Immortality, Religion, & the Search for Life | Dr. David Kipping | EP 463

So we are, you know, a primate, and we have our brains in our head, and we have these two eyes, and we, our version of experience is really defined by the bodies we inhabit and the planet we live on. So you could imagine a fungus that lives on a planet, and it totally inhabits it, and it's basically a giant neuron network that's on that planet. But then that's not perhaps so satisfying because if there is a planet covered in fungus, we're not going to have a communication with that thing.

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Hello everybody, I'm talking today with Dr. David Kipping, a scientist, an associate professor of astronomy and director of the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia. Recently tenured, he's published already over a hundred peer-reviewed articles, research articles, and is an active communicator regarding scientific matters on YouTube, Cool Worlds YouTube channel.

What did we talk about? We talked about, well, the position of man and woman in the universe. Are we alone? We talked about the means by which the exoplanets that could harbor alien life have been discovered and assessed, and what those planets look like. We talked about the potential progression of civilizations at different technological levels and how that might be detected in the cosmological space. We talked about Dyson spheres and the utilization of the energy that a planet's sun produces for moving the technological enterprise forward. We talked about the Big Bang and some of the challenges that have been posed to the axioms and theories of modern cosmology in the light of the development of the James Webb telescope.

And we talked about the pursuit of astrophysics as a career, so join us.

Alright, well, let's start with the big question, I suppose. I know that you study the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, and so I suppose the big question that goes along with that is: Are we alone in the universe? That's a question that so many scientists have very assertive answers to; they feel very confident they know what the answer is. Typically, the response is, “Well, of course, there must be!” There are sort of two ways of answering that: whether you're talking about simple life, microbial life, or whether you're going all the way to intelligent civilizations compared to our own, or even far more sophisticated.

But on both fronts, the most intellectually honest answer that I can offer you is: I don't know. I think we have to be comfortable owning that possibility at the moment. If you're going to say, “I don't know,” you have to concede that it may be possible that we are alone, but it's also quite possible that we're not.

Our job as scientists is not to presume what the answer is but rather to do the experiment, collect the data, and then analyze it to determine the most likely outcome. But, I do have a lot of trepidation about how overly zealous and confident some of my colleagues are on this topic, because I'm just so aware of the danger of experimenter’s bias, which, of course, in psychology is a very common issue as well.

With many experiments that have been done, where you think you know what the answer to an experiment is, you can consciously or subconsciously influence the outcome of how you conduct that experiment and how you interpret it. So I just say, let’s try to be forcibly agnostic. I hope the answer is yes; I hope there’s someone out there. But I think it does us a disservice to our objectivity when we say, "Of course, there must be."

Well, it seems to me that part of the problem is that all the answers to the question seem preposterous, right? Yes, there’s life elsewhere. Okay, well then the first question perhaps that comes up is: where? And then what? If there isn't, well, that seems completely preposterous because it seems so utterly unlikely, given the vast magnitude of the universe, that we would somehow be alone.

The meaning of that seems so incomprehensible that I can understand why scientists particularly would be loathed to accept that. It implies a very peculiar kind of uniqueness to Earth. And then I suppose the third problem is: well, are there other civilizations? The only species that’s ever managed a civilization, even on Earth, is human beings, and that’s only really occurred in the last few hundred thousand years. So even in a place where we know there’s life, the probability of an advanced technological civilization that can sustain itself seems... well, it’s happened once. Once isn’t very many times.

I know that human civilization has emerged in different places, but really only after the last ice age, and only in a few places that communicated very rapidly. So, further thoughts on any of that?

Yeah, I mean, you kind of remind me of Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote about this: that there's two possibilities, and both of them are equally terrifying—that either we are alone or surrounded. I think you’re right on the money in terms of the cognitive dissonance that both of those seem to imply.

I think there are ways out. If the universe is teeming with microbial simple life, then I think we could probably be okay with that scenario in terms of, you know, compatibility with the observations we look out at these exoplanets. As impressive as our instrumentation is, especially the James Webb Space Telescope, even that facility is not capable of detecting biosignatures, signs of life on another planet, unless we’re extremely fortuitous with the types of signatures that they present. So it's very unlikely that even JWST would be able to detect biosignatures. We're probably looking at the next generation of telescopes to make that experiment.

Therefore, the fact that nobody has made a headline yet saying "Microbes discovered on Proxima Centauri b" or “Choose your favorite exoplanet” is not surprising. So we can perhaps be comfortable with the idea that the universe is compatible with being full of simple life, but then that raises the question that this simple life does not go on very often to at least form galactic empires, right?

Something like you see in Star Wars or Star Trek, where you have these federations spanning the galaxy. I read a mathematical analysis years ago in Scientific American about a scientist who had been arguing strenuously against the existence of advanced civilizations because he calculated that even a spacefaring civilization that had reasonably but not absurdly fast interstellar craft could populate an entire galaxy over the span of something approximating a million or a couple of million years.

Given that the universe is 14 billion years old, perhaps there’s 14,000 such timespans. And yet, where the hell are the aliens? That was an interesting argument as far as I was concerned. I’d never seen it sort formulated like that from a kind of quasi-arithmetic perspective. That’s known as Fermi's Paradox.

I’m sure you've heard of many of your viewers who have probably heard of this idea of, you know, if everybody's out there, why don’t we see them? We should see evidence for them. But kind of the stronger version of Fermi’s Paradox is not so much about radio signals or ships flying through space, but it really is the aspect of colonization—that if there really is a galactic empire that has some will to span themselves across multiple planets, which remember is essentially what we’re trying to do.

I mean, Elon Musk often talks about this. He feels almost an obligation to try and continue the flame of consciousness, as he describes it, and that’s why he wants to go multiplanetary—to go to build a colony there. It’s perfectly natural that any species that’s interested in self-perpetuation would see the obvious benefits of trying to expand to other colonies on other planets, and eventually even to other stars.

Because, let’s face it, even if you’re all in the solar system, it can only take a nearby supernova or gamma-ray burst to completely extinguish your life in this solar system. So there’s an obvious need that I think it’s hard to argue why, at least at a common rate, you’d expect a survival instinct to encourage civilizations to want to do this. Yet there is the problem because, as far as we can tell, that has not happened.

We do not see stars which have been engineered. We do not see galactic spanning empires or Dyson spheres littering the sky. So it appears, as far as we can tell, that if there are others out there, they’re certainly not at a rate where they dominate the galaxy. If they are, they’re very rare, and maybe they’re around one or two handful of stars, a sprinkling of stars if you like. But they certainly don’t dominate.

That’s perplexing because you would think a survival instinct would be to go out and get as many as you could.

Well, it’s also perplexing in that if such civilizations are possible, then, and they've done it at all, then why aren’t they everywhere? I mean, is it just the fact that by some strange fluke of time and space that we’re either the first ones to even vaguely attempt this, or that it's somehow set up so that what? This is equally improbable—that no advanced civilization that exists has managed to get to that point.

It just doesn’t seem that, especially given that we seem, in some ways, as you pointed out, to be on the verge of that.

Yeah, it’s very—I think mysteries everywhere. One of the strangest things, I think, one of the things we have a lot of resistance to is the idea of any kind of suggestion that we might be special. I think astronomers and cosmologists have a real aversion to that idea, and it's kind of built into this idea called the cosmological principle.

So when we look out around the universe, this patch of the universe is not any different from any other patch of the universe. That's kind of foundational to how we understand the nature around us. It is a problem then; it would seem incongruous to this principle if we admit that perhaps we are the first or we are the only one, or maybe the Earth is the only planet in the whole galaxy which is capable, maybe not of microbial life, but getting all the way to this point.

At the same time, this is called the Serendipity Principle sometimes as well, the mediocrity principle. But what flies in the face of that argument—and I hear that argument all the time by many optimists, let's say, for life in the universe—what flies in the face of that is what’s known as the weak anthropic principle.

This is an idea that Brandon Carter wrote about in the 1970s, and he was thinking about cosmology as well. It’s things like the fine-tuning of constants of the universe, the speed of light, the mass of the electron—these all seem to also be finely tuned such that life is possible in this universe.

If you change any of those numbers, then we really shouldn't be here to talk about it. But of course, an obvious answer to that is that maybe there are many, many universes out there, and it just so happens that we live in the one which is tuned just right for life. Because, of course, it couldn’t be any other way; we can’t live elsewhere.

So this really comes down to why the planet might be special. A couple of things there. I’ve never really understood the tuning argument because it seems to me that if you’re a Darwinian, you’ve already taken care of that problem. It isn’t so much that the universe is tuned; it’s that we’re adapted to the constants that are in place.

Now, I suppose you could argue that without those particular constants, our form of life wouldn’t be possible, but I don’t think that actually shifts the problem with the argument. Because we have our form of life, and we can’t conceptualize—or at least not very accurately—what any other form of life might take.

Now, I know that people have made the case that there’s something particularly special about carbon in so far as it’s because of its ability to combine in ways that make very complex molecules probable and even likely. But still, the fine-tuning argument always seems to me to put the cart before the horse. It’s like, well, you adapt to the constants that present themselves, so of course it appears, in retrospect, that everything’s been finely tuned.

I don’t see that. Like, I’m inclined towards what—what would you say—a deistic belief in some fundamental way, but I don’t think the fine-tuning argument is a very good argument for the existence of, let’s say, the specialness of the human psyche.

So I don’t know; maybe I’ve just got that wrong.

Yeah, I think, if I can just respond to that, I think there’s an interesting aspect. It almost gets into the philosophical a little bit—that is the experience of the observer themselves.

So we are, you know, a primate, and we have our brains in our head, and we have these two eyes, and our version of experience is really defined by the bodies we inhabit and the planet we live on. It may very well be that there is plenty of quote-unquote intelligent life, however you want to call that, out there that is just so radically different that its experience is not really comparable to our own.

So you could imagine a fungus that lives on a planet, and it totally inhabits it, and it's basically a giant neuron network that’s on that planet, and its version of experience would be completely atypical to that of ours.

So when we use this argument of, you know, well, with the weak anthropic principle, we experience this sort of version of events, and that everything has to be so finely tuned such that that’s the case, there may be parallel paths.

When we talk about this rare Earth and we talk about weak anthropic principle, it’s really a funnel to this particular type of experience that we enjoy. It’s perfectly possible there are completely alternates, but then that’s not perhaps so satisfying because if there is a planet covered in fungus, we’re not going to have a communication with that thing.

So it doesn’t really scratch the itch. I think when we talk about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, we really do hope—maybe naively—to actually engage in a conversation or communication or an interaction of some meaningful sense where we can understand one another's minds, and that, in my opinion, is probably too aspirational. I don’t think that’s very likely to occur.

Well, again, you look at the earthly situation because you would assume that that's the simplest place to look for first, and we can communicate to some degree with mammals that are psychophysiologically similar to us. I suppose the biggest gap we’ve managed to bridge might be with octopi, right?

Because I’ve seen— and I don’t know how accurate these accounts are—but I’ve seen some documentary evidence, let’s say, of people establishing something akin to at least a relationship of curiosity with octopi. They’re very exploratory and they have the kind of tentacles that are sufficiently close to hands that you could imagine a kind of parallel mucking about with things; intelligence that characterizes octopi because they can manipulate so well.

But that's about it on Earth. And that includes cetaceans. I mean, we’ve been trying to communicate with whales and dolphins, porpoises and so forth, for 60 years, really, with some degree of intensity. And it isn’t obvious that that’s gone very far.

Whales are sufficiently different from us, so even if we could talk, it’s not clear what we would talk about. That was what E.O. Wilson’s arguments about ants were. I think if we could talk to ants, we’d have nothing to say to each other.

Because they—yeah, well, the fun— you know, that’s a consequence of that psychophysiological embedding that you described. We don’t really understand, I think, when we think of our consciousness as like a free-floating entity how grounded in our hands, for example, our consciousness really is.

Yeah, I agree. Even between different cultures, it can sometimes be extremely difficult to have conversations and to understand one another’s mindset. So I totally agree. It puts me in— even with your wife, sometimes that does happen as well.

So I think it’s perfectly possible that I’m willing to let go of this idea of the fatherly figure. It’s almost like a stand-in for a god, you know. The fatherly figure alien comes down and teaches us the error of our ways, provides all this advanced technology, and shepherds us to becoming more sophisticated and mature. I think that's a complete fiction.

I think if there isn’t other life out there, it’s likely vastly more different than we can possibly imagine. But that doesn’t make it scientifically not interesting. It’s still extremely, perhaps even more scientifically interesting to investigate because we already know about this experience.

So I think learning about these other possible forms of life could be extremely rewarding. But I really don’t have a bet in the game as to whether that's even possible. As I said before, I do try to remain forcibly agnostic. But I’m actually okay with the idea of just lots of empty worlds out there.

Yeah, you mentioned the mediocrity principle essentially, and that earlier, if I got that right. That seems to me to be a reasonable variant of Ockham's Razor, right? There’s no reason to assume a priori that this corner of the universe is any different from the rest of the universe than you would assume any given handful of sand differs from all the sand on a given beach.

Having said that, and I do think that’s a good scientific starting point, we are definitely stuck with the problem that here we are, and we are conscious, and we seem to be rather unique in that regard. So that does challenge that assumption of what you described as the assumption of mediocrity.

Yeah, or the Serendipity principle that scientists start with.

Yeah, yeah. So I think an obvious counterexample to the mediocrity principle—and I often say this when I teach my students about this idea—is a case where it breaks down is in the solar system.

Thinking about, say, oxygen atmospheres. Before we had studied any other planets in the solar system, we lived on a planet with an oxygen atmosphere and said, “Hey, you know, we must assume that everywhere is typical, and we cannot assume we are special. Therefore, oxygen atmospheres must be very, very common on all of the other planets in the solar system.” Then, lo and behold, not a single moon or planet in the solar system, out of over a hundred of those things, has an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

Now there’s not all liquid water or, you know, plate— you can go on. There’s a list of things. So it’s not maybe surprising that that is the case because, of course, we could not live on Pluto if it lacked an oxygen atmosphere. We have to necessarily live on the rare instantiation where oxygen is because that's a prerequisite, at least for mammalian life.

So I think this mediocrity principle—it's okay to use it in cases where your existence is not predicated upon that statement. So if I was to say, “The solar system has a Neptune,” as far as we know, “Neptune has no bearing whatsoever on the probability of life developing on the Earth,” so by the Copernican principle, many of the solar systems should have Neptunes. And you would be right.

In fact, Neptunes are the most common type of planet in the universe, and Jupiters too are very common. So it'd be perfectly reasonable to apply it in those instances. It’d be very dangerous to apply it to say our large moon, because our large moon may, may not—we're still trying to figure this out—have some influence to the development of life on this planet. Likewise, oxygen certainly does, liquid water certainly does. So we can’t take those properties, I would say, and generalize them because we’re only here because those things are here.

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Yeah, so I guess the question there is how many of the prerequisites for the complex life that has emerged on Earth are the function of features that are just as uncommon in some sense as life? And that is a very interesting exception to that rule of homogeneity, let's say. Because it is, even from a statistical perspective, it is odd, given that principle, that the Earth would be the only planet that has oxygen on it.

I know that’s also a function of life. So that’s a very difficult puzzle to work through intellectually. Because I can certainly understand why the presumption of homogeneity is a useful presumption. It works in many cases, and why it would not work in the case of Earth is a great mystery.

Hey, I’ve got a question for you that I’ve always wondered about. You know, I see people looking for life on Mars, analyzing rocks from Mars, for example. To me, thinking biologically, this just seems utterly preposterous to me because I don’t think life is the sort of thing, like on a given planet, where it would be somewhere hidden and hard to find.

I mean, if you look at Earth, I know—I don’t know how far down we've gone into the Earth's core to continue to check for microorganisms—but I read not so long ago that there’s more biomass in the Earth’s crust than there is on the surface.

I mean, life seems to be one of those things that if it’s anywhere, it’s everywhere.

Yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, is the argument that Mars underwent a cataclysm at some point hypothetically that was so overwhelming that it destroyed all life, but maybe there are some signs of it sequestered somewhere? Like what's the rationale for the search?

Yeah, I think that's exactly one very plausible scenario. We certainly do know that Mars has undergone significant changes. We see evidence of liquid water once flowing on the surface in the past. There are many geological features that we see that strongly indicate, almost unambiguously, that liquid water must have been there, significant levels. It’s just unclear for how long.

So it may have been like flash floods that just kind of appeared briefly or it may have been a stained body of water. This obviously is not the case any longer. And thus, we can surmise from this that something has happened to Mars over time—it's probably lost its magnetic field over time that has probably decayed—that has led to the sputtering of the atmosphere. It’s probably lost its atmosphere over time; now it has a much thinner atmosphere than it once did.

So I think we can imagine, you know, this is almost like looking ahead to the Earth’s future.

When we make projections about the biosphere of our own planet, most of those predictions actually predict that the biosphere will gradually decline. It’s already slowly in decline at this point. The sun is gradually warming up and producing more luminosity that is putting greater pressure, if you like, on the Earth's biosphere until we hit this point where it becomes harder and harder for life to keep up with the amount of insulation we’re receiving. And so most of these predictions predict that after about a billion years into the future, Earth’s biosphere will essentially collapse, and the only things left would be living in extreme conditions.

You might have some subterranean life, as you allude to, deep in the mantle or deep in the crust. We can imagine pockets of life surviving that are the relics of a once-rich biosphere, and that’s possible! It still raises the problem: why we don’t see fossils, and we don’t see any evidence of fossils on the surface. So whatever was on Mars, if you are an optimist that it had life, it certainly was nothing like the kind of extent that we had here on Earth.

Having said that, another possibility is that life could transfer between them. So there's also this idea of panspermia. Perhaps there's life on the Earth which is being knocked off on asteroids—it's clinging on, maybe a tardigrade, it’s like clinging onto a little asteroid or something, and it can actually survive the vacuum of space.

These things we don’t know if it could survive an impact like mushroom spores, right? Yes! It could just propagate across the solar system. Mars would be one of the places that, I mean, it's surely the most hospitable place after the Earth, and so you would imagine if anywhere it's going to be a place where extremophiles—which are highly adapted for extreme conditions here on Earth—might have a chance of surviving in some of the, you know, remnant pockets of habitability left on Mars at this point.

Right, okay. So that’s the rationale. So now, are you have you also been interested in the issue of—this is a strange kind of science fiction-like issue. I’ve seen descriptions in the pop scientific culture online, I suppose, of the notion of different civilizational types. So is that a notion that you’ve toyed with to any degree?

Yeah, this is the probably the Kardashev scaling you’re thinking of. So this was a Nikolai Kardashev, a Russian Soviet Union physicist, I think in the 60s or 70s, and he wanted to try and come up with a way of classifying different potential civilizations out there. He argued that the most reasonable way to do this—and many people would disagree with him, I think—but he argued the most reasonable way would be energy usage.

So he calculated that a type I civilization, as he defined it, would be one that uses all of the IR radiation that hits the planet. So, you know, imagine you cover the whole Earth in solar panels, and there are 100% efficient solar panels, and the energy you collect equals the energy you use. So that would be a type I civilization.

Now, in practice, you couldn't do it with solar panels, of course; you have nowhere to live. So you probably have structures in space to make this really work, but it's the energy usage which really matters. Going to a type II is the energy of a star, and a type III is the energy of an entire galaxy.

There is interest. I think the reason why we like this is that if it's purely in terms of energy, we think we have a pretty good grasp on thermodynamics, and we think it's fairly immutable that any civilization must operate within the rules of thermodynamics. This places some fairly firm observational limits on how often this happens.

If there really were civilizations out there that were harvesting all the energy from their star and using it for work, so imagine like your laptop running; it produces still waste heat, and if you actually collected all the waste heat that it radiates, it would be equal to the amount of power that goes in—energy balance, conservation of energy, one of the laws of thermodynamics. So we can look at these across the sky and see if there are stars which are essentially invisible in visible light because all that radiation is being absorbed but radiating in the kind of waste heat band passes, which would be like infrared heat signatures.

We've been looking for those. Actually, a few weeks ago, there were a couple of candidates announced by a group. They were scanning the sky looking for objects that had these anomalous infrared excesses. Very interesting. However, another group soon after showed that three of these seven candidates happened to co-align with known radio sources, which they surmised were most likely background galaxies or, you know, things very far away that were covered in dust.

We know that galaxies do often get covered in dust, and that can produce a similar type of signature to that they see. They argued that three of the seven are definitely false positives, and in fact, when you run the numbers, it’s perfectly possible that the other four are too; it’s we haven’t seen the galaxies yet.

But the density of these objects, given the number of stars they looked at, looked consistent with them all being false positives. So we don’t have any compelling evidence for those objects. But it is nice that it’s an observational test we can do. One of my colleagues, Jason Wright, led a survey at Penn State, where they surveyed 100,000 nearby galaxies to see if the entire galaxy had been converted this way.

This is looking for what we call the Kardashev Type III civilizations, and they found that basically there was no strong candidates. This is, you know, really intriguing. We look around and we don’t see nearby galaxies—after 100,000 of them—do not appear to have been converted in this way.

Similarly, for many stars—about 100,000 nearby stars have been surveyed similar to this. So it’s very curious. It means that if civilizations do develop, they probably don’t ever reach this Kardashev Type II or Type III. Maybe they go to the virtual world. You know, maybe the idea of just developing with physical structures to add into an item doesn’t make sense, and eventually we all go into the metaverse, whatever it is, and just decide to live in a virtual world rather than the physical world.

Yes, well, in some ways, that would be a more straightforward thing to do, obviously, because we’re already doing that, and it’s definitely less resource intense.

So, what got you interested in your line of research? You have about a hundred papers, so why don't you outline first the full range of your research—or at least the bulk of your research—so that we can flesh out all the domains that we might discuss? Then I’d like to know what it was that sparked your interest in what you’re pursuing.

Yeah, thank you. I work on many different things. My main area of research is exoplanets, so these are planets orbiting other stars we’ve been talking about thus far. You know, that has always been a fascinating topic to me just because it was fairly new—only in the last 30 years have we been able to actually detect these things for the first time.

However, for me, when you look for exoplanets—certainly when I started looking for exoplanets, I would be immediately interested in the possibility of life and intelligent life that we’ve been talking about. Many of my colleagues would kind of giggle and laugh about that. It still carries what we call the giggle factor in the field of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

Many of my colleagues kind of dismissed that as a frivolous activity, but for me, it’s always been obvious that if we’re going to look for stars which could have planets and then we’re going to look for planets that could have, you know, Earth-like conditions, then surely the endpoint of this entire intellectual exercise is to ask the question whether they have life on them.

I don’t understand what we’re doing if we’re not going to eventually shoot at that question. So I was never shy of addressing that, and so a lot of my research has broadened out into questions of astrobiology, technosignatures, which is kind of a modern rebranding of SETI—ways of looking for technology in the universe, such as the Dyson spheres that we’ve spoken about.

I’m increasingly being interested in statistics and the application of statistics to these types of problems, where, as we've already pointed out, we’re very data-starved. We don’t have a catalog of habitats out there—at least known habitats. We don’t have a catalog of civilizations discovered thus far, so we’re trying to make inferences about our uniqueness, which to me is one of the most interesting and fundamental questions we can ask: how special or common are we out there in the universe?

We are trying to make inferences based off very little data, a paucity of data, and to me that's always just been intellectually very stimulating to try and work on that fringe of where you know so little but there's actually still some information there. There’s information about the timing of when Earth developed, when life developed on the Earth, there’s information about the future of our planet we know that from the evolution of the sun, there’s information about the fact we don’t see galactic empires.

My job is to try to piece this puzzle together and not give necessarily a definitive answer, but at least limit the options down to what the landscape of what's possible is.

Okay, so you mentioned that it's been about 30 years that we’ve had the technological capacity to even detect exoplanets. Do you want to talk a little bit about what that technology consists of, when we started to discover these planets, and then also how, in the world, do you in fact discover them?

Yeah, it’s a long enterprise. We’ve been trying to do it ever since 1855. There’s actually the first paper published trying to make the first claim of an exoplanet. It’s a lovely story of Captain William S. Jacob. He was at the Madras Observatory in India, and he was trying to use a technique back then called astrometry, which is essentially—we still try to do it—but it's looking at wobbling stars.

That’s what we mean by astrometry: stars and measuring their position very carefully. He was inspired by the detection of many binary star systems this way, especially by Friedrich Bessel, a German astronomer.

However, this method never really bore fruit until, really, only in the last few years we've been able to make reliable detections using this method. Actually, the first method which gave us success was pulsar timing, which was kind of ignored. This happened in the early 1990s; I think 1990 was the first ever claim of this method.

It was largely ignored because pulsars—these are stars which aren’t quite massive enough to collapse into a black hole when they die, but not too far off, so they’re kind of the predecessors. If you actually spooned a bit more mass onto them, you could probably tip them over the edge into becoming a black hole. These things produce these very powerful magnetic jets out of their north and south pole.

As they spin, it’s like a lighthouse spinning, and they spin extremely fast, like as fast as a blender, basically, like a millisecond. They can spin, and we can use these as clocks, like the clock, a cosmic clock of the universe. If there’s a planet orbiting it, it disturbs that clock gravitationally, and we can detect its presence indirectly.

So the first planets were found that way. However, no Nobel Prize was given to that—you might think since that was the first ever discovery. It was Alexander Wolszczan at Penn State, a very incredible discovery. It was largely ignored and still often overlooked in the scientific community.

It wasn’t until we discovered planets around “normal” stars (which really means stars similar to our sun, which are not neutron stars)—the discovery there was through, again, a wobbling method, but through a speed wobbling method rather than a position method. So if a planet is tugging on a star and making it move, yes, its position changes, but also its speed relative to us is changing. So when it's coming towards us, it'll be blue-shifted, and when it's coming away from us, it'll be red-shifted, is the classic analogy of an ambulance going past you on the sidewalk.

Its siren will appear higher pitch as it’s driving towards you, and sound lower pitch as it’s moving away. We can use that same change in pitch to discover exoplanets. In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz made the first discovery of 51 Pegasi b, the first real bona fide exoplanet around a normal star, and that was actually where the Nobel Prize was awarded to, I think, two or three years ago.

But still, I think reasonably many colleagues in the pulsar world have been saying, "Hold on! What about us? We were five years before you!" And we, you know, why are we ignoring these planets? Why does the existence of a planet? Why does that alter the shift of the light?

I’m missing something. Yes, it’s a gravitational effect. The planet—we often think of the planet orbiting a star, and the star just kind of sits there inertly, static. But that's not true, really. It’s not that the Earth orbits the Sun; the Earth and the Sun orbit one another.

The Sun is therefore moving in inertial space, sometimes a little bit towards us in response to the Earth's gravitational field. So it’s this influence that we can look for.

Right, they both rotate around their center of mass, don’t they?

The center of the mass of the Sun and Earth is—so weighted towards the Sun that I—the center of mass is still inside the Sun, if I remember correctly.

Oh, far, far inside the Sun, even for Jupiter. It’s far inside the Sun, and in fact, the speed difference caused by the Earth is—it’s the Sun moving by about 8 cm every second. That's the speed, so that’s literally less than, I think, the speed that a snail will crawl, and that’s the speed that we are able to detect at this level.

We are getting to the point where we can now detect centimeters level per second speed changes in stars, so it’s a remarkable feat, that’s for sure.

That's for sure! So you can detect movements of stars, distant stars, that are literally moving at a snail’s pace because of the effects of their planets—that is really something.

Well, I guess light is a very accurate measurement tool.

But I have to say, even when these planets were discovered in '95, the Nobel Prize was only awarded recently. For probably a decade or so, people didn’t even believe those planets. There was still a lot of skepticism about them.

It was only when we started to discover what we called transits that largely everyone got on board and said, "Okay, these planets are real." There was a lot of concern that these changes in light that we were seeing might not be due to a planet but instead could be due to something happening on the surface of the star.

So maybe there’s a weird sunspot or star spot, maybe there's strange flaring activity or pulsation that is mimicking this signature. Since it is an indirect method, it was always possible that was the case, so there were still skeptics.

It wasn’t until we started seeing planets eclipse in front of their star—we call those transits—and they happened coincidentally with when the wobbling method predicted they should happen, that everyone kind of said, "Okay, this is wrapped up. There can be no question now that these are real planets."

And when did that happen?

That was around 2000, so David Charbonneau and Henry Noyes independently discovered two—there was the same system actually, but independently measured two transits of the same planet, and that was around 2000. Ever since then, the whole field has been largely focused on this. We now have over 5,000 exoplanets discovered primarily using that method, so it’s been far the most successful technique.

Okay, now you mentioned earlier that the most common form of exoplanet is Neptune-like. So would you describe for us what a Neptune-like planet is precisely, and then also what proportion of the discovered planets have been Neptune-like and why that’s the most common planet?

Yeah, well, let me even correct myself a little bit and say it’s actually even like a mini-Neptune is the most common type of planet. It appears that the Earth is, well, let’s just say the Earth is the size of the Earth, and a Neptune is four times that size.

In between that, around 2 to 3 Earth radii, we find many, many, many exoplanets, so we call these mini-Neptunes. But honestly, that might be a misnomer; we're not really sure what they are. Maybe many of them are just Mega Earths or super-Earths, rather than mini-Neptunes.

So a big question in the field is actually trying to figure out what these things are. They may even be a completely different type of object, like an ocean world—we call those “Ocean Worlds”—and that’s been hypothesized as well. There could be big balls of water in space, so we’re still trying to figure out where these are.

We do know that they’re extremely common, and it kind of raises the question, actually, because they are so common—why doesn't the solar system have one? That is kind of an oddity. In fact, there are many qualities of the solar system which betray the trends that we see in exoplanets.

For example, Jupiter seems, you know, fairly—and you might expect to be a common outcome because we have basically two Jupiters in the solar system, with Saturn and Jupiter being the same size as each other. But when you look out at exoplanets, they’re quite rare. Only 10% of stars have Jupiter-like planets around them.

So this immediately is interesting when we look at the solar system in different ways and different dimensions. It does appear that it has lots of unusual properties.

We also see many exoplanets which are highly eccentric—they're almost like comets going around their star, and they're on these greatly elliptical orbits. We see many hot Jupiters—these are Jupiter-sized planets, which are very, very close to the star.

We also see lots of compact multis, as we call them. A compact multi is essentially six or seven small rocky planets or sub-Neptunes, which are very, very close to the star in nice compact circular orbits, but all kind of squeezed in within, say, the orbit of Mercury around the Sun.

So we see many of these types of systems as well. So you can have almost like a “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” version of the solar system, and that appears to be a common outcome. So we’re still really making a headway of like, what do we do with all these systems? How do we understand the uniqueness of the solar system?

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So one of the findings appears to be that solar systems of the type that we inhabit aren’t particularly—what? The solar system is not particularly emblematic of the typical solar system that has been discovered.

So that’s another bit of evidence for some kind of odd exceptionalism.

Yeah, we’re not the template! I mean, even just the Sun is not the template. Only 10% of stars look like the Sun, and of those, very few are as quiet as our Sun. Our Sun’s actually remarkably stable; it doesn’t flare too often, doesn’t have very many sunspots. Most other suns we look at are far more active than our Sun, so that's interesting.

As I said, we have Jupiter. We have two Jupiters. That appears to be unusual. We have this rich dynamical system of eight planets. As far as we can tell, I think the record holder is of seven planets around one system that we’ve ever discovered.

So there are many aspects about the solar system which could be quite special. But I wouldn’t go as far as to say it's completely unique because, of course, our instrumentation is finite. We cannot detect exact clones of say Mars. Mars is just too small; it would be invisible to our current technologies.

So as we're getting better and better, we are able to get more insight into the true uniqueness of the solar system. But it’s certainly not a typical outcome. I think we could say that with some confidence at this point.

Okay, now you mentioned a couple of things I wanted to return to: the suggestion that there was something suspicious or even frivolous, let's say, about the search for life on exoplanets. I was wondering what your opinion on that matter is.

You talked about the projection that science fiction-oriented people, let’s say, might have of something approximating a religious belief in a sky alien who descends to the Earth to save us. That was an unbelievably common trope in the 1970s.

I mean, I read a lot of science fiction in the 1970s, and that was extraordinarily— in fact, the grok that Musk's AI is named after is a remnant of that kind of thinking, right? Because grok was the mode of apprehension used by, I think, Valentine Smith in “Stranger in a Strange Land,” Robert Heinlein’s book.

It was basically a sky savior who came from Mars to—oh yes, that's very—see! See, well, that’s why I wanted to bring this up! Because there is a religious impulse that’s lurking behind the technological enterprise that’s associated, let’s say, with the fantasizing about life on other planets.

I mean, you see this pop up everywhere. For example, the Superman, the DC Comics character Superman, is another good example of that, right? Because Superman has sky parents, and he’s essentially a technological god who ends up on Earth, and you see the same thing replicated with—well, the Marvel Universe in many ways—with Thor and Loki.

I know they’re drawing from Norse mythology, obviously, there, but the idea still lurks there, and I’m wondering if it's that subversion, like a juvenile subversion of the religious instinct that drives these fantasies of extraplanetary salvation at the hands of aliens, or perhaps destruction for that matter.

So I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about whether that might be part of the reason why such concern was regarded for such a long time as less than serious or even frivolous.

Yeah, there’s a rich history of theology intermixing with the search for alien life. If you even go back to the first speculations about alien life, this, I think you’re talking about Cassini. He believed there was life on the Moon, and so they were imagining kind of angels flying around in their—these depictions of, you know, with wings flying around in these caves.

So they kind of imagined these angelic beings living on the Moon; that’s why we should one day try and visit there. Similarly, when you look at speculations about life on Mars, Percival Lowell was an astronomer who was kind of really an amateur astronomy, kind of was an industrialist first in the 19th century, and then sort of committed to getting into astronomy and purchased the L— the L Observatory in Arizona as a huge donation from his wealth.

He was passionate about the idea of looking for life on Mars, and he really believed— as many did at the time—that they would be fairly humanlike. So many of the depictions were even not just humanlike but even expecting them to speak English and interact with radio technology and things like this.

It would be English!

Yeah, so it’s very much like that Star Trek trope of everyone just happens to look just like us. There was really no—almost imagination. It’s kind of strange to get your head around—why did they—It’s puzzling to me. Why was there the assumption that all these beings would look just like us?

Well, I think it is an intermingling of the theological with the material, let’s say. I mean, obviously there is an overlap between the idea of heaven and the idea of space, and heaven has been imagined as populated by beings forever.

That’s a mystery; that’s a very deep mystery in and of itself. It seems relatively obvious to me that the heaven of the mythological imagination is not the same heaven as the material heaven that’s above us.

I suppose part of the evidence for that would be that the material heaven that’s above us doesn’t seem to be populated by devils, let’s say, angels or gods. But there is that strange strain of human metaphysical speculation that does posit a parallel universe of a sort, or multiple parallel universes, where alien beings exist.

You know, there are some very strange things about that too. And one of the strangest things I know of is the fact that if you give human subjects DMT, which is the fundamental psychoactive chemical component of ayahuasca, people reliably report being shot out of their bodies and encountering alien beings.

That’s so common that the main person who did this research, who was a very down-to-earth physiologist, I think, got so discombobulated by the consistency of these reports and the insistence by the people who had the experience that that was real that he ceased investigating the DMT phenomenon.

So, I don’t know what to make of all that, obviously, and I don’t think anyone else does too. But it is interesting to see the overlap between the imagination that projects deities into a mythological heaven and the actual domain of heaven above us.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot we can learn from theologians interacting with them. I’ve been to SETI conferences, and theologians are actually now starting to participate in those meetings. There’s a lot to learn about it.

It’s almost like a search not only for life out there, but a search for who we are. What we look for says a lot about who we are. Rather, I mean, if we're looking for a species which are engaging in nuclear war—because that produces such a loud signature that is almost more of a reflection of our own inner fears than it is of a serious discussion of what an advanced civilization would do.

I think this connection has always been there.

Well, you saw this in the latest mythological extravaganza, sort of planet-wide mythological extravaganza, which was the explosion of the Marvel Universe. I mean, the Chitauri who come from space are—they're basically apocalyptic End of Time demons.

Right, but it is conflated with actual space in a very interesting manner. It does say something very deep about our fears—about, well, the ends of the world, end of salvation, and of the notion that both the end of the world and salvation will come from, what would you say, come from above, come from below, come from outside, something like that.

Yeah, I think this do-it mentality certainly has been with us for a long time; in SETI, obviously, when SETI seriously got going in the 60s and 70s, the specter of the Cold War was looming over. It really baked into the origins of SETI was thinking about the fear of destruction and annihilation. I think there’s a certain sense that these days as well that has been re-raising its head for various reasons.

I’ve often said, you know, even if you’re a pessimist about intelligent life in the universe—now, right?—there might be nobody out in the galaxy right now. You’d have to be much more of a pessimist to believe that it never ever happens in the billions, even trillions of years, future that our galaxy still has ahead of it.

And so, if we are serious about making it our goal to have contact with another intelligent civilization, we should perhaps concede that it might not be a two-way conversation. But we could have a one-way conversation into the future that we could leave an AI—we could leave a monument, as our ancestors did with the pyramids and many monuments, Stonehenge.

They left us messages from the past that transcend their own existence. If we are feeling maybe pessimistic that we will never expand this galactic empire, there is still hope of being remembered if that’s all we—maybe there’s—I think that’s a fundamental component of our human desires is to not be forgotten, to have some thread of our strain of existence not be completely futile and get remembered by the galaxy.

Then I think we should seriously commit to building a monument, maybe on the Moon. The Moon is an obvious place to do it because it’s just unaffected by weather or geological activity; it could last for billions and billions of years.

We could build something or a spacecraft that goes out with messages that just has a tomb of information about who we are, what we believed in—our arts, our sciences—and I think that would be a really beautiful endeavor to try and unify people beyond what we believe in or maybe don’t believe in.

And also to have, honestly, some hope that the universe will not forget us. And maybe it's a small thread of a chance that anyone will ever discover it, but it’s better than just giving up on the idea of detection altogether. I think that’s probably our most likely window of getting detection.

I think I read a science fiction story when I was about 13 of some advanced human civilization turning the Moon into a gigantic Coca-Cola ad, like a billboard! So we could do that, but I don’t think that’s exactly what you’re thinking about.

That’s certainly not, not quite that!

That would be a—well, that seems to be something EA's approximations for.

Well, definitely! Definitely! It wouldn’t cost that much to spray paint the surface, let’s say.

So hey, I’m kind of curious. You referred to something else too: you talked about Dyson spheres, and I know a little bit about Dyson. He was quite the character, to put it mildly. A lot of the great physicists are—you know, you tend to think of great physicists, if you don’t know much about them, as very, very serious and they’re like ordinary people except extremely brilliant and very serious.

If you look into the lives of great physicists, they’re, well, to call them odd is barely scraping the surface. And odd in the best way, yeah.

Well, Dyson was definitely one of those characters. Do you want to talk about the Dyson sphere and let everybody know what it is?

Yeah, Dyson had many wonderful ideas. I’ve built upon a few of his ideas myself in my own research, but the Dyson sphere idea was kind of the manifestation of this Kardashev Type II civilization—how would one harvest all of the energy from a star and use it to do something useful with it?

So the Dyson sphere is essentially trying to construct some giant shell around a star. Now, a lot of people imagine a solid structure that it would be a—you know, a solid sphere, a spheroid put around a star. But that’s actually not what Dyson had in mind, because he immediately realized that was not stable.

For instance, if you take a solid spoon and you give it just the slightest nudge from the outside, it would fall into the star, so it’s meta-stable immediately. Unless it’s perfectly balanced, one slight particle of dust would nudge it into the star, basically. It also has extreme strains in terms of the tar strength that would be required that basically no material could possibly hold this thing together.

So there’s immediate problems to to something in that naive version of a Dyson Sphere. Maybe a better way to think about it is a Dyson swarm, or, you know, a collection of small objects which almost form like a quasi-shell, but they’re not physically connected.

So these objects all orbit around the star. They’d actually have different orbital periods, depending on where they’re located at which hemisphere and what latitude, you know, latitude they are in this shell.

This object would be essentially trying to collect all the energy from the star and use it for what we don’t know. You know, one might imagine extreme computation. An interesting question is: what does a super-advanced civilization even do with all of this energy?

Maybe they just solve math problems until, you know, because there’s always—there’s an infinite number of math problems to solve, and maybe that’s what they’re using all the energy for.

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My brother-in-law, Jim Keller, is a very famous and able designer of computer chips—perhaps foremost in the world on that front. He and I have had some very interesting conversations in that regard. One of the things that he’s rather comically pointed out to me in the last 10 years is that the Earth’s crust happens to be made up of elements that are very similar to precisely what you need to build a computer chip.

So he could envision, in his wilder fantasies—which can be quite wild—that all of the Earth’s crust is transformed into computer chips and, with all of the computational technology that that would entail.

You could certainly imagine a technological civilization going that direction because, in some ways, that’s clearly the direction that we’re going.

There seems to be no upper bound. It’s a weird thing too, you know, I was thinking about time in this regard. You know, we think that the time that we inhabit is finite, but time is very fractional, and computers can obviously do many trillions of calculations in a given second.

If you keep adding computers, then that’s more computations per second, and it doesn’t seem there’s an upper limit to that, obviously defined by something like energy and material availability.

That’s all not to the fractionation of time, and so you could imagine a civilization—well, you can’t, because we have no idea what would happen. We can’t even keep track of our computational power now!

You can't imagine what a civilization would be like that had something approximating unbounded computational power at its fingertips.

Yeah, I mean, there’s always a bound. There must be some bound, even if that bound is unimaginably high compared to our own capabilities, by just the amount of physical matter there is in the system.

So a Dyson sphere actually isn't just the crust of the Earth; it would actually be comparable to the entire mass of Jupiter being deconstructed.

Even though Jupiter is not mostly silicon, which is what you want for building chips, you can imagine using fusion to combine into the elements that you need.

We’re obviously extremely advanced. We’re talking about, you know, to have the capabilities of doing something like this.

But yeah, the real limits of computation are essentially how much mass and energy is there in the entire galaxy.

Neil Blomkamp—he’s the director who made the District 9 movies—he gave a wonderful TED Talk that I found very influential; you can probably find it online—about what he thinks the most likely form of life is.

He talks about the idea of basically computation spreading across the universe and the universe waking up at this instant. So as soon as you have these ships which can start moving, it doesn’t have to be very fast. As we said earlier, probably comparable to even the speed of our current spacecraft is sufficient to colonize the entire galaxy in a much smaller fraction of its own lifetime—like 100 or 50 times less than its current age.

You could actually spread out—imagine like a 3D printer with an AI on it, and it just lands on a planet, and it just starts going around converting all of the matter it interacts with into more versions of itself, almost like a virus, and essentially it's going around converting the entire galaxy.

All dumb matter becomes smart matter, and that’s its primary goal.

It’s hard to imagine what they would do with all of that computation, as I said. It’s hard to imagine. You know what we do—

Well, what we do!

Weirdly enough, so you might ask: what is driving the demand for advanced computational devices now? Because most people have enough power in their laptops.

So they can—the laptop in many ways exceeds their ability to use it already! Now that’s not true in every regard. But then you might say, "Well, what’s driving the demand for enhanced computation?"

And the answer to that, at least part of the answer to that is the desire to ever more accurately simulate realities such that games can be played with those simulations.

Like, that sounds trivial in a way that you’d use computation to play games, but that’s only trivial if you think games are trivial. And they’re not trivial.

They’re forms of—look, there’s a very deep biological idea in relationship to thought that the reason that we think is so that our thoughts can die instead of us, right?

Material evolution is a very slow process, and the price you pay to evolve materially is that your material form dies if you are sufficiently in error.

If you virtualize that so that your thoughts are now avatars of yourself, you can have your foolish avatars expire, and you can continue.

So it’s a very useful way of experimenting; it’s certainly what children are doing, for example, when they’re playing games.

We don’t know the limits to that, and I don’t think it’s mere fluke that a tremendous amount of the market for high-end computational devices is the market to drive simulation so that we can play fictional games.

Maybe advanced civilizations do, in fact, take off into the fictional game space because it’s, in some ways, an infinite domain of potential experimentation.

Now, you know, that's way beyond the limits of my capacity to imagine in some fundamental sense, but that's the trend at the moment among human users. So it's not an unreasonable extrapolation.

It would resolve the Fermi Paradox. I mean, it’s a natural answer that everybody just eventually transcends the physical world and disappears into the virtual one. This would naturally explain why—

What?

Why would anything?

You know, we—speaking of Dyson earlier, Freeman Dyson had another interesting point about this idea of the virtual world. He was so far ahead of his time, he was thinking about, you know, simulation theory way before people were trending about it with Elon Musk's statements and things like this.

He had a really interesting idea. He asked, “How could you live forever?” Truly live forever.

He suggested that in a simulation, you could do this. So if you imagine, you go far, far into the future—it’s thought that the universe will eventually arrive at this, what we call the heat death, where entropy takes over and essentially the amount—you know, all the stars burn out, and there’s very, very little energy left in the universe intrinsically until there’s eventually almost nothing.

And so he imagined that you could simulate yourselves, but you could adjust the speed of the simulation.

So that one day for you—one full day actually takes, in the real world, maybe 1,000 years to simulate. So you’re essentially moving, you know, almost in slow motion in your simulation.

Once you know you’ve used up the energy that’s available, then you slow down ever more and ever more and ever more.

As long as you keep slowing it down, you can actually live forever.

It's a strange idea—so it’s called Dyson's Eternal intelligence.

And even though the universe asymptotically approaches zero energy, you can just equally asymptotically slow down your simulation such that you live forever.

It’s kind of like Zeno’s Paradox of like the arrow never quite catching up with a runner, and so it’s kind of a beautiful genius idea that he had that there is potential of living forever.

Didn’t Dyson also suggest that at some level, information was conserved? I mean, I know he went way the hell out into the metaphysical realms in his writings, and I read a fair bit of Dyson—I don’t know—a long time ago, so I could barely remember it.

But he had some concept that was essentially theological where all the information that constituted the universe was somehow conserved. That was part of—wasn't that part of singularity theory?

I’m reaching way the hell back in my memory.

I don’t know about Dyson’s writing on that, but it’s certainly the idea of information conservation is actually thought to be almost an axiom of quantum mechanics.

So it really is thought that—this was definitely Dyson—this kind of gets into the idea of what we call the black hole information paradox.

When information falls in, it seemingly is destroyed, and this violates this curious feature that we think quantum mechanics demands, that everything should be really—not so much that information is conserved, but reversible.

If I, you know, burn a book and all the particles of ash fall around onto the ground and into the air, in principle, I should be able to recollect up all those particles, put them back together, and reconstruct the pages and the words on those pages.

A black hole seemingly violates that, so that has been a puzzle. People have been wondering about it and I think most people who work on this believe that somehow the information must get out of the black hole.

We’re still trying to put one possible candidate—probably through Hawking radiation, so this radiation which happens— that Stephen Hawking predicted on the outskirts of these black holes.

It’s a very pitiful amount of radiation but perhaps that is carrying away some information about what fell into the black hole. Thus, if you did fall into a black hole, in principle, you could be reconstructed from this Hawking radiation.

So that’s the current hope. Because otherwise, we have to seriously rethink quantum mechanics.

How does the—so now that Hawking radiation, if I remember correctly, it emerges at the event horizon, right? Right at the event horizon.

Some particle, an antiparticle, falls in, and a particle flies off. It’s something like that—emerging out of those are virtual particles.

How in the world are they supposed to propagate information?

That's a good question. I mean, the problem with this is that in order to propagate information about what's inside the black hole, that requires essentially an entanglement.

What we call a quantum entanglement with states inside—somehow this particle which has just been created on the event horizon, it probably had a, let’s say, an antiparticle pair which was created just inside the event horizon.

Now, because they’re created as a pair, they should be entangled with each other. An entanglement, unlike people, is strictly monogamous. There's no way you can have an entanglement that can suddenly become re-entangled. We’re really struggling with this problem right now.

Right, I see. I see. So does that imply that the antimatter particle that falls into the black hole is affected by what's in there in such a way that the entangled particle that’s escaped contains that information?

That’s the idea, if I got that about right.

I think people are wrestling with tweaking the rules of entanglement to try and somehow allow for an entanglement to be maintained with whatever fell inside the black hole.

And that perhaps the stuff that falls in can, in a way, be thought of as the antiparticle of the Hawking radiation which came out, and that we—and there may be two aspects of the same thing rather than discrete processes.

So this—I have to say, this is not my field of expertise, but I find it a totally fascinating topic. I’ve made videos about it in the past, but it is really—I—

So that means that not only does the black hole evaporate because of the Hawking radiation, in principle, but the information from the black hole escapes as well?

That's okay, that's wild! I didn’t know that! That’s very interesting!

So what’s on the horizon for your field, do you think? One of the things I wanted to ask you, for example, is that I know there’s—I know this isn’t your area of specialty, but any light you could shed on it would be—appreciated.

I’ve heard that the new telescopes, which can see farther into space than anything we’ve managed before and farther back into time, therefore, have put some wobbles in the almost universal acceptance of the theory of the Big Bang.

Can you clue us in a little bit about at least what’s going on in astrophysics with regards to that?

Sure, debate. We have this telescope that was launched two years ago—the James Webb Space Telescope. It's the most powerful instrument we have right now for peering back into the far reaches of the universe and thus, therefore, into the past.

Because of course something that’s very far away from us takes a long time for that light to travel. Essentially, the light we are seeing from some of these objects is over 13 billion years old. We are seeing the universe in its first few hundred million years.

When we look at this very ancient primordial phase, we are surprised to see rich structures, like fairly mature-looking galaxies. They’re still nothing as mature as what we have like the Milky Way, but surprisingly mature, given the epoch we are looking at in our data.

Similarly, for large black holes as well, we see black holes more massive than we would expect in the center of some of those galaxies.

So the puzzle has been how do you build this stuff fast enough? Obviously, you could argue that maybe you need to totally rip up the textbook and say, you know, all of our cosmological models are wrong, and including the Big Bang, and we need to change everything.

I don’t think most astronomers are quite ready to rip up the textbook. I think there are other ways to explain what we are seeing without going quite so drastically.

Speaking with my colleagues about this, we had a wonderful colloquium. I was speaking to some of my colleagues about making sense of this. One of the interesting things I took away from that was the models of star formation that we apply are calibrated to the local universe, and they may not be actually applicable to this earliest epoch.

So when we see these galaxies—these ancient galaxies—we are basically saying there are too many stars, too many built stars, and too much stuff faster than it should have done based off the rates at which we think stars can form.

But really, the rates at which we think stars can form are calibrated to what we see around us now, which is—which is not necessarily representative of the conditions—well, certainly cannot be represented as the conditions of the early universe.

In fact, when they've gone back and revised those models and they've updated them to account for the much stronger star formation and more intense densities that they naturally have in these early epochs, it actually does predict these galaxies and a large most of the galaxies we see.

So, in fact, we could have predicted many of these galaxies had we just been maybe a little bit more thoughtful about what we put into the physics of those models in the first place.

But it did make, of course, a spectacular headline to claim that the Big Bang model was wrong. I don’t want to totally dismiss it, but there are still challenges, but I don’t think it’s quite as dramatic as has been portrayed.

I see, I see. So part of the problem, too, was an extension of that principle of homogeneity, or uniformity in the temporal domain, when it wasn't appropriate, as you said.

So then the question would be, well, how consequential are those differences? And your argument is the magnitude of those differences was conservatively underestimated, and that’s cast some of the theory into disrepute.

But that doesn’t mean that, at least in your estimation, that the baby has to be thrown out with the bathwater.

Yeah, I think if you throw out all of—we, you know, the Big Bang model, which really—when we say the Big Bang model, we don’t really just mean the Big Bang. What we call is Lambda CDM, which means Lambda is dark energy and CDM stands for cold dark matter.

And you can think of Lambda CDM as essentially the standard model of astronomy in the same way there is a standard model of particle physics that includes the basic fundamental particles.

We have a standard model of astronomy and cosmology, and so this model has been extraordinarily successful, as indeed as the standard model in particle physics. It explains such a wide span of observations that were you to throw it out, it would be extremely difficult to understand how it could coincidentally explain such a vast array of diverse phenomena so exquisitely.

So I think we’re not—you know, astronomers do like it. Physicists like it when we get to rip things up, but given the extraordinary success of the model, and this, you know, one interesting puzzle, I don’t think we’re quite ready to throw in the towel at the first punch.

You know, we’re willing to fight back a little bit. I think it was Arthur, I think it was Arthur C. Clarke, possibly—I might be wrong about this—who said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

And so the proper response to that is that you always modify your theory no more dramatically than is minimally necessary, right?

That's the—yeah! Otherwise, that's true, even psychologically! You know, if you don’t—every time you’re upset with your wife, you don’t think that now divorce is in the offing, right? That’s just not the solution to the problem.

So, okay, so maybe we could close with this, if you don’t mind. This is a very complex question for a closing question, but so be it.

I don't understand at all the theories that purport to include dark matter and dark energy, and they’ve always seemed to me—and this, I’m sure, is a reflection of my ignorance—as post-hoc rationalizations for the failure of a theory. Like—sort of like the cosmological constant.

But like I said, I’m nowhere near informed enough to make that judgment. But can you explain—you talked a little bit about the standard cosmological theory. Can you explain how the notions of dark matter and dark energy have been incorporated into that, and why?

And you have like five minutes. Just kidding, take your time.

Yeah, it’s a huge topic