dark Side of the Moon album as getting pretty close up there to the pinnacle of what can be created.
7
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So Time s a great song.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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It s a great song.
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Just the entirety of just the instruments, the lyrics, the feeling created by a song, like Pink Floyd
7
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can create feelings, the entire experience.
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I mean, you have that with The Wall of just transporting you into another place.
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Songs don t, not many songs could do that as well.
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Not many artists can do that as well as Pink Floyd did.
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There are a lot of bands that you can kind of say, oh yeah, like if you take Blink-182, right?
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If you have no idea, like if you are listening to sort of that type of pop punk for the first time, it s difficult to differentiate between Blink-182 and like Sum 41 and the
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thousand of other lesser known bands that all sounded, they all had that sparkling production feel.
7
SPEAKER_00
They all kind of sounded the same, right?
7
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With Pink Floyd,
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it s hard to find another band that you re like, well, is this one Pink Floyd?
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Like, you know, when you re listening to Pink Floyd, what you re listening to.
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The uniqueness, that s fascinating.
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You know, in the calculation of the greatest song in the greatest band of all time, you could probably, you could probably actually quantify this like scientifically is like how unique
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SPEAKER_01
If you play different songs, how well are people able to recognize whether it s this band or not?
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And that s probably a huge component to greatness.
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Like if the world would miss it if it was gone.
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Yes.
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Yes.
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But there s also the human story things.
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Like I would say I ll put Johnny Cash s cover of Hurt as one of the greatest songs of all time.
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And that has less to do with the song.
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But your interaction with it.
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Interaction with it, but also the human, the full story of the human.
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So, like, it s not just if I just heard the song, I d be like, OK, that.
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But if it s the full story of it, also the video component for that particular song.
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So like that, you can t discount the full experience of it.
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SPEAKER_00
Absolutely.
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You know, I have no confusion about not being, you know, anywhere
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you know, in that lane.
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But I just, like, sometimes think about, you know, music that is being produced today feels, oftentimes feels like kind of clothes, like clothes that you buy at, like, H&M and you wear three times before they rip and you throw away.
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SPEAKER_00
So, like, so much of it is, it s not bad, it s just kind of forgettable, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Like, the fact that,
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we re talking about Pink Floyd in 2021 is in itself an interesting question.
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Why are we talking about Pink Floyd?
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There s something unforgettable about them and unforgettable about the art that they created.
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That could be the markets that like, so Spotify has created this kind of market where, you
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the incentives for creating music that lasts is much lower because there s so much more music.
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You just want something that shines bright for a short amount of time, makes a lot of money and moves on.
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I mean, the same thing you see with the news and all those kinds of things.
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We re just living in a shorter and shorter, shorter time scale in terms of our attention spans.
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And that, nevertheless, when we look at the long arc of history of music, perhaps there will be some songs from today that will last as much as Pink Floyd.
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We re just unable to see it.
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Yeah, just the collected works of Nickelback.
7
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
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You never know.
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You never know.
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Justin Bieber, it could be a contender.
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I ve recently started listening to Justin Bieber just to understand what people are talking about.
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I ll just keep my comments to myself on that one.
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It s too good to explain in words.
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The words do not capture the greatness that is the Biebs.
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You as a musician, so you write your own music, you play guitar, you sing.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe can you give an overview of the role music has played in your life?
7
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You re one of the, you re a world-class scientist.
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SPEAKER_01
And so it s kind of fascinating to see somebody
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in your position, who s also a great musician and still loves playing music.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, I wouldn t call myself a great musician.
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SPEAKER_01
One of the best of all time.
7
SPEAKER_00
That s right.
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SPEAKER_01
We were saying offline confidence is like the most essential thing about being a rock star.
7
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
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SPEAKER_00
It s the confidence and kind of like moodiness, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Look, I mean, music plays an absolutely essential role in everything I do because if I stop playing for one reason or another, say I m traveling,
7
SPEAKER_00
I notably lose creativity in every other aspect of my life, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
There s something I don t view, you know, playing music as a separate endeavor from doing science or doing whatever.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s all part of that same creative thing, which is distinct from, I don t know,
7
SPEAKER_00
pressing a button or like, you know.
7
SPEAKER_00
So it s not a break from science, it s a part of your science.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s absolutely is a part of, it s, I would say, you know, it s a thing that enables the science, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
The science would, you know, suck even more than it does already without the music.
7
SPEAKER_01
And that means like the creating of the, the writing of the music, or is it just even playing other people s stuff?
7
SPEAKER_01
Is it, is it the whole of it?
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s, it s definitely both.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
And also just,
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, I love love to play guitar.
7
SPEAKER_00
I love to sing, you know, my wife tolerates my My screeching singing, you know and even kind of likes it So yeah, so people should check out your stuff.
7
SPEAKER_01
You have a great voice.
7
SPEAKER_01
So I love your stuff Is there something you re you re super busy?
7
SPEAKER_01
Is there something you could say about practicing?
7
SPEAKER_01
Oh
7
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for musicians, for guitar, you re also in a band, so like that whole, how you can manage that, is there some tricks, is there some hacks to being a lifelong musician while being like super busy?
7
SPEAKER_00
So I would say, you know,
7
SPEAKER_00
The way that I optimize my life is I try to do the thing that I m passionate about in a moment and put that at the top of the priority list.
7
SPEAKER_00
There are moments when you feel inspired to play music.
7
SPEAKER_00
And if you re in the middle of something, if you can avoid, if that can be put on hold, just do it.
7
SPEAKER_00
There are times when you get inspired about something scientific.
7
SPEAKER_00
do my best to drop everything, go into that isolated mode and execute upon that.
7
SPEAKER_00
So it s a chaotic, I think I have a pretty chaotic lifestyle where I m always doing kind of multiple things and jumping between what I m doing.
7
SPEAKER_00
But at the end of the day, it s not like those moments of inspiration
7
SPEAKER_00
are actually kind of rare, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
Most of the time, all of us are just doing the stuff that needs to get done.
7
SPEAKER_00
If you do the disservice to yourself of saying, oh, I m inspired to do this calculation, figure this out, but I ve got to answer email or just do something silly,
7
SPEAKER_00
So, that is nothing more than the service.
7
SPEAKER_00
And also, I have some social media presence, but I mostly stay off of social media.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, just frankly, because I don t enjoy the mental cycles that it takes over.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it robs you of those precious moments that could be filled with inspiration in your other pursuits.
7
SPEAKER_01
But there s something, too, maybe you and I are different in this.
7
SPEAKER_01
I try to play at least 10 minutes of guitar every day, almost on the technical side.
7
SPEAKER_01
keeping that base of basic competence going.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I mean, the same way like writers will get in front of a paper, no matter what, that kind of thing.
7
SPEAKER_01
It just feels like that for my life has been essential to the daily ritual of it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Otherwise, days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and you haven t played guitar for months.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, no, I understand.
7
SPEAKER_00
For me, I think it s been like, if we have a gig coming up, we ll definitely... You mean deadlines.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, yeah, that s right.
7
SPEAKER_00
No, like, we will sharpen up, definitely, you know, especially coming up to a gig.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s like, you know,
7
SPEAKER_00
We re not trying to make money with this.
7
SPEAKER_00
This is like just for the for that satisfaction of doing something, doing something well, right?
7
SPEAKER_00
But overall, I would say most I play guitar most days, most days.
7
SPEAKER_00
And, you know, when I put kids to sleep, I play guitar, you know, with them.
7
SPEAKER_00
And we d like, just make up random songs about
7
SPEAKER_00
you know, about our cat or something, you know, like we just do kind of random stuff.
7
SPEAKER_00
But, you know, music is always involved in that process.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, keeping it fun.
7
SPEAKER_01
You have Russian roots?
7
SPEAKER_01
I sure do.
7
SPEAKER_01
Were you born in Russia?
7
SPEAKER_00
I was, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_01
When did you come here?
7
SPEAKER_00
So I came to the U.S.
7
SPEAKER_00
in the very end of 99, so I was almost 14 years old.
7
SPEAKER_00
But along the way, we spent six years in Japan.
7
SPEAKER_00
So we moved from Russia to Japan in 94, and then to the U.S.
7
SPEAKER_00
in 99.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I did elementary school, middle school in Japan.
7
SPEAKER_01
So elementary school in Japan.
7
SPEAKER_01
So that s interesting.
7
SPEAKER_01
Do you still speak Russian?
7
SPEAKER_00
Sure.
7
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
7
SPEAKER_01
Do you speak Russian?
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes, of course.
7
SPEAKER_01
Okay, maybe I ll... Let me ask you in Russian.
7
SPEAKER_01
What do you remember about Russia?
7
SPEAKER_00
It d be interesting to hear you speak Russian.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, in general, I remember... I was eight when we left.
7
SPEAKER_00
And, of course,
7
SPEAKER_00
I remember everything in the first approach, including the transition from 1991 to 1992, this turbulent period, and then, of course, 1993.
7
SPEAKER_00
I also remember very well how, at some point,
7
SPEAKER_00
And then Coca-Cola appeared.
7
SPEAKER_00
I remember I was 6 years old, and I thought, how is it possible that Coca-Cola stole a product and did the same thing?
7
SPEAKER_00
I thought for a long time that...
7
SPEAKER_01
So for people who don t speak Russian, Constantine was talking about basically his first in 1992 interaction with capitalism, which is Pepsi and at first he discovered Pepsi and then he discovered Coke and he was confused how such theft could occur.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like an intellectual property theft.
7
SPEAKER_00
And remember Pepsi,
7
SPEAKER_00
arrived to the Soviet Union first.
7
SPEAKER_00
And there s some complicated story which I don t quite understand the details of.
7
SPEAKER_00
For a while, Pepsi commanded submarines or something.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, Pepsi had like a fleet of Soviet submarines that it was sponsoring.
7
SPEAKER_01
Tanks and this fessing.
8
SPEAKER_00
And I remember, there s certain things that trickled in, like McDonald s, I remember that was a big deal.
8
SPEAKER_01
Certain aspects of the West.
8
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
8
SPEAKER_01
So, I remember we went to McDonald s and we stood in line.
8
SPEAKER_01
I mean, this is absurd, right, from kind of looking at it from today s perspective, but we stood in line for like six hours to get into this McDonald s.
8
SPEAKER_01
And I remember inside, it was just like,
8
SPEAKER_01
a billion people, and I m just taking a bite out of that Big Mac.
8
SPEAKER_01
I m like, wow.
8
SPEAKER_00
what was it an incredible experience for you?
8
SPEAKER_00
So like, what does this taste of the West like?
8
SPEAKER_00
Did you enjoy it?
8
SPEAKER_01
I enjoyed the fact that, I mean, this is like, this is getting into the weeds, but I really enjoyed the fact that the top of the bun had those seeds, you know, like, and I remember how on the commercials, like the Big Mac would kind of bounce.
8
SPEAKER_01
I was like, the seeds, how do they inject the seeds into the bread?
8
SPEAKER_01
Like,
8
SPEAKER_01
Amazing, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
So I think it was- Artistry.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it was just- You enjoyed the artistry of the culinary experience.
8
SPEAKER_01
Exactly, it was the food art that is the Big Mac.
8
SPEAKER_00
Actually, I still don t know the answer to that.
8
SPEAKER_00
How do they get the sesame seeds on the bun?
8
SPEAKER_00
It s better to not know the answer.
8
SPEAKER_00
You just wander the mystery of it all.
8
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I remember it being exceptionally delicious, but I m with you, I don t know,
8
SPEAKER_00
you didn t mention how transformative Pepsi was, but to me, basically sugar-based stuff, like Pepsi was, or Coke, I don t remember which one we partook in, but that was an incredible experience.
8
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
8
SPEAKER_01
No, absolutely, and you know, I think it s, you know, it was an important and formative period.
8
SPEAKER_01
I sometimes, I guess, rely on that a little bit in my daily life because I remember the early 90s were real rough.
8
SPEAKER_01
My parents were on the bottom of the spectrum in terms of financial well-being.
8
SPEAKER_01
When I run into trouble,
8
SPEAKER_01
not like, you know, money trouble, just any kind of trouble these days, it just kind of is not particularly meaningful when you compare it to that turbulent time of the early 90s.
8
SPEAKER_01
And the other thing is, I think there s like an advantage to being, you know, an immigrant, which is that you go through the mental exercise of changing your environment completely early in your life, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
by no means, you know, pleasant in the moment, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
But like going into Japanese elementary school, right?
8
SPEAKER_01
Like I didn t go to some like
8
SPEAKER_01
private thing.
8
SPEAKER_01
I just went to a regular Japanese public elementary school, and I was the non-Japanese person in my class.
8
SPEAKER_00
So just learning Japanese and just kind of... So that s a super humbling experience in many ways, where you made fun of all that kind of stuff, you being the outsider.
8
SPEAKER_01
Absolutely.
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SPEAKER_01
But you kind of do that and then you just kind of are okay with stuff, you know what I mean?
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And so, doing that again in middle school in the US, it was arguably easy because I was like, yeah, well, I ve already done this before.
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So,
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I think it kind of prepares you mentally a little bit for switching up, for whatever changes that will come up for the rest of your life.
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So, I wouldn t trade that experience really for anything.
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It s a huge aspect of who I am and I m sure you can relate to a lot of this.
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Yes.
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Is there advice from your life that you can give to young people today, high school, college, you know, about their career or maybe about life in general?
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I m not like a career coach by any accounts, right?
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I m definitely not a life coach.
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I don t have it all figured out.
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But I think there s a
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There s a perpetual cycle of thinking that there s kind of like a template for success.
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Maybe there is, but in my experience, I haven t seen it.
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you know, I would say people in high school, right?
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So much of their focus is on getting straight A s, filling their CV with this and this and this, so that it looks impressive, right?
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That is not, I think, a good way to optimize your life, right?
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Do the thing that fills your life with passion, do the thing that fills your life with interest, and, you know, do that perpetually, right?
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straight-A student, you know, is really impressive but also, you know, somewhat boring, right?
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So, I think, you know, injection of more of that kind of interest into the lives of young people would go a long way in just
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both upping their level of happiness and then just kind of ensuring that, looking forward, they are not suffering from a perpetual condition of, oh, I have to satisfy these checkboxes to do well, right?
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SPEAKER_00
Because you can lose yourself in that whole process for the rest of your life.
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SPEAKER_00
But it s nice if it s possible, like Max Tegmark was exceptionally good at this at MIT, figure out how you can spend a small part of your percent of your efforts such that your CV looks really impressive.
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Yeah, absolutely, there s no, without a doubt, that s a baseline that you need to have.
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You know what I mean?
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So spend most of your time doing amazing things you re passionate about, but such that it, kind of like Planet Nine produces objects that feed your CV slowly over time.
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So getting good grades in high school, maybe doing extracurricular activities,
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or in terms of like, you know, for programmers that s producing code that you can show up on GitHub, like leaving traces like throughout your efforts such that your CV looks impressive to the rest of the world.
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In fact, I mean, this is somewhat along the lines of what I m talking about.
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We see like getting like good grades is important, but grades are not a tangible like product.
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Like you cannot,
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I ll show your A and have your A live a separate life from you.
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Code very much does.
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Music very much takes on, provided somebody else listens to it, takes on a life of its own.
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That s kind of what I mean.
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Doing
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doing stuff that can then get separated from you is exceptionally attractive, right?
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It s like a fun and- And it s also very impressive to others.
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I think we re moving to a world where grades mean less and less, like certifications mean less and less.
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If you look at, especially again, in the computing fields, getting a degree, finishing your,
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Currently, just finishing your degree, whether it s bachelor s or master s or PhD, is less important than the things you ve actually put out into the world.
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And that s a fascinating, that s great that, in that sense, the meritocracy, in its richest, most beautiful form, is starting to win out.
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Yeah, it s weird, because my understanding, and I m not like, I don t know the history of science well enough to speak very confidently about this,
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Advisor of my advisor of my advisor from undergrad Like didn t have a PhD, right?
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So I think it was a more common thing back in the day even in the academic sector to You know
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not have Faraday.
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Faraday didn t know algebra.
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When drew diagrams about magnetic fields, Faraday s law was derived entirely from intuition.
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So, it is interesting to how the world of academia has evolved into a
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you ve got to do this and then get PhD, then you have to postdoc once and twice and maybe thrice, and then you move on.
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So I do wonder if we re
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you know, if there s a better approach.
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SPEAKER_00
I think we re heading there, but it s a fascinating historical perspective, like that we might have just tried this whole thing out for a while, where we put a lot more emphasis on grades and certificates and degrees and all those kinds of things.
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I think the difference historically is
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Like we can actually using the internet show off The show off ourselves and our creations better and better and more effectively Whether that s code or producing videos or all those kinds of things, right?
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It can become a certified drone pilot
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SPEAKER_00
Of all the things you want to pick, yeah, for sure.
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Or you could just fly and make YouTube videos that get hundreds of thousands of views with your drone and never getting a certificate.
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SPEAKER_00
That s probably illegal.
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Don t do it.
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What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
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So you look at planets.
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they seem to orbit stuff without asking the why question.
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And for some reason, life emerged on Earth such that it led to big brains that can ask the big why question.
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Do you think there s an answer to it?
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I m not sure what the question is.
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The meaning of life?
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The meaning of life.
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It s 42.
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It s 42.
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Yeah.
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But, you know, aside from that, it s, you know, why I think if the question you re asking is like, why we do all this, right?
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Why we do all this?
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It s part of the human condition, right?
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Human beings are fundamentally
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I feel like sort of stochastic and fundamentally interested in
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kind of expanding our own understanding of the world around us.
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And creating stuff to enable that understanding.
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SPEAKER_00
So we re like stochastic, fundamentally stochastic.
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So like there s just a bunch of randomness that really doesn t seem like it has a good explanation, and yet there s a kind of direction to our being that we just keep wanting to create and to understand.
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That s right.
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I ve met people that claim to be anti-science, right?
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And yet in their anti-science discussion, they re like, well, if you re so scientific, then why don t you explain to me how, I don t know, this works.
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SPEAKER_01
And it always, there s that fundamental seed of curiosity and interest that is common to all of us.
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That,
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is absolutely what makes us human, right?
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And I m in a privileged position of being able to have that be my job, right?
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I think as time evolves forward, the kind of economy
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changes, I mean, we re already starting to see, you know, a shift towards that type of, you know, creative, you know, enterprise as being, as merging, taking over a bigger and bigger chunk of the sector.
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It s not yet, I think, the dominant portion of the economy by any account.
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But if we compare this to like,
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you know, a time when the dominant thing you would do would be to, you know, go to a factory and do the same exact thing, right?
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SPEAKER_01
I think, you know, there s a tide there and things are sort of headed in that direction.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, life s becoming more and more fun.
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I can t wait.
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SPEAKER_00
Honestly, what happens next?
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SPEAKER_01
I can t wait to just chill.
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SPEAKER_00
Just chill.
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SPEAKER_01
The terminal point of this is just...
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SPEAKER_01
Chill and wait for those Kuiper belt objects to complete one orbit.
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I m going to credit you with this idea.
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I do hope that we definitively discover proof that there is a planet nine out there in the next few years.
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So you can sit back with a cigar, a cigarette or vodka or wine and just say, I told you so.
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SPEAKER_00
That s already happening.
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SPEAKER_01
I m gonna do that later tonight.
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SPEAKER_00
As I mentioned, confidence is essential to being a rock star.
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SPEAKER_00
I really appreciate you explaining so many fascinating things to me today.
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SPEAKER_00
I really appreciate the work that you do out there.
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And I really appreciate you talking with me today.
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Thanks, Konstantin.
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Pleasure, thanks for having me on.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Konstantin Batygin, and thank you to Squarespace, Literati, Onnit, and AnEye.
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SPEAKER_00
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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SPEAKER_00
And now, let me leave you with some words from Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy.
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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
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Orbiting this, at a distance of roughly 92 million miles, is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descendant lifeforms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
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Thank you for listening.
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I hope to see you next time.