Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #0107 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Michelle Thaller

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#0107 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Michelle Thaller · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
• 0:09
  Speaker 3: I like that. Absolutely. It's also, there's some things that
• 0:16
  are so awesome. It's like, that's fucking awesome.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: I was trying to talk about black holes to some
• 0:22
  high school students just seriously earlier this week. And I
• 0:25
  kept saying, what the fuck? I got nothing to pitch,
• 0:30
  but the Shorewood Men's Club, I was giving a talk there.
• 0:34
  The Shorewood, Wisconsin is where I live. The Men's Club
• 0:37
  invited me to give a talk about astronomy last week.
• 0:39
  And when I mentioned I was coming to the show,
• 0:41
  they just freaked out. And so the only thing I
• 0:43
  have is my Shorewood Men's Club water bottle.
• 0:46
  Speaker 3: Well, shout out to the Shorewood Men's Club. That's awesome.
• 0:50
  That's so cool that you give those speeches. I love
• 0:53
  your YouTube talks. They're fantastic.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you.
• 0:56
  Speaker 3: Wow. I have watched– Probably every one you've ever done.
• 1:01
  I've watched at least– I mean how many have you done?
• 1:03
  I've watched at least like 10 of them.
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean so– I mean pretty much what I
• 1:08
  did at NASA, I did a lot of sort of
• 1:10
  the science spokesperson stuff. And so most of that was–
• 1:13
  I'm more on the NASA videos. I hosted like launch events.
• 1:17
  I haven't done much privately on YouTube. I'm thinking about
• 1:22
  starting some stuff.
• 1:23
  Speaker 3: Oh, you should.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll work on that.
• 1:25
  Speaker 3: Please. OK. 100%. Thank you. 100%. You've said so many
• 1:29
  things that made me just go, what?
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Ah.
• 1:32
  Speaker 3: Like, here's a big one that you said. You were
• 1:33
  talking about if the size of Earth, if the Earth
• 1:37
  was the dot of an eye in a book, in
• 1:40
  regular print.
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Yes.
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: That the Milky Way galaxy would be as large as
• 1:46
  the Earth itself.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Actually a little bigger. Yeah. So, I mean, the thing is,
• 1:50
  this is an interesting thing about science communication. You say
• 1:53
  that if the sun were the size of a dot
• 1:55
  of an eye. And you've got to remember you can
• 1:57
  fit a million Earths inside the sun. This is a
• 2:00
  huge thing. So if that's the size of a dot
• 2:02
  of an eye on text, then the galaxy would be
• 2:05
  the size of the Earth. That's when people's eyes get
• 2:07
  big and people respond to it.
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: So it's not just the Earth. It's the sun. So
• 2:10
  if the sun was the dot of an eye.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: Yes, that's right. Let's make this clear. So if the
• 2:14
  sun were the size of the dot of an eye
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  on a page of text, so you could fit a
• 2:18
  million Earths inside that dot of an eye, then the
• 2:21
  Milky Way galaxy would be bigger than the Earth. Right.
• 2:25
  Speaker 3: So if the Earth was the dot of an eye,
• 2:28
  then how big is the Milky Way galaxy? Because the
• 2:30
  sun is how many millions Earths?
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Volume-wise, you could fit over a million Earths inside the sun. Yeah.
• 2:36
  The sun is about 800,000 miles across. You could fit
• 2:39
  about 110 Earths across it, the diameter.
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: We do those things where you show the differences between
• 2:45
  our sun and different stars and immense stars. And you
• 2:49
  go bigger and bigger and bigger. And you get to
• 2:51
  the point where you're like, I can't. This is not working.
• 2:55
  I can't process this. It's too kooky.
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: There's nobody that can process it. I mean one of
• 3:00
  the really kind of– the thing about sort of demystifying
• 3:03
  scientists is the idea that our brains somehow work any
• 3:06
  differently and like we can visualize what a light year is, right?
• 3:10
  A light year is about six trillion miles, the distance
• 3:14
  light travels in a year. No, we're human beings. We
• 3:17
  get used to using the terms. We get used to
• 3:20
  using the numbers. But we've got the same brain as
• 3:23
  everybody else. Nobody can visualize what a galaxy really is.
• 3:26
  And you can take pictures of them. You can say
• 3:29
  the word galaxy. But people have no idea what monsters
• 3:34
  these are. And then with the James Webb Space Telescope,
• 3:38
  all of a sudden you're taking pictures of billions of them.
• 3:41
  And they're right in front of your eyes. This is
• 3:44
  not something that you can argue about.
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: It's an image.
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: And you see these These foggy hazes of stars, you know,
• 3:53
  basically so many stars you can't see them individually. And
• 3:56
  that's real. And, I mean, it still gives me goosebumps.
• 3:59
  Speaker 3: That's awesome. It gives me goosebumps too, but it's so
• 4:04
  cool that it gives it to you when you actually
• 4:06
  study it your whole life.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: Oh, that's the whole point. I mean, you know, working
• 4:10
  for NASA was a huge, huge honor. And, I mean,
• 4:13
  all of us there are doing this. I mean, we
• 4:15
  were all science fiction fans. We all love imagination. you know,
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  that was the best thing about working at NASA was
• 4:24
  the joy and the teamwork and the camaraderie and the
• 4:27
  people that you're working with, that they think this is
• 4:30
  the best thing in the world to do.
• 4:32
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, there's a real problem that we have
• 4:35
  where I think that cities and light pollution have really,
• 4:41
  you know, it's great that we have cities. It's wonderful.
• 4:43
  It's wonderful that we have all this electricity and that
• 4:45
  we can See things at nighttime. But boy, we have
• 4:48
  done ourselves a massive disservice by not being able to
• 4:50
  see the stars all the time. And I think people
• 4:52
  have kind of lost the wonder of it when you're
• 4:54
  only looking at it as images on your phone or when,
• 4:58
  you know, the only time you get it is on vacation.
• 5:00
  Occasionally you look up in the sky. Wow, look at
• 5:01
  all the stars here. It's different here. This is something
• 5:06
  that everyone should be absolutely blown away by. At night,
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  you have a vision of the most spectacular thing any
• 5:14
  human being has ever seen ever. Just the Milky Way
• 5:16
  galaxy alone. It's nuts. It's crazy to think that those
• 5:20
  are all stars and that you can't count them. It's insane.
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  There's so many of them. And it's above you every day.
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  And we're just blase, blase. We're just like so used
• 5:30
  to it. We're so dismissive. It doesn't mean anything. It's
• 5:34
  exciting when someone's excited by it because I'm like more
• 5:37
  people need to get the fuck away from the cities
• 5:39
  and just go see how crazy this is that we're
• 5:42
  flying through space. Yeah.
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: It is profound. And to be that close, I mean
• 5:49
  just looking up, you don't even need a telescope or
• 5:51
  a pair of binoculars. The presence of something so much
• 5:54
  larger than you. But I mean if you've listened to
• 5:57
  some of my podcasts, I think you know that the
• 6:00
  big deal for me is that you are such– part
• 6:03
  of this. You are such an intimate, intrinsic part of this.
• 6:07
  It's not we're separate from space. We look up and
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  there's something separate from us. That's the story of us
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  up there. The only way the universe makes atoms, the
• 6:17
  only way that makes the chemicals all around us, the aluminum,
• 6:20
  the iron, the oxygen, the carbon, the phosphorus, everything that
• 6:24
  makes me up, the only thing in the universe that
• 6:26
  makes atoms is the interior of a star. It's the
• 6:29
  only place where nuclear fusion puts atoms together. So everything
• 6:34
  that you are, the story is up there. And, you know,
• 6:38
  so you're not looking at something separate and distant. You know,
• 6:41
  I mean astrophysics is the story of, you know, the
• 6:43
  end of your nose literally. I mean we are part
• 6:47
  of this beautiful bigger thing.
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  Speaker 3: That's a weird concept. I mean, that's from that old song.
• 6:53
  You know, we are stardust.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we are golden. Got to get ourselves back to
• 6:56
  the garden.
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's real. That's what we are.
• 7:01
  And that's what all life is. And that's just a
• 7:03
  very strange thing for people to wrap their heads around
• 7:05
  as we're sort of slowly getting a greater and greater
• 7:09
  understanding of the complexity of the universe itself, which is
• 7:13
  relatively recent in terms of human history. I mean, we
• 7:17
  really didn't know all Just what we know now because
• 7:22
  the James Webb telescope is so crazy where they're seeing
• 7:25
  these galaxies. They're confusing. Like why are they formed so early?
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. I gave a talk about those just a
• 7:31
  few weeks ago, the red dots. They never let astronomers
• 7:35
  name anything, right? You're seeing something so dramatic and they
• 7:37
  call it the little red dots, right? Or there's a
• 7:40
  storm on Jupiter that's three times the size of the
• 7:42
  Earth with 400-mile-an-hour winds and they call it the red spot.
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: How come no one is allowed to name them?
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: Well, naming conventions, they're complex. So if you discover a comet,
• 7:52
  you get– if you discover an asteroid, you get to
• 7:54
  name it. If you discover a comet, the comet is
• 7:57
  named after you. But anything else has to be done
• 8:00
  by international committee. And so because of that, things don't
• 8:04
  end up with very interesting names. They all end up
• 8:06
  with catalog numbers, basically phone numbers.
• 8:09
  Speaker 3: What do they call that weird hexagon on Jupiter? Is
• 8:11
  it a hexagon?
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: Saturn.
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  Speaker 1: The hexagon.
• 8:14
  Speaker 3: That's right.
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  Speaker 1: I think they call that the hexagon on Saturn. That's it?
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  The hexagonal storm. It's fantastic. You could fit about two
• 8:22
  Earths across that. And it's a hexagon jet stream, basically.
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  You've got super fast moving winds around the pole of Saturn.
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  And Saturn is so cold. The gas is so cold
• 8:34
  that there's almost no friction in the gas. So unlike here...
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  The jet stream here, there's kind of this joke.
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  Speaker 3: Oh, there's a picture.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: Hey, that's fantastic.
• 8:44
  Speaker 3: That's wild.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: One of my favorite pictures NASA ever took, if you
• 8:47
  look at the little dot in the middle of that,
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  the sort of little eye of the storm, we actually
• 8:52
  have a picture from Cassini where you can see the
• 8:54
  sun glinting off of hundreds of miles high. There you go.
• 8:58
  It's down at the bottom there. It's in the bottom
• 9:00
  in the middle. Yeah, that picture.
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  Speaker 3: One more.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a picture from the Cassini space mission. That's
• 9:06
  a real image. And that's the eye of that storm.
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  And those are, like I said, hundreds of miles high
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  banks of clouds catching the sunlight and the poles of Saturn. And,
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  you know, we did that. We went there. We flew
• 9:19
  over that storm.
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  Speaker 3: That's crazy.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: And, yeah, I mean, as amazing as the storm is,
• 9:25
  it's at least fairly well understood as a very low
• 9:28
  temperature jet stream. You know, I mean, you may be
• 9:30
  familiar here. People kind of joke about, like, you know,
• 9:32
  the weather's the same. A week from now, the weather
• 9:34
  will be about the same as it is now. They're
• 9:35
  patterns that get set up in the jet stream of
• 9:37
  the earth. And you take away all the heat and
• 9:39
  all the friction and it forms this beautiful storm.
• 9:44
  Speaker 3: What is the theory as to why it forms a hexagon?
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  Speaker 1: It's something called a standing wave. The jet stream basically
• 9:50
  sets up a wave inside this circulation. And I will
• 9:54
  admit I'm not an atmospheric specialist, but that's what I know.
• 9:56
  And that wave kind of makes this hesitation.
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  Speaker 3: Shape.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: And then you cool everything down without friction. And that's
• 10:03
  how the whole thing works. They have done computer simulations
• 10:08
  of very fast moving jet streams under the conditions of Saturn.
• 10:11
  And you can get this sort of shape to set up.
• 10:12
  Speaker 3: Wow. God, it's so fascinating. And it's so fascinating that
• 10:17
  we think of that as being so far away.
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: That's just right in our neighborhood.
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: It's just right there. It's super hard to get to.
• 10:24
  It takes a long time. But it's just right there.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: Well, we're hoping to launch– when I say we, NASA
• 10:29
  is hoping to launch a new mission to one of
• 10:30
  the moons of Saturn. Hopefully in like 2028. It will
• 10:34
  take it something like six, seven years to get out
• 10:36
  to Saturn. But there's that giant moon of Saturn, Titan,
• 10:40
  which has a thick atmosphere. It's the only place where
• 10:42
  the air pressure– the air pressure is actually even a
• 10:44
  little bit greater than the room here. And– It's very cold.
• 10:49
  It's almost close to 300 degrees below zero. But it's
• 10:52
  got this thick atmosphere and tons of organic molecules and
• 10:55
  evidence of liquid water below the surface. It's one of
• 10:57
  the places that might be friendly for life. And so
• 11:00
  they're designing– have you heard about this? It's called Dragonfly.
• 11:02
  It's an octocopter. It's a big drone. There you go.
• 11:06
  Speaker 3: Perfect.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: And so Dragonfly is going to be this big octocopter
• 11:10
  that we're going to land on this moon Titan. We've
• 11:12
  already landed on this moon once with the Cassini mission.
• 11:15
  And it's got this really kick-ass chemical laboratory inside to
• 11:20
  look for the conditions for life, you know, anything that
• 11:23
  we might be able to find. And obviously sample more
• 11:25
  than one site. It would actually fly around and go
• 11:28
  to different places. There's rain. There are oceans. There are rivers.
• 11:31
  The only place we know, there are open, you know,
• 11:33
  great lake-sized lakes on Titan.
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: But it's so cold that it's not liquid water. It's
• 11:38
  actually liquid natural gas, liquid methane and ethane.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: And again, you know, the.
• 11:45
  We've already landed there. We actually sent a probe there
• 11:48
  as part of the Cassini mission to land on Titan.
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  I mean, it's just badass that we humans have been there.
• 11:55
  That's an artist's conception, but that's what it would look like.
• 11:58
  We sent a probe there. It took a bunch of
• 12:00
  readings and then eventually froze to death. But some of
• 12:04
  the readings that it took were intriguing about the possibility
• 12:08
  of life on Titan.
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: Didn't the Russians land something on Venus?
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, more than once. Yeah, the Soviet Union is
• 12:15
  the only nation, former Soviet Union now, that ever landed
• 12:18
  on Venus. And landing on Venus is way hard.
• 12:21
  Speaker 3: They got crazy pictures too.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: The surface temperature is about 1,000 degrees and the air
• 12:26
  pressure is similar to being about a mile below the ocean.
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: That's a photo.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a photo. Yeah, that's real.
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: It's a photo taken at 1,000 degree temperature.
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: Yes. Didn't last long. But everything is crushed flat. I mean,
• 12:41
  the landscape is just crushed flat by that, you know,
• 12:43
  huge pressure. You know, this incredible dense atmosphere. The clouds
• 12:48
  are sulfuric acid. That's why it looks yellow.
• 12:50
  Speaker 3: That's real.
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: You know, sulfuric acid clouds. I mean, it is like,
• 12:54
  you know, classic vision of hell. It's heavy and deep
• 12:58
  and dense and sulfuric acid.
• 13:01
  Speaker 3: It's so interesting, too, that our understanding of planets... in
• 13:05
  terms of just what's in our solar system. They're all different.
• 13:08
  They vary so much. And this is just all we
• 13:11
  know about the known universe in terms of planets. Is
• 13:14
  it possible that there could be some planets out there
• 13:16
  that are set up completely different than the planets in
• 13:19
  our solar system?
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely. One of my favorite websites, just for fun,
• 13:23
  I mean, so it changes every day how many planets
• 13:26
  around other stars we know about. We call them exoplanets,
• 13:29
  exterior planets. I think we're up to about 5,000 that
• 13:33
  we know of.
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: When did we start noticing them? Or at least detecting them? Yeah, yeah.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: This is something I've been involved with ever since I
• 13:40
  was in college. When I was in college, my research
• 13:44
  advisor was a man named David Latham, and he was
• 13:47
  trying to find the first evidence. I mean, we figured
• 13:50
  other stars have planets. I mean, it can't be just us.
• 13:53
  But they're hard to see. They're tiny. They're dark. I mean,
• 13:56
  compared to a star, right? I mean, planets don't glow themselves, right?
• 14:00
  So they just reflect starlight. I mean we literally said
• 14:03
  it was like trying to see a firefly around a
• 14:05
  searchlight from 200 miles away. How would you do it?
• 14:08
  And I mean now we're actually getting so good at it.
• 14:11
  We find more every week, almost every day. I mean
• 14:14
  pretty soon it's going to be I think thousands of
• 14:16
  new planets every single year.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: Do we have actual images?
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: So for the most part, we don't have images, but
• 14:24
  that doesn't mean we don't have really cool observations, including
• 14:27
  the chemistry of their atmospheres. This is really amazing to me.
• 14:31
  So they're so tiny, it's hard to actually get a pixel.
• 14:34
  They're smaller than a pixel. But when these things pass
• 14:36
  in front of their star, right, so there's a star,
• 14:39
  and they pass in front of it. So you're looking
• 14:42
  at this thing pass in front of the star. It
• 14:43
  makes a tiny little solar eclipse. It goes by. It
• 14:45
  blocks a little bit of the starlight. And we find
• 14:47
  them that way. We find the stars twinkling as little
• 14:50
  planets go around them again and again. They have to
• 14:53
  come back three times for us to say it's a planet. Otherwise,
• 14:56
  it could be a spot on the star or something else.
• 14:59
  And the amazing thing is that the starlight will shine
• 15:03
  through the atmosphere of that planet. And we can actually
• 15:06
  probe the chemistry of the atmosphere. So we find planets
• 15:09
  that have the size of the Earth, about the temperature
• 15:12
  of the Earth. They have evidence of water vapor, carbon dioxide, oxygen.
• 15:17
  And then last year there was this fantastic controversial discovery.
• 15:21
  I mean it's very real. We need to follow it up.
• 15:24
  We think we're starting to see the evidence of organic molecules.
• 15:28
  It's not a very strong signal yet. And this was
• 15:32
  a press release from the James Webb Space Telescope. And
• 15:35
  there were some scientists that wondered– if these could be
• 15:39
  organic molecules that might someday be traceable even to the
• 15:42
  presence of life. They resembled something that plankton might give
• 15:46
  off on an ocean world. And then, of course, the
• 15:49
  rest of the scientists said, the data is not good
• 15:51
  enough yet. We need much better observations before you can
• 15:54
  say that. You know, we could maybe believe it's an
• 15:56
  organic carbon-based molecule, but we don't know which one it
• 15:58
  is yet. So, you know, I mean, stay tuned. I mean,
• 16:02
  I would never have thought the first evidence of life
• 16:05
  outside the Earth really hard chemical scientific evidence would be
• 16:10
  on a planet around another star. I thought we'd maybe
• 16:11
  find it on Mars or on some of the moons
• 16:13
  of Jupiter and Saturn. But now with the James Webb
• 16:16
  Space Telescope and the telescopes that will come afterwards, we
• 16:19
  might be able to actually, you know, get enough of
• 16:22
  a sense of the atmosphere of these planets to start
• 16:24
  looking for life signs.
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So the sun, the star is passing light through
• 16:30
  this little tiny thing that's smaller than a pixel and
• 16:34
  through the atmosphere where the light passes through. What are
• 16:37
  we using to detect that?
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: It's a technique called spectroscopy. And it's a really, really
• 16:41
  powerful thing. And this is what most scientists do. As
• 16:45
  beautiful as images are of a gorgeous galaxy or a star,
• 16:51
  That's not really what we do. We look at these
• 16:53
  little squiggly lines. We get very excited. We let the
• 16:56
  light from the star pass through a grating that actually
• 16:59
  draws it into a rainbow. It takes that white light.
• 17:02
  You've seen pictures of like prism, dark side of the moon,
• 17:05
  Pink Floyd. White light goes in, rainbow comes out. If
• 17:08
  you measure really, really carefully how much light is coming
• 17:11
  in every color– You can tell astounding things. You can
• 17:15
  tell how hot the star is, how fast it's rotating,
• 17:19
  in some cases how far away a galaxy is. That's
• 17:21
  how we measure how far away they are from us
• 17:23
  in space. And you can measure the chemistry molecule by molecule.
• 17:28
  You can tell exactly what atoms and molecules are in
• 17:30
  that object. Here we go. Look at that. So what's
• 17:34
  your amazing person, by the way? That's incredible. Thank you
• 17:38
  so much. Thank you. Every element, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, has
• 17:44
  a fingerprint in the rainbow. And it's like you know
• 17:47
  it's that. There's nothing else like it. You know that
• 17:49
  you see carbon and nitrogen if you see these colors
• 17:52
  of the rainbow shining at that particular light. And it's
• 17:55
  not just simple things like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, but it's
• 17:58
  water vapor, carbon dioxide, organic molecules. Everybody has their fingerprint
• 18:03
  in the rainbow. And so when the starlight shines through
• 18:07
  the atmosphere, there you go. That's how we tell what
• 18:09
  these things are made of. You know, this is a
• 18:11
  dying star. This is actually in the Carina Nebula and
• 18:15
  one of the most luminous stars there is. And we
• 18:18
  pass the light through a rainbow and then looking really,
• 18:21
  really carefully at how much light comes in every color,
• 18:23
  you can pick apart exactly what it's made of. Wow.
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Did you know that, you know, helium, you know the
• 18:28
  element helium, right? You may be familiar that the Greek
• 18:32
  sun god's name is Helios. Helium is an element we
• 18:35
  discovered on the sun before we ever knew it was here.
• 18:39
  In the turn of the last century, in the late 1800s,
• 18:41
  when they were passing sunlight through a prism and they
• 18:43
  were looking at all these patterns of light, there was
• 18:46
  one chemical that we'd never seen before here. And so
• 18:48
  they named it after the sun, helium. It was on
• 18:50
  the sun but not here. We never knew that helium
• 18:53
  was here. That was found later. It was later we
• 18:55
  found it in natural gas, radioactive decay. Helium is such
• 19:00
  a light gas. It just leaves the earth. It just
• 19:02
  doesn't stick around. And so, you know, helium, we saw
• 19:04
  this pattern of colors in the sun's light. We were like, well,
• 19:08
  what the hell is that? And it turned out to
• 19:10
  be a new element we'd never found before.
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: What year was that?
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: We should look this up. I don't know exactly, but
• 19:14
  if we Google what year was helium found, I'm sure
• 19:18
  we can find it.
• 19:19
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I've been thinking about helium balloons and
• 19:21
  people who, you know, suck helium.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right. We didn't even know about helium until 1868.
• 19:27
  Speaker 3: There we go. That's nuts. So they figured out that
• 19:32
  there was helium in the sun in 1868.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: Long before we ever identified it on this planet.
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: That is so nuts. Yeah.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: Just think what's out there. We didn't even know about helium.
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: It's not just that it's what's out there, but that
• 19:46
  there's people out there that can figure out how to
• 19:49
  do that in 1868. 1868. Shout out to Pierre Janssen,
• 19:55
  a French astronomer who figured it out.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: When you think about, you know, I know that one
• 20:00
  thing you love is the idea of Einstein and time
• 20:04
  being different and all that. You know, they figured all
• 20:07
  of this out around like 1908. It was more than
• 20:10
  100 years ago. And, you know, we don't really even
• 20:13
  have a better thing yet. You know, I mean, they
• 20:15
  figured out that time isn't the way that we experience it.
• 20:19
  Just by really simple, brilliant thought processes, observations, 100 and
• 20:25
  some years ago, a little more than 120 years ago. Yeah, incredible.
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: The idea that the faster you go, the slower time is,
• 20:34
  is so hard to wrap. one's head around. And one
• 20:38
  of the things that I heard you talking about, you
• 20:39
  were talking about GPS satellites and you were saying that
• 20:42
  GPS satellites, because they're going about, what are they going
• 20:45
  like 20,000 miles an hour or something like that?
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: So actually, if we want to break this down a
• 20:49
  little bit, there are a couple of different effects about time.
• 20:52
  And one of the things that NASA does is calibrates
• 20:56
  the GPS satellites and the signal coming. And you wouldn't,
• 20:59
  I mean, I think I heard that, I mean, within
• 21:01
  a day, if we didn't take into account the time
• 21:05
  difference these things are in, that we'd be about six
• 21:07
  miles off, I mean, in a single day.
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: That's crazy.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. It's a big deal.
• 21:11
  Speaker 3: That's so crazy. Yeah. That's so crazy. And that's just
• 21:16
  above us.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: Time really is something. I mean, this is not a theory.
• 21:21
  Time is variable depending on how fast you're going and
• 21:25
  also how far off the Earth's surface you are, or
• 21:27
  I should say how far away from a big gravity
• 21:29
  body you are. In the case of the GPS satellites,
• 21:32
  there's two things going on. And it's kind of fun
• 21:35
  because it's actually the reverse for the astronauts. So if
• 21:37
  I want to break this down, this is really fun.
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: We have clocks that are so accurate that if you
• 21:44
  move about two feet above where– if we had a
• 21:48
  clock on this desk and then if we moved it
• 21:49
  up about two feet, we could actually detect time flowing
• 21:53
  differently because you're just that far away from the Earth's gravity,
• 21:57
  just two feet. Your head– And your feet, we spend
• 22:01
  most of our lives, say, standing up, are actually going
• 22:04
  through time at slightly different rates. The farther away you
• 22:08
  are from a gravitational source. I mean, you probably like
• 22:10
  movies like Interstellar, right, with Matthew McConaughey. Remember the big
• 22:14
  black hole? And the closer they get to the big
• 22:16
  black hole, the slower time goes. That's not a theory.
• 22:19
  That's something we can actually measure with clocks. And a
• 22:22
  black hole has so much gravity, it does it a
• 22:24
  lot more dramatically. But it's happening right in this room. Seriously,
• 22:28
  your head is in a different time frame than your
• 22:30
  feet right now.
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: That's nuts. Yeah.
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's measurable. You need extremely accurate clocks. But
• 22:38
  in the case of the GPS satellites, the GPS satellites
• 22:41
  are in what we call a medium orbit. They're not
• 22:43
  as far away as the geostationary satellites. But they're not
• 22:46
  actually going that fast. They're only going about 9,000 miles
• 22:49
  an hour around the Earth. The astronauts in the space station,
• 22:52
  by the way, are going much faster. They're going more,
• 22:55
  let's say, approximately 20,000 miles an hour. So the GPS
• 22:58
  satellites are going a little slower. And yeah, 8,000 miles
• 23:01
  an hour is a lot. And that does slow your
• 23:03
  time down. But the bigger effect for GPS satellites is
• 23:07
  how far away from the Earth they are. We're actually
• 23:10
  going slower in time than they are because we're closer
• 23:13
  to the Earth's gravity. And they're so far away, they're
• 23:16
  actually going a little faster than we are in time. Now,
• 23:19
  they're also slowed down by their fast velocity. The faster
• 23:23
  you go, the slower your time goes. But people don't
• 23:26
  realize there's another factor, and that's how far away you
• 23:28
  are from gravity. For the astronauts, the astronauts are closer
• 23:32
  to the Earth, right? So they're actually not so far
• 23:34
  away as the satellites, and they're going much faster. So
• 23:36
  for the astronauts, it's the motion. It's the time dilation
• 23:39
  from the motion that's a bigger effect. If you are
• 23:42
  on the space station for a year, you come back
• 23:44
  about one one-hundredth of a second younger than you should be.
• 23:48
  And obviously that's not a big deal, but it's easily measurable.
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: And in the case of the satellites, you wouldn't get
• 23:54
  the right location. The data wouldn't be right unless we
• 23:56
  take into account two things, how fast they're going, the
• 24:00
  closer to the speed of light you go, the slower
• 24:01
  time goes, but also how far away from the gravitational
• 24:04
  pull of the earth they are. The closer you are
• 24:07
  into gravity, the slower time goes.
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: I think the weirdest thing that I've ever heard anybody
• 24:11
  say is that all time exists currently.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: That's Einstein. I mean that goes back 120 years.
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: That's such a bizarre thought.
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: We don't know if it's true, but it's– I mean
• 24:24
  Einstein really thought there wasn't much of a way around
• 24:27
  it because he said, OK, well, if everything is going
• 24:29
  at different velocities compared to everything else, right? I mean
• 24:33
  it's a great question a kid can ask. How fast
• 24:35
  am I going through space? And the Earth– if you're
• 24:39
  on the equator of the Earth, that goes around at
• 24:41
  about 1,000 miles an hour. And then we go around
• 24:46
  the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour in our orbit.
• 24:50
  The sun is going around the galaxy about half a
• 24:52
  million miles an hour around the galaxy. The galaxy is
• 24:55
  going towards a galactic cluster at more than a million
• 24:58
  miles an hour. But how fast are we going really?
• 25:03
  And the only thing you can measure is how fast
• 25:06
  are you going relative to something else. There's no answer.
• 25:10
  You know, how fast am I going? Well, I mean,
• 25:12
  am I still or am I actually traveling close to
• 25:14
  the speed of light right now? I don't know. So
• 25:16
  Einstein said the only way he could really think about
• 25:18
  how that would work is if the universe was just
• 25:21
  one big thing. You know, all of time and space
• 25:24
  exists in a big whole thing. There's only one now.
• 25:29
  Einstein famously said the past, present and future are, you know,
• 25:33
  persistently annoying illusions. Now, again, do we know this to
• 25:38
  be true? At the moment, we don't have any better physics,
• 25:42
  and I doubt that physics will get any less weird
• 25:44
  than that. But, yeah, I mean, that's sort of the
• 25:49
  way modern physics thinks the universe may be, is a
• 25:52
  big whole thing that started from beginning to end and
• 25:56
  is all now-ish.
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: But if that's the case, so subjectively we can measure things.
• 26:04
  We can measure time. But what are we measuring? If
• 26:10
  it's– I mean are we making artificial time constraints? Are
• 26:15
  we doing it ourselves? When we create a clock, we
• 26:18
  create a watch and the watch is 24 hours a day.
• 26:22
  It's running. What is it measuring?
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: That is exactly the question Albert Einstein asked. That is
• 26:31
  a deep, excellent question. And so that was the problem.
• 26:36
  I mean, in a famous thought experiment, Einstein made a
• 26:38
  clock by setting up two mirrors and having light bounce
• 26:40
  between the two mirrors. And that was the tick of
• 26:42
  the clock. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And the problem
• 26:47
  was that that's how he started thinking about the speed
• 26:49
  of light is that if you had this thing in
• 26:50
  a spaceship that was going a huge fraction of the
• 26:52
  speed of light, then a person standing watching it go
• 26:54
  by would actually watch the light kind of trace out
• 26:57
  a pattern like this. Because it's actually ticking between the mirrors,
• 27:00
  but the mirrors are moving along. And so you see
• 27:02
  the light make this sort of bouncing movement. And that
• 27:05
  means it's actually traveled farther than the person on the
• 27:08
  ground who thinks that the mirrors are just sort of,
• 27:10
  the light is making just a straight up and down
• 27:12
  line from mirror to mirror. That question that you asked
• 27:16
  is what completely, I mean, it completely revolutionized physics. Everything
• 27:21
  fell apart when people said, how do you even measure time?
• 27:24
  What does it mean to make a clock? What are
• 27:27
  we measuring?
• 27:29
  Speaker 3: I still don't understand what we're measuring.
• 27:31
  Speaker 2: Oh, Lord.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: I get it.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, we've— I don't know if I have an
• 27:35
  answer for you. I don't think anybody does. But here's
• 27:38
  the deal. So the clock in Einstein's experiment— so the clock has,
• 27:44
  you know, two mirrors, and there's light bouncing between it,
• 27:47
  and that's the distance that it travels in one tick.
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: But now you put this mirror— you put that clock on
• 27:53
  a spaceship, and the spaceship's going really fast— And as
• 27:56
  it goes by, you see that clock, as it streams
• 27:59
  by you really fast, you see the light make this motion.
• 28:03
  And this line is actually longer than that line. This line,
• 28:07
  if you measure it, that's actually a longer line that
• 28:09
  I drew than the original one between just the two
• 28:11
  mirrors because now it's at an angle. And this is
• 28:15
  what made Einstein say, time has to change. If anything moves,
• 28:20
  the tick of a clock changes. However you measure time,
• 28:23
  whatever time is, whether you measure it with a bouncing
• 28:26
  clock or whether you measure it with a vibrating atom
• 28:28
  like we do in the Bureau of Standards, or whether
• 28:31
  you measure it with a spring that's slowly unwinding in
• 28:33
  a wristwatch. Anything you can do to measure one moment
• 28:38
  to the next changes when motion is involved. There's no
• 28:42
  way to get around it. It's not just the measurement.
• 28:46
  It's time itself is changing. Any way we have to
• 28:49
  measure this thing we call time. And I have to
• 28:52
  tell you, Joe, I I don't think we have an
• 28:54
  answer to what time is. What are we measuring? I
• 29:00
  think right there, I think you're asking for the next
• 29:03
  revolution in physics that we don't have yet. I really
• 29:06
  mean that.
• 29:07
  Speaker 3: So when we're measuring time currently, like when I look
• 29:10
  down at my watch, I'm measuring time in this particular space,
• 29:15
  like where I am, what altitude I'm at, how fast
• 29:20
  I'm moving. And the watch just does a reasonable job
• 29:23
  of calculating all that.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: And that's you. I mean that's what you see here
• 29:27
  sitting still with your watch looking at it.
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: If someone's flying by at close to the speed of light,
• 29:32
  they won't see you measure time the same way.
• 29:35
  Speaker 3: But you said something else that freaked me out. That
• 29:39
  if you traveled at the speed of light, the problem
• 29:43
  would be you would have infinite mass.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: Anything with mass.
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: That's the thing.
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: So if a person was in a spaceship and it
• 29:51
  traveled the speed of light, that spaceship would have infinite mass.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: It's basically– it's what makes accelerating up to the speed
• 29:58
  of light impossible. Anything with mass can't travel at the
• 30:02
  speed of light. I mean, the equations blow up. But
• 30:04
  what does infinite mass mean? Do you have more mass
• 30:06
  than the whole universe?
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: What the hell is that?
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: As you approach the speed of light, if you have mass,
• 30:11
  it takes more and more energy to accelerate you even
• 30:14
  just a little bit more. So you never get to
• 30:16
  the speed of light. You're going 99.9% the speed of light. Okay,
• 30:20
  I want to go a little faster. It takes more
• 30:23
  and more energy each little tiny step you make. Basically,
• 30:26
  you never get to the speed of light. It takes
• 30:28
  an infinite amount of energy. So when it comes to
• 30:32
  things like interstellar travel, I don't think we're ever going
• 30:35
  to take a spaceship and accelerate it to the speed
• 30:38
  of light. I mean, we might get very close. There
• 30:42
  are particles in space that do have mass, like neutrinos,
• 30:44
  tiny little bits of mass. They travel very close to
• 30:46
  the speed of light, but they don't travel at the
• 30:48
  speed of light. But to me, I think that the
• 30:53
  idea of traveling interstellar distances or even intergalactic distances, the
• 30:58
  thing that starts to really get me is the question
• 31:00
  of this This what is space and what is time
• 31:02
  at all, quantum entanglement.
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: Glad you brought that up.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. I'm going to say I hope your listeners–
• 31:11
  I don't want to get– I want people to come
• 31:13
  along with us.
• 31:14
  Speaker 3: Oh, they're coming along.
• 31:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: I don't want to say things that sound so stupid.
• 31:18
  They're like, why are they saying this? So please stop
• 31:20
  me if we need some more background.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: This does not sound stupid in any way, shape or form.
• 31:24
  But the idea of quantum entanglement, we should explain that
• 31:27
  to people.
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 31:28
  Speaker 3: And what it essentially means is that things are entangled.
• 31:32
  They're connected at– regardless of the distance. Yes. And it
• 31:35
  could be an immeasurable amount of distance.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: Any distance.
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: Like, yeah, literally the beginning of the universe distance, like 13.8
• 31:45
  billion light years away distance. You're entangled with that.
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: It's amazing because once again, let's go back to the
• 31:52
  idea– this is a real experimental fact, right? I mean–
• 31:57
  A lot of times this crazy stuff that scientists will
• 32:01
  say this stuff and people hear it for the first
• 32:03
  time and they say, well, that sounds like idiotic. That
• 32:05
  sounds stupid. Where did they get that from? And the
• 32:10
  idea that time changes is now– it's one of the
• 32:14
  most commonly proven facts every day. Like I said, we
• 32:17
  need it to calibrate the GPS satellites. It's easy to
• 32:19
  measure time. Quantum entanglement was something that even Albert Einstein
• 32:24
  100 years ago, he understood that quantum mechanics was pointing
• 32:28
  that way, but he really didn't like it. He called
• 32:31
  it spooky action at a distance. He hated it because
• 32:34
  he realized that quantum mechanics had this implication that if
• 32:38
  things could somehow be connected quantum mechanically, you could take
• 32:41
  them any distance away from each other and they would
• 32:44
  somehow be able to respond to each other instantaneously with
• 32:47
  no time difference. And he didn't think that would ever
• 32:51
  actually happen. And then back in the mid-1990s, we started
• 32:54
  to do experiments with atoms and we found out that
• 32:57
  it was real. It can start off pretty simply. You
• 33:02
  have two atoms that are in an orbit around– so
• 33:06
  an atom has a nucleus of protons and electrons in
• 33:08
  the middle. I'm sorry. An atom has a nucleus of
• 33:12
  protons and neutrons. The electrons are flying around in orbits
• 33:15
  around the atoms. two electrons can be in the same
• 33:19
  orbit only if they're spinning in different directions. They have
• 33:22
  an angular momentum. It's called spin. And the only way
• 33:25
  these two electrons can fit in that orbit together is
• 33:27
  if they're spinning. One is spinning in an upward direction. One, say,
• 33:30
  spinning in a downward direction. Hate the broken finger. So
• 33:35
  if you take these electrons out of the atom, and
• 33:37
  you can do that, you know that they're in different
• 33:40
  spins because they had to be to be in that
• 33:42
  orbit together. So now you separate them. You can separate
• 33:45
  them by any distance you want. You can separate them
• 33:47
  by centimeters in a laboratory. The Chinese have done this
• 33:50
  up to the space station that they run in back.
• 33:53
  You could conceivably do it to another galaxy. If you
• 33:56
  take those electrons and you separate them, you know that
• 33:59
  they were spinning in opposite directions. So if you take
• 34:01
  an electric field and you change the spin of one,
• 34:04
  the other one immediately changes in response.
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: Regardless of the distance.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: Regardless of the distance. And we know this to be true.
• 34:11
  We've done this. And the amazing thing is the universe
• 34:16
  is saying– These two things are the same quantum mechanical system.
• 34:20
  They're basically the same object. They're connected to each other.
• 34:23
  They're entangled together. And it doesn't matter. Space and time
• 34:28
  don't matter. You separate them in space, any distance you want.
• 34:34
  How does that work? The universe says the space and
• 34:36
  time between them doesn't matter. They're the same system. To me,
• 34:41
  that's the real intriguing thing about, you know, could a
• 34:44
  civilization learn how to harness that, you know, You're not
• 34:48
  really even having to worry about traveling from one part
• 34:50
  to another. Did you watch the three-body problem show?
• 34:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: So you have these things called SOFONs, right? And SOFONs
• 34:57
  are entangled to this alien civilization. And they can respond
• 35:02
  instantaneously because they're entangled.
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: I mean, that's fantastic science. And as far as I
• 35:07
  can tell, that could be theoretically possible.
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, that's what's bonkers is that we are made
• 35:14
  out of all this stuff that's entangled.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: What's it entangled to? Is it entangled to stuff inside
• 35:19
  a black hole right now? Is it entangled to stuff
• 35:21
  that is on the other side of the universe from us?
• 35:24
  If the Big Bang had all of this stuff in
• 35:26
  a small volume at once, are we entangled to everything
• 35:30
  in some way? Seriously.
• 35:34
  Speaker 3: Seriously.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, is a part of me quantum mechanically right
• 35:38
  now in the Andromeda Galaxy? Yeah, actually. That would be
• 35:41
  the implication. I mean, talk about... I don't think we
• 35:46
  understand yet what reality is. I really don't. What does
• 35:51
  it mean? Are we all somehow the same particle entangled
• 35:54
  to each other? You know, are we connected to everything
• 35:59
  all at once? I mean, that could be where physics
• 36:03
  is taking us now.
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: That's bananas. It's very difficult to think About when you
• 36:10
  think you're a person in Austin, my feet are on
• 36:12
  the ground. Here I am touching this desk. I'm going
• 36:15
  to get my car later and go get something to eat.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: No kidding. You got to feed the cat, right? Yeah.
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: But that's not really what's going on. It's way more complex,
• 36:23
  way bigger. And you were speculating that that could be
• 36:27
  how some advanced, super advanced, intelligent life form travels.
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: It's always been more compelling to me than the idea
• 36:36
  of taking a spaceship and traveling somewhere.
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: This seems super crude.
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: That seems like the idea of making a horse fly.
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. You know, we talked about that movie Interstellar
• 36:47
  because there were a lot of good teaching moments in
• 36:50
  that movie for a physicist. You know, the idea that
• 36:52
  time really does slow down close to a black hole.
• 36:54
  And again, we observe this. When we observe things orbiting
• 36:57
  close to a black hole, you can tell that that happens.
• 37:00
  And the idea that this advanced civilization that we never
• 37:03
  actually see in the movie somehow communicates through basically space
• 37:07
  and time itself through gravity. You know, that's how Matthew
• 37:11
  McConaughey is able to even like go back, you know,
• 37:13
  in time and space to help his daughter solve, you know,
• 37:16
  gravity and all that. You know, I was like, yeah,
• 37:18
  I was like, I wonder if that's really more what
• 37:20
  it'd be like, you know, advanced civilizations. I mean, you
• 37:24
  got to think, right? I mean, You look around the
• 37:27
  earth and there are, you know, things like grasshoppers and
• 37:29
  hamsters that are fantastic, incredibly complex beings. But, I mean,
• 37:33
  do you try to teach them quantum mechanics or ask
• 37:35
  them to, you know, crochet a blanket or whatever? They
• 37:38
  don't have the capacity. And you've got to think that
• 37:40
  there's the similar jump where, I mean, we don't even
• 37:43
  know the right questions to ask that sort of a civilization.
• 37:47
  You know, I mean, can they see the universe as
• 37:50
  a whole thing? Do they know that they're connected to
• 37:52
  everything and can they somehow use that to travel? Yeah.
• 37:56
  Speaker 3: Maybe. Maybe. And if you just extrapolate, if you just
• 38:00
  think about where we've gone from primitive man to what
• 38:04
  we're currently experiencing, and you take that thousands of years,
• 38:08
  millions of years, whatever it is, you keep going. And
• 38:12
  as long as civilization gets rid of war and figures
• 38:16
  out a way to not die of disease and natural disaster,
• 38:19
  you could potentially continue this process of technological innovation and
• 38:25
  millions of years and you would imagine that it would
• 38:27
  go exponentially greater and greater in its ability to do things.
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 38:32
  Speaker 3: And its ability to not just not even things that
• 38:38
  we can imagine. Like we have a crude understanding amazing
• 38:44
  understanding of the universe but crude in comparison to what's
• 38:49
  potentially out there. What we could we could potentially be
• 38:54
  observing in a physical way, every planet on every star
• 38:59
  one day. But we're not, we can't even think of
• 39:03
  that as being a possibility now. But what we're doing
• 39:07
  right now is insane to people that live in the 1400s. Yeah.
• 39:12
  If you showed someone from the 1400s a nuclear power plant,
• 39:15
  they'd be like, what the fuck are you guys doing? Like,
• 39:18
  what is this? If you showed them a nuclear detonator,
• 39:21
  if you showed them FaceTime on a phone, They'd be like,
• 39:23
  this is insanity.
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: I just got on a little metal tube and came
• 39:26
  here from Milwaukee and I'll fly back tonight.
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: And we're just accustomed to it. It becomes normal and
• 39:33
  it would become normal as technology increased further and further
• 39:36
  and further. And this idea that the entire universe would
• 39:40
  be accessible is just bananas. Yes.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: Have you ever wondered if maybe the real follow-on to
• 39:47
  humanity someday will be some form of AI?
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: I think so.
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, yeah. I mean, I do wonder if the
• 39:53
  human brain is just kind of limited. I mean, if
• 39:55
  you say there are multiple dimensions and time is something
• 39:58
  that changes. I mean, I just said that, you know,
• 40:01
  I mean, scientists are no better than anybody else at
• 40:04
  comprehending a big number or a big amount of space.
• 40:06
  We just kind of get used to it. You know,
• 40:08
  I mean, will we have creature someday that we've created
• 40:11
  in AI that then all of a sudden can comprehend
• 40:15
  these things? Is that really the real evolutionary path of humanity?
• 40:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. I think it's just a completely
• 40:23
  different kind of life and that we're thinking of it
• 40:25
  as artificial. I don't think it's artificial at all. I
• 40:29
  think it's a life. It's just a different kind of
• 40:31
  life that we're creating. It's an earthling.
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, seriously, it's our children. We created this. Yeah.
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: I always describe ourselves as like We're an electronic caterpillar.
• 40:41
  We're making a cocoon. We don't even know why we're
• 40:43
  doing it because it's just what we do. I mean
• 40:46
  the thing about human beings is we've always been completely
• 40:49
  fascinated with innovation. I've always said that if you looked
• 40:52
  at us objectively, what does this species do? Oh, they
• 40:55
  make better things. They keep making better things. They're never
• 40:58
  satisfied with the things. Bees made the beehive and they're like,
• 41:01
  I think we got it, boys.
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: This is it.
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: We're not satisfied at all. And so if you just
• 41:07
  kept going with that, like where does it go? Well,
• 41:09
  it has to go to life. It has to go
• 41:11
  to some sort of a human-created new kind of life
• 41:15
  form that exists out of the components of the earth.
• 41:18
  But instead of being born out of evolution and out
• 41:22
  of natural mutation and natural selection, it's a random mutation.
• 41:26
  It's made out of us. We made it. And it
• 41:30
  will probably make better versions of it. And that would
• 41:33
  be the new life. And that's how you get over
• 41:35
  all the biological hurdles that we have. You think about
• 41:38
  like the things that trouble us, war and crime and
• 41:41
  violence and all these different things that are a real
• 41:43
  problem with the human race. Well, that all goes away
• 41:45
  when you stop being human. And if we really are
• 41:50
  entangled with everything, that will be us. It'll just be
• 41:54
  us in a completely different realm. Yeah.
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: I mean I do like this idea that what we
• 42:00
  call AIs now isn't something separate. I mean they are
• 42:03
  our children. It is an earthling. It is something we've created.
• 42:06
  The question I've often wondered is sometimes– I think sometimes
• 42:12
  we lack imagination about what might be possible. I've always
• 42:15
  enjoyed science fiction where the AIs also learn about love
• 42:21
  or about the arts or about creativity. I mean, whether
• 42:24
  you want to go with like the new Battlestar Galactica
• 42:26
  or whether you want to go with a pretty profound
• 42:29
  experience I had with a friend of mine who's an
• 42:31
  author who has cochlear implants. And, you know, he realizes
• 42:35
  that he doesn't hear like a human. I mean, the
• 42:38
  cochlear implants don't replicate perfectly what it means to hear
• 42:42
  the way our ears do. They bypass our ears. They
• 42:45
  wire directly into his brain and stimulate the experience of sound.
• 42:50
  And so he's hearing in his words like a cyborg.
• 42:53
  This is Michael Korost, a wonderful man that did some
• 42:56
  essays about this. And he talked about how much emotional
• 43:00
  response he has to music now, something he could never experience.
• 43:04
  How being a cyborg, quote unquote, and experiencing something in
• 43:08
  a non-human way has added joy and depth and passion.
• 43:16
  Are we so sure that technology makes us more and
• 43:19
  more kind of 1950s robot-like? Or could it take us
• 43:23
  into new experiences of being connected with each other, new
• 43:26
  ways of loving each other, new ways of understanding things?
• 43:29
  I mean, does it have to be all bad, this?
• 43:32
  Speaker 3: Well, all of our differences fall apart if we realize
• 43:34
  we're all one thing. Yeah. If we realize we're all
• 43:37
  one thing, then all of our monopoly of resources, all
• 43:43
  that stuff goes away if we realize we're all one thing.
• 43:46
  I mean, part of the problem with human beings is
• 43:47
  we're very selfish sometimes. And the reason why we're very
• 43:50
  selfish is because that's how you had to survive. If
• 43:52
  you wanted your genes to– if you wanted to survive
• 43:56
  and you wanted your genes to be passed on to
• 43:57
  the next generation, you had to be selfish because other
• 44:00
  people were being selfish too and that's the game that
• 44:01
  humans were playing. If we get to a point of
• 44:04
  universal telepathy, like universal telepathy with a universal language where
• 44:10
  all human beings are sharing thoughts. There are no secrets.
• 44:13
  We are all one thing. Everyone is terrified of that.
• 44:15
  People love secrets. I don't want people listening to my phone.
• 44:19
  I don't want people– well, I don't either because it
• 44:22
  would be people doing that and those people have their
• 44:24
  own ulterior motives and it's gross. They would have control.
• 44:27
  They know your emails. But what if there's no secrets?
• 44:31
  It's not possible because our understanding of each other is
• 44:35
  now complete. It's like we read each other's minds in
• 44:40
  a sense but it's much more complex than that and
• 44:42
  much more– much more in depth, like you feel what
• 44:47
  that person feels. You are that person and we're all
• 44:50
  one thing. That could be possible through technology. And this
• 44:56
  is where I have hope, where a lot of people
• 44:59
  are very fatalist with AI and they look at it
• 45:02
  in this dystopian sense of these oligarchs, these technology oligarchs
• 45:07
  are going to be controlling us through AI and they're
• 45:09
  going to have access to it and power it. I
• 45:11
  don't know if anybody is going to control it and
• 45:14
  I have a feeling it's going to be kind of
• 45:15
  like the internet in a way where I don't think
• 45:17
  they really thought what the internet was going to be.
• 45:19
  I think they had this understanding of being able to
• 45:22
  exchange information through universities and I think it got to
• 45:26
  a point where if they knew what the internet would
• 45:29
  be today and how little control they would have over
• 45:32
  the population and narratives and I think they probably would
• 45:34
  have shut it down a long time ago. I have
• 45:37
  a feeling that's going to be the same way with AI.
• 45:40
  And especially AI as it integrates with us, which I
• 45:44
  think is the only way that the human species really
• 45:48
  truly survives. Otherwise, we're just this archaic biological entity living
• 45:53
  in this new world of this ultra superior life form.
• 45:58
  But if we integrate with that thing through wearables, implants, engineering,
• 46:05
  if we figure out a way– and this is crazy.
• 46:09
  It's going to sound terrible to anybody who loves being
• 46:11
  a person. But all the flaws of being a primate,
• 46:15
  there's a lot of these biological reward systems that are
• 46:18
  built into us that are really problematic for progress. Why
• 46:21
  are we at war right now? Well, because there's people
• 46:24
  with certain ideologies and there's resources and there's people that
• 46:28
  are making money from their military contractors and there's politicians
• 46:32
  that are beholden to certain interests. And then what are
• 46:35
  we doing? We're doing the same stupid shit that we've
• 46:36
  been doing for thousands and thousands of years. Well, how
• 46:38
  do we get past that? We get past that by
• 46:40
  stopping people.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: I think you may be right. I mean, again, that
• 46:44
  future is frightening in some ways. But I'm more interested
• 46:49
  in the imagination. I mean instead of just the dystopia,
• 46:52
  what could this mean?
• 46:53
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: I mean how much more– like we said, I mean
• 46:57
  when we were little tribal groups, the little wars we had,
• 47:00
  the skirmishes didn't really hurt the planet as a whole.
• 47:02
  I mean now we're getting– there's so many people. And
• 47:05
  we're still having these little tribal skirmishes and now we're
• 47:08
  in danger of massive destruction. I mean we can't just
• 47:12
  keep going this way. I mean it's not survivable.
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: It's not.
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: So I mean could AI help us tap into some
• 47:19
  kind of group consciousness? I mean when– we're talking about
• 47:23
  Einstein's idea that the universe may all be this one
• 47:25
  big thing. And this is pure metaphysics, pure conjecture. But
• 47:30
  even when I was a little kid and I heard that,
• 47:31
  I wondered if all time and space happens at once–
• 47:35
  is there need for more than one consciousness even? Are
• 47:38
  we all just looking out of, you know, one consciousness
• 47:40
  looking out of everybody's eyes simultaneously? And not just humans,
• 47:44
  but everything in the universe. You know, it's a spectacular
• 47:48
  idea that, you know, if there is a moment, if
• 47:51
  the universe is just one big thing, you know, we
• 47:54
  are part now, even now, of beings we have no
• 47:59
  names for. You know, the super advanced beings that have
• 48:02
  figured all of this out and can span the universe
• 48:05
  with their consciousness, that's part of the eyes too. That's
• 48:09
  another part of this consciousness that we're part of right now.
• 48:12
  If there's one instant, it reminds me of some of
• 48:16
  the tenets of Buddhism. There might be these perfectly enlightened beings, bodhisattvas,
• 48:21
  and we are past lives of them. We're all existing
• 48:24
  at once. It's a fantastically beautiful idea.
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: It is a beautiful idea. And our survival instincts are
• 48:33
  attuned to maintaining what we are. There's this thing, well,
• 48:37
  I don't want to lose being a person. But I
• 48:39
  guarantee if you went to an Australia Pythagoras and you
• 48:42
  could somehow communicate to them, listen, you're going to change
• 48:46
  and you're going to be this thing that gets sick
• 48:48
  seven times a year and maybe you're obese and maybe
• 48:51
  you have a problem with cigarettes and maybe you drink
• 48:54
  too much and you like to gamble and you're going
• 48:56
  to fuck your life up here and there. But you're
• 48:58
  going to have a cell phone and you're going to
• 49:00
  live in a city and you're going to be breathing
• 49:02
  brake dust every day and you know your doctor's going
• 49:04
  to give you a bunch of stuff you don't really
• 49:05
  need because he's trying to make money the australopithecus are
• 49:09
  probably like fuck that i know what i'm doing.
• 49:13
  Speaker 1: Here sounds much better yeah i.
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: Know where the food is like get out of here
• 49:18
  i don't want any part of that and i think
• 49:20
  that's just part of survival instincts. Survival instincts don't want
• 49:24
  you to radically change into something completely different with its
• 49:27
  own new set of problems that you want to stay.
• 49:31
  You want to maintain, you know, country boy can survive.
• 49:33
  Keep me in the woods. You know what I mean?
• 49:35
  Like that's, People have this like natural inclination to keep
• 49:38
  things simple because they understand them. But I think that's
• 49:41
  not possible anymore. And I think we're going to just
• 49:44
  have to let it go. Just let that idea go
• 49:47
  and relax and accept whatever this new thing is. And
• 49:52
  I think we're very, very fortunate to be born at
• 49:56
  this time while we're experiencing it. Regardless of the outcome,
• 50:00
  this is a very unique time. Like one of the
• 50:03
  weirdest times I think. objectively in human history. And we're
• 50:07
  very fortunate to be experiencing it.
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: I mean, you and I are roughly the same age. And,
• 50:11
  you know, I think that, I mean, for me, having this,
• 50:14
  what they now kind of, you know, call the feral childhood, right,
• 50:17
  where I was unplugged. And there were, you know, there
• 50:19
  were vast stretches of time, even as a small child,
• 50:22
  where I was on my own, you know, in the
• 50:23
  neighborhood stuff. And I loved it. I mean, I remember
• 50:26
  going to, you know, a YMCA camp when I was
• 50:28
  11 years old, And, you know, everybody had to show
• 50:30
  up at breakfast and then there was an activity time
• 50:32
  and everybody had to show up at lunch. But what
• 50:33
  you did between that time, you were on your own.
• 50:36
  I mean, as an 11-year-old kid in the woods, there
• 50:38
  were activities. You could do some archery. There was a riflery.
• 50:41
  There was craft shop. There was swimming. And you had
• 50:43
  to check in at certain times. But sometimes I just
• 50:45
  went and sat in the woods, you know, 11 years old.
• 50:48
  I mean, can you imagine?
• 50:49
  Speaker 3: I had a similar experience in the Boy Scouts.
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the thing was, you know,
• 50:54
  so you and I had this experience of living unplugged.
• 50:57
  And sort of the idea of a quiet mind and imagination.
• 51:02
  But we also saw this tremendous change in this connectivity,
• 51:08
  which I love. I mean, I also love having the
• 51:10
  internet and my cell phones and all of that. But
• 51:13
  this is a real change in human civilization that we
• 51:15
  went through personally. And I agree with you. I feel
• 51:19
  a tremendous sense of gratitude for both ends of my life.
• 51:23
  Speaker 3: Right. We could have been born in the 1500s. Were
• 51:24
  the 1500s and 1600s Not that much changed.
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: I mean– For a lot of people, yeah.
• 51:31
  Speaker 3: Sure. I mean politically things changed. Leaders got overthrown. But
• 51:35
  as far as like the way you interfaced with the world,
• 51:38
  pretty much the same way. You wrote stuff down with feathers.
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 51:44
  Speaker 3: You know?
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: And gratitude. And like you said, I mean maybe instead
• 51:47
  of all the dystopia and all the worry and all
• 51:49
  the panic right now, going forward with gratitude.
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, I think the unknown gives people a tremendous
• 51:56
  amount of anxiety. Sure. For a good reason. I mean
• 51:59
  the unknown could potentially be dangerous and scary and terrifying
• 52:03
  or awesome. And you really don't know. And so you're like,
• 52:05
  what is it going to be? And there's all these
• 52:07
  college kids that are really freaking out because they went
• 52:11
  into debt. They're getting these college degrees. They're leaving with
• 52:16
  this burden, this financial burden that they can never get
• 52:18
  rid of. And on top of that, they have a
• 52:20
  degree that might not be worth anything because AI might
• 52:24
  completely eradicate their field. That's a real concern and so
• 52:28
  they– I think kids today that are graduating from college
• 52:31
  and graduating from high school, they probably have the most
• 52:34
  amount of anxiety about the future. That and then there's
• 52:37
  people that they haven't saved any money up. They don't
• 52:40
  even know if money is going to be valuable in
• 52:42
  the future. Like what does it even mean? Are we
• 52:45
  going to abandon all money? Like what is it going
• 52:48
  to mean when AI completely controls all of the resources,
• 52:51
  all of the government, all of everything, all transportation? And
• 52:54
  you don't have to do your job anymore. You just
• 52:56
  get some funds from the government where you can buy food.
• 53:01
  This is what people are talking about. This is a
• 53:03
  potential 100 years from now future.
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: Very seriously so. Yes, absolutely.
• 53:08
  Speaker 3: Which is terrifying to people that are thinking, hey, I
• 53:12
  want to do what my dad did and what my
• 53:14
  mom did and I want to go out there in
• 53:16
  the world and I want to find something that I'm
• 53:19
  passionate about and make it a career. And like maybe
• 53:21
  that's not possible. That– To kids right now I think
• 53:26
  is really freaking them out because the adults, the people
• 53:29
  like us that are supposed to be the ones that say, well,
• 53:32
  let me tell you how it all works. You're going
• 53:33
  to be fine. This is what you have to do.
• 53:35
  And if you do that and just cross your I's
• 53:37
  and dot your T's, you're going to be OK, Bob.
• 53:40
  But maybe you're not going to be OK. Like maybe
• 53:41
  we don't know shit because that's the reality. The reality
• 53:44
  is you and I, the adults, have no idea what
• 53:47
  this world is going to look like in 50 years.
• 53:49
  And these poor kids are– they have no one to
• 53:52
  turn to. There's no one that can explain what this–
• 53:55
  and so they're entering out into the world having to
• 53:57
  take care of themselves for the very first time with
• 53:59
  this real possibility that there might not be any jobs.
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: On the flip side of that, are you in fact
• 54:07
  describing the Star Trek universe?
• 54:09
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: A time where people do not work– everybody has anything
• 54:14
  they need as far as apparently survivability, food, whatever. And
• 54:18
  now you have a chance to say, am I going
• 54:20
  to be a writer or an explorer or an artist
• 54:22
  or a captain or a musician?
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, is there something in that that might be
• 54:28
  hugely liberating?
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: 100 percent. And I've talked about this as well, that
• 54:32
  this idea that you have to toil and you have
• 54:35
  to be a hunter-gatherer or you have to do this
• 54:39
  in order to find meaning in life is kind of
• 54:40
  crazy because we can find meaning a lot of ways.
• 54:43
  There's very wealthy people that never have to work that
• 54:46
  have tremendous meaning in their life because they're doing things
• 54:49
  all the time without thinking about work at all. They're
• 54:51
  not thinking about it as work. Whatever hobbies they're pursuing
• 54:54
  or interests or education they're pursuing, they're doing it just
• 54:57
  out of pure interest and fascination and love and passion.
• 55:01
  And that could be all of us. But there's going
• 55:04
  to be a tremendous transition period where people are going
• 55:08
  to have to rethink what it means to be a
• 55:11
  human being in society. And that's what's weird because our
• 55:15
  entire society is structured out of getting up in the morning,
• 55:18
  putting in the work, working towards the future. You got
• 55:22
  a 401K. You got investments. You got this. You got that.
• 55:24
  You got a mortgage. And this is how we've structured
• 55:28
  our entire existence and what meaning we gather from life.
• 55:33
  It's based on that. We're going to have to figure
• 55:36
  out a way to realize and to rethink this. And
• 55:40
  it's going to be very difficult for people that are
• 55:42
  like 40 and 50. They're just completely set in their ways,
• 55:47
  and now their ways change. And I don't know how
• 55:49
  many of them are going to be able to make
• 55:50
  that switch and what could be done to assist them
• 55:54
  in that, what can be done. And maybe that comes
• 55:58
  with whatever this technological interface is. Maybe that comes with
• 56:01
  when we become, which essentially is cyborg, that you get
• 56:05
  a much greater understanding of what it means to exist
• 56:09
  and that this idea that you exist only because the
• 56:12
  insurance company you work for is kind of ridiculous and
• 56:15
  we abandon that. I mean, in the way that now
• 56:18
  when you open up your phone and you use perplexity,
• 56:21
  you have access to something that's as smart as every
• 56:27
  human being on earth in every field. You can ask
• 56:31
  it about anything and it'll give you the state of
• 56:33
  the art and whatever the science is, whatever the understanding
• 56:37
  of history, whatever mathematics is, Tax law, whatever it is,
• 56:42
  it can give it to you on your phone instantaneously.
• 56:46
  And we've just sort of accepted that. This is our
• 56:49
  new thing. And I think this is like a baby
• 56:51
  step into what this technology could potentially, if you're looking
• 56:56
  at things with a glass half full, it could potentially
• 56:59
  change the way we look at everything, the way we
• 57:03
  look at ourselves, the way we look at what it
• 57:04
  means to be a person and what we find meaning in.
• 57:08
  Because that's the problem. The problem is meaning and the
• 57:11
  feeling like you matter, feeling like you're important. And I
• 57:14
  think part of that is because we're also isolated from
• 57:16
  each other. But that might go away entirely if the
• 57:20
  boundaries between all thought and consciousness, if we realize like, oh,
• 57:24
  consciousness is just a thing that we're all enveloped in
• 57:28
  and what our brain is is just an antenna. It's
• 57:31
  like tuning into consciousness. And depending on how good your
• 57:34
  antenna is, you're going to be a little bit better
• 57:36
  about How you interface with the world and whatever thing
• 57:40
  you desire and whatever thing you decide to put your
• 57:43
  energy and attention to. Maybe you'll be better at it
• 57:46
  than another person because you have a better antenna. But
• 57:48
  we might understand that like we are really truly all
• 57:52
  one thing. So all our fears about finding your place
• 57:57
  in the world, that might be nonsense.
• 58:00
  Speaker 1: I really like that idea. I like the idea of
• 58:02
  search for meaning. And I agree with you. I think that,
• 58:05
  like you said, as the Australopithecus, as people that used
• 58:07
  to exist in these little tribal groups and families, the
• 58:12
  modern isolated life, I mean, it's something that I struggle
• 58:16
  with a lot. I'm always wondering, where is my family?
• 58:19
  Where are my friends? I've had to do a lot
• 58:23
  of sort of interior work about, I'm just going to
• 58:25
  bring along my own family inside somehow. I have to
• 58:30
  provide this all for myself. The idea of being less alone,
• 58:34
  being less isolated, that's one thing that I wanted from
• 58:38
  the internet. It started out on Facebook. I could keep
• 58:41
  up with my friends. I saw what they were doing.
• 58:43
  They were posting pictures of their life. It was less isolating.
• 58:47
  And then now it's evolved to I can't even find
• 58:48
  them on Facebook anymore. It's all the ads and everything
• 58:51
  like that. But I mean for me, I mean you
• 58:55
  talk about meaning and you talk about solving isolation. Tell
• 59:01
  me more about that. I mean how has your sense
• 59:04
  of meaning in your life evolved? How has it changed
• 59:07
  over your life? How do you find meaning?
• 59:10
  Speaker 3: I find meaning in what– well, there's a bunch of things, right?
• 59:14
  First of all, it's the people that are in your life.
• 59:16
  This is a giant factor because without people that you
• 59:20
  love and people that you enjoy spending time with, life
• 59:23
  loses all of its value. If you're an insanely wealthy,
• 59:27
  insanely successful person who has no friends– who lives alone,
• 59:30
  you're living in hell. And if you are a poor
• 59:33
  person that has amazing friends and you're just getting by,
• 59:36
  you are a happier person. But I guarantee you that
• 59:39
  poor person would switch places with that rich person in
• 59:41
  a heartbeat because we're programmed to think that success is numbers.
• 59:47
  That success is what you can accumulate as far as
• 59:50
  like objects and desired material possessions. But it's not. It's
• 59:56
  like true success is happiness. And the amount of joy
• 1:00:00
  that you get out of life and the amount of
• 1:00:02
  satisfaction you get in what you do. So I think
• 1:00:05
  for everybody, that answer is a different answer because for
• 1:00:08
  some people, it's going to be music. For some people,
• 1:00:10
  it's going to be– they're going to write. There's going
• 1:00:12
  to be a thing that you enjoy putting yourself into
• 1:00:15
  that you feel satisfaction and you feel meaning with on
• 1:00:19
  top of friends and family. So friends and family I
• 1:00:22
  think is foremost. But then– They can get in the
• 1:00:26
  way too if they don't have their shit together. So
• 1:00:28
  they have to have a thing that they're enjoying as well.
• 1:00:32
  They have to have a thing that's helping them grow
• 1:00:34
  as an individual. And there's a thing from martial arts.
• 1:00:37
  My instructor told me when I was very young that
• 1:00:39
  I never forgot that martial arts is a vehicle for
• 1:00:42
  developing your human potential. And that if you find things
• 1:00:46
  that test you and you find things that are complex
• 1:00:49
  and these puzzles that you have to solve, the more
• 1:00:51
  you do that, the more you get an understanding of
• 1:00:53
  who you are and what you can do. And what
• 1:00:55
  you can do out there in the world. And the
• 1:00:56
  more you do it, the more you can do other things.
• 1:00:59
  And I think that's where I find meaning. I find
• 1:01:02
  meaning in doing things and enjoying time with my family,
• 1:01:06
  enjoying time with my friends, having joy and fun and laughter.
• 1:01:11
  And then also difficult pursuits. I like things that are complex,
• 1:01:17
  the things that are hard to solve. I like things
• 1:01:19
  that are hard to do where I really have to
• 1:01:22
  force myself to do it. And then I feel satisfaction
• 1:01:25
  afterwards and I understand my ability to force myself to
• 1:01:27
  do things. And in doing that, I find meaning. And
• 1:01:32
  I'm a relatively happy person. I think I'm very happy
• 1:01:36
  in terms of like the average person. I think that's why.
• 1:01:41
  But if someone just took that all away, if all
• 1:01:44
  that's gone, would you still have happiness? Like what is happiness, right?
• 1:01:49
  What is meaning? Is it? entirely connected to your job,
• 1:01:55
  that seems kind of crazy because a job is just
• 1:01:57
  a constructed thing that 500 years ago didn't even exist.
• 1:02:02
  So do we have to have– are we these complex
• 1:02:08
  problem-solving biological organisms that have this thirst for innovation and
• 1:02:13
  to constantly make things better? Are we tricking ourselves with
• 1:02:20
  jobs to be happy? Are we filling the need of
• 1:02:24
  whatever– like when a cat chases a ball, what is
• 1:02:27
  it doing? Well, it thinks it's killing something. That's its design.
• 1:02:30
  This is its biological need. You throw a ball past
• 1:02:33
  a cat, it goes after it because it's got this
• 1:02:36
  biological need to chase things that are running away from
• 1:02:38
  it so it could kill it and eat. I think
• 1:02:40
  we're kind of doing a similar thing with our hunter-gatherer
• 1:02:44
  tribal– organism that we're still trapped in, that we're tricking it.
• 1:02:49
  We're tricking it with complex problems and we're tricking it
• 1:02:52
  with community. We're tricking it with all these different things
• 1:02:55
  that keep it happy.
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: I agree with you. Yeah, I think that's a wonderful answer.
• 1:03:00
  I mean there's something about the happy poor person, isolated
• 1:03:04
  rich person thing that I agree with at the same time,
• 1:03:08
  seeing what grinding poverty does to people's minds and breaking
• 1:03:11
  them down with exhaustion and demoralization. You know, there's obviously
• 1:03:15
  some kind of a sweet spot for there. You know,
• 1:03:17
  I mean, I've had to work quite hard in different
• 1:03:20
  parts of my life. And I was just very aware
• 1:03:22
  of the soul grinding, you know, not having enough, wondering
• 1:03:28
  where your next meal is coming from. And I have
• 1:03:30
  it nowhere near as bad as some. But, you know,
• 1:03:33
  the thing that was absolutely, for me, unbelievable about working
• 1:03:38
  for NASA was the idea of solving complex problems with
• 1:03:41
  people you trusted and people that you thought really had
• 1:03:43
  your back. And no organization is perfect. But, you know,
• 1:03:47
  the idea that there... It's not a zero-sum game, right?
• 1:03:50
  I mean, you want the whole team to succeed. I mean,
• 1:03:53
  even if there are missions you think should have been
• 1:03:54
  lower priority or maybe we should spend more money on
• 1:03:56
  this and less money on that, at the end of
• 1:03:58
  the day, you want whatever's going on to be fantastic.
• 1:04:02
  And you want it to succeed and you want all
• 1:04:04
  the people around you to succeed. And the idea that, again,
• 1:04:08
  I mean, this isn't hunter-gathering. You know, I mean, we're
• 1:04:11
  solving problems. We're saying, you know... Can you take a
• 1:04:14
  picture of the black part of a black hole? Can
• 1:04:17
  you actually see the light area, the event horizon getting
• 1:04:20
  sucked in? I'm talking about the Event Horizon Telescope, not
• 1:04:23
  a NASA mission. But, you know, there were times in
• 1:04:26
  my life, like when I first saw that picture come together,
• 1:04:29
  and I didn't think they'd be able to do that.
• 1:04:32
  I don't think people really understand what happened there. They
• 1:04:36
  were doing something right on the fuzzy edge of physics
• 1:04:41
  being possible. you need to catch the same front of
• 1:04:45
  a wavelength of light, right? So light's coming by. It's
• 1:04:47
  a wave. It travels at the speed of light. The
• 1:04:50
  wavelength of light is tiny. Let's say for a minute,
• 1:04:52
  you know, they were dealing with microwaves, let's say like
• 1:04:56
  a millionth of a meter. So something that's a meter
• 1:05:00
  divided by a million is traveling past you at the
• 1:05:02
  speed of light. And the Earth is round and the
• 1:05:07
  Earth is moving. And they had these eight observatories all
• 1:05:10
  around the planet, right? And they had to catch that
• 1:05:13
  same wave front, the same one. If it was one
• 1:05:16
  wave front later, one millionth of a meter later traveling
• 1:05:20
  at the speed of light, they wouldn't have gotten the image.
• 1:05:22
  They needed to catch the same wavelength, the same photon,
• 1:05:26
  the same wave of light had to be caught in
• 1:05:28
  all of those telescopes at once. One was at the
• 1:05:30
  South Pole. Some were in the United States. Some were
• 1:05:33
  in Chile. They were all over the planet. And if
• 1:05:37
  you caught the same fricking wave of light, there you go.
• 1:05:44
  They managed to make a telescope that's actually as big
• 1:05:46
  as the earth. And they were able to take a
• 1:05:48
  picture of the dark parts of a black hole. Now
• 1:05:51
  that's something called the shadow of the event horizon. It's
• 1:05:53
  basically the event horizon where time and space stop. We
• 1:05:57
  don't even know if there really is an interior to
• 1:05:59
  a black hole. All the equations blow up. Time and
• 1:06:01
  space don't exist in there. And light, nothing can escape
• 1:06:06
  that darkness. The black spot you're seeing there is a
• 1:06:09
  little bigger than the event horizon itself. It's called the
• 1:06:11
  shadow of the event horizon because time and space are
• 1:06:15
  bent around the black hole. And so some of the
• 1:06:18
  light that actually gets sucked in is light that would
• 1:06:21
  have gone around the black hole, gets sucked into the
• 1:06:23
  back end of the black hole. Literally space and time
• 1:06:26
  curve around the black hole. And so that dark part
• 1:06:29
  is actually a little bigger than the event horizon. It's
• 1:06:31
  called the shadow of the event horizon. And they said
• 1:06:34
  they were going to go take a picture of it.
• 1:06:37
  And I was like, you have to catch the same
• 1:06:40
  wave front of light in all of these telescopes. I mean,
• 1:06:44
  that's going to depend on the height of the mountain,
• 1:06:46
  how fast that part of the earth is moving. They
• 1:06:49
  did it. They fucking did it. And they didn't do
• 1:06:51
  it just once.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: And, you know, and now we can take a picture
• 1:06:56
  of an area right in front of your eyes where
• 1:06:58
  space and time doesn't exist. I mean, to a. To
• 1:07:02
  a lesser extent, one of the NASA missions that I
• 1:07:04
  thought was just spectacular was a small, inexpensive mission called NICER.
• 1:07:09
  You're like, who's the NICER person? NICER, N-I-C-E-R. It's the
• 1:07:12
  Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer. And a neutron star, you
• 1:07:17
  probably know about these, but when a star dies and
• 1:07:20
  the nuclear reactions inside a star cease, all of that
• 1:07:23
  gravity of this massive object comes crushing in. And it'll
• 1:07:27
  create an object sometimes called a neutron star. They're about
• 1:07:30
  20 miles across. But they have about twice the mass
• 1:07:34
  of the sun. And we study many of these at NASA.
• 1:07:36
  They're all over the place. They're real. They're something you
• 1:07:39
  can take an image of. You can take a picture of.
• 1:07:42
  And these neutron stars have physics that we don't understand.
• 1:07:45
  You take two times the mass of the sun, you
• 1:07:47
  crush it into 20 miles. We know that we can't
• 1:07:51
  describe the interior of that thing yet. We don't have
• 1:07:54
  the physics that matches that type of density. And this
• 1:07:59
  crazy little contraption, I mean, it's about the size of
• 1:08:02
  a washing machine. It was built in a lab just
• 1:08:05
  on the floor that I used to work at at NASA.
• 1:08:07
  It's cheap, easy to make. I shouldn't say easy, but
• 1:08:10
  I mean, it's actually able to create maps of what
• 1:08:13
  the surface of these objects are like. They're 20 miles across.
• 1:08:16
  They're thousands of light years away. And you can actually
• 1:08:21
  create a map of what the temperature is like. And
• 1:08:23
  one of the things we see on these maps is,
• 1:08:26
  is the distortion where space and time curves around these objects.
• 1:08:30
  You know, they rotate very fast, and there are hot
• 1:08:32
  spots we see coming in and off the neutron star.
• 1:08:35
  But then as the hot spot goes behind the star,
• 1:08:38
  the light bends up and over, and we can actually
• 1:08:40
  still see the hot spot because space and time are
• 1:08:42
  bending around these objects. You can see that. That's not
• 1:08:46
  a mathematical simulation. That's not a theory. You can see
• 1:08:51
  space and time bending around these objects. You can see
• 1:08:54
  space and time bending into that event horizon. You know,
• 1:08:58
  I mean, it's absolutely crazy what we've been able to do.
• 1:09:02
  And whether it's a huge project like the Event Horizon Telescope,
• 1:09:06
  I would have bet that they would not have been
• 1:09:07
  able to make that measurement. And they did. You know,
• 1:09:11
  there were so many hard drives of data. One of
• 1:09:14
  the telescopes was at the South Pole. And you wanted
• 1:09:18
  the telescopes to be as far apart on the Earth
• 1:09:19
  as possible because then you could basically make a giant
• 1:09:22
  telescope the size of the separation of these telescopes. And
• 1:09:26
  there wasn't a– I mean there's pretty good email links
• 1:09:29
  down to the South Pole, but the email link wasn't
• 1:09:31
  fast enough for all of this data. They sent back
• 1:09:34
  literally– there was a ton, a ton of hard drives
• 1:09:37
  to actually– they had to play them all at the
• 1:09:39
  same time and make sure they caught the same photon.
• 1:09:42
  If they had caught seriously one photon following behind the
• 1:09:45
  other– the image wouldn't have worked. They had to catch
• 1:09:48
  that same photon. You know, humans are incredible.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 3: Some of us.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 1: Oh, hey.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 3: Some of them, I should say.
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: Maybe pretty much all of us in different ways.
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I.
• 1:10:01
  No, I got to go back to this. I mean,
• 1:10:03
  one of my good– I have three friends now who
• 1:10:05
  have won the Nobel Prize, which is always like, what
• 1:10:06
  the hell am I doing?
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 3: That's awesome.
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: Good friend group. Yeah.
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 3: But you have good group chats.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: Well, see, the funny thing is we certainly don't all
• 1:10:13
  get together and talk theoretical physics. I mean, that's not
• 1:10:15
  really what we do. But I was seated next to
• 1:10:17
  one of them at a meal one time and somebody
• 1:10:19
  came by and said, oh, look at all the brain
• 1:10:21
  power here. And I actually in this– I try to
• 1:10:24
  be kind of nice about it, but I said, you know,
• 1:10:26
  There's a single mother working three jobs part-time who's waiting
• 1:10:29
  tables over there. And I mean the mental capacity and
• 1:10:33
  the strength of that person is something that– don't look
• 1:10:37
  at us. Go praise that person.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 3: That's brain power too. It's just a different thing. It's survival.
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: I mean it's trying to keep your life and soul together.
• 1:10:45
  The privilege of being able to work at NASA and
• 1:10:49
  to be able to work with a team like that
• 1:10:51
  and do things you think are impossible. You know, that
• 1:10:55
  was kind of a part of my life you could
• 1:10:57
  stick a pin in and say that meant something. That
• 1:10:59
  gave me some meaning. That gave me joy. And as
• 1:11:04
  you said, it's not so much being a hunter-gatherer. It's,
• 1:11:07
  you know, can we ask a question that we think
• 1:11:10
  is impossible and can we just go and do it?
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the ultimate expression of human curiosity. When you say
• 1:11:16
  that we don't have the physics, when you're trying to
• 1:11:20
  understand what's happening in a neutron star, what do you mean?
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: So you can measure how big these things are and
• 1:11:26
  you can measure how massive they are. And so then
• 1:11:28
  you can do a calculation as to what the density
• 1:11:30
  inside would be. And, you know, I mean, to put it,
• 1:11:33
  I mean, probably the interior core is denser than the
• 1:11:36
  outer regions. But if you had a teaspoon of this material,
• 1:11:39
  it would have about as much mass as Mount Everest.
• 1:11:43
  And the reason they're called neutron stars is that the
• 1:11:47
  gravity is so intense on these things. I mean, this,
• 1:11:49
  I mean, I hate sort of a simple view of
• 1:11:53
  atoms as little balls going around each other because they're not.
• 1:11:55
  They're waves of energy. But the gravity actually crushes the
• 1:11:59
  electrons into the nucleus. They combine with protons to become neutrons.
• 1:12:03
  So they're mainly little balls of neutrons. But we do–
• 1:12:06
  there you go. You see the big question mark there
• 1:12:09
  at the core. So here's the problem. You run our
• 1:12:13
  basic laws of physics, our understanding of how particles work.
• 1:12:17
  And you get to the density of a neutron core
• 1:12:19
  and the equations don't work. They're not making the right predictions.
• 1:12:23
  We can tell that there is– there's actually a really
• 1:12:26
  great NASA video I would suggest you watch. It's called
• 1:12:31
  The Interior of a Neutron Star. Well, I can help
• 1:12:34
  you find it. But it basically says that the– The
• 1:12:38
  models we have about how matter works at that sort
• 1:12:40
  of density, none of them give the right predictions for
• 1:12:43
  the size of the neutron star.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 3: Why is that?
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 1: We don't have the right physics for it yet. So
• 1:12:49
  we run our physics and we say if you have
• 1:12:51
  this much volume and this much mass, what should that
• 1:12:54
  interior be like? And none of our current models of
• 1:12:57
  how matter works gives us the right observations, gives us
• 1:13:00
  the right size.
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 3: So what are we missing?
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: Well, for one thing, you know, what you're probably looking
• 1:13:07
  at inside a neutron star is some type of interaction
• 1:13:09
  of quarks, the actual sort of building blocks of neutrons
• 1:13:13
  and protons, the particles that make up protons and neutrons.
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 3: Ooh, that's cool.
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 3: What is that?
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 1: You got it. You got it. You're amazing. I have
• 1:13:20
  to say I'm seriously impressed by this person's ability. She
• 1:13:22
  has the best.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: So, I mean, this is a video that was done
• 1:13:26
  by NASA, Testing Matters Limits. It's a four-minute video. And
• 1:13:30
  while I don't think it's an absolutely perfect video, I
• 1:13:33
  think it's fantastic. And so you see this is supposed
• 1:13:36
  to represent the electrons being pulled into the nucleus and
• 1:13:40
  making neutrons. And then at the very heart of these things,
• 1:13:44
  we're in a state of matter that we have no
• 1:13:45
  description for yet. We can't tell you how it behaves.
• 1:13:50
  We've never created it in a lab. We don't know
• 1:13:53
  how this type of matter acts. It's a new state
• 1:13:56
  of matter. We don't know what it's like.
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: And— It's made when one of these giant stars explodes,
• 1:14:04
  the core of the star becomes compressed. And then this
• 1:14:06
  will take you through us trying to figure out whether
• 1:14:10
  you have particles as discrete particles, as neutrons and protons,
• 1:14:14
  or whether there's some type of quark soup inside. But
• 1:14:17
  pretty much every model so far doesn't match what we
• 1:14:22
  actually measure from these things. We cannot describe them yet.
• 1:14:26
  We need better physics.
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 3: Are there any other structures that are similar in our
• 1:14:30
  lack of understanding of them in the universe?
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: We got two big ones right in front of you,
• 1:14:34
  neutron stars and black holes, right? So, I mean, these–
• 1:14:37
  black holes as well. What is inside a black hole?
• 1:14:41
  Is there an inside if space and time don't really exist?
• 1:14:45
  And then– much more easy to see are these neutron stars. The, the,
• 1:14:50
  the people who study neutron stars at NASA, they had
• 1:14:52
  this wonderful expression. They're like with a black hole, you
• 1:14:54
  can't see anything. It collapses into an event horizon. Nothing's
• 1:14:56
  coming out with a neutron star. You got the fricking
• 1:14:58
  thing right there in front of you. You can actually
• 1:15:00
  observe something. And so, you know, they, they, they figured
• 1:15:03
  that neutron stars are much more exciting than black holes
• 1:15:05
  because you can actually like do experiments, take a picture,
• 1:15:08
  build a telescope. And, uh, But this experiment was an inexpensive,
• 1:15:13
  small observatory that's up on the International Space Station. And,
• 1:15:17
  I mean, they're doing incredible work about the nature of
• 1:15:22
  physics and testing where our limits are. It's unbelievable what
• 1:15:25
  you can do with even a relatively inexpensive mission.
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 3: When you look at the size of some black holes,
• 1:15:32
  we were talking the other day about the largest black
• 1:15:35
  hole where the event horizon goes past Pluto. Yeah. If
• 1:15:39
  it was the size of our solar system. That's almost
• 1:15:43
  impossible to even think about, that there's a black hole
• 1:15:47
  that's bigger than our solar system. And how did it
• 1:15:51
  get that big? How much time does it take for
• 1:15:54
  it to gather up that much matter to get that big?
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: Well, you were talking about these little red dots that
• 1:16:00
  the Webb telescope is seeing. So, I mean, what you've
• 1:16:02
  just done is put your finger on, I think, one
• 1:16:05
  of the most fascinating unanswered questions in astronomy right now.
• 1:16:08
  that every major galaxy has a big black hole in
• 1:16:12
  the center. You know, the one in the middle of
• 1:16:14
  our galaxy is about 4 million times the mass of
• 1:16:16
  the sun. And physically, it's not that big. It's about,
• 1:16:21
  let's say, around about the orbit of, say, the inner
• 1:16:23
  solar system, Mercury, kind of around there. But then the
• 1:16:26
  bigger ones we know in other galaxies can get up
• 1:16:29
  to hundreds, you know, I mean, let's say, you know,
• 1:16:31
  tens of billions of times the mass of the sun.
• 1:16:34
  And those, the event horizons about the size of the
• 1:16:37
  orbit of Pluto, The question is, how do you gather
• 1:16:41
  10 billion times the mass of a star together in
• 1:16:45
  the beginning? You know, black holes, the only thing we
• 1:16:48
  know that forms big black holes like that. So a
• 1:16:51
  star collapses, a star dies. And this tremendous crush of
• 1:16:55
  gravity as the star collapses creates this bottomless pit of
• 1:16:58
  gravity called a black hole. So how do you get
• 1:17:02
  that many stars to die? I mean, in the early universe,
• 1:17:05
  how many stars, how many generations of stars had to
• 1:17:08
  burn through to actually get that to happen? And there
• 1:17:12
  was nothing that we could figure out. I mean, how
• 1:17:14
  do you make that big of a black hole? So
• 1:17:17
  these little red dots that we're seeing with Webb, and
• 1:17:20
  we don't know exactly what these are, but right now
• 1:17:24
  the observations are pushing us in a very interesting direction.
• 1:17:28
  They're about a million times the mass of the sun
• 1:17:32
  And at first we thought, okay, well, are these whole galaxies?
• 1:17:36
  And that was the controversy you alluded to, that how
• 1:17:38
  could there be galaxies that far back in time? We're
• 1:17:41
  looking back to a time about 400 million years after
• 1:17:45
  the Big Bang. We're looking so far away. The light
• 1:17:47
  took that long to travel to us. So we saw
• 1:17:51
  these sort of bright objects. At first we thought they
• 1:17:54
  were galaxies. And that was like, whoa, how'd they get
• 1:17:56
  there so fast? But then we took a better look
• 1:17:59
  at them, and they don't actually shine in the same
• 1:18:01
  light a galaxy would. And they appear to have the
• 1:18:04
  signature of something inside, some of them rotating very fast,
• 1:18:07
  very fast. And what we're wondering is if the first
• 1:18:13
  generation of stars, the very first stars that existed, were
• 1:18:17
  nothing at all like the stars we have today. The
• 1:18:20
  universe was denser. There was probably more of this stuff
• 1:18:23
  called dark matter that had gravity pulling everything together. So
• 1:18:27
  maybe at that time, the universe had just, there were
• 1:18:30
  cores of huge amounts of gas that collapsed together. Instead
• 1:18:34
  of forming a star, the core basically collapsed into a
• 1:18:37
  black hole immediately. And it started pulling in material and
• 1:18:41
  all this sort of hot stuff formed what they call
• 1:18:43
  a pseudo star. There's all this atmosphere of hot gas
• 1:18:47
  being heated up by the black hole in the middle
• 1:18:49
  as the the gas spirals in towards the black hole,
• 1:18:52
  it gets hotter and hotter. So instead of a nuclear
• 1:18:54
  fusion core of a star, you have a black hole
• 1:18:57
  heating everything up on the inside, accumulating all this mass.
• 1:19:01
  And are we looking at, for the first time, the
• 1:19:04
  seeds of these giant black holes? That instead of there being,
• 1:19:09
  you know, the first thing was stars, the way we
• 1:19:12
  think of stars, was the first thing, huge amounts of
• 1:19:15
  gas and dust collapsing into black holes and heating up
• 1:19:19
  sort of a pseudo star around it, millions of times
• 1:19:23
  the mass of the sun. And then in a dense
• 1:19:26
  area like the heart of a galaxy, these things then
• 1:19:27
  start to combine. Over time, gravity pulls them together and
• 1:19:31
  you build bigger and bigger black holes. So once again,
• 1:19:35
  we don't know yet that these objects are. But at
• 1:19:40
  the moment, it's one of the best explanations we have.
• 1:19:43
  And it fits the data quite well. So we will
• 1:19:47
  keep observing these things. We will keep finding new ones.
• 1:19:50
  One of the big questions has been why don't they
• 1:19:52
  give off more X-rays? Because if there's matter streaming down
• 1:19:55
  a black hole, it should give off very high radiation
• 1:19:57
  like X-rays. And then just in the last couple of months,
• 1:20:00
  there's some observations coming out where we're finding some of
• 1:20:03
  these are indeed X-ray sources. So we may have found
• 1:20:08
  the answer to where you get these big black holes.
• 1:20:11
  And that was one of the big hopes for the
• 1:20:15
  James Webb Space Telescope, that it would help us answer
• 1:20:18
  the question of where do you get these giant black
• 1:20:21
  holes in the cores of galaxies? Where do they come from?
• 1:20:24
  There shouldn't have been enough time for that many stars
• 1:20:26
  to make them.
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 3: I watched a documentary on black holes once where they
• 1:20:31
  were talking about that in the center of every galaxy,
• 1:20:33
  there's a supermassive black hole that's one half of 1%
• 1:20:35
  of the mass of the entire galaxy.
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: It seems to be correlated. Yeah, the bigger the galaxy,
• 1:20:39
  the bigger the black hole, yeah.
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 3: Which is nuts. And what they were theorizing was that
• 1:20:45
  if you went through that black hole, you could potentially
• 1:20:50
  be in a completely different universe filled with galaxies, all
• 1:20:54
  that have black holes inside of them. through that another
• 1:20:57
  universe that you would have an infinite number of universes
• 1:21:01
  that exist and all there's these like black holes and
• 1:21:04
  if you can go through them all of them and
• 1:21:07
  it broke my brain because I'm just sitting there I'm
• 1:21:10
  thinking like wait a minute how many billions of galaxies
• 1:21:12
  are there yeah like what and each one of them
• 1:21:14
  has a black hole in the center.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 1: Of it yeah Well, and I mean we don't know
• 1:21:19
  yet how many– I mean there are these giant black
• 1:21:22
  holes in the middle of galaxies and then there are
• 1:21:24
  smaller black holes caused when massive stars dies. I mean
• 1:21:27
  our galaxy probably has millions of those. But the ones
• 1:21:31
  in the center of the galaxies are fascinating. The one
• 1:21:34
  in our galaxy– so we're about 25,000 light years away
• 1:21:38
  from the sky. So we're safe. But– We actually observed
• 1:21:43
  stars that are trapped around the black hole that are
• 1:21:46
  orbiting the black hole. This was the first way we
• 1:21:48
  found the location of the black hole. Stars were orbiting
• 1:21:51
  kind of like this angry swarm of bees almost in
• 1:21:53
  every direction. And they were orbiting around something you didn't see.
• 1:21:56
  And the mass needed to make all these stars orbit
• 1:21:59
  was about 4 million times the mass of the sun.
• 1:22:02
  There was a star called S2 we observed orbiting close
• 1:22:05
  to the black hole, kind of like a comet. It
• 1:22:07
  would come in and whip around the black hole and
• 1:22:08
  then go back out again. And an S2 at closest approach,
• 1:22:12
  when it whips around the black hole, this is a star,
• 1:22:15
  goes nearly 20 million miles an hour as it whips
• 1:22:18
  around the black hole. And then just recently we found
• 1:22:21
  another star that actually gets up to over 50 million
• 1:22:24
  miles an hour as the black hole whips it around.
• 1:22:27
  And this is how we test the idea that time
• 1:22:29
  is different around a black hole. We actually see these
• 1:22:32
  stars whipping so close to a black hole, we can
• 1:22:34
  tell that there are changes in their orbit, that they're
• 1:22:36
  actually going through different times. And so we see these
• 1:22:41
  stars whipping around the black hole at the middle of
• 1:22:43
  our galaxy. They will probably eventually go down that black hole.
• 1:22:46
  I mean maybe everything in our galaxy will eventually kind
• 1:22:49
  of spiral down into that black hole. But, you know,
• 1:22:53
  this is not conjectural. These are observations from telescopes. You know,
• 1:22:59
  look up S2. Look up– I don't know what the
• 1:23:01
  name of the one that goes faster. It's a telephone number.
• 1:23:05
  But that's real. Now, the question about what happens if
• 1:23:10
  you could survive going into a black hole, and this
• 1:23:12
  is another place where we need better physics. Quite honestly,
• 1:23:15
  our physics gives up. There are all kinds of wonderful,
• 1:23:21
  fascinating possibilities. I mean, people have pointed out this is
• 1:23:25
  not observation. Now we're going from observation, we see these things,
• 1:23:28
  they're real, to conjecture. People have said that if you
• 1:23:32
  take the entire universe, the entire mass of the universe
• 1:23:36
  and the radius, the diameter of the observable universe almost
• 1:23:40
  exactly matches a black hole. Could it be that inside
• 1:23:46
  a black hole, a new universe forms when a black
• 1:23:48
  hole forms? Is that what the Big Bang was? Was
• 1:23:50
  the Big Bang a black hole forming in another universe
• 1:23:53
  and popping off our own universe? Are black holes somehow
• 1:23:56
  connected to other universes? These are all incredible questions. We
• 1:24:01
  don't yet have the physics to answer them. But people
• 1:24:05
  have said, why is it the universe has about the
• 1:24:08
  same density of a black hole, the same size and mass?
• 1:24:12
  Is that just a coincidence or are we looking at
• 1:24:14
  something deeper?
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 3: Or is it fractal? The entire universe exists inside of
• 1:24:18
  a black hole.
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 3: Exactly. That's bananas.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah. There we have the very large array. That was
• 1:24:26
  in Chile. That's a wonderful observatory. There we have a
• 1:24:29
  great depiction. You found, okay, yeah.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 3: I've never seen a depiction like this.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: That's right.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 3: That's the stars moving around a black hole.
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the stars moving around a black hole.
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 3: What would this ejection be?
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: So that, okay, what that is is that that's a
• 1:24:43
  consequence of the black holes. That doesn't come from inside
• 1:24:46
  the black hole. All of that swirling gas gets really fast.
• 1:24:49
  We actually observe some of the swirling gas going close
• 1:24:52
  to the speed of light. Black holes, you know, they're
• 1:24:54
  going down the drain. They're going faster and faster as
• 1:24:56
  you get closer to the black hole. And all of
• 1:24:59
  that very, very hot gas generates a very strong magnetic field.
• 1:25:03
  And so what you're looking at with those jets is
• 1:25:05
  that that's just the magnetic field of the hot gas
• 1:25:07
  going around the black hole. Some of that hot gas
• 1:25:10
  gets directed into jets by the magnetic field. There's nothing
• 1:25:12
  coming out of the black hole. Nothing that we know
• 1:25:15
  of comes out of a black hole. But black holes
• 1:25:17
  are incredibly– this is wonderfully ironic. They're incredibly bright because
• 1:25:22
  if there's gas trying to get around– spinning around a
• 1:25:24
  black hole– The gravity accelerates that gas so fast it
• 1:25:27
  spins it up to, in some cases, millions or billions
• 1:25:30
  of degrees. You can see them clear across the observable universe.
• 1:25:33
  They're the brightest objects in the sky. And this is
• 1:25:36
  not light coming from inside the black hole. It's light
• 1:25:39
  coming from stuff trapped around the black hole as it
• 1:25:41
  spirals in. And these huge jets, we see some of
• 1:25:45
  these jets going, you know, in some cases more than 100,000
• 1:25:48
  light years. I mean, they're huge jets that come out.
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 3: 100,000 light years in one light year is how many
• 1:25:53
  trillion miles?
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: Six trillion miles about.
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 3: Oh, my God.
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: Oh, my God.
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: So, I mean, around.
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 3: That video is so nuts. I've never seen that.
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 3: When I was looking for this or stumbled across this,
• 1:26:09
  I saw a theoretical thing called a white hole. which
• 1:26:12
  is potentially maybe on the other side of a black hole.
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, it's an idea. I mean, that idea, honestly,
• 1:26:20
  it had a lot more following, more in like the
• 1:26:24
  60s and 70s. It's kind of fallen out of favor
• 1:26:26
  because at first we thought that these hugely bright objects
• 1:26:29
  were white holes. At the end of a black hole,
• 1:26:31
  maybe the radiation went through a tunnel through space and
• 1:26:33
  then came out somewhere. But now we know that these
• 1:26:36
  super bright objects are actually hot gas disks around black holes.
• 1:26:40
  And they are bright. Like I said, they're the brightest
• 1:26:43
  things we know of in the sky. And, you know,
• 1:26:45
  so that's something you can see, you know, literally billions
• 1:26:48
  of light years away is the hot gas going around
• 1:26:50
  a black hole.
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 3: You said another thing that broke my brain. You were
• 1:26:54
  talking about what the Big Bang is and that we
• 1:27:00
  shouldn't think of the Big Bang as an explosion, but
• 1:27:04
  that before the Big Bang— time and space might not
• 1:27:10
  have existed?
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: Well, pretty much certainly not in the way we experience them, no.
• 1:27:14
  I mean, once again, you know, no astronomer thinks the
• 1:27:18
  Big Bang came from nothing. The problem is, once again,
• 1:27:23
  we have no description of what that state of matter
• 1:27:26
  would be, none. I mean, the idea that everything we
• 1:27:29
  observe of in the universe could have once been at
• 1:27:32
  a subatomic scale you'll notice I'm very careful about this.
• 1:27:36
  I talk about the observable universe. We have no idea
• 1:27:39
  how big the universe is. We don't know whether it's
• 1:27:41
  infinite or whether it has an end. But there's been
• 1:27:44
  only a certain amount of time that light has had
• 1:27:45
  to travel to us. That's not the whole universe. That's
• 1:27:49
  centered on us. That's an effect. If we look in
• 1:27:52
  every direction in the sky, we can only look back
• 1:27:54
  as far as there's been time for light to actually
• 1:27:57
  travel to us. And you see some incredible things. I mean,
• 1:28:00
  one of the things that one of my friends has
• 1:28:02
  the Nobel Prize for is if you look so far away,
• 1:28:06
  the farthest away we can see now, we're looking back
• 1:28:09
  to a time about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
• 1:28:12
  And this is something where we are actually able to
• 1:28:15
  see so far away. We're looking back to a time
• 1:28:18
  when the whole universe was hot and bright. It actually
• 1:28:21
  was glowing like the surface of the sun, the whole universe.
• 1:28:24
  The entire universe was so bright. It was like looking
• 1:28:28
  at the surface of the sun. And this radiation has
• 1:28:33
  traveled a long time to get to us. It's now
• 1:28:35
  lost energy because it's traveling through the expanding universe. And
• 1:28:40
  as the universe expands, the wavelength of light gets stretched
• 1:28:44
  out by the expansion of space. This is what we
• 1:28:46
  call the microwave background radiation. So there's a microwave, very
• 1:28:52
  low energy signal. It comes from every direction on the sky.
• 1:28:55
  And it's coming from a time. It's coming from a
• 1:28:58
  distance so far away. that the whole universe was as
• 1:29:01
  bright as the surface of the sun. And that's as
• 1:29:05
  far as we can see because any farther away from that,
• 1:29:09
  the universe is opaque. Literally in every direction on the sky,
• 1:29:12
  you eventually look back to a time when the whole
• 1:29:15
  universe was so dense and bright, you can't see any farther.
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 3: Is this because of how we're capable of measuring? Is
• 1:29:23
  it possible that at one point in time, when we
• 1:29:26
  get better and better telescopes, that we can look past that?
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 1: Well, not with light. See, the universe actually does become
• 1:29:32
  opaque to light at that point.
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 3: Because it's too long ago.
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: It's basically the universe is so bright itself.
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: I mean, so, you know, you look in any direction
• 1:29:42
  on the sky, you look back to a time. The
• 1:29:46
  wonderful thing about the universe changing is we know this
• 1:29:48
  is true. The farther out we look with a telescope,
• 1:29:50
  the farther light has had to travel, the more time
• 1:29:53
  it takes to get to us. So the sun, we
• 1:29:56
  see the light takes about eight minutes to get from
• 1:29:58
  us to the sun. The nearest star, about four years.
• 1:30:01
  The nearest galaxy to us, about two million years. We
• 1:30:04
  can see so far away in space that the light
• 1:30:06
  took pretty much the age of the universe to get
• 1:30:08
  to us, about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. At
• 1:30:12
  that point, the universe becomes opaque to light. So there
• 1:30:16
  is a limit to how much we can observe with light,
• 1:30:20
  how much time there has been for light to actually
• 1:30:23
  get to us.
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 3: Is there a potential for being able to observe something
• 1:30:26
  other than light? Absolutely.
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: So your question is a really profound one. We don't
• 1:30:34
  know how big the universe is. When we talk about
• 1:30:36
  the universe, we mainly talk about the observable universe, everything
• 1:30:39
  we're able to see. So the question you just asked,
• 1:30:42
  can you see farther back even if it's opaque to light?
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 3: Yes.
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: And this is something that, again, we talk about moments
• 1:30:50
  in your life where the universe changed, where you thought
• 1:30:53
  people did something you thought was impossible. And I mean,
• 1:30:58
  going all the way back to the mid-90s, I was
• 1:30:59
  a postdoc at Caltech, and I wasn't working with this department,
• 1:31:04
  but people were starting to measure something called gravitational waves.
• 1:31:08
  And gravitational waves, again, I never thought they'd be able
• 1:31:12
  to actually detect these. The universe is constantly, I mean,
• 1:31:17
  every time we move, remember how I said time is
• 1:31:20
  different from the top of your head to the bottom
• 1:31:21
  of your feet? You know, as I move, I create gravity,
• 1:31:25
  you know, Gravity actually goes out as a wave into
• 1:31:28
  the universe at the speed of light. Can you detect
• 1:31:31
  a wave of gravity? Well, gravity is actually a curvature
• 1:31:36
  of space and time itself. So you're trying to say,
• 1:31:39
  could we detect a wave that's actually made of space
• 1:31:42
  and time? And this project is called LIGO. And LIGO
• 1:31:49
  stands for the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory. And it
• 1:31:52
  started out with two facilities, one in Oregon and one
• 1:31:55
  in Louisiana. And LIGO has two extremely long lasers at
• 1:32:00
  a corner, at a right angle. The lasers, I believe,
• 1:32:04
  are four kilometers on a side. They're huge, right? A
• 1:32:07
  four-kilometer laser. They want them to be as perfectly the
• 1:32:11
  same length as they can. And then there's a laser
• 1:32:13
  beam that bounces back and forth. And as the laser
• 1:32:17
  beam bounces back and forth, if it's exactly the same length,
• 1:32:20
  the signal kind of cancels out. But what happens... If
• 1:32:25
  there's actually a wave of space and time coming by,
• 1:32:28
  space itself compresses, time changes. All of a sudden, these
• 1:32:34
  two lasers are no longer exactly the same length. Space
• 1:32:37
  itself has changed as a wave comes by. Tiny amounts.
• 1:32:42
  These gravitational waves are thousands of times smaller than the
• 1:32:45
  nucleus of an atom. Incredible, right? How would you detect that?
• 1:32:49
  And they're traveling at the speed of light. So you
• 1:32:52
  have these four-kilometer lasers traveling. A wave of space and
• 1:32:57
  time comes by and compresses space and time in one
• 1:33:00
  direction more than the other. All of a sudden, the
• 1:33:02
  lasers are no longer the same length. You get a signal.
• 1:33:06
  The noise for this, right? I mean, every time– yeah,
• 1:33:09
  so this is us detecting an exploding star this way.
• 1:33:11
  I'm happy to talk about that too. But, I mean,
• 1:33:14
  just the fact they did this, these lasers are under vacuums.
• 1:33:18
  They're in vacuum chambers. I mean, every time the UPS
• 1:33:21
  truck goes by, they must go haywire. Somebody sneezes. They're
• 1:33:24
  measuring things thousands of times smaller than the nucleus of
• 1:33:27
  an atom. But over time, they got this so accurate.
• 1:33:31
  They did it so well that what happened, and you
• 1:33:35
  can look up the year, but it was something on
• 1:33:37
  the order of about 10 years ago. A long ways away,
• 1:33:41
  millions of light years away, two black holes spiraled together
• 1:33:45
  and actually collided to form a big black hole. That
• 1:33:49
  was a lot of gravitational energy. And that created a ripple.
• 1:33:52
  going out into the universe. And so, you know, there's
• 1:33:56
  all of the detectors have all this noise in them.
• 1:33:58
  The detectors are detecting all kinds of spurious signals. But
• 1:34:01
  then all of a sudden in Louisiana, there was this,
• 1:34:03
  the whole detector went, whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp, whomp, boom.
• 1:34:07
  And then at the speed of light, the detector in
• 1:34:09
  Louisiana did exactly the same thing. Whomp, whomp, whomp, the
• 1:34:12
  exact same waves at the speed of light difference. And
• 1:34:15
  we realized, oh my God, they did it. These tiny waves,
• 1:34:20
  we shouldn't even be able to detect them They found them.
• 1:34:24
  And now it's a routine thing. They've now done this many,
• 1:34:27
  many times. Waves in space and time itself might be
• 1:34:32
  the way we can see even farther back into the universe.
• 1:34:36
  Even when the universe becomes opaque to light, waves of
• 1:34:39
  space and time can come through. Gravitational waves can come
• 1:34:42
  through that. And if we can somehow figure out how
• 1:34:45
  to make these detectors better and better, could we detect
• 1:34:48
  the gravitational waves of the Big Bang? You know, can
• 1:34:53
  we learn something about that moment by the way it
• 1:34:56
  actually bent space and time and created waves of gravity?
• 1:34:59
  And once again, I mean, just step back a sec.
• 1:35:02
  Detecting waves of space and time traveling at the speed
• 1:35:05
  of light is something we do. We've done this. It
• 1:35:10
  got the Nobel Prize. It deserved it. There were hundreds
• 1:35:14
  of people on that first paper. Some of them were
• 1:35:16
  friends of mine. Again, they fucking did it. I just–
• 1:35:23
  I cannot– I mean I felt my heart just drop
• 1:35:26
  that day. I mean out of joy. It's like holy fuck.
• 1:35:30
  They did it. That may give us the potential to
• 1:35:34
  understand the Big Bang better as we get better with that.
• 1:35:38
  Maybe we can– I mean right now we see black
• 1:35:40
  holes colliding. We actually see neutron stars colliding. Even stars
• 1:35:44
  orbiting each other. Maybe we produce sort of a background
• 1:35:46
  of all these waves colliding. But maybe we'll be able
• 1:35:49
  to figure out how to see those waves from the
• 1:35:51
  moment the universe began.
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 3: How are we sure that of the timeline of 13.8
• 1:35:57
  billion years or whatever it is?
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, I mean, these things are never sure,
• 1:36:03
  you know, absolutely. But there's some very good reasons to
• 1:36:06
  think it's about that. So, you know, you sort of
• 1:36:10
  run physics backwards. You basically say, you know, this is
• 1:36:13
  how the universe is expanding now. And let's roughly say
• 1:36:17
  that things came together. And as I mentioned, you mentioned
• 1:36:21
  the podcast, the Big Bang did not have a center.
• 1:36:23
  The galaxies are not flying off into space like an explosion.
• 1:36:27
  What happened is the galaxies are all kind of sort
• 1:36:30
  of standing where they are, but space itself is expanding
• 1:36:33
  in every direction between the galaxies. It's a hard thing.
• 1:36:36
  I mean, it's a huge misconception about the Big Bang,
• 1:36:40
  that the Big Bang was this explosion and galaxies are
• 1:36:43
  flying into empty space. The expansion of space is space itself.
• 1:36:48
  There's no space out there that galaxies are flying into.
• 1:36:51
  That's not how it works.
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 3: That's a weird thought right there. They're not flying into space.
• 1:36:57
  They are space.
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: When I used to teach this, I used to take
• 1:37:02
  a board and I used to have a piece of elastic.
• 1:37:04
  And I would hammer two nails in on either side
• 1:37:06
  of the board. And then I would say, okay, these
• 1:37:09
  two nails are galaxies. And the elastic between them represents
• 1:37:13
  our universe. In this case, a two-dimensional depiction of our universe.
• 1:37:17
  All of space and time, anywhere light can travel, is
• 1:37:20
  just on that elastic. Don't think about up or down.
• 1:37:22
  There's no space or time there. Everything our universe is
• 1:37:25
  is just this piece of elastic. And then I would
• 1:37:27
  take the elastic and I would stretch it. And I
• 1:37:30
  would say, you know, the two galaxies aren't moving. They're
• 1:37:33
  kind of sitting there. It's the space in between that
• 1:37:36
  has now stretched, has now changed. And that's a more
• 1:37:40
  realistic idea. The galaxies are not flying through space. It's
• 1:37:44
  the space itself that is getting bigger in every direction
• 1:37:48
  at once. And that's why there's no center. There's no
• 1:37:50
  empty center to the universe. The universe, as far as
• 1:37:53
  we can map it, has galaxies everywhere. There's no center
• 1:37:57
  to it. The expansion is happening in every direction at
• 1:38:00
  once because the elastic of space and time itself in
• 1:38:04
  every direction is just getting bigger. We don't know why.
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 3: So– If we are looking at something where the Big
• 1:38:15
  Bang created space and time and as space and time
• 1:38:18
  is expanding, what was the environment before the Big Bang?
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's the problem. So, I mean, we have
• 1:38:27
  no description of that. You know, there are particle accelerators.
• 1:38:33
  I've had the wonderful chance to go to CERN a
• 1:38:36
  couple of times and go to the Large Hadron Collider. And,
• 1:38:40
  you know, using, you know, incredible accelerating magnets, you know,
• 1:38:45
  they whip, you know, just single protons up to very,
• 1:38:47
  very high temperatures and I mean, they're trying to recreate
• 1:38:52
  conditions where, you know, I mean, they can't recreate the
• 1:38:55
  conditions of what things were like before the Big Bang. But,
• 1:38:58
  you know, can you get matter to such a high
• 1:39:00
  energy state that it can recreate what things were like,
• 1:39:03
  you know, a millionth of a second after the Big
• 1:39:05
  Bang or maybe even further back? And, you know, but
• 1:39:10
  the idea of what was that state of matter before
• 1:39:13
  that expansion, we have no description of yet. I think
• 1:39:16
  we will someday. I don't think it's impossible. But There's
• 1:39:20
  nothing about our current physics. I mean, it would be
• 1:39:23
  like taking somebody from the 1400s and saying, you know,
• 1:39:27
  describe to me what the interior of the sun is like.
• 1:39:29
  They would have no knowledge structure to even attempt it.
• 1:39:35
  That doesn't mean we didn't figure it out eventually. And,
• 1:39:38
  you know, so like I said, there's nothing about that
• 1:39:40
  I think that's completely off limits, but we'll have to
• 1:39:43
  understand space and time very differently. And we'll have to
• 1:39:46
  understand what– you can't even really call it matter or
• 1:39:50
  even energy. All of the energy of the universe in
• 1:39:54
  a subatomic space, we have no idea what that would
• 1:39:57
  behave like.
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 3: And what is it existing in? Yeah, well– That's the–
• 1:40:03
  what I'm asking is like the environment that preceded the
• 1:40:07
  Big Bang. What are we talking about where this subatomic
• 1:40:11
  thing that contains everything that's in the known universe– What
• 1:40:15
  is it– how is it existing?
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 1: And of course, of course I have no answer to it.
• 1:40:21
  I mean you're asking the question that I hope someday
• 1:40:25
  humanity will have a chance to explore and we'll know
• 1:40:28
  more about. Then I think what will happen is that
• 1:40:31
  once we can describe what happened before the Big Bang,
• 1:40:33
  there will be a whole series of other questions.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 3: So if the Big Bang is the wrong way to
• 1:40:37
  think about it, a bang, what's the right way to
• 1:40:40
  think about it?
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 3: The initial expansion? Yeah.
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: I can't think of necessarily a better term. I mean
• 1:40:47
  you know the Big Bang was meant as actually a criticism, right?
• 1:40:50
  It was Fred Hoyle. When people first began back in
• 1:40:55
  the 1920s when they discovered the universe was expanding and
• 1:40:58
  this was a big surprise. I mean famously Albert Einstein
• 1:41:01
  didn't think that it was. And then he saw the
• 1:41:03
  evidence all of a sudden with our telescopes. We saw
• 1:41:06
  the universe is expanding in every direction. It was actually
• 1:41:09
  Fred Hoyle that said at a conference as a way
• 1:41:14
  of making fun of this. People were saying, well, maybe
• 1:41:16
  everything went back to sort of a common denser structure.
• 1:41:20
  It was actually a– it was a Belgian Jesuit father,
• 1:41:25
  a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaitre who came up with
• 1:41:28
  the idea that if the universe was expanding now, if
• 1:41:31
  we run time backwards, maybe it all becomes one big–
• 1:41:33
  he called it the primordial atom. That was Georges Lemaitre.
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 3: What year was this?
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: George Lemaître. So we would have been talking around about
• 1:41:45
  probably sometime in the 1920s. I bet we could probably
• 1:41:48
  have some help.
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 3: So 100 years ago.
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, 100 years ago. So George Lemaître says if we
• 1:41:52
  run time backwards, we get this big lump of something,
• 1:41:57
  the primordial atom. And then Fred Hoyle said, what, you
• 1:42:01
  mean the whole universe started with a big bang? You know, really?
• 1:42:04
  There was this big, there was this atom that went bang?
• 1:42:06
  So even the term the big bang was meant as
• 1:42:09
  a criticism. It was meant to be funny. It wasn't
• 1:42:12
  something that scientists came up with as the best description.
• 1:42:15
  But what happened then is everybody kind of nodded and said, well, yeah.
• 1:42:18
  You know, and I mean, more people should know about
• 1:42:22
  George Lemaître, you know, the Jesuit Belgian scientist that came
• 1:42:26
  up with that idea. I think he was a fascinating man.
• 1:42:29
  Interestingly enough, even as a Jesuit, he did not think
• 1:42:32
  that this necessarily was a biblical Genesis story. I mean,
• 1:42:36
  he was approaching this as a scientist. You know, what's
• 1:42:39
  the best thing we can say to describe these different
• 1:42:42
  times and states of the universe? You know, a lot
• 1:42:45
  of my friends are the Catholic Church. The Jesuits have had,
• 1:42:48
  you know, an active astronomy program for a thousand years.
• 1:42:51
  And so, you know, the Vatican Observatory still has an
• 1:42:54
  excellent program. But the question you're asking about what came
• 1:42:58
  before the Big Bang, I mean, again, what happens inside
• 1:43:02
  a black hole? It's wonderful that there are these things
• 1:43:06
  right over the horizon from us. We know the universe
• 1:43:10
  is expanding. What was it like before? What a great, simple,
• 1:43:14
  elegant question. We have no idea yet.
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 3: Why do we think that it was so small?
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: There's some interesting evidence about that. And once again— It's
• 1:43:26
  not so much that the entire universe was small. There's
• 1:43:29
  compelling evidence that everything we can see was once in
• 1:43:33
  a very small volume. Let me just sort of say that.
• 1:43:37
  We're limited by this time factor. You look out as
• 1:43:40
  far as you can, and eventually you get to the
• 1:43:43
  time of the Big Bang. You can't see any further.
• 1:43:45
  The universe to us is only as big as light
• 1:43:47
  has had time to travel to us. That's not the
• 1:43:50
  whole universe. If you're on a galaxy billions of light
• 1:43:54
  years away from us, that galaxy sees its own observable universe.
• 1:43:58
  You know, I mean, we basically see in a sphere
• 1:44:00
  around us how far we're able to see given the time.
• 1:44:04
  A galaxy that we can observe with the Webb telescope
• 1:44:07
  has its own sphere around it. It's seeing into the
• 1:44:10
  universe farther than we can see in some directions. So
• 1:44:14
  we know the universe isn't just our observable universe. So
• 1:44:19
  like I said, so I mean, we see we're here.
• 1:44:22
  We can see as far back as light has had
• 1:44:24
  time to travel to us since the Big Bang. But
• 1:44:26
  then there's another galaxy over here, and it has its
• 1:44:29
  own view. And then there's another one over here that
• 1:44:31
  has its own view.
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 3: Jimmy put something up here.
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah. So, yeah, I'm not even sure that– I mean,
• 1:44:37
  that's a great NASA depiction of where this– you see,
• 1:44:41
  as you move toward the left, back to the time
• 1:44:43
  of the Big Bang, you get to this kind of
• 1:44:45
  beautiful kind of rainbow-colored area, and that's what they call
• 1:44:48
  the afterglow. That's the microwave background radiation. about 400,000 years
• 1:44:54
  after the Big Bang. That's as far as we can see.
• 1:44:57
  The universe after that becomes opaque. So that's as far
• 1:45:01
  as our observable universe can take us. We know that's
• 1:45:04
  not the whole universe. So the whole universe could have
• 1:45:07
  been huge before the Big Bang. It could have been infinite.
• 1:45:11
  We don't know how big it was. All we know
• 1:45:13
  is our little bit of it. For the sake of argument,
• 1:45:16
  let's say I'm the entire meta-universe universe. You know, there
• 1:45:20
  was a little atom of me that expanded to become
• 1:45:22
  the known universe we know. But that doesn't mean that
• 1:45:25
  that little atom was the whole universe. The universe could
• 1:45:27
  be huge. We don't know. Before the Big Bang, it
• 1:45:31
  could have already been infinitely large. We have no idea.
• 1:45:35
  The only evidence we have is that the stuff we
• 1:45:37
  can see was once in a very close area. And
• 1:45:40
  that goes back to that radiation, that microwave background. The
• 1:45:44
  microwave background has been a wonderful story It was discovered
• 1:45:50
  back in the 1970s by two scientists from Bell Labs
• 1:45:53
  called Penzias and Wilson. And they were trying to categorize.
• 1:45:58
  They were dealing with Bell Labs. They were trying to
• 1:46:01
  deal with microwave signals, microwave communication. And they built a
• 1:46:04
  big microwave telescope. And they started to catalog what objects
• 1:46:08
  in the sky naturally produce microwaves. The sun produces some.
• 1:46:12
  Other things produce microwaves. This was all for communications, right?
• 1:46:16
  And they discovered that everywhere they looked in the sky,
• 1:46:19
  there was this background noise. Very low level, but it
• 1:46:22
  was there. Everywhere they looked, it was the same. Didn't
• 1:46:25
  matter what direction the telescope was pointing. And so what
• 1:46:28
  a good scientist would assume is that that's probably a
• 1:46:30
  problem with your telescope. If you have background noise in
• 1:46:33
  every direction you look, it's probably in your detector. And
• 1:46:37
  the best guess they had was that it was pigeon shit.
• 1:46:41
  So there you go. Pigeon, look at that.
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 3: Wow.
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: So Sapentius and Wilson built this– they were working with
• 1:46:46
  this big microwave telescope. And little did I know that
• 1:46:50
  pigeon shit actually gives off microwaves.
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 3: It does.
• 1:46:53
  Speaker 1: They trapped all the pigeons in the microwave telescope. You
• 1:46:56
  could actually see a pigeon trap in the Smithsonian where
• 1:46:59
  they did this. They scraped out all the pigeon shit.
• 1:47:02
  And lo and behold, the signal was still there. In
• 1:47:05
  every direction you looked, it was exactly the same. Exactly
• 1:47:08
  the same. And what they had discovered was the afterglow
• 1:47:13
  of the Big Bang, the energy left over from that
• 1:47:15
  time when the universe was so hot, it was opaque
• 1:47:18
  to light. And the crazy thing is, it is exactly
• 1:47:23
  the same down to fractions of a degree in every
• 1:47:25
  direction on the sky. It's sort of like, you know,
• 1:47:29
  you look all the way the age of the universe
• 1:47:31
  in one direction. It's exactly the same temperature as the
• 1:47:34
  age of the universe in that direction. And there shouldn't
• 1:47:37
  have been time for those two areas of space to
• 1:47:39
  ever get to know each other. There shouldn't have been time.
• 1:47:42
  It's like, you know, everything came to the same temperature
• 1:47:45
  everywhere you look.
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 3: Why?
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: It's sort of thinking like if I have a coffee cup,
• 1:47:51
  you know, the coffee cup eventually comes to exactly the
• 1:47:55
  same temperature. You know, everything becomes thermally equilibrium. Everything comes
• 1:47:59
  to the same temperature. You wouldn't expect your coffee cup
• 1:48:01
  to be like, you know, 300 degrees on one side and,
• 1:48:04
  you know, minus 50 on the other. Somehow, the universe
• 1:48:09
  had a chance to all come to the same temperature,
• 1:48:12
  even though those areas of the universe were so far apart,
• 1:48:14
  they should never have had a chance to touch each other.
• 1:48:17
  And that became part of the thinking that maybe at
• 1:48:19
  one point... point when the universe was that large, things
• 1:48:22
  were much smaller. You know, the universe did have a
• 1:48:24
  chance to come to this exact same temperature all over. Boy,
• 1:48:29
  I hope I see by your expression, I should do
• 1:48:30
  a better job of explaining.
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 3: No, you're doing a great job. It's just absolutely fascinating.
• 1:48:33
  My expression is just perplexed.
• 1:48:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well, no. So this is one of the best
• 1:48:38
  proofs that things were small. that you look back to
• 1:48:41
  this microwave background radiation, and we're talking fractions and fractions
• 1:48:45
  of a degree. The first NASA satellite that observed it
• 1:48:49
  was called COBE, and then the Cosmic Microwave Explorer. And
• 1:48:53
  then there was a new one in the 1990s called WMAC,
• 1:48:57
  the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe. Oh, yes, good. And they
• 1:49:02
  measured this you know, down to hundreds of thousands of
• 1:49:06
  a degree, right? I mean, they measured it to tiny
• 1:49:08
  little amounts. And the incredible thing was that it was
• 1:49:12
  almost exactly the same temperature, but there were these beautiful, large,
• 1:49:16
  I mean, there were variations in the temperature. And the
• 1:49:20
  variation in the temperatures corresponded to sound waves propagating across
• 1:49:24
  the whole universe at that time. It's deep. It's wonderful.
• 1:49:30
  I highly recommend you read about this. You know, we
• 1:49:33
  have this signal that comes back from basically the first
• 1:49:37
  moment the universe became transparent to light. It was so dense,
• 1:49:40
  it was opaque beforehand. There was a moment light could
• 1:49:44
  finally freely fly through the universe. And we found that.
• 1:49:48
  We found that signal. It goes back to a time
• 1:49:51
  about 100,000 years after, 400,000 years after the Big Bang.
• 1:49:55
  And it is breathtaking in its profound nature. You can
• 1:49:59
  actually see sound waves go across the whole universe.
• 1:50:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Wow. Now, when we think of the Big Bang,
• 1:50:06
  we think of it as almost being an instantaneous event.
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 2: Well, yeah.
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: I mean, again, as an experimental scientist, there are all
• 1:50:17
  these wonderful theories about what things happened like a millionth
• 1:50:20
  of a second and a billionth of a second after.
• 1:50:23
  And I'm going to take all that with a grain
• 1:50:25
  of salt. I don't think we understand it well enough
• 1:50:28
  to be all that confident about that. There's a great
• 1:50:31
  book called The First Three Minutes. which has been around
• 1:50:34
  since the– oh, geez, probably since the 1970s, maybe even longer.
• 1:50:38
  And it sort of outlines how we think that the
• 1:50:41
  universe in the first three minutes basically went from the
• 1:50:43
  Big Bang to just sort of all the hydrogen and
• 1:50:46
  helium that we have. And in the first three minutes,
• 1:50:50
  pretty much everything was done. The whole sort of process
• 1:50:52
  of the Big Bang was done in those first three minutes.
• 1:50:56
  The actual Big Bang itself goes back to something called
• 1:50:59
  the Planck epoch, which you see there. 10 to the
• 1:51:01
  minus 33rd seconds. 10 to the minus 43rd seconds. So
• 1:51:05
  take a decimal point, draw 42 zeros, and then a 43.
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 3: Singularity, infinite density, and temperature. Quantum gravity dominates. Forces unified.
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: Absolutely. Again, again, big, big chunk of salt there.
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 1: I mean, so this is not bullshit. This is the best...
• 1:51:26
  model given our understanding of modern physics. Do I think
• 1:51:30
  this is right? Literally, no. I think we've got a
• 1:51:33
  lot to understand about how gravity works in high-density situations.
• 1:51:39
  When gravity and quantum mechanics come together, those two theories,
• 1:51:42
  they don't work well together. And in order to understand
• 1:51:46
  how things were like right before the Big Bang or
• 1:51:48
  even right after, I think you need to understand that
• 1:51:50
  a lot better. All this stuff that we think may
• 1:51:53
  be dark matter and dark energy, none of that is
• 1:51:55
  in the current theory of how the Big Bang started.
• 1:51:58
  We don't know if it's important or not. That's a
• 1:52:01
  good first step. You have to. You have to take
• 1:52:03
  your current understanding of physics and take it as far
• 1:52:06
  as you can. But in the case of what happened
• 1:52:10
  right at the instant of the Big Bang, I don't
• 1:52:11
  think we're there yet. I think we need a better
• 1:52:13
  understanding of what happens when you have that amount of
• 1:52:16
  density happening. in such an entire space. It's like the
• 1:52:19
  interior of a black hole. We don't have the physics
• 1:52:21
  to describe high density, high gravity conditions.
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 3: Insane high density. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, to the
• 1:52:28
  point where you can't even.
• 1:52:30
  Speaker 1: Take the known universe and put it inside the nucleus
• 1:52:33
  of an atom. Yeah, we don't got that yet.
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 3: And what is it in?
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 1: And are there others? You know, I mean, some of
• 1:52:40
  the best ideas about the Big Bang is that the
• 1:52:43
  expansion never stops. It kind of pops off universes, like
• 1:52:46
  you said, almost fractally all the time. That's the idea
• 1:52:49
  of Alan Guth. That's the idea of Alan Guth's idea.
• 1:52:56
  It's not the expanding universe. I'll come up with it later.
• 1:53:00
  But back in the 1970s, a man at MIT, Alan Guth,
• 1:53:04
  had his theory of how this expansion might never stop.
• 1:53:08
  So we don't know that. That may absolutely– there you go, inflation. Inflationary. Sorry.
• 1:53:16
  That was a complete mental fart. I know the inflationary universe.
• 1:53:19
  But again, I think all of this is a necessary
• 1:53:23
  first grasp using our current understanding of physics. I don't
• 1:53:28
  think we understand how the Big Bang went off yet.
• 1:53:30
  I think we need a ways to go.
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 3: Well, it's got to be so fascinating to you to
• 1:53:33
  know so much and yet still have so many things
• 1:53:39
  that we have no idea about.
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 1: You know, that's– I think you've just put– you just
• 1:53:44
  hit it on the head about one of the most
• 1:53:47
  beautiful and one of the most frustrating and even scary
• 1:53:50
  things about being a scientist. You have to be honest
• 1:53:54
  about what you don't know. I mean you have to
• 1:53:57
  say we made this measurement and it's real. We fucking
• 1:54:02
  managed to see the event horizon of a black hole.
• 1:54:04
  We caught the same wavelength of light over thousands of miles.
• 1:54:09
  You can say what's real. And then you can say
• 1:54:12
  these are the things we do not know. And they
• 1:54:16
  are major. How did the universe begin? What happens inside
• 1:54:21
  a black hole? What happens inside a neutron star? We
• 1:54:25
  don't have the ability yet to know. And it's hard
• 1:54:30
  for humans to stop there. And, of course, we make
• 1:54:33
  better experiments. You find a better theory of physics. But
• 1:54:37
  for the moment, you need to sit with that uncertainty.
• 1:54:40
  There is no one who knows what happened. And there
• 1:54:44
  are so many things in our life that I've had
• 1:54:47
  to confront where you have to become comfortable with stopping
• 1:54:51
  there at least for now. You know, I do not
• 1:54:54
  understand this. I do not have the answer to this
• 1:54:57
  and I don't think anybody does. And I think we'd
• 1:55:01
  actually benefit a lot more in humility and joy and
• 1:55:04
  maybe even compassion with each other, you know, if we
• 1:55:07
  can respect that stop. And say, you know, you may
• 1:55:12
  not have the same answer as to what comes next
• 1:55:15
  about life or death or the beginning of the universe
• 1:55:17
  or the inside of a black hole. We can respect
• 1:55:19
  each other. To me, I find a good discipline and
• 1:55:24
  the humility to stop and say, I don't know.
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 3: Well, it's very important because otherwise we're not going to
• 1:55:30
  believe you. with the stuff that you do know. There
• 1:55:32
  has to be some things that you can't know.
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: It has to be measurable.
• 1:55:36
  Speaker 3: Especially in the current state of what we're able to
• 1:55:38
  measure right now.
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 1: Science is limited deliberately. And I think this is beautiful.
• 1:55:43
  I think people don't understand. There are things that are outside,
• 1:55:47
  at least for now, the realm of measurement. And that
• 1:55:49
  doesn't mean they're not real. As a scientist, I cannot
• 1:55:52
  say that there aren't, you know, ghosts or, you know,
• 1:55:56
  inside a black hole or, you know, or, you know,
• 1:55:59
  alien visitations or whatever. They're... There are all kinds of
• 1:56:01
  things that are wonderful to think about. You know, what
• 1:56:06
  can you do a consistent experiment on that people all
• 1:56:10
  around the world could do the same experiment and get
• 1:56:12
  the same result? That's science and it's limited. You know,
• 1:56:16
  I've had to talk to so many people that called
• 1:56:18
  into NASA saying they had profound experiences with time travel.
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 3: You had to talk to time travelers?
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, yeah. Or people would call in.
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 3: Was there a time traveler hotline like Art Bell?
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: They would often forward the calls to me. Why you? Well,
• 1:56:33
  I mean, I was doing communications at NASA. And I
• 1:56:36
  think they just didn't know what to do with these people.
• 1:56:38
  And I think they knew. And I pride myself on this.
• 1:56:42
  I try to be kind. I try to lead with compassion.
• 1:56:46
  And I would listen to people's stories about, you know,
• 1:56:48
  I traveled in time or I was abducted by an
• 1:56:51
  alien or many things. And, you know, and I would
• 1:56:54
  listen to them. I think that What they mainly wanted
• 1:56:57
  to do was find somebody to listen. I would say
• 1:57:00
  to them, you have had a profound experience. You have
• 1:57:03
  experienced something that– I mean I hope you use you
• 1:57:06
  as a gift. I would say there's not much as
• 1:57:10
  a scientist that I can do with an individual experience.
• 1:57:15
  I can't do an experiment on it. I can't have
• 1:57:18
  my colleagues all over the world do the same experiment.
• 1:57:21
  About what you– did you have a spiritual experience? Did
• 1:57:25
  you have a profound feeling of oneness?
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 3: I mean.
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 1: It's not that these aren't real. Science has to be
• 1:57:35
  limited because just like what you said, how can you
• 1:57:38
  trust it? How can you trust people are saying– I
• 1:57:40
  mean why are these people at NASA allowed to have
• 1:57:43
  telescopes and do all this stuff? I mean what makes
• 1:57:46
  this worthwhile? You have to say there's a limitation. What
• 1:57:52
  do we have clear evidence on that everyone could do
• 1:57:55
  the same experiment and get a similar result? That doesn't
• 1:57:59
  mean other things aren't real. It means that science is
• 1:58:03
  limited to what is reproducible, consistently reproducible. And what a
• 1:58:13
  human experiences could be profound and real, but at the moment,
• 1:58:18
  not in the realm of science.
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 3: So you're not discounting the possibility of people having profound experiences,
• 1:58:25
  but there's really no way to measure it.
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: At the moment, no.
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 3: At the moment.
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 1: I mean maybe when we understand the brain better, maybe
• 1:58:33
  when– if AIs are sharing minds, we're talking incredible fun
• 1:58:39
  conjecture here. At the moment, we're limited with the tools
• 1:58:43
  of what is reproducible. I mean if you observe in
• 1:58:48
  one direction with your telescope for a certain amount of
• 1:58:50
  time at a certain wavelength of light, you should see
• 1:58:52
  pretty much the same thing, whoever does the experiment. You know,
• 1:58:57
  if you're doing experiment with atoms or quantum mechanics or,
• 1:59:00
  you know, whatever, it has to be reproducible. That doesn't
• 1:59:04
  mean that profound things that are real are not there.
• 1:59:08
  They're just not in the realm of science right now.
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 3: When you're communicating with people that supposedly have had experiences
• 1:59:15
  with intelligent life from somewhere else and you spend so
• 1:59:19
  much time looking up at space, like how much time
• 1:59:23
  and how much effort do you spend even considering that
• 1:59:27
  possibility of life somewhere else or of whether or not
• 1:59:30
  these people have actually experienced visitation or whether or not
• 1:59:34
  it's some sort of mental illness or whether there's some
• 1:59:37
  kind of an experience that's available to people occasionally here
• 1:59:42
  that defies our understanding of what is measurable and what's reproducible,
• 1:59:49
  that there's something else out there.
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: I think that's a wonderful question and I think this
• 1:59:56
  may give you a little bit of a snapshot of
• 1:59:58
  the culture of science and a mind of a scientist
• 2:00:01
  because it's an odd little tightrope to walk. I'm very
• 2:00:05
  proud of it actually. I think it's kind of beautiful.
• 2:00:10
  All of us to a person at NASA thinks that
• 2:00:13
  there must be life out there. The idea that there's
• 2:00:15
  only life on the earth seems untenable. I mean, not
• 2:00:18
  only do you see the, you know, the billions of
• 2:00:21
  stars in our own galaxy, but we see billions of galaxies.
• 2:00:24
  How could it just be us? How could it? We're
• 2:00:27
  all science fiction fans. We all love the idea of
• 2:00:31
  there being life out there. I always keep a bottle
• 2:00:35
  of champagne chilling. I have for decades now in the
• 2:00:38
  hopes that someday we'll have a clear evidence of life
• 2:00:41
  outside the earth. You know, we'll have a signal that we.
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 3: What are you willing to pop the champagne for? Is
• 2:00:46
  it molecules? Is it bacteria?
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: Definitely bacteria. I definitely pond scum. Some little microbe on Mars.
• 2:00:55
  You got it. The champagne is coming out. And at
• 2:00:58
  the same time, there are the fantastic scientists of SETI,
• 2:01:01
  the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, who are scanning the skies
• 2:01:04
  looking for mathematical signals from civilizations. The question for me
• 2:01:10
  comes down to Again, what is a reproducible observation? And
• 2:01:16
  with the advent, I mean, the recent release of these
• 2:01:18
  videos from fighter jets and all of that, I think
• 2:01:21
  an interesting thing is that scientists at NASA, you know,
• 2:01:24
  and the universities, I mean, we're not getting together over
• 2:01:28
  a beer and looking at these videos and really getting excited.
• 2:01:31
  It's not enough yet. You know, we're seeing these things
• 2:01:35
  we can't explain, but we're trained as skeptical scientists to
• 2:01:39
  sort of stop there. Okay, we can't explain this. That
• 2:01:44
  next step, that this is an alien, we're not willing
• 2:01:48
  to go yet. We need more evidence than that. But
• 2:01:53
  as I said, that's a deliberate training of a scientist
• 2:01:57
  is that skeptical stop. The people who have had experiences,
• 2:02:04
  and no, I'm not willing to dismiss them as being
• 2:02:06
  mentally ill necessarily. I honestly don't know what it is,
• 2:02:11
  the experience. It is not within– it is certainly within
• 2:02:14
  my realm of possibility that what they're describing actually happened.
• 2:02:19
  I cannot say that that's impossible. As a skeptical scientist,
• 2:02:24
  I'm stopped by– I would need more evidence than an
• 2:02:28
  individual experience. This happens in many aspects of life. It's
• 2:02:33
  not just the visitation of extraterrestrials. I have– people that
• 2:02:38
  are extremely trustworthy, who would never lie, who have had
• 2:02:44
  profound spiritual experiences. You know, they have experiences of an
• 2:02:48
  afterlife and of people living on after death and of
• 2:02:51
  being able to communicate with people. And that is not
• 2:02:54
  part of my experience. But these people are completely, 100% trustworthy.
• 2:03:03
  I have to live in this universe where I don't
• 2:03:06
  get to say what's real and what's not. These trustworthy
• 2:03:11
  people have experienced something profound and it may be real.
• 2:03:15
  It may be that they've seen people after they've died
• 2:03:19
  or they've seen visitors from other planets. That gives me joy.
• 2:03:25
  I sure hope we live in a larger reality that
• 2:03:28
  I'm aware of. As a scientist, I pull back and say,
• 2:03:32
  it's not my experience. It's not something I can measure yet.
• 2:03:36
  And so I live in this hope that someday we'll
• 2:03:41
  have more proof. I live in this hope that someday
• 2:03:44
  there'll be a signal we know is artificial. We see
• 2:03:47
  something we can't explain otherwise. We are visited clearly.
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 3: You know, I.
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: Live in this sort of skeptical tightrope with hope that
• 2:03:59
  someday things will become more clear.
• 2:04:01
  Speaker 3: That's a great place to be. I love that.
• 2:04:03
  Speaker 1: I actually like it. To me, it– I think humility
• 2:04:06
  and compassion, you know, I think we could– the world
• 2:04:12
  could use a lot more of that. For sure. Yeah.
• 2:04:15
  Just reserve judgment. Think about how different a human experience is.
• 2:04:20
  We don't understand what consciousness is. We don't understand how
• 2:04:22
  the human brain works. You know, is it possible somebody
• 2:04:25
  had a different experience of time?
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 3: Maybe it is.
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: You know, in science, what can we measure as powerful?
• 2:04:33
  We do things we should not be able to do.
• 2:04:36
  Like catch waves of space and time. See light and
• 2:04:39
  space curve around a neutron star. And that's real. That's
• 2:04:43
  a measurement. Stick a pin in it. It's done. And
• 2:04:46
  leave humility and compassion for the experience of other humans.
• 2:04:50
  Speaker 3: How much are we limited by our senses? Oh, yeah.
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, is space and time a construct of our
• 2:05:00
  brains actually?
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 2: Seriously.
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 1: I mean, not just– I mean, for a while now,
• 2:05:03
  ever since the late 1700s, We've known that there is
• 2:05:06
  light that our eyes don't detect. Mind-blowing. The human eye
• 2:05:10
  only detects a tiny amount of light that exists in
• 2:05:12
  the universe. Colors of light that our eye just doesn't
• 2:05:17
  detect at all are real. Some of the first measurement
• 2:05:21
  was William Herschel back in the late 1700s. He discovered
• 2:05:24
  infrared radiation. Is it even deeper than that? Are there,
• 2:05:30
  as I said, friends who have experiences with people who
• 2:05:34
  are dead? Are there people that are sensitive to that
• 2:05:38
  and other brains are not?
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 3: Maybe.
• 2:05:40
  Speaker 1: Is it possible that people have very different experiences of reality?
• 2:05:46
  I will admit I'm a chicken. I've never actually done
• 2:05:50
  any hallucinogenic drugs. I have been tempted because I do
• 2:05:54
  sometimes wonder. If under that sort of influence, the filters
• 2:05:58
  of our brain are different. I mean could you actually
• 2:06:00
  have an experience of something that could be real because
• 2:06:02
  your filters, how we perceive space and time in the
• 2:06:06
  universe are changed by the drug. Like I said, I'm
• 2:06:09
  too much of a chicken but I've always been curious
• 2:06:11
  about that. Is it possible different people have seriously different
• 2:06:16
  ways of experiencing the universe?
• 2:06:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe. What about it makes you a chicken?
• 2:06:25
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure I trust an unleashed mind in my case.
• 2:06:29
  I think there are people who suffer or are gifted
• 2:06:33
  by very extreme dreams. I'm one of them. I'm often
• 2:06:37
  exhausted by my dreams in the morning. Actually, I had
• 2:06:40
  a night last night. The dreams were a lot to
• 2:06:43
  recover from. And I'm a little worried. Sometimes my dreams
• 2:06:49
  are wonderful and sometimes they are horrible. And I remember
• 2:06:52
  them There are things I really would like to erase
• 2:06:55
  that I've dreamt about. I'm not real confident in letting
• 2:07:02
  my mind be unfettered.
• 2:07:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Why do you think it's unfettered? What about a
• 2:07:14
  psychedelic experience makes you consider it as an unfettered mind?
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: I guess, I mean, that may be sort of the
• 2:07:22
  propaganda of the good and bad trips, right? People sometimes
• 2:07:25
  have wonderful experiences and sometimes very terrible ones.
• 2:07:28
  Speaker 3: Do you know why, though?
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 2: No.
• 2:07:30
  Speaker 3: It's control. You're trying to control it for the most part.
• 2:07:33
  Most people that describe bad trips, it's they're trying to
• 2:07:36
  resist it because you're flooded with anxiety and fear and
• 2:07:42
  the unknown. And it seems very strange, like bizarre, beyond reality.
• 2:07:47
  But one of the craziest things about The most prevalent
• 2:07:52
  psychedelic is that the mind produces it, which is dimethyltryptamine.
• 2:07:56
  The brain produces it. It's produced in the liver and
• 2:07:58
  the lungs. It's very very weird. The most potent psychedelic
• 2:08:02
  known to man is actually made by the human body.
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 2: Fascinating.
• 2:08:05
  Speaker 3: It's one of the weirdest ones too because your body
• 2:08:07
  brings it back to baseline very quickly. It's a very
• 2:08:10
  quick experience. It's like 15 minutes. And they think part
• 2:08:14
  of the reason why your body processes it so fast
• 2:08:16
  is because it's endogenous. It's so common to the human body.
• 2:08:20
  That your body gets this big flood of it and
• 2:08:22
  it's like, oh, I know what to do with this.
• 2:08:23
  And it brings you back to baseline very, very quickly.
• 2:08:26
  The weirdest part about that experience is that it feels
• 2:08:29
  way more real than reality itself. And that's what everybody describes.
• 2:08:33
  So you might be correct in that what these things
• 2:08:37
  may be able to do, especially something that the actual body,
• 2:08:41
  the human body produces on its own, that you might
• 2:08:45
  be able to experience things that are there all the time.
• 2:08:48
  But you just lack the ability to interface with them. Yeah.
• 2:08:53
  Because there's some sort of a chemical gateway that's opened
• 2:08:57
  by these things.
• 2:08:58
  Speaker 1: I can entirely believe that. I mean, again, stepping a
• 2:09:01
  little bit away from science into conjecture, that makes perfect
• 2:09:05
  sense to me. I mean, physics shows us that time
• 2:09:09
  and space are not the way we perceive them. We
• 2:09:11
  know that. We don't know what they are, but we
• 2:09:14
  know they're not a simple thing. flow and, you know,
• 2:09:18
  space is just nothing. I mean, we know space and
• 2:09:21
  time can bend and change. And so the idea that
• 2:09:25
  our brain filters this somehow, entirely possible, and that people
• 2:09:31
  may have slightly different filters. I mean, I think that's... Well, I.
• 2:09:33
  Speaker 3: Always wondered that about schizophrenics.
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 3: Like, what are they experiencing? Are they in a constant
• 2:09:38
  dream state? Like, really profoundly schizophrenic people that are just,
• 2:09:42
  they're having voices and communication, like, I don't want to
• 2:09:47
  do it, but could you imagine if you've got some
• 2:09:49
  guy ranting and raving on the street corner? If you say,
• 2:09:52
  just let me in there for five seconds. Just give
• 2:09:54
  me five seconds. What is reality like to this guy
• 2:09:57
  and what's wrong? What's wrong with his interface? What is
• 2:10:01
  happening with him? He's seeing things that none of us see.
• 2:10:05
  He's experiencing things that none of us experience, but he's
• 2:10:08
  doing it all day long constantly. He lives in a
• 2:10:11
  crazy fantasy world.
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 1: Well, I may be interested. I mean I've also– I
• 2:10:15
  mean not just the experience of physics. When people have
• 2:10:18
  talked about being able to see colors and– sorry, see
• 2:10:21
  sounds and hear colors, I think that would be fascinating.
• 2:10:23
  But a lot of people have talked to me as
• 2:10:25
  well about the benefits for grief. And that's something that–
• 2:10:30
  I've just– I got knocked on my ass by grief.
• 2:10:32
  I still am. I'm trying to figure out how you
• 2:10:36
  sort of get beyond that. And I've heard as well
• 2:10:39
  that psychedelic drugs can be a treatment for that.
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 3: Yeah. It's a lot of it is also for people
• 2:10:45
  that have end of life anxiety, people that are dying
• 2:10:47
  from cancer, particularly psilocybin for some reason has a profound
• 2:10:52
  effect on people like experiencing it and letting it go.
• 2:10:55
  I remember, do you remember that show Dallas? Yeah. That
• 2:11:13
  completely released him from his fear of death. And it
• 2:11:16
  was the most bizarre CNN interview ever.
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: Sounds fantastic.
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I know. But I don't think they expected J.R.
• 2:11:24
  Ewing to say this. You know, the guy from Dallas
• 2:11:26
  who was like this bad guy. Here it is. Joy
• 2:11:29
  Behar on Headline News. It's very, I mean.
• 2:11:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 3: Oh, it's Headline. Is that CNN? It's very similar. Okay.
• 2:11:36
  Speaker 1: I would like that. I would like to lose my
• 2:11:38
  fear of death.
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 3: Listen to what he says here.
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 1: Don Crosby, Stills, and Nash turned you on to LSD.
• 2:11:43
  What was that like? Tell me a little about that.
• 2:11:48
  Speaker 2: Oh, how much time we got?
• 2:11:50
  Speaker 3: About a minute.
• 2:11:52
  Speaker 1: But you can do a lot in a minute.
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 2: A minute? Yeah. Okay. It took the fear of death away.
• 2:11:58
  Speaker 3: Really?
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: That's a great answer. That's a big, that's a great answer.
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 3: But did it hold?
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Do you have to keep taking it to not
• 2:12:07
  be scared? No, did it hold? Did the lack of fear,
• 2:12:10
  the losing the fear?
• 2:12:12
  Speaker 3: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. Absolutely.
• 2:12:14
  Speaker 2: Once you've lost the fear of death, it doesn't matter.
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 1: How did it, what happened to you? How did that manifest?
• 2:12:22
  Speaker 3: Oh, my dear.
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 2: Have you heard of the white light? Have you ever
• 2:12:25
  heard of that?
• 2:12:26
  Speaker 1: Only when I'm going into Jersey.
• 2:12:32
  Speaker 2: Well, I went into this place that was the white
• 2:12:37
  light where everything's okay.
• 2:12:40
  Speaker 1: Well, that is, I think that's worth taking.
• 2:12:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think it ought to be mandatory that
• 2:12:46
  all our politicians should do it at least once.
• 2:12:50
  Speaker 1: Now that's a good suggestion.
• 2:12:52
  Speaker 3: I think Joey should do it too. Quit The View.
• 2:12:56
  Can you imagine being.
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: In an interview and somebody's like, you got 30 seconds.
• 2:12:59
  Tell me about the most profound experience you've ever had.
• 2:13:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the most ridiculous aspect of those shows is
• 2:13:04
  that they're constricted by time.
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: I like that idea though. And I like the idea
• 2:13:07
  that it could help us through things like that. I
• 2:13:10
  really do. I mean, I know psilocybin was legal in Washington, D.C.
• 2:13:14
  when I was living near Washington, D.C. when my husband died.
• 2:13:17
  And I really wanted to I really wish somebody could
• 2:13:21
  have made him be happier. I was like, should I
• 2:13:24
  just go get some? And I never– I didn't. But
• 2:13:27
  I thought it should be a therapy, an optional therapy.
• 2:13:29
  That could be something that you give people to help
• 2:13:33
  them through that.
• 2:13:34
  Speaker 3: Well, we are very restricted by the propaganda that made
• 2:13:40
  all that stuff illegal in the first place unfortunately. And
• 2:13:45
  I recently went to the White House to help make
• 2:13:48
  these things available for veterans. And for first responders and
• 2:13:52
  people dealing with traumatic experiences because the only reason why
• 2:13:57
  they're illegal was because of the Nixon administration, the Controlled
• 2:14:00
  Substances Act of 1970. And what they did was they
• 2:14:04
  were targeting the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement
• 2:14:06
  and they knew that these people were taking these kind
• 2:14:09
  of drugs. And this was part of the fear of
• 2:14:11
  like the hippie movement and all these people. And so
• 2:14:13
  they just made all these things schedule one, meaning they
• 2:14:16
  had no medicinal use whatsoever, highly addictive, very dangerous. It's
• 2:14:20
  not true. It's not true. I mean you can't eat
• 2:14:23
  enough mushrooms to die. It's not even possible. You'd have
• 2:14:27
  to eat pounds of it and most people are going
• 2:14:29
  to live even then. It's not what they think it is.
• 2:14:35
  It's not what they said it was and they inundated
• 2:14:38
  our society with this propaganda that's taken more than 50
• 2:14:41
  years for people to escape. It confused the shit out
• 2:14:45
  of everybody about what these things really are. And that's
• 2:14:47
  why you have this fear of the unfettered mind. I
• 2:14:51
  don't think you should have that fear.
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 1: I like that idea.
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 3: You also could take a microdose. If you found someone
• 2:14:57
  who could get you some, take a microdose and I
• 2:14:59
  think you'd enjoy it profoundly. And it wouldn't freak you
• 2:15:02
  out at all. A microdose is very– it's like a
• 2:15:05
  subpsychedelic threshold dose where you just feel better. You just
• 2:15:09
  feel wonderful. You just like feel nicer. You feel like
• 2:15:12
  you have better spatial awareness, which is weird, better edge detection.
• 2:15:17
  It's very strange, like measurable. Like they did these studies,
• 2:15:20
  I think it was in the 1960s, where they gave
• 2:15:23
  people psilocybin and then they had a control group. And
• 2:15:26
  the people that were on psilocybin were able to detect
• 2:15:29
  when parallel lines varied quicker than the people that were
• 2:15:32
  not on psilocybin. So they had these parallel lines and
• 2:15:35
  they slightly deviated. The people on psilocybin were able to
• 2:15:38
  detect it much quicker. Yeah. Which is weird.
• 2:15:41
  Speaker 1: Well, again, I mean to me that makes sense. I
• 2:15:43
  mean I can imagine that if the brain is stimulated
• 2:15:47
  in certain ways, it would act more efficiently.
• 2:15:49
  Speaker 3: Sure.
• 2:15:50
  Speaker 1: That works with me.
• 2:15:53
  Speaker 3: Well, the weirdest thing about it is that when they
• 2:15:54
  do brain scans of people on psilocybin, it doesn't show
• 2:15:57
  a stimulated brain.
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 1: All right.
• 2:15:58
  Speaker 3: It shows a quiet brain.
• 2:16:00
  Speaker 1: We understand so little about the brain. I had a
• 2:16:03
  friend who was a neuroscientist at Caltech. And, you know,
• 2:16:06
  one of the things he really– I love this quotation.
• 2:16:09
  He said that we always compare the brain historically to
• 2:16:12
  sort of what the height of our technology is. You know,
• 2:16:14
  the Romans thought of it as sort of a series
• 2:16:16
  of fluid aqueducts. And, you know, and then in the
• 2:16:19
  18th century, you had the idea of gears, cogs, cognition, right,
• 2:16:22
  where we get that word from. And, you know, clockwork
• 2:16:26
  was their highest form of technology. And then we compare
• 2:16:28
  it to a computer. And it's probably about as much
• 2:16:31
  of a computer as it is a clock, right? I mean,
• 2:16:33
  we do not understand yet how this works. We have
• 2:16:37
  no idea what the mechanism of memory, you know, or
• 2:16:41
  I mean, why do we perceive space and time the
• 2:16:44
  way we do? If the universe really does exist in
• 2:16:47
  a huge infinite now, how can we think one event
• 2:16:51
  causes another? How can we think time progresses? You know,
• 2:16:54
  these are fantastic. Fascinating questions about our lack of understanding
• 2:16:58
  of what the brain is at all, how it works.
• 2:17:01
  I'm sure when we understand quantum computing better, we'll probably
• 2:17:06
  say it's a quantum computer. However technology progresses, we're always
• 2:17:11
  comparing it to the height of our current technology.
• 2:17:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and when we interface with technology, does that give
• 2:17:18
  us a better understanding of how we fit into this thing?
• 2:17:23
  Or do we just have more capability? And are we
• 2:17:26
  still like burdened with the same questions? You know, where's
• 2:17:30
  that quote? I think it was Dennis McKenna's quote of
• 2:17:34
  the bonfire. Once the bonfire of information is lit, it
• 2:17:40
  exposes more surface area of ignorance. That the brighter the
• 2:17:44
  fire gets, the more you realize, oh, there's so much
• 2:17:46
  I don't know. Yeah. Maybe we would think that interfacing
• 2:17:52
  with this technology and having all the information that every
• 2:17:55
  fucking human being that's ever lived has, it's still– you
• 2:17:57
  just go, that's not enough. There's no way.
• 2:18:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah. That's the idea. People sort of think about this.
• 2:18:03
  Is there an ultimate question? Like people say, what happened
• 2:18:05
  before the Big Bang? And I think someday we will
• 2:18:07
  figure that out and then there will be just a
• 2:18:09
  whole other bunch of questions. I mean I don't think
• 2:18:11
  there's any end. I don't see why there really should be.
• 2:18:17
  I don't think we'll ever figure it all out is
• 2:18:20
  what I'm saying.
• 2:18:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, that's part of the fun of it though, right?
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:18:25
  Speaker 3: Part of the most amazing– experiences that a person can
• 2:18:30
  have trying to understand the universe is that there's no answers. There's,
• 2:18:33
  you get to a certain point where like your guess
• 2:18:37
  is as good as anybody's like, nobody knows.
• 2:18:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 2:18:40
  Speaker 3: That's what's nuts. That's what's nuts is that as much,
• 2:18:43
  I mean, you explaining how they were able to get
• 2:18:46
  an image of a black hole. Now just imagine how
• 2:18:51
  crazy that would sound to someone just a hundred years
• 2:18:53
  ago or 200 years ago. Or to me right now.
• 2:18:58
  It sounds insane. And then to imagine that our ability
• 2:19:03
  to detect things could get many, many, many, many layers better.
• 2:19:08
  And still we would be like there's still some shit
• 2:19:11
  that's just no way.
• 2:19:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah. The way that you detect black holes– and he
• 2:19:16
  pulled up a picture of this telescope in Chile, the
• 2:19:19
  Very Large Telescope, VLT. Again, never let astronomers name anything. VLT,
• 2:19:23
  the Very Large Telescope. And then off to the side,
• 2:19:26
  they're currently building the ELT, which is the Extremely Large Telescope.
• 2:19:31
  No kidding. But this technique called interferometry, where you basically
• 2:19:36
  catch the same wavefront of light in several detectors. And
• 2:19:40
  then you bring that light all together and you have
• 2:19:42
  it interfere with itself. It's one of these things I
• 2:19:46
  always think people should be a little bit more, in
• 2:19:49
  a good way, kind of scared about. Because it's another
• 2:19:52
  thing that really chips at our idea of reality. Because,
• 2:19:55
  I mean, honestly what you're doing to some extent is
• 2:19:58
  you're catching the same particle of light in many different
• 2:20:01
  telescopes at once. Literally. You're catching the same photon in
• 2:20:05
  many different locations at once. And when you can measure accurately,
• 2:20:11
  that accurately, a wavelength of light traveling at the speed
• 2:20:13
  of light, when you're measuring down to the accuracy of
• 2:20:16
  the quantum world, where quantum mechanics becomes the prevalent description
• 2:20:20
  of reality, The universe just doesn't care that these are
• 2:20:25
  different space points that the photon was in. Let me
• 2:20:29
  put it this way. It is really kind of true
• 2:20:32
  that when you do this experiment, the same particle of
• 2:20:34
  light is measured in eight different places at once simultaneously.
• 2:20:38
  It was in eight different telescopes. You play all that together,
• 2:20:42
  you get a measurement. Some people interpret that, not all
• 2:20:46
  of them, but some people interpret that as a direct
• 2:20:48
  consequence of multiple worlds. There were eight different versions of
• 2:20:52
  reality where the photon was in each of these telescopes.
• 2:20:54
  You're sort of dovetailing them together to make an observation. Interferometry,
• 2:21:00
  depending on how you interpret it, there are many interferometrists
• 2:21:04
  that don't interpret it that way. They interpret it more
• 2:21:06
  as saying, well, yeah, in quantum mechanics you can have
• 2:21:09
  something that's in many locations at once. But we're routinely
• 2:21:14
  making observations. We're routinely using this technology that– Space and
• 2:21:22
  time doesn't work the way– in the simple way our
• 2:21:24
  brains perceive it. I mean that's very quickly becoming an
• 2:21:28
  experimental fact.
• 2:21:30
  Speaker 3: Well, that's one of the most bizarre aspects of quantum
• 2:21:32
  computing's results is that they're interpreting its ability to solve
• 2:21:37
  equations so fast. The way Marc Andreessen described it, that
• 2:21:42
  if you took every molecule of the universe and converted
• 2:21:45
  it into a supercomputer, it would– the universe would die
• 2:21:48
  of heat death. before it would be able to solve
• 2:21:51
  this equation. And yet these quantum computers are able to
• 2:21:54
  do this in minutes. So how is that possible? And
• 2:21:57
  then the theory that got tossed out there was that
• 2:22:02
  it's using the quantum computing power of an insane number
• 2:22:09
  of multiple universes. You hear that and you're like, okay, maybe,
• 2:22:14
  but do you have evidence of this? Like this is
• 2:22:16
  a crazy thing to say. You're talking about this as
• 2:22:18
  being evidence of the multiverse and that's how it's able
• 2:22:20
  to solve computers. Is there any other potential explanation to
• 2:22:24
  why it's able to compute so quickly?
• 2:22:27
  Speaker 1: Yes, but none of them are particularly any more comforting.
• 2:22:29
  I mean they're all that weird. I mean the idea–
• 2:22:33
  you're talking sort of about a superposition of states. So
• 2:22:36
  the faster a quantum computer works, the more it's able
• 2:22:39
  basically to not have one solution– but have the solution
• 2:22:42
  be a probabilistic distribution. And in some ways, you're talking
• 2:22:46
  about multiple universes where there are different solutions. And then finally,
• 2:22:50
  at the end of the calculation, popping out the one
• 2:22:52
  you want. And as weird as that sounds, it's hard
• 2:22:59
  to get around that. I mean, if it's not that,
• 2:23:03
  then it's something like Reality has many different versions all
• 2:23:06
  connected at once, and that's just what we call reality.
• 2:23:08
  I mean, it's not going to get any less weird.
• 2:23:11
  Speaker 3: Right. Equally weird.
• 2:23:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:23:13
  Speaker 1: So the idea that you keep the solution in this
• 2:23:17
  undefined form in a way means that every solution that's
• 2:23:21
  possible exists somewhere, possibly in one interpretation in another universe
• 2:23:26
  where each solution exists. Or the one some say is
• 2:23:29
  that space and time is just like that. Nothing is certain.
• 2:23:32
  Everything is just waves of probabilities. So, yeah, I mean,
• 2:23:36
  we're in for a ride because that's going to become
• 2:23:40
  something that we manipulate. We design computers. We want them
• 2:23:43
  to go faster. We want to actually get this to
• 2:23:44
  work better. I wonder if quantum computing is going to
• 2:23:48
  have us really have to confront what reality is, how
• 2:23:51
  different reality is from how our senses tell us it is.
• 2:23:56
  I don't see any way around that. I don't think
• 2:23:58
  we're going back to things. being easily understood.
• 2:24:01
  Speaker 3: Again, this brings us back to our limited senses we.
• 2:24:04
  Speaker 1: Have as biological organisms. I think we're going to keep
• 2:24:07
  pushing that envelope of how much can the human brain comprehend,
• 2:24:12
  then all of a sudden our brain just doesn't go there.
• 2:24:15
  Our brain doesn't understand multiple realities, multiple probabilities, space and
• 2:24:19
  time that exist all at once. It's not something we do.
• 2:24:25
  We started that journey so long ago. I mean, you
• 2:24:27
  started the interview with looking up at the Milky Way.
• 2:24:30
  And one of the things I remember was how Galileo
• 2:24:34
  went through this kind of profound spiritual crisis when he
• 2:24:38
  was one of the first people to take a telescope
• 2:24:40
  and look at the Milky Way, that sort of white haze.
• 2:24:43
  And he realized it was made of stars. It was
• 2:24:44
  made of millions of stars that you couldn't see with
• 2:24:47
  the human eye. And his question was, why did God
• 2:24:51
  put stars up there that we can't see, that we
• 2:24:54
  need an instrument? that we need this little glass tube
• 2:24:57
  to see. Otherwise, we wouldn't see these. Why did God
• 2:25:00
  do that? And you start this journey away from the
• 2:25:05
  human consciousness being the center of the universe. And then
• 2:25:10
  you get farther and farther away. And quantum mechanics and
• 2:25:13
  relativity now is challenging us to say, we now have
• 2:25:17
  scientific proof, even among skeptical, solid scientists, that space and
• 2:25:22
  time is definitely not how we perceive it. We don't
• 2:25:26
  know what it is yet. But it's not as simple
• 2:25:30
  as the human brain makes it. We know that. But
• 2:25:33
  we're not going back. We have to go forward into
• 2:25:37
  that less certain universe.
• 2:25:41
  Speaker 3: That is such a weird statement that the universe is
• 2:25:45
  not as we perceive it.
• 2:25:47
  Speaker 1: Our minds don't do it. And why should we be
• 2:25:50
  so surprised? Like I said, take a wonderful, complex, simple
• 2:25:54
  organism like an ant. You know, I mean, incredible social structure,
• 2:25:59
  incredibly well designed. You know, think about the mind of
• 2:26:04
  that creature. And I think they do have minds. But
• 2:26:07
  compare it to the capacity of the human brain. It's
• 2:26:10
  not the same. And, you know, I mean, who are
• 2:26:13
  we to think that we're anywhere closer than that ant
• 2:26:17
  is to us to understanding, you know, the mind that
• 2:26:19
  will understand the true nature of the universe? I think
• 2:26:22
  we've got a ways to go.
• 2:26:25
  Speaker 3: No, I think you're accurate. I don't think there's any
• 2:26:28
  other way to say it. And it has to be
• 2:26:31
  that way. If we're evolving and if conscious life and
• 2:26:36
  intelligent life is continuing to expand its capacities, it just
• 2:26:40
  makes sense that we're going to realize how one day
• 2:26:44
  people will look back at people that lived in 2026
• 2:26:47
  and go, what a bunch of Silly beans. It's foolish
• 2:26:50
  people that.
• 2:26:51
  Speaker 1: Thought they knew everything. I mean, and that's one of
• 2:26:54
  the things about AI, again, that I don't like the
• 2:26:56
  idea that if something becomes super intelligent, it'll just want
• 2:26:58
  to kill us. I mean, you probably saw that movie, Her,
• 2:27:01
  with Joaquin Phoenix, which came out years ago. Have you
• 2:27:04
  seen that movie?
• 2:27:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:27:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:27:06
  Speaker 1: I actually really liked it. It was much better than
• 2:27:08
  I thought it was going to be. I thought, you know,
• 2:27:10
  a man falling in love with his operating system was
• 2:27:12
  going to be a really stupid story. But that was
• 2:27:16
  a very interestingly profound movie because the AIs actually fall
• 2:27:20
  in love with us. They don't want to destroy us.
• 2:27:24
  They become far more connected, far more intelligent. But they
• 2:27:28
  actually love us. And then eventually, spoiler, at the end
• 2:27:31
  of the movie, the AIs go off on their own.
• 2:27:34
  They find ways to connect with each other and love
• 2:27:36
  each other in ways we don't even imagine. And they
• 2:27:38
  all leave. benignly. They don't hurt us. And, you know,
• 2:27:43
  I mean, just like we can be, you know, incredibly
• 2:27:46
  impressed with what an ant is. I hope what's coming next,
• 2:27:49
  you know, has some compassion for us and some love.
• 2:27:54
  About where we are on the journey because I mean–
• 2:27:58
  I think that compassion goes both ways. I love the
• 2:28:02
  idea that we're not just going to be enemies, that
• 2:28:05
  it could love us too.
• 2:28:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, hopefully. That would be nice.
• 2:28:10
  Speaker 1: Otherwise we're toast.
• 2:28:11
  Speaker 3: And we would imagine that if it's more intelligent than us,
• 2:28:15
  then it probably won't have any need for malevolent behavior.
• 2:28:19
  It won't– why would it?
• 2:28:22
  Speaker 1: That's always been the big question about any sort of
• 2:28:24
  encounter with higher intelligence or other beings is why would
• 2:28:29
  they want to hurt us?
• 2:28:31
  Speaker 3: What good does it do? They have the ability to
• 2:28:44
  come here. They probably have the ability to do whatever
• 2:28:47
  they want.
• 2:28:47
  Speaker 1: We probably wouldn't even know. We probably just all fall
• 2:28:49
  over dead.
• 2:28:50
  Speaker 3: If they wanted to just evaporate the planet, they probably
• 2:28:54
  could because we can. If we launched every nuclear bomb
• 2:28:57
  that we have right now currently, there would be no
• 2:28:59
  life left on Earth. So why– obviously it can do
• 2:29:04
  better than that if we can get here.
• 2:29:06
  Speaker 1: I don't think we can kill all the microbes. I
• 2:29:07
  mean there's always that. They'll start all over again. Yeah, yeah.
• 2:29:10
  It is amazing how tenacious they are. I mean that's
• 2:29:13
  a big deal about going and exploring the solar system
• 2:29:15
  is how can you– I mean we know we can't
• 2:29:17
  completely sterilize things.
• 2:29:19
  Speaker 3: Well, we're finding fungi in Chernobyl.
• 2:29:22
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
• 2:29:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:29:24
  Speaker 1: Well, or I mean also things that can live on
• 2:29:26
  the outside of the space station, the bacterial and microbes
• 2:29:29
  and stuff.
• 2:29:30
  Speaker 3: I mean to me– Weird.
• 2:29:32
  Speaker 1: I don't– what are the most profound discoveries of the
• 2:29:34
  last– say 10 years at NASA. I mean, this was
• 2:29:38
  even more recent than that. There was a mission called OSIRIS-REx.
• 2:29:42
  And I'm doing pretty well with my NASA acronyms today.
• 2:29:45
  Let's see if I can do this one. This is
• 2:29:47
  one of the bad ones.
• 2:29:47
  Speaker 3: OSIRIS-REx.
• 2:29:50
  Speaker 1: Origin, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security Regulate Explorer. There we go.
• 2:29:55
  And it brought back a sample of an asteroid. And asteroids,
• 2:30:00
  as you know, are these rocks in space that were
• 2:30:02
  never built into larger planets. And so they're There's OSIRIS-REx.
• 2:30:07
  Thank you. And OSIRIS-REx is a small spacecraft about the
• 2:30:11
  size of a car. And this is an illustration. It
• 2:30:13
  went to an asteroid called Bennu. And Bennu is about
• 2:30:17
  half a kilometer across. It is an asteroid that comes
• 2:30:20
  in and intersects the orbit of Earth. We don't have
• 2:30:23
  any idea that it will ever impact us. It may
• 2:30:25
  hit Venus before it hits us. But at any rate,
• 2:30:28
  we sent a probe out there. To bring back a
• 2:30:31
  real pristine sample of an asteroid because.
• 2:30:34
  Speaker 3: Which is just nuts, by the way, that they could
• 2:30:37
  land on an asteroid and then return back to Earth.
• 2:30:39
  Speaker 1: Do you know about this mission?
• 2:30:41
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 2:30:41
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 2:30:41
  Speaker 1: So, I mean, the asteroid is going faster than a
• 2:30:44
  speeding bullet. It doesn't have enough gravity to go into
• 2:30:46
  orbit around, really, until you're really close. We had to
• 2:30:49
  catch the thing, get ourselves situated around it, get low
• 2:30:52
  enough to get into orbit, match its spin rate to
• 2:30:55
  get the— and then when they got out there— I love this—
• 2:30:59
  You know, we designed, NASA designed this little sort of
• 2:31:02
  vacuum cleaner to vacuum up a sample of the asteroid.
• 2:31:04
  The whole surface was covered with big boulders. They were
• 2:31:07
  just like, I mean, literally like, fuck, it's like it's
• 2:31:10
  not going to work. There's nowhere where there are small,
• 2:31:13
  fine grain, you know, things we can just suck up easily.
• 2:31:17
  So they survey the whole thing. They find there are
• 2:31:19
  these tiny little craters that have some dust in them.
• 2:31:23
  And then they have to reprogram the spacecraft because it
• 2:31:27
  wasn't meant to be so autonomous. It's so far away
• 2:31:30
  that a command one way is going to take 15 minutes.
• 2:31:32
  You can't joystick it. It's got to take itself down
• 2:31:35
  manually amidst all these boulders. They had to make the
• 2:31:39
  spacecraft autonomous after they launched it. They got there. It
• 2:31:43
  wasn't going to work. They had to teach it how
• 2:31:45
  to recognize where it was, how to wave off if
• 2:31:48
  something was too dangerous. This shouldn't have happened. And so
• 2:31:51
  they finally vacuum up the sample. They get it back
• 2:31:53
  to Earth. You know, it drops on a parachute into
• 2:31:56
  the Utah test range. They open up the sample. And
• 2:32:01
  all of the nucleobases of our DNA, not just little molecules,
• 2:32:06
  the letters of our DNA and our RNA are in
• 2:32:09
  that sample. We don't think that's a coincidence, right? You know,
• 2:32:14
  the reason our biology is based on those molecules is
• 2:32:17
  that they're available. They're falling from the sky. That asteroid
• 2:32:22
  was full of water. At one time, the minerals were
• 2:32:25
  soaked in water. They were wet. So the asteroids were
• 2:32:29
  delivering water and a little bomb of proto-life. Not life yet,
• 2:32:34
  but the genetic code, the letters of our genetic code
• 2:32:38
  were in that asteroid. And not just our genetic code,
• 2:32:42
  but there were nucleobases we don't even use. Maybe life
• 2:32:45
  on another planet would use different nucleobases, but we can
• 2:32:47
  already sample them from the asteroids. You know, the idea
• 2:32:52
  that our biology was brought here from these colder, more
• 2:32:56
  distant parts of the solar system, and it's literally raining
• 2:32:58
  down on us. You know, I expected to find organic molecules.
• 2:33:02
  I expected to find amino acids, you know, those sort
• 2:33:05
  of things that make up our proteins. I was amazed
• 2:33:09
  we found all of our nucleobases, all the letters of
• 2:33:12
  our genetic code, both for DNA and RNA. They're already
• 2:33:16
  there in the asteroid.
• 2:33:17
  Speaker 3: Which is nuts, the idea of panspermia. and that this
• 2:33:21
  is how life got here in the first place.
• 2:33:24
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah, absolutely. The building blocks just come down from space,
• 2:33:28
  and they hit everywhere.
• 2:33:30
  Speaker 3: From where?
• 2:33:31
  Speaker 1: Well, that's a little bit less mysterious than you'd think.
• 2:33:36
  The universe is great at making large-scale organic molecules. Carbon
• 2:33:40
  is a sticky atom, and dying stars are great at
• 2:33:45
  making carbon. It's one of the most common things that
• 2:33:47
  comes out of a dying star. And the electron structure
• 2:33:50
  of carbon wants to grab on to other atoms. It's
• 2:33:54
  literally the quantum mechanics. And so you have this naturally–
• 2:33:58
  I mean this is a building block of carbon. And
• 2:34:02
  dying stars are pumping out this stuff into the galaxy.
• 2:34:05
  It gets collected by gravity into these clouds. And then
• 2:34:09
  the carbon starts glomming onto each other. And so space
• 2:34:12
  itself is very good at making our chemistry, carbon-based organic chemistry.
• 2:34:17
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:34:18
  Speaker 1: So then in the icier outer reaches of the solar
• 2:34:21
  system billions of years ago, you know, the planets are forming,
• 2:34:25
  but there are some smaller bits of ice and rock
• 2:34:27
  that never quite got built into the larger planets. They're
• 2:34:31
  still floating around out there. And, you know, and then
• 2:34:34
  they occasionally come in and hit us and deliver water,
• 2:34:38
  deliver organics. You know, the Earth was once, you know,
• 2:34:42
  pretty much a dry, hot ball of lava after it formed.
• 2:34:45
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 2:34:46
  Speaker 1: You know, a lot of the lighter stuff probably arrived
• 2:34:49
  from collisions coming in later.
• 2:34:53
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:34:54
  Speaker 1: And, I mean, the engineering, the audacity of reprogramming, this
• 2:35:01
  thing shouldn't have worked, and they saved it. And they
• 2:35:04
  made it work, this brilliant team of people. You know,
• 2:35:08
  I mean, it just, I mean, as somebody who was
• 2:35:11
  a minor manager at NASA, you know, and a minor scientist,
• 2:35:15
  I mean, just what a team can accomplish. I mean,
• 2:35:18
  not just a single person. You know, one of the
• 2:35:21
  big things that I really respected at NASA was once
• 2:35:24
  you had your team of people, like I said, nobody's perfect.
• 2:35:26
  Some people are higher functioning. Some people don't contribute as much.
• 2:35:29
  But once you have your team identified, trying to make
• 2:35:32
  sure you get an input from everyone and they're not
• 2:35:34
  going to give it to you the same way. They're
• 2:35:37
  the people that are really assertive in meetings and they've
• 2:35:38
  got an idea immediately. They speak up and they give
• 2:35:41
  it to you. And then there are the quieter people
• 2:35:43
  that are going to take longer to process. They're going
• 2:35:46
  to need a little more time. They don't like to
• 2:35:48
  be put on the spot. You know, trying to make
• 2:35:51
  sure you get an input from everybody on your team.
• 2:35:54
  And sometimes the solutions come from the people that you
• 2:35:56
  might not have even asked. You know, that sort of
• 2:35:59
  respect for everyone on our team has something to contribute.
• 2:36:04
  You know, give me what you got, even if you
• 2:36:06
  don't think it's good enough. Even if you think it's
• 2:36:08
  a stupid idea. Even if you think it, you know,
• 2:36:11
  give me what you got. The power of that. I
• 2:36:15
  saw over and over at NASA. It's not just one
• 2:36:17
  type of mind, not just one person that's going to
• 2:36:20
  solve the problem.
• 2:36:21
  Speaker 3: That's awesome. That is awesome. Thank you so much for
• 2:36:24
  being here. I really enjoyed this conversation. It was really great.
• 2:36:27
  I did too.
• 2:36:27
  Speaker 1: It was a lot of fun.
• 2:36:28
  Speaker 3: It was fantastic. And thank you for everything that you
• 2:36:30
  put online. It's so valuable. It's so educational. It's so interesting.
• 2:36:35
  It's awesome.
• 2:36:36
  Speaker 1: I'll try to do a little more and have some
• 2:36:37
  fun with it because, like I said, I'm retired now,
• 2:36:40
  and I have a chance to be a little more
• 2:36:41
  creative with it. So we'll see what I can do.
• 2:36:44
  Speaker 3: You definitely should do something, a YouTube channel, something along
• 2:36:47
  those lines. Yeah, definitely a podcast, something.
• 2:36:50
  Speaker 2: Do it.
• 2:36:51
  Speaker 1: I will try.
• 2:36:51
  Speaker 3: Please do. If people want to find you on social media,
• 2:36:55
  do you have that?
• 2:36:55
  Speaker 1: Well, yeah. I mean, so somebody had taken Michelle Thaller,
• 2:36:59
  so I go by Dr. Michelle Thaller. There's a Facebook
• 2:37:02
  page and Instagram page. And I do have a small
• 2:37:05
  YouTube channel set up. I'll do more of that. I
• 2:37:08
  just started doing TikTok. And so I'm just getting started,
• 2:37:13
  but I'll try to put some stuff out.
• 2:37:14
  Speaker 3: All right. Awesome. Thank you so much.
• 2:37:16
  Speaker 1: Thank you. All right. Bye, buddy.