The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2506 - Michelle Thaller

00:00:02.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:09.000 I like that.

00:00:13.000 Absolutely.

00:00:15.000 It's also, there's some things that are so awesome. 0.91

00:00:17.000 It's like, that's fucking awesome. 0.99

00:00:20.000 I was trying to talk about black holes to some high school students just seriously earlier this week, and I kept saying, you know, what the fuck? 0.99

00:00:29.000 So I got nothing to pitch, but I, um, The Shorewood Men's Club, I was giving a talk there. 0.99

00:00:34.000 The Shorewood, Wisconsin is where I live.

00:00:36.000 The Men's Club invited me to give a talk about astronomy last week.

00:00:39.000 And when I mentioned I was coming to the show, they just freaked out.

00:00:42.000 And so the only thing I have is my Shorewood Men's Club waterboard.

00:00:46.000 Well, shout out to the Shorewood Men's Club.

00:00:48.000 That's awesome.

00:00:50.000 That's so cool that you give those speeches.

00:00:52.000 I love your YouTube talks, they're fantastic.

00:00:55.000 Oh, thank you.

00:00:56.000 I have watched probably every one you've ever done.

00:00:56.000 Wow.

00:01:01.000 I've watched at least, I mean, how have you done?

00:01:03.000 I've watched at least like 10 of them.

00:01:05.000 Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, pretty much what I did at NASA, I did a lot of sort of the science spokesperson stuff.

00:01:12.000 And so, most of that was, you know, I'm more on the NASA videos.

00:01:16.000 I hosted like launch events.

00:01:17.000 I haven't done much privately on YouTube.

00:01:20.000 I'm thinking about starting some stuff.

00:01:23.000 Yeah, I'll put that on.

00:01:23.000 Oh, you should.

00:01:25.000 Please.

00:01:25.000 Okay.

00:01:26.000 100%.

00:01:27.000 Thank you.

00:01:27.000 100%.

00:01:28.000 You've said so many things that made me just go, what?

00:01:31.000 Ah.

00:01:32.000 Like, here's a big one that you said.

00:01:33.000 You were talking about.

00:01:35.000 If the size of Earth, if the Earth was the dot of an eye in a book in regular print, that the Milky Way galaxy would be as large as the Earth itself.

00:01:47.000 Actually, a little bigger.

00:01:48.000 Yeah.

00:01:49.000 So, I mean, the thing is this is an interesting thing about science communication.

00:01:53.000 You say that if the sun were the size of a dot of an eye, and you've got to remember, you can fit a million Earths inside the sun.

00:01:59.000 This is a huge thing.

00:02:01.000 So, if that's the size of a dot of an eye on text, then the galaxy would be the size of the Earth.

00:02:06.000 That's when people's eyes get big and people respond to it.

00:02:08.000 So it's not just the Earth, it's the Sun.

00:02:10.000 So if the Sun was the dot of an eye.

00:02:11.000 Yes, that's right.

00:02:12.000 Let's make this clear.

00:02:13.000 So if the Sun were the size of a dot of an eye on a page of text, so you could fit a million Earths inside that dot of an eye, then the Milky Way galaxy would be bigger than the Earth.

00:02:23.000 Yeah.

00:02:23.000 So if the Earth was the dot of an eye, then how big is the Milky Way galaxy?

00:02:29.000 Because the Sun is how many millions of Earths?

00:02:31.000 Volume wise, you could fit over a million Earths inside the Sun.

00:02:34.000 Yeah.

00:02:35.000 The Sun is about 800,000 miles across.

00:02:37.000 You could fit about 110 Earths across it, the diameter.

00:02:40.000 We do those things where you show the differences between our sun and different stars and immense stars, and you go bigger and bigger and bigger, and you get to the point where you're like, I can't, this is not working.

00:02:53.000 I can't process this.

00:02:55.000 It's too kooky.

00:02:56.000 There's nobody that can process it.

00:02:58.000 I mean, one of the really kind of things about demystifying scientists is the idea that our brains somehow work any differently, and like we can visualize what a light year is, right?

00:03:09.000 A light year is about.

00:03:10.000 Six trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

00:03:14.000 No, we're human beings.

00:03:15.000 We get used to using the terms, we get used to using the numbers, but we've got the same brain as everybody else.

00:03:22.000 Nobody can visualize what a galaxy really is.

00:03:25.000 You can take pictures of them, you can say the word galaxy, but people have no idea what monsters these are.

00:03:33.000 Then, with the James Webb Space Telescope, all of a sudden you're taking pictures of billions of them.

00:03:39.000 You know, they're right in front of your eyes.

00:03:43.000 This is not something that you can argue about.

00:03:45.000 It's an image.

00:03:46.000 And you see these foggy hazes of stars, you know, basically so many stars you can't see them individually.

00:03:54.000 And I mean, it still gives me goosebumps.

00:03:54.000 And that's real.

00:03:58.000 It still gives me goosebumps.

00:03:59.000 That's awesome.

00:04:00.000 It gives me goosebumps too, but it's so cool that it gives it to you and you actually study it your whole life.

00:04:07.000 Oh, that's the whole point.

00:04:08.000 I mean, working for NASA was a huge, huge honor.

00:04:11.000 And I mean, all of us there are doing this.

00:04:14.000 I mean, we were all science fiction fans.

00:04:16.000 We all love imagination.

00:04:17.000 That was the best thing about working at NASA the joy and the teamwork and the camaraderie and the people that you're working with.

00:04:28.000 They think this is the best thing in the world to do.

00:04:31.000 There's a real problem that we have where I think that cities and light pollution have really.

00:04:38.000 You know, it's great that we have cities.

00:04:42.000 It's wonderful.

00:04:43.000 It's wonderful that we have all this electricity and that we can see things at nighttime.

00:04:46.000 But boy, we have done ourselves a massive disservice by not being able to see the stars all the time.

00:04:51.000 And I think people have kind of lost the wonder of it when you're only looking at it as images on your phone or when, you know, the only time you get it is on vacation.

00:04:59.000 Occasionally you look up in the sky, wow, look at all the stars here.

00:05:02.000 It's different here.

00:05:03.000 This is something that everyone should be absolutely blown away by.

00:05:09.000 At night, you have a vision of the most spectacular thing any human being has ever seen, ever.

00:05:14.000 Just the Milky Way galaxy alone.

00:05:16.000 It's nuts.

00:05:17.000 It's crazy to think that those are all stars and that you can't count them.

00:05:23.000 It's insane.

00:05:24.000 There's so many of them and it's above you every day.

00:05:26.000 We're just blase, blase.

00:05:28.000 We're just like so used to it.

00:05:30.000 We're so dismissive.

00:05:31.000 It doesn't mean anything. 0.95

00:05:33.000 It's exciting when someone's excited by it because I'm like, more people need to get the Fuck away from the cities and just go see how crazy this is that we're flying through space. 0.61

00:05:43.000 Yeah. 0.93

00:05:44.000 It is profound.

00:05:46.000 And to be that close, I mean, just looking up, you don't even need a telescope or a pair of binoculars.

00:05:51.000 The presence of something so much larger than you.

00:05:54.000 But I mean, if you've listened to some of my podcasts, I think you know that the big deal for me is that you are such a part of this.

00:06:03.000 You are such an intimate, intrinsic part of this.

00:06:07.000 It's not, we're separate from space.

00:06:08.000 We look up and there's something separate from us.

00:06:10.000 That's the story of us up there.

00:06:13.000 The only way the universe makes atoms, the only way that makes the chemicals all around us the aluminum, the iron, the oxygen, the carbon, the phosphorus, everything that makes me up the only thing in the universe that makes atoms is the interior of a star.

00:06:29.000 It's the only place where nuclear fusion puts atoms together.

00:06:32.000 So everything that you are, the story is up there.

00:06:36.000 And so you're not looking at something separate and distant.

00:06:40.000 I mean, astrophysics is the story of the end of your nose, literally.

00:06:44.000 I mean, we are part of this beautiful, bigger thing.

00:06:48.000 That's a weird concept.

00:06:50.000 I mean, that's from that old song, you know, we are stardust.

00:06:53.000 Yeah, we were golden.

00:06:54.000 Got to get ourselves back to that.

00:06:56.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:06:57.000 Yeah.

00:06:58.000 That's real.

00:06:59.000 That's what we are, and that's what all life is.

00:07:01.000 And that's just a very strange thing for people to wrap their heads around as we're sort of slowly getting a greater and greater understanding of the complexity of the universe itself, which is relatively recent in terms of human history.

00:07:15.000 I mean, we really didn't know.

00:07:18.000 All with just what we know now because the James Webb telescope is so crazy, where they're seeing these new galaxies.

00:07:26.000 They're confusing.

00:07:27.000 Like, why are they formed so early?

00:07:29.000 Oh, yeah.

00:07:30.000 I gave a talk about those just a few weeks ago the red dots, yes.

00:07:33.000 They never let astronomers name anything, right?

00:07:35.000 You're seeing something so dramatic and they call it the little red dots, right?

00:07:38.000 Or there's a storm on Jupiter that's three times the size of the Earth with 400 mile an hour winds and they call it the red spot.

00:07:44.000 How come no one's allowed to name them?

00:07:46.000 Well, naming conventions, they're complex.

00:07:49.000 So if you discover a comet, you get If you discover an asteroid, you get to name it.

00:07:54.000 Name it.

00:07:55.000 If you discover a comet, the comet is named after you.

00:07:59.000 But anything else has to be done by international committee.

00:08:01.000 And so, you know, because of that, things don't end up with very interesting names.

00:08:05.000 They all end up with, you know, catalog numbers, you know, basically phone numbers.

00:08:08.000 What do they call that weird hexagon on Jupiter?

00:08:11.000 Is it a hexagon?

00:08:12.000 The hexagon.

00:08:12.000 Or Saturn.

00:08:13.000 I think they call that, you know, the hexagon on Saturn.

00:08:15.000 They don't even, they don't really, the hexagonal storm.

00:08:18.000 It's fantastic.

00:08:19.000 You could fit about two Earths across that.

00:08:22.000 And it's a hexagon jet stream, basically.

00:08:26.000 You've got super fast moving.

00:08:28.000 Winds around the pole of Saturn.

00:08:30.000 And Saturn is so cold, the gas is so cold that there's almost no friction in the gas.

00:08:36.000 So, unlike here, the jet stream here, there's kind of this joke.

00:08:40.000 There we go.

00:08:41.000 Hey, that's fantastic.

00:08:41.000 There's a picture.

00:08:42.000 One of my favorite pictures NASA ever took, if you look at the little dot in the middle of that, the sort of little eye of the storm, we actually have a picture from Cassini where you can see the sun glinting off of hundreds of miles high.

00:08:42.000 That's wild.

00:08:57.000 There you go.

00:08:58.000 It's not on the bottom there, it's in the bottom in the middle.

00:09:00.000 Yeah, that picture.

00:09:01.000 One more over.

00:09:02.000 Yeah, that's a picture from the Cassini space mission.

00:09:05.000 That's a real image.

00:09:06.000 And that's the eye of that storm.

00:09:06.000 Wow.

00:09:08.000 And those are, like I said, hundreds of miles high banks of clouds catching the sunlight and the poles of Saturn.

00:09:14.000 And, you know, we did that.

00:09:17.000 We went there.

00:09:18.000 We flew over that storm.

00:09:19.000 That's crazy.

00:09:20.000 And, yeah, I mean, as amazing as the storm is, it's at least fairly well understood as a very low temperature jet stream.

00:09:28.000 You know, I mean, you may be familiar here.

00:09:30.000 People kind of joke about, like, The weather's the same.

00:09:32.000 A week from now, the weather will be about the same as it is now.

00:09:34.000 There are patterns that get set up in the jet stream of the Earth.

00:09:37.000 And you take away all the heat and all the friction, and it forms this beautiful storm.

00:09:41.000 What are the theories why it forms a hexagon?

00:09:45.000 It's something called a standing wave.

00:09:47.000 The jet stream basically sets up a wave inside this circulation.

00:09:51.000 And I will admit, I'm not an atmospheric specialist, but that's what I know.

00:09:56.000 And that wave kind of makes this hexagonal shape, and then you cool everything down without friction.

00:10:02.000 And that's how the whole thing works.

00:10:04.000 They have done computer simulations of very fast moving jet streams under the conditions of Saturn, and you can get this sort of shape to set up.

00:10:12.000 God, it's so fascinating.

00:10:12.000 Wow.

00:10:14.000 And it's so fascinating that we think of that as being so far away.

00:10:18.000 That's just right in our neighborhood.

00:10:20.000 It's super hard to get to, it takes a long time, but it's just right there.

00:10:20.000 It's just right there.

00:10:26.000 Well, we're hoping to launch, when I say we, NASA's hoping to launch a new mission to one of the moons of Saturn, hopefully in like 2028.

00:10:32.000 Something like six, seven years to get out to Saturn.

00:10:36.000 But there's that giant moon of Saturn, Titan, which has a thick atmosphere.

00:10:40.000 It's the only place where the air pressure is actually even a little bit greater than the room here.

00:10:45.000 And it's very cold.

00:10:47.000 It's almost close to 300 degrees below zero.

00:10:50.000 But it's got this thick atmosphere and tons of organic molecules and evidence of liquid water below the surface.

00:10:56.000 It's one of the places that might be friendly for life.

00:10:58.000 And so they're designing have you heard about this?

00:11:01.000 It's called Dragonfly.

00:11:01.000 It's an octocopter, it's a big drone.

00:11:03.000 There you go.

00:11:04.000 Perfect.

00:11:05.000 And so, Dragonfly is going to be this big opticopter that we're going to land on this moon, Titan.

00:11:11.000 We've already landed on this moon once with the Cassini mission.

00:11:14.000 And it's got this really kick ass chemical laboratory inside to look for the conditions for life, anything that we might be able to find.

00:11:23.000 And obviously, sample more than one site.

00:11:25.000 It would actually fly around and go to different places.

00:11:28.000 There's rain, there are oceans, there are rivers.

00:11:30.000 The only place we know there are open, great lake sized lakes on Titan.

00:11:34.000 Wow.

00:11:34.000 But it's so cold that it's not liquid water, it's actually liquid natural gas, liquid methane and ethane.

00:11:40.000 And again, you know, we've already landed there.

00:11:40.000 Yeah.

00:11:46.000 We actually sent a probe there as part of the Cassini mission to land on Titan.

00:11:49.000 Land on Titan.

00:11:50.000 I mean, it's just badass that we humans have been there.

00:11:55.000 That's an artist's conception, but that's what it would look like.

00:11:58.000 We sent a probe there.

00:12:00.000 It took a bunch of readings and then eventually froze to death.

00:12:03.000 But some of the readings that it took were intriguing about the possibility of life on Titan.

00:12:09.000 Didn't the Russians land something on Venus?

00:12:12.000 Yeah, well, more than once.

00:12:13.000 Yeah, the Soviet Union is the only nation, former Soviet Union now, that ever landed on Venus.

00:12:19.000 And landing on Venus is way hard.

00:12:22.000 They got crazy pictures, too.

00:12:23.000 The surface temperature is about 1,000 degrees, and the air pressure is similar to being about a mile below the ocean.

00:12:30.000 Yeah, it's a photo.

00:12:30.000 That's a photo.

00:12:31.000 Yep, that's real.

00:12:32.000 It's a photo taken in 1,000 degree temperatures.

00:12:35.000 Yes.

00:12:36.000 Didn't last long.

00:12:37.000 But everything is crushed flat.

00:12:40.000 I mean, the landscape is just crushed flat by that huge pressure, this incredible dense atmosphere.

00:12:48.000 The clouds are sulfuric acid.

00:12:49.000 That's why it looks yellow.

00:12:50.000 That's real.

00:12:52.000 Sulfuric acid clouds, I mean, it is like.

00:12:54.000 Classic vision of hell.

00:12:57.000 It's heavy and deep and dense and sulfuric acid.

00:13:01.000 It's so interesting, too, that our understanding of planets in terms of just what's in our solar system, they're all different.

00:13:08.000 They vary so much.

00:13:09.000 This is just all we know about the known universe in terms of planets.

00:13:13.000 Is it possible that there could be some planets out there that are set up completely different than the planets in our solar system?

00:13:20.000 It changes every day how many planets around other stars we know about.

00:13:27.000 We call them exoplanets, exterior planets.

00:13:29.000 I think we're up to about 5,000 that we know of.

00:13:34.000 When did we start noticing them?

00:13:35.000 At least detecting them.

00:13:37.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:13:38.000 This is something I've been involved with ever since I was in college.

00:13:40.000 When I was in college, my research advisor was a man named David Latham, and he was trying to find the first evidence.

00:13:48.000 I mean, we figured other stars have planets.

00:13:50.000 I mean, it can't be just us, but they're hard to see.

00:13:53.000 They're tiny, they're dark.

00:13:54.000 I mean, compared to a star, right?

00:13:57.000 I mean, planets don't glow themselves, right?

00:13:58.000 So they just reflect starlight.

00:14:00.000 I mean, we literally said it was like trying to see a firefly around a searchlight from 200 miles away, right?

00:14:05.000 How would you do it?

00:14:07.000 And I mean, now we're actually getting so good at it.

00:14:10.000 We find more every week, almost every day.

00:14:13.000 I mean, pretty soon it's going to be, I think, thousands of new planets every single year.

00:14:17.000 And some.

00:14:17.000 Do we have actual images?

00:14:20.000 So for the most part, we don't have images, but that doesn't mean we don't have really cool observations, including the chemistry of their atmospheres.

00:14:28.000 This is really amazing to me.

00:14:29.000 So, they're so tiny, it's hard to actually get a pixel.

00:14:33.000 They're smaller than a pixel.

00:14:34.000 But when these things pass in front of their star, right?

00:14:37.000 So, there's a star, and they pass in front of it.

00:14:40.000 So, you're looking at this thing pass in front of the star.

00:14:43.000 It makes a tiny little solar eclipse.

00:14:43.000 It goes by, it blocks a little bit of the starlight.

00:14:46.000 And we find them that way.

00:14:47.000 We find the stars twinkling as little planets go around them again and again.

00:14:51.000 They have to come back three times for us to say it's a planet.

00:14:54.000 Otherwise, it could be a spot on the star or something else.

00:14:57.000 And the amazing thing is that the starlight will shine through the atmosphere of that planet, and we can actually We could actually probe the chemistry of the atmosphere.

00:15:07.000 So we find planets that have, you know, they're the size of the Earth, about the temperature of the Earth.

00:15:12.000 They have evidence of water vapor, carbon dioxide, oxygen.

00:15:14.000 And then last year there was this fantastic controversial discovery.

00:15:18.000 I mean, it's very real.

00:15:21.000 We need to follow it up.

00:15:23.000 We think we're starting to see the evidence of organic molecules.

00:15:25.000 It's not, you know, a very strong signal yet.

00:15:29.000 And this was a press release from the James Webb Space Telescope.

00:15:33.000 And there were some scientists that wondered.

00:15:35.000 If these could be organic molecules that might someday be traceable even to the presence of life, they resembled something that plankton might give off on an ocean world.

00:15:46.000 On an ocean world.

00:15:48.000 And then, of course, the rest of the scientists said the data is not good enough yet.

00:15:51.000 We need much better observations before you can say that.

00:15:55.000 We could maybe believe it's an organic carbon based molecule, but we don't know which one it is yet.

00:16:00.000 So, I mean, stay tuned.

00:16:02.000 I mean, I would never have thought the first evidence of life outside the Earth, like really hard chemical scientific evidence, would be on a planet around another star.

00:16:11.000 I thought we'd maybe find it on Mars or on some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

00:16:15.000 But now with the James Webb Space Telescope and the telescopes that will come afterwards, We might be able to actually get enough of a sense of the atmosphere of these planets to start looking for life signs.

00:16:25.000 Yeah.

00:16:26.000 So the sun, the star, is passing light through this little tiny thing that's smaller than a pixel and through the atmosphere where the light passes through.

00:16:36.000 What are we using to detect that?

00:16:38.000 It's a technique called spectroscopy, and it's a really, really powerful thing.

00:16:42.000 I mean, this is what most scientists do.

00:16:45.000 As beautiful as images are of a gorgeous galaxy or a star, That's not really what we do.

00:16:52.000 We look at these little squiggly lines.

00:16:54.000 We get very excited.

00:16:55.000 We let the light from the star pass through a grating that actually draws it into a rainbow.

00:17:01.000 It takes that white light.

00:17:02.000 You've seen pictures of like prism, you know, dark side of the moon, Pink Floyd, you know, white light goes in, rainbow comes out.

00:17:08.000 If you measure really, really carefully how much light is coming in every color, you can tell astounding things.

00:17:15.000 You can tell how hot the star is, how fast it's rotating, in some cases, how far away a galaxy is.

00:17:21.000 That's how we measure.

00:17:22.000 How far away they are from us in space.

00:17:24.000 And you can measure the chemistry molecule by molecule.

00:17:28.000 You can tell exactly what atoms and molecules are in that object.

00:17:32.000 Look at that.

00:17:32.000 Here we go.

00:17:33.000 So, what you're an amazing person, by the way, that's incredible.

00:17:38.000 Thank you so much.

00:17:41.000 Every element, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, has a fingerprint in the rainbow.

00:17:46.000 And it's like you know it's that.

00:17:47.000 There's nothing else like it.

00:17:48.000 You know that you see carbon and nitrogen if you see these colors of the rainbow shining at that particular light.

00:17:55.000 And it's not just simple things like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, but it's water vapor, carbon dioxide, organic molecules.

00:18:02.000 Everybody has their fingerprint in the rainbow.

00:18:04.000 And so when the starlight shines through the atmosphere, there you go.

00:18:08.000 That's how we tell what these things are made of.

00:18:10.000 You know, this is a dying star.

00:18:12.000 This is actually in the Carina Nebula, and one of the most luminous stars there is.

00:18:17.000 And we pass the light through a rainbow, and then looking really, really carefully at how much light comes at every color, you can pick apart exactly what it's made of.

00:18:26.000 Wow.

00:18:26.000 Yeah.

00:18:26.000 Did you know that, you know, helium, you know the element helium, right?

00:18:30.000 You may be familiar that the Greek sun god's name is Helios.

00:18:34.000 Helium is an element we discovered on the sun before we ever knew it was here.

00:18:39.000 In the turn of the last century, in the late 1800s, when they were passing sunlight through a prism and they were looking at all these patterns of light, there was one chemical that we'd never seen before here.

00:18:48.000 And so they named it after the sun, helium.

00:18:50.000 It was on the sun, but not here.

00:18:52.000 We never knew the helium was here.

00:18:53.000 That was found later.

00:18:54.000 It was later we found it, you know, in like, you know, natural gas, you know, radioactive decay.

00:18:59.000 Helium is such a light gas, it just leaves the earth.

00:19:01.000 It just doesn't stick around.

00:19:03.000 And so, you know, helium, we saw this pattern of colors in the sun's light.

00:19:07.000 We were like, well, what the hell is that?

00:19:09.000 And it turned out to be a new element we'd never found before.

00:19:11.000 What year was that?

00:19:13.000 We should look this up.

00:19:13.000 I don't know exactly, but if we Google what year was helium found, I'm sure we could find it.

00:19:19.000 Well, I mean, I've been thinking about helium balloons and people who, you know, suck helium, make their voice go really high.

00:19:25.000 We didn't even know about helium until 1868.

00:19:28.000 There we go.

00:19:29.000 That's nuts.

00:19:30.000 So, they figured out that there was helium on the sun in 1868.

00:19:36.000 Long before we ever identified it on this planet.

00:19:39.000 That is so nuts.

00:19:41.000 Yeah.

00:19:42.000 Just think what's out there.

00:19:43.000 We didn't even know about helium.

00:19:44.000 It's not just that it's what's out there, but that there's people out there that can figure out how to do that in 1868.

00:19:51.000 Shout out to Pierre Janssen, a French astronomer who figured it out.

00:19:58.000 When you think about it, I know that one thing you love is the idea of Einstein and time being different and all that.

00:20:07.000 They figured all of this out around 1908, it was more than 100 years ago.

00:20:11.000 And we don't really even have a better thing yet.

00:20:15.000 I mean, they figured out that time isn't the way that we experience it.

00:20:19.000 Just by really simple, brilliant thought processes, observations, 100 and some years ago, a little more than 120 years ago.

00:20:28.000 Yeah, incredible.

00:20:30.000 The idea that the faster you go, the slower time is, is so hard to wrap one's head around.

00:20:37.000 And one of the things that I heard you talking about, you were talking about GPS satellites, and you were saying that GPS satellites, because they're going about, what are they going like, 20,000 miles an hour, something like that?

00:20:46.000 So actually, if we want to break this down a little bit, There are a couple different effects about time.

00:20:52.000 And one of the things that NASA does is calibrates the GPS satellites and the signal coming.

00:20:58.000 And you wouldn't I mean, I think I heard that within a day, if we didn't take into account the time difference these things are in, that we'd be about six miles off in a single day.

00:21:09.000 That's crazy.

00:21:10.000 That's so crazy.

00:21:10.000 It's a big deal.

00:21:11.000 That's so crazy.

00:21:13.000 And that's just above us.

00:21:16.000 Time really is something.

00:21:17.000 I mean, this is not a theory.

00:21:20.000 Time is variable depending on how fast you're going and also how far off the Earth's surface you are.

00:21:25.000 Or I should say, how far away from a big gravity body you are.

00:21:28.000 In the case of the GPS satellites, there's two things going on.

00:21:32.000 And it's kind of fun because it's actually the reverse for the astronauts.

00:21:36.000 So if I want to break this down, this is really fun.

00:21:38.000 Okay.

00:21:39.000 We have clocks that are so accurate that if you move about two feet above where, if we had a clock on this desk and then if we moved it up about two feet, we could actually detect time flowing differently.

00:21:51.000 Because you're just that far away from the Earth's gravity, just two feet.

00:21:56.000 Your head and your feet, we spend most of our lives, say, standing up, are actually going through time at slightly different rates.

00:22:04.000 The farther away you are from a gravitational source, I mean, you probably like movies like Interstellar, right, with Matthew McConaughey.

00:22:11.000 Remember the big black hole?

00:22:13.000 And the closer they get to the big black hole, the slower time goes?

00:22:16.000 That's not a theory.

00:22:17.000 That's something we can actually measure with clocks.

00:22:20.000 And a black hole has so much gravity, it does it a lot more dramatically.

00:22:24.000 But it's happening right in this room.

00:22:26.000 Seriously, your head is in a different time frame than your feet right now.

00:22:30.000 Yeah.

00:22:30.000 That's nuts.

00:22:30.000 And I mean, it's measurable.

00:22:32.000 You need extremely accurate clocks.

00:22:34.000 But in the case of the GPS satellites, the GPS satellites are in what we call a medium orbit.

00:22:41.000 They're not as far away as the geostationary satellites.

00:22:43.000 But they're not actually going that fast.

00:22:46.000 They're only going about 9,000 miles an hour around the Earth.

00:22:49.000 The astronauts in the space station, by the way, are going much faster.

00:22:53.000 They're going more, let's say, approximately 20,000 miles an hour.

00:22:55.000 So the GPS satellites are going a little slower.

00:22:58.000 And yeah, 8,000 miles an hour is a lot, and that does slow your time down.

00:23:03.000 But the bigger effect for GPS satellites is how far away from the Earth they are.

00:23:07.000 Wow.

00:23:07.000 We're actually going slower in time than they are because we're closer to the Earth's gravity.

00:23:12.000 And they're so far away, they're actually going a little faster than we are in time.

00:23:17.000 Now, they're also slowed down by their fast velocity.

00:23:20.000 The faster you go, the slower your time goes.

00:23:24.000 But people don't realize there's another factor, and that's how far away you are from gravity.

00:23:28.000 For the astronauts, the astronauts are closer to the Earth.

00:23:31.000 So, they're actually not so far away as the satellites, and they're going much faster.

00:23:35.000 So, for the astronauts, it's the motion, it's the time dilation from the motion that's a bigger effect.

00:23:39.000 Motion that's a bigger effect.

00:23:42.000 If you are on the space station for a year, you come back about 1/100th of a second younger than you should be.

00:23:48.000 And obviously, that's not a big deal, but it's easily measurable.

00:23:51.000 Wow.

00:23:52.000 And in the case of the satellites, you wouldn't get the right location.

00:23:55.000 The data wouldn't be right unless we take into account two things: how fast they're going, the closer to the speed of light you go, the slower time goes, but also how far away from the gravitational pull of the Earth they are.

00:24:06.000 The closer you are into gravity, the slower time goes.

00:24:09.000 I think the weirdest thing that I've ever heard anybody say is that all time exists.

00:24:15.000 That's Einstein.

00:24:16.000 I mean, that goes back 120 years.

00:24:19.000 That's such a bizarre thought.

00:24:21.000 We don't know if it's true, but it's I mean, Einstein really thought there wasn't much of a way around it because he said, okay, well, if everything is going at different velocities compared to everything else, right?

00:24:32.000 I mean, it's a great question a kid can ask How fast am I going through space?

00:24:37.000 You know, and the Earth, if you're on the equator of the Earth, that goes around at about, you know, about a thousand miles an hour.

00:24:45.000 And then we go around the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour in our orbit.

00:24:50.000 The sun's going around the galaxy about half a million miles an hour around the galaxy.

00:24:54.000 The galaxy is going towards a galactic cluster at more than a million miles an hour.

00:25:00.000 But how fast are we going, really?

00:25:03.000 And the only thing you can measure is how fast are you going relative to something else.

00:25:08.000 There's no answer.

00:25:10.000 How fast am I going?

00:25:11.000 Well, I mean, am I still or am I actually traveling close to the speed of light right now?

00:25:15.000 I don't know.

00:25:16.000 So, Einstein said the only way he could really think about how that would work is if the universe was just one big thing.

00:25:23.000 All of time and space exists in a big whole thing.

00:25:27.000 There's only one now.

00:25:29.000 Einstein famously said the past, present, and future are persistently annoying illusions.

00:25:36.000 Now, again, do we know this to be true?

00:25:40.000 At the moment, we don't have any better physics.

00:25:42.000 And I doubt that physics will get any less weird than that.

00:25:46.000 Yeah.

00:25:47.000 I mean, that's sort of the way modern physics thinks the universe may be is a big whole thing that started from beginning to end and is all now ish.

00:25:57.000 But if that's the case, so subjectively we can measure things.

00:26:01.000 We can measure time.

00:26:04.000 But what are we measuring?

00:26:08.000 If it's, I mean, are we making artificial time constraints?

00:26:13.000 Are we doing it ourselves?

00:26:15.000 When we create a clock, we create a watch, and the watch is, you know, 24 hours a day, it's running.

00:26:22.000 What is it measuring?

00:26:24.000 Yeah.

00:26:24.000 Right?

00:26:24.000 That is exactly the question Albert Einstein asked.

00:26:29.000 That is a deep, excellent question.

00:26:32.000 And so that was the problem.

00:26:35.000 I mean, in a famous thought experiment, Einstein made a clock by setting up two mirrors and having light bounce between the two mirrors.

00:26:41.000 And that was the tick of the clock tick, And the problem was that that's how he started thinking about the speed of light if you had this thing in a spaceship that was going a huge fraction of the speed of light, Then a person standing watching it go by would actually watch the light kind of trace out a pattern like this.

00:26:57.000 Because it's actually ticking between the mirrors, but the mirrors are moving along.

00:27:01.000 And so you see the light make this sort of bouncy movement.

00:27:04.000 And that means it's actually traveled farther than the person on the ground who thinks that the mirrors are just sort of, the light is making just a straight up and down line from mirror to mirror.

00:27:13.000 That question that you asked is what completely, I mean, it completely revolutionized physics.

00:27:19.000 Everything fell apart.

00:27:21.000 When people said, how do you even measure time?

00:27:23.000 What does it mean to make a clock?

00:27:26.000 What are we measuring?

00:27:27.000 I still don't understand what we're measuring.

00:27:30.000 Oh, Lord.

00:27:31.000 Yeah.

00:27:31.000 I get it.

00:27:33.000 I mean, we've.

00:27:34.000 I don't know if I have an answer for you.

00:27:35.000 I don't think anybody does.

00:27:36.000 But here's the deal.

00:27:38.000 The deal.

00:27:39.000 So, the clock in Einstein's experiment so, the clock has two mirrors and there's light bouncing between it, and that's the distance that it travels in one tick.

00:27:52.000 But now you put that clock on a spaceship, and the spaceship's going really fast.

00:27:56.000 And as it goes by, you see that clock, as it streams by you really fast, you see the light make this motion.

00:28:03.000 And this line is actually longer than that line.

00:28:07.000 This line, if you measure it, that's actually a longer line that I drew than the original one between just the two mirrors.

00:28:12.000 Because now it's at an angle.

00:28:15.000 And this is what made Einstein say time has to change.

00:28:19.000 If anything moves, the tick of a clock changes.

00:28:22.000 However, you measure time, whatever time is, whether you measure it with a bouncing clock or whether you measure it with a vibrating atom like we do in the Bureau of Standards, or whether you measure it with a spring that's slowly unwinding in a wristwatch, anything you can do to measure one moment to the next changes when motion is involved.

00:28:41.000 There's no way to get around it.

00:28:43.000 It's not just the measurement.

00:28:46.000 It's time itself is changing.

00:28:48.000 Any way we have to measure this thing we call time.

00:28:52.000 And I have to tell you, Joe, I don't think we have an answer to what time is.

00:28:56.000 What are we measuring?

00:29:00.000 I think right there, I think you're asking for the next revolution in physics that we don't have yet.

00:29:05.000 I really mean that.

00:29:07.000 So when we're measuring time currently, like when I look down on my watch, I'm measuring time in this particular space, like where I am.

00:29:17.000 What altitude I'm at, how fast I'm moving, and the watch just does a reasonable job of calculating all that.

00:29:25.000 And that's you.

00:29:26.000 I mean, that's what you see here sitting still with your watch looking at it.

00:29:29.000 If someone's flying by at close to the speed of light, they won't see you measure time the same way.

00:29:34.000 Yeah.

00:29:35.000 Well, you said something else, too, that freaked me out.

00:29:37.000 That if you traveled at the speed of light, the problem would be you would have infinite mass.

00:29:46.000 Well, anything with mass.

00:29:47.000 Yeah.

00:29:48.000 So if a person was in a spaceship and it traveled the Speed of light, that spaceship would have infinite mass?

00:29:48.000 That's the thing.

00:29:48.000 Yeah.

00:29:55.000 It's basically what makes accelerating up to the speed of light impossible that anything with mass can't travel at the speed of light.

00:30:03.000 I mean, the equations blow up.

00:30:04.000 What does infinite mass mean?

00:30:05.000 Do you have more mass than the whole universe?

00:30:07.000 What the hell is that?

00:30:09.000 As you approach the speed of light, if you have mass, it takes more and more energy to accelerate you even just a little bit more.

00:30:15.000 So you never get to the speed of light.

00:30:18.000 You're going 99.9% the speed of light.

00:30:20.000 Okay, I want to go a little faster.

00:30:22.000 It takes more and more energy each little tiny step you make.

00:30:25.000 It's basically you never get to the speed of light.

00:30:28.000 It takes an infinite amount of energy.

00:30:30.000 So, you know, when it comes to things like interstellar travel, I don't think we're ever going to take a spaceship and accelerate it to the speed of light.

00:30:40.000 I mean, we might get very close.

00:30:42.000 There are particles in space that do have mass, like neutrinos, tiny little bits of mass.

00:30:45.000 They travel very close to the speed of light, but they don't travel at the speed of light.

00:30:50.000 But to me, you know, I think that the idea of traveling interstellar distances or even intergalactic.

00:30:57.000 Distances.

00:30:58.000 The thing that starts to really get me is the question of this what is space and what is time at all, quantum entanglement.

00:31:04.000 Right, glad you brought that up.

00:31:05.000 Oh, yeah.

00:31:08.000 I'm going to say, I hope your listeners, I don't want to get, I don't want to, I want people to come along with us.

00:31:14.000 Oh, they're coming along.

00:31:15.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:31:16.000 I don't want to say things that sound so stupid. 0.99

00:31:18.000 They're like, you know, why are they saying this? 0.98

00:31:19.000 So please stop me if we need some more background. 0.94

00:31:21.000 This does not sound stupid in the way, shape, or form.

00:31:24.000 But the idea of quantum entanglement, we should explain that to people.

00:31:28.000 Yeah.

00:31:28.000 And what it essentially means is that things are entangled, they're connected at regardless of the distance.

00:31:35.000 Yes.

00:31:35.000 And it could be an immeasurable amount of distance.

00:31:38.000 Any distance.

00:31:39.000 Yeah, literally the beginning of the universe distance, like 13.8 billion light years away distance.

00:31:46.000 You're entangled with that.

00:31:49.000 It's amazing because once again, let's go back to the idea that this is a real experimental fact, right? 0.99

00:31:54.000 I mean, a lot of times this is crazy stuff that scientists will say this stuff and people hear it for the first time and they say, well, that sounds like idiotic. 1.00

00:32:04.000 That sounds stupid. 1.00

00:32:05.000 Where did they get that from? 1.00

00:32:07.000 The idea that time changes is now one of the most commonly proven facts every day.

00:32:16.000 Like I said, we need it to calibrate the GPS satellites.

00:32:18.000 It's easy to measure.

00:32:19.000 Quantum entanglement was something that even Albert Einstein 100 years ago understood that quantum mechanics was pointing that way, but he really didn't like it.

00:32:29.000 He called it spooky action at a distance.

00:32:32.000 He hated it because he realized that quantum mechanics had this implication that if things could somehow be connected quantum mechanically, you could take them any distance away from each other and they.

00:32:43.000 Would somehow be able to respond to each other instantaneously with no time difference.

00:32:47.000 And he didn't think that would ever actually happen.

00:32:51.000 And then back in the mid 1990s, we started to do experiments with atoms and we found out that it was real.

00:32:57.000 It can start off pretty simply.

00:33:01.000 You have two atoms that are in an orbit around.

00:33:04.000 So an atom has a nucleus of protons and electrons in the middle.

00:33:08.000 Sorry.

00:33:08.000 An atom has a nucleus of protons and neutrons.

00:33:12.000 The electrons are flying around in orbits around the atom.

00:33:15.000 Two electrons can be in the same orbit only if they are spinning in different directions.

00:33:21.000 They have an angular momentum.

00:33:23.000 It's called spin.

00:33:23.000 And the only way these two electrons can fit in that orbit together is if they're spinning.

00:33:27.000 One is spinning in an upward direction, one, say, is spinning in a downward direction.

00:33:31.000 Hate the broken finger.

00:33:32.000 So if you take these electrons out of the atom, and you can do that, you know that they're in different spins because they had to be to be in that orbit together.

00:33:42.000 So now you separate them.

00:33:43.000 You can separate them by any distance you want.

00:33:45.000 You can separate them by Centimeters in a laboratory. 0.99

00:33:48.000 The Chinese have done this up to the space station that they run in back. 1.00

00:33:52.000 You could conceivably do it to another galaxy. 0.99

00:33:54.000 If you take those electrons and you separate them, you know that they were spinning in opposite directions.

00:34:00.000 So if you take an electric field and you change the spin of one, the other one immediately changes in response.

00:34:06.000 Regardless of the distance.

00:34:08.000 And we know this to be true.

00:34:10.000 We've done this.

00:34:11.000 And the amazing thing is the universe is saying these two things are the same.

00:34:18.000 Quantum mechanical system.

00:34:19.000 They're basically the same object.

00:34:21.000 They're connected to each other.

00:34:23.000 And it doesn't matter.

00:34:23.000 They're entangled together.

00:34:25.000 Space and time don't matter.

00:34:27.000 You can separate them in space any distance you want.

00:34:32.000 How does that work?

00:34:34.000 The universe says the space and time between them doesn't matter.

00:34:37.000 They're the same system.

00:34:38.000 To me, that's the real intriguing thing about could a civilization learn how to harness that?

00:34:45.000 You're not really even having to worry about traveling from one part to another.

00:34:50.000 Did you watch the.

00:34:51.000 The three body problem show.

00:34:53.000 So you have these things called sophons, right?

00:34:56.000 And sophons are entangled to this alien civilization.

00:34:58.000 And they can respond instantaneously because they're entangled.

00:35:03.000 Yes.

00:35:03.000 I mean, that's fantastic science.

00:35:05.000 And as far as I can tell, that could be theoretically possible.

00:35:09.000 Yeah.

00:35:10.000 Well, that's what's bonkers is that we are made out of all this stuff that's entangled.

00:35:15.000 What's it entangled to?

00:35:17.000 Is it entangled to stuff inside a black hole right now?

00:35:19.000 Is it entangled to stuff that is on the other side of the universe from us?

00:35:23.000 If the Big Bang had all of this stuff in a small volume at once, are we entangled to everything in some way?

00:35:30.000 Seriously.

00:35:30.000 Some way?

00:35:33.000 Seriously.

00:35:34.000 I mean, is a part of me quantum mechanically right now in the Andromeda Galaxy?

00:35:34.000 Seriously.

00:35:39.000 Yeah, actually.

00:35:40.000 That would be the implication.

00:35:43.000 I mean, talk about.

00:35:46.000 I don't think we understand yet what reality is.

00:35:48.000 I really don't.

00:35:50.000 What does it mean?

00:35:52.000 Are we all somehow the same particle, entangled to each other?

00:35:56.000 You know, are we connected to everything all at once?

00:36:01.000 I mean, That could be where physics is taking us now.

00:36:05.000 That's bananas.

00:36:06.000 It's very difficult to think about when you think you're a person in Austin.

00:36:12.000 My feet are on the ground.

00:36:13.000 Here I am touching this desk.

00:36:15.000 I'm going to get in my car later and go get something to eat.

00:36:17.000 No kidding.

00:36:18.000 You got to feed the cat, right?

00:36:19.000 But that's not really what's going on.

00:36:19.000 Yeah.

00:36:22.000 It's way more complex, way bigger.

00:36:24.000 And you were speculating that that could be how some advanced, super advanced, intelligent life form travels.

00:36:33.000 It's always been more compelling to me than the idea of taking a spaceship and traveling somewhere.

00:36:38.000 This seems super crude.

00:36:39.000 That seems like the idea of making a horse fly.

00:36:39.000 Yeah.

00:36:42.000 Yeah.

00:36:42.000 We talked about that movie Interstellar because there were a lot of good teaching moments in that movie for a physicist.

00:36:50.000 The idea that time really does slow down close to a black hole.

00:36:53.000 Again, we observe this.

00:36:54.000 When we observe things orbiting close to a black hole, you can tell that that happens.

00:36:58.000 The idea that this advanced civilization that we never actually see In the movie, somehow communicates through basically space and time itself, through gravity.

00:37:07.000 That's how Matthew McConaughey is able to even go back in time and space to help his daughter solve gravity and all that.

00:37:16.000 I was like, I wonder if that's really more what it would be like.

00:37:21.000 Advanced civilizations.

00:37:21.000 You've got to think, right?

00:37:24.000 You look around the earth and there are things like grasshoppers and hamsters that are fantastic, incredibly complex beings.

00:37:30.000 But you try to teach them quantum mechanics or ask them to.

00:37:35.000 You know, crochet a blanket or whatever, they don't have the capacity.

00:37:38.000 And you've got to think that there's the similar jump where, I mean, we don't even know the right questions to ask that sort of civilization.

00:37:45.000 You know, I mean, can they see the universe as a whole thing?

00:37:50.000 Do they know that they're connected to everything and can they somehow use that to travel?

00:37:54.000 Yeah, maybe.

00:37:55.000 Maybe.

00:37:55.000 And if you just extrapolate, if you just think about where we've gone from primitive man to what we're currently experiencing and you take that.

00:38:05.000 Thousands of years, millions of years, whatever it is.

00:38:09.000 You keep going.

00:38:10.000 And as long as civilization gets rid of war and figures out a way to not die of disease and natural disaster, you could potentially continue this process of technological innovation for millions of years.

00:38:25.000 And you would imagine that it would go exponentially greater and greater in its ability to do things.

00:38:30.000 And its ability to not just, not even things that we can imagine.

00:38:38.000 Like, we have a crude understanding, an amazing understanding of the universe, but crude in comparison to what's potentially out there.

00:38:49.000 We could potentially be observing in a physical way every planet on every star one day.

00:38:58.000 But we're not, we can't even think of that as being a possibility now.

00:39:04.000 But what we're doing right now is insane to people that live in the 1400s. 0.99

00:39:09.000 If you showed someone from the 1400s a nuclear power plant, they'd be like, What the fuck are you guys doing? 0.99

00:39:09.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:39:16.000 Like, what is this?

00:39:18.000 If you showed them a nuclear detonator, if you showed them FaceTime on a phone, they'd be like, This is insanity.

00:39:23.000 I just got on a little metal tube and came here from Milwaukee, and I'll fly back tonight.

00:39:27.000 I'll fly back tonight.

00:39:28.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:39:30.000 And we're just accustomed to it.

00:39:32.000 It becomes normal and it would become normal as technology increased further and further and further.

00:39:38.000 And this idea that the entire universe would be accessible is just bananas.

00:39:44.000 Have you ever wondered if maybe the real follow on to humanity someday will be some form of AI?

00:39:50.000 I think so.

00:39:51.000 I mean, yeah.

00:39:52.000 I mean, I do wonder if the human brain is just kind of limited.

00:39:55.000 I mean, if you say there are multiple dimensions and time is something that changes.

00:40:00.000 I mean, I just said that, you know, I mean, scientists are no better than anybody else at comprehending a big number or a big amount of space.

00:40:06.000 We just kind of get used to it.

00:40:08.000 You know, I mean, will we have a creature someday that we've created, an AI, that then all of a sudden can comprehend these things?

00:40:16.000 You know, is that really the real evolutionary path of humanity?

00:40:20.000 Yeah, I think so.

00:40:22.000 I think it's just a completely different kind of life and that we're thinking of it as artificial.

00:40:27.000 I don't think it's artificial at all.

00:40:29.000 I think it's a life.

00:40:30.000 It's just a different kind of life that we're living.

00:40:33.000 I mean, seriously, it's our children.

00:40:33.000 It's an earthling.

00:40:35.000 We created this.

00:40:36.000 I always describe ourselves as like we're an electronic caterpillar and we're making a cocoon.

00:40:36.000 Yeah.

00:40:42.000 We don't even know why we're doing it because it's just what we do.

00:40:45.000 I mean, the thing about human beings is we've always been completely fascinated with innovation.

00:40:51.000 I've always said that if you looked at us objectively, what does this species do?

00:40:55.000 Oh, they make better things.

00:40:56.000 They keep making better things.

00:40:58.000 They're never satisfied with the things.

00:41:00.000 Bees made the beehive and, like, I think we got it, boys.

00:41:02.000 This is it.

00:41:04.000 We're not satisfied at all.

00:41:06.000 And so, if you just kept going with that, like, where does it go?

00:41:08.000 Well, it has to go to life.

00:41:10.000 It has to go to some sort of a human created new kind of life form that exists out of the components of the earth, but instead of being born out of evolution and out of, you know, natural mutation and natural selection, it's a random mutation.

00:41:26.000 It's made out of us.

00:41:28.000 We made it.

00:41:29.000 And it'll probably make better versions of it.

00:41:32.000 And that would be the new life.

00:41:34.000 And that's how you get over all the biological hurdles that we have.

00:41:37.000 You think about, like, the things that.

00:41:39.000 Trouble us.

00:41:40.000 War and crime and violence and all these different things that are a real problem with the human race.

00:41:44.000 Well, that all goes away when you stop being human.

00:41:48.000 And if we really are entangled with everything, that will be us.

00:41:54.000 It'll just be us in a completely different realm.

00:41:57.000 Yeah.

00:41:58.000 I mean, I do like this idea that what we call AIs now isn't something separate.

00:42:03.000 I mean, they are our children, it is an earthling, it is something we've created.

00:42:07.000 The question I've often wondered is.

00:42:12.000 I think sometimes we lack imagination about what might be possible.

00:42:14.000 I've always enjoyed science fiction where the AIs also learn about love or about the arts or about creativity.

00:42:23.000 I mean, whether you want to go with like the new Battlestar Galactica or whether you want to go with a pretty profound experience I had with a friend of mine who's an author who has cochlear implants.

00:42:33.000 And he realizes that he doesn't hear like a human.

00:42:37.000 I mean, the cochlear implants don't replicate perfectly what it means to hear.

00:42:42.000 The way our ears do.

00:42:43.000 They bypass our ears.

00:42:45.000 They wire directly into his brain and stimulate the experience of sound.

00:42:50.000 So he's hearing, in his words, like a cyborg.

00:42:53.000 This is Michael Chorist, a wonderful man that did some essays about this.

00:42:58.000 He talked about how much emotional response he has to music now, something he could never experience.

00:43:04.000 How being a cyborg, quote unquote, and experiencing something in a non human way has added joy and depth and passion.

00:43:16.000 Are we so sure that technology makes us more and more kind of 1950s robot like?

00:43:22.000 Or could it take us into new experiences of being connected with each other, new ways of loving each other, new ways of understanding things?

00:43:29.000 I mean, does it have to be all bad, this?

00:43:32.000 Well, all of our differences fall apart if we realize we're all one thing.

00:43:36.000 Yeah.

00:43:36.000 If we realize we're all one thing, then all of our monopoly of resources, all that stuff goes away if we realize we're all one thing.

00:43:46.000 I mean, part of the problem with human beings is we're very selfish.

00:43:49.000 And the reason why we're very selfish is because that's how you had to survive.

00:43:52.000 If you wanted your genes to.

00:43:54.000 If you wanted to survive and you wanted your genes to be passed on to the next generation, you had to be selfish because other people were being selfish too, and that's the game that humans were playing.

00:44:02.000 If we get to a point of universal telepathy, like universal telepathy with a universal language where all human beings are sharing thoughts, there are no secrets, we are all one thing.

00:44:14.000 Everyone's terrified of that.

00:44:15.000 People love secrets.

00:44:17.000 I don't want people listening to my phone.

00:44:19.000 I don't want people.

00:44:20.000 Well, I don't either because it would be people doing that, and those people have their own ulterior motives, and it's gross that they would have control of it.

00:44:27.000 They'd know your emails.

00:44:29.000 But what if there's no secrets?

00:44:31.000 It's not possible because our understanding of each other is now complete.

00:44:37.000 It's like we read each other's minds in a sense, but it's much more complex than that and much more in depth.

00:44:45.000 Like you feel what that person feels.

00:44:48.000 You are that person, and we're all one thing.

00:44:53.000 That could be possible through technology.

00:44:56.000 And this is where I have hope, where a lot of people are very Fatalist with AI, and they look at it in this dystopian sense that these oligarchs, these technology oligarchs, are going to be controlling through AI and they're going to have access to it and power.

00:45:11.000 I don't know if anybody's going to control it.

00:45:14.000 I have a feeling it's going to be kind of like the internet in a way where I don't think they really thought what the internet was going to be.

00:45:20.000 I think they had this understanding of being able to exchange information through universities.

00:45:25.000 I think it got to a point where if they knew what the internet would.

00:45:29.000 Be today, and how little control they would have over the population and narratives.

00:45:34.000 I think they probably would have shut it down a long time ago.

00:45:36.000 I have a feeling that's going to be the same way with AI, and especially AI as it integrates with us, which I think is the only way that the human species really truly survives.

00:45:49.000 Otherwise, we're just this archaic biological entity living in this new world of this ultra superior life form.

00:45:58.000 But if we integrate with that thing, Through wearables, implants, engineering, if we figure out a way, and this is going to sound terrible to anybody who loves being a person, but all the flaws of being a primate.

00:46:15.000 There's a lot of these biological reward systems that are built into us that are really problematic for progress.

00:46:22.000 Why are we at war right now?

00:46:23.000 Well, because there are people with certain ideologies and there are resources and there are people that are making money from their military contracts.

00:46:31.000 And there's politicians that are beholden to certain interests, and then what are we doing? 1.00

00:46:35.000 We're doing the same stupid shit that we've been doing for thousands and thousands of years. 1.00

00:46:38.000 Well, how do we get past that? 1.00

00:46:39.000 We get past that by stopping people.

00:46:42.000 I think you may be right.

00:46:43.000 I mean, again, that future is frightening in some ways, but I'm more interested in the imagination.

00:46:50.000 I mean, instead of just the dystopia, what could this mean?

00:46:53.000 Right.

00:46:54.000 You know, I mean, how much more?

00:46:56.000 Like we said, I mean, when we were little tribal groups, you know, the little wars we had, the skirmishes didn't really hurt the planet as a whole.

00:47:02.000 I mean, now we're getting there's so many people.

00:47:05.000 And we're still having these little tribal skirmishes, and now we're in danger of massive destruction.

00:47:11.000 I mean, we can't just keep going this way.

00:47:13.000 I mean, it's not survivable.

00:47:15.000 It's not.

00:47:16.000 So, I mean, could AI help us tap into some kind of group consciousness?

00:47:20.000 I mean, we're talking about Einstein's idea that the universe may all be this one big thing.

00:47:26.000 And this is pure metaphysics, pure conjecture.

00:47:29.000 But even from when I was a little kid and I heard that, I wondered well, if all time and space happen at once, is there need for more than one consciousness even?

00:47:37.000 Are we all just looking out of one consciousness looking out of everybody's eyes simultaneously?

00:47:43.000 And not just humans, but everything in the universe.

00:47:47.000 It's a spectacular idea.

00:47:49.000 That if there is a moment, if the universe is just one big thing, we are part now, even now, of beings we have no names for, super advanced beings that have figured all of this out and can span the universe with their consciousness.

00:48:07.000 That's part of the eyes, too.

00:48:09.000 That's another part of this consciousness that we're part of right now.

00:48:12.000 If there's one instant, it reminds me of some of the tenets of Buddhism.

00:48:19.000 Perfectly enlightened beings, bodhisattvas, and we are past lives of them.

00:48:23.000 We're all existing at once. 1.00

00:48:26.000 It's a fantastically beautiful idea.

00:48:28.000 It is a beautiful idea.

00:48:30.000 Our survival instincts are attuned to maintaining what we are.

00:48:36.000 There's this thing, I don't want to lose being a person. 0.98

00:48:39.000 But I guarantee you, if you went to an Australopithecus and you could somehow communicate to them listen, you're going to change and you're going to be this thing that gets sick seven times a year, and maybe you're obese and maybe you have a Problem with cigarettes, and you know, maybe you drink too much and you like to gamble, and you're gonna fuck your life up here and there, but you're gonna have a cell phone and you're gonna live in a city and you're gonna be breathing brake dust every day, and you know, your doctor's gonna give you a bunch of stuff you don't really need because he's trying to make money. 0.99

00:49:08.000 The Australopithecus are probably like, fuck that. 0.99

00:49:12.000 I know what I'm doing here. 1.00

00:49:14.000 Sounds much better.

00:49:15.000 Yeah, I know where the food is.

00:49:16.000 Like, get out of here.

00:49:18.000 I don't want any part of that.

00:49:19.000 And I think that's just part of survival instincts.

00:49:23.000 Survival instincts don't want you to radically change into something completely different with its own new set of problems.

00:49:29.000 You want to stay.

00:49:31.000 You want to maintain.

00:49:32.000 You know, country boy can't survive.

00:49:33.000 Keep me in the woods.

00:49:34.000 You know what I mean?

00:49:35.000 Like, that's people have this like natural inclination to keep things simple because they understand them.

00:49:40.000 But I think that's not possible anymore.

00:49:43.000 And I think we're going to just have to let it go.

00:49:46.000 Just let that idea go and relax and accept whatever this new thing is.

00:49:52.000 And I think we're very, very fortunate to be born at this time while we're experiencing it.

00:49:58.000 Regardless of the outcome, this is a very unique time.

00:50:02.000 Like one of the weirdest times, I think, objectively in human history.

00:50:07.000 And we're very fortunate to be experiencing it.

00:50:09.000 I mean, you and I are roughly the same age.

00:50:12.000 And I think that, I mean, for me, having this, what they now kind of call the feral childhood, right, where I was unplugged.

00:50:19.000 And there were vast stretches of time, even as a small child, where I was on my own in the neighborhood stuff.

00:50:24.000 And I loved it.

00:50:25.000 I remember going to a YMCA camp when I was 11 years old.

00:50:29.000 And everybody had to show up at breakfast, and then there was an activity time, and everybody had to show up at lunch.

00:50:33.000 But what you did between that time, you were on your own.

00:50:36.000 I mean, as an 11 year old kid in the woods, there were activities.

00:50:39.000 You could do some archery, there was a riflery, there was craft shop, there was swimming, and you had to check in at certain times.

00:50:45.000 But sometimes I just went and sat in the woods.

00:50:48.000 11 years old.

00:50:48.000 I mean, can you imagine?

00:50:49.000 I had this similar experience in the Boy Scouts.

00:50:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:50:52.000 And the thing was so you and I had this experience of living unplugged and sort of the idea of a quiet mind and imagination.

00:51:04.000 But we also saw this tremendous change in this connectivity, which I love.

00:51:09.000 I also love having the internet and my cell phones and all of that.

00:51:13.000 But this is a real change in human civilization that we went through personally.

00:51:18.000 And I agree with you.

00:51:19.000 I feel a tremendous sense of gratitude for both ends of my life.

00:51:23.000 Right.

00:51:23.000 We could have been born in the 1500s, where the 1500s to the 1600s, not that much changed.

00:51:30.000 Sure.

00:51:30.000 For a lot of people, yeah.

00:51:31.000 I mean, politically things changed, leaders got overthrown, but as far as the way you interfaced with the world, pretty much the same way.

00:51:39.000 You wrote stuff down with feathers.

00:51:40.000 And gratitude.

00:51:41.000 And like you said, I mean, maybe instead of all of the dystopia and all the worry and all the panic right now, going forward with gratitude.

00:51:51.000 Yeah.

00:51:51.000 Well, I think the unknown gives people a tremendous amount of anxiety.

00:51:55.000 For a good reason.

00:51:57.000 I mean, the unknown could potentially be dangerous and scary and terrifying or awesome.

00:52:01.000 And you really don't know.

00:52:03.000 And so you're like, what is it going to be?

00:52:05.000 And there are all these college kids that are really freaking out because they went into debt.

00:52:09.000 They're getting these college degrees.

00:52:12.000 They're leaving with this burden, this financial burden that they can never get rid of.

00:52:18.000 And on top of that, they have a degree that might not be worth anything because AI might completely eradicate their field.

00:52:24.000 That's a real concern.

00:52:25.000 And so I think kids today that are graduating from college and graduating from high school, they probably have the most amount of anxiety about the future.

00:52:34.000 That, and then there's people that, you know, they haven't saved any money up.

00:52:39.000 They don't even know if money's going to be valuable in the future.

00:52:41.000 Like, what does it even mean?

00:52:43.000 Are we going to abandon all money?

00:52:45.000 Like, what is it going to mean when AI completely controls all of the resources, all of the government, all of everything, all transportation, and you don't have to do your job anymore?

00:52:55.000 You just get some funds from the government where you can buy food.

00:52:59.000 This is what people are talking about.

00:53:01.000 Like, this is a potential 100 years from now future.

00:53:04.000 Very seriously, so.

00:53:05.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:53:06.000 Which is terrifying to people that are thinking, hey, I want to do what my dad did and what my mom did, and I want to go out there in the world.

00:53:16.000 And I want to find something that I'm passionate about and make it a career, and like maybe that's not possible.

00:53:21.000 That to kids right now, I think, is really freaking them out because the adults, the people like us that are supposed to be the ones that say, Well, let me tell you how it all works.

00:53:32.000 You're going to be fine.

00:53:33.000 This is what you have to do.

00:53:34.000 And if you do that and just cross your I's and dot your T's, you're going to be okay, Bob.

00:53:38.000 But maybe you're not going to be okay. 0.98

00:53:40.000 Like maybe we don't know shit because that's the reality. 0.94

00:53:42.000 The reality is you and I, the adults, have no idea what this world's going to look like in 50 years, and these poor kids are. 0.96

00:53:49.000 They have no one to turn to.

00:53:51.000 There's no one that can explain what this is.

00:53:53.000 And so they're entering out into the world, having to take care of themselves for the very first time with this real possibility that there might not be any jobs.

00:54:01.000 On the flip side of that, are you in fact describing the Star Trek universe?

00:54:08.000 Right.

00:54:08.000 You know, a time where people do not work for everybody has, you know, anything they need as far as, you know, apparently survivability, you know, food, whatever.

00:54:16.000 And now you have a chance to say, Am I going to be a writer or an explorer or an artist or a captain or a musician?

00:54:23.000 Yes.

00:54:23.000 captain or a musician.

00:54:24.000 You know, I mean, does it, does it, I mean, I mean, I mean, is there something in that that might be hugely liberating?

00:54:24.000 Yes.

00:54:30.000 100%.

00:54:30.000 And I've talked about this as well, that this idea that you have to toil and you have to be a hunter gatherer or, you know, you have to do this in order to find meaning in life is kind of crazy because we could find.

00:54:42.000 There's very wealthy people that never have to work that have tremendous meaning in their life because they're doing things all the time without thinking about work at all.

00:54:50.000 They're not thinking about it as work.

00:54:51.000 Whatever hobbies they're pursuing or interests or education they're pursuing, they're doing it just at a pure Interest and fascination and love and passion.

00:54:59.000 And that could be all of us.

00:55:02.000 Could be all of us.

00:55:04.000 But there's going to be a tremendous transition period where people are going to have to rethink what it means to be a human being in society.

00:55:13.000 And that's what's weird because our entire society is structured out of getting up in the morning, putting in the work, working towards a future.

00:55:21.000 You got a 401k, you got investments, you got this, you got that, you got a mortgage.

00:55:26.000 And this is how we've structured our entire existence and what meaning we gather from life.

00:55:33.000 It's based on that.

00:55:35.000 We're going to have to figure out a way.

00:55:37.000 To realize and to rethink this, and it's going to be very difficult for people that are like 40 and 50.

00:55:43.000 They're just completely set in their ways, and now their ways change.

00:55:48.000 I don't know how many of them are going to be able to make that switch, and what could be done to assist them in that.

00:55:55.000 What can be done?

00:55:56.000 Maybe that comes with whatever this technological interface is.

00:56:00.000 Maybe that comes with when we become what's essentially a cyborg, that you get a much greater understanding of what it means to exist.

00:56:09.000 And that this idea that you exist only because the insurance company you work for is kind of ridiculous, and we abandon that.

00:56:16.000 I mean, in the way that now, when you open up your phone and you use perplexity, you have access to something that's as smart as every human being on earth in every field.

00:56:30.000 You can ask it about anything, and it'll give you the state of the art.

00:56:34.000 And whatever the science is, whatever the understanding of history, whatever mathematics, Tax law, whatever it is, it can give it to you on your phone instantaneously, and we've just sort of accepted that.

00:56:48.000 This is our new thing.

00:56:50.000 I think this is like a baby step into what this technology could potentially, if you're looking at things with a glass half full, it could potentially change the way we look at everything, the way we look at ourselves, the way we look at what it means to be a person, and what we find meaning out of.

00:57:08.000 Because that's the problem.

00:57:09.000 The problem is meaning and the Feeling like you matter, feeling like you're important.

00:57:14.000 And I think part of that is because we're also isolated from each other.

00:57:17.000 But that might go away entirely if the boundaries between all thought and consciousness, if we realize, like, oh, consciousness is just a thing that we're all enveloped in, and what our brain is, is just an antenna.

00:57:31.000 It's like tuning into consciousness.

00:57:33.000 And depending on how good your antenna is, you're going to be a little bit better about how you interface with the world and whatever thing you desire and whatever thing you decide to.

00:57:43.000 Put your energy and attention to.

00:57:45.000 Maybe you'll be better at it than another person because you have a better antenna.

00:57:48.000 But we might understand that, like, we are really, truly all one thing.

00:57:52.000 So all our fears about, you know, finding your place in the world, that might be nonsense.

00:58:00.000 I really like that idea.

00:58:01.000 I like the idea of search for meaning.

00:58:03.000 And I agree with you.

00:58:04.000 I think that, as, like you said, as the Australopithecus, as people that used to exist in these little tribal groups and families, the modern isolated life.

00:58:15.000 It's something that I struggle with a lot.

00:58:17.000 I'm always wondering where is my family?

00:58:19.000 Where are my friends?

00:58:21.000 I've had to do a lot of interior work about I'm just going to bring along my own family inside somehow.

00:58:29.000 I've had to provide this all for myself.

00:58:32.000 The idea of being less alone, being less isolated, that's one thing that I wanted from the internet.

00:58:39.000 It started out on Facebook.

00:58:40.000 I could keep up with my friends.

00:58:42.000 I saw what they were doing.

00:58:43.000 They were posting pictures of their life.

00:58:45.000 It was less isolating.

00:58:47.000 And then now it's evolved to, I can't even find them on Facebook anymore.

00:58:49.000 It's all, you know, all the ads and everything like that.

00:58:52.000 But, I mean, for me, I mean, you talk about meaning and you talk about solving isolation.

00:59:01.000 Tell me more about that.

00:59:02.000 I mean, how has your sense of meaning in your life evolved?

00:59:06.000 How has it changed over your life?

00:59:07.000 How do you find meaning?

00:59:10.000 I find meaning in what, well, there's a bunch of things, right?

00:59:14.000 First of all, it's the people that are in your life.

00:59:16.000 This is a giant factor because without people that you love and people that you enjoy spending time with, life loses all of its value.

00:59:25.000 If you're an insanely wealthy, insanely successful person who has no friends, who lives alone, you're living in hell.

00:59:32.000 And if you are a poor person that has amazing friends and you're just getting by, you are a happier person.

00:59:38.000 But I guarantee you that poor person would switch places with that rich person in a heartbeat because we're programmed to think that success is numbers, that success is what you can accumulate as far as like objects and desired material possessions.

00:59:55.000 But it's not.

00:59:56.000 It's like true success is happiness and the amount of joy that you get out of life and the amount of satisfaction you get in what you do.

01:00:04.000 So I think.

01:00:05.000 For everybody, that answer is a different answer because for some people, it's going to be music.

01:00:09.000 For some people, it's going to be literary.

01:00:11.000 They're going to write.

01:00:12.000 There's going to be a thing that you enjoy putting yourself into that you feel satisfaction and you feel meaning with, on top of friends and family.

01:00:21.000 So, friends and family, I think, is foremost. 0.99

01:00:24.000 But then they can get in the way too if they don't have their shit together. 0.97

01:00:28.000 So, they have to have a thing that they're enjoying as well. 0.99

01:00:32.000 They have to have a thing that's helping them grow as an individual.

01:00:35.000 And there's a thing from martial arts my instructor told me that when I was very young that I never forgot.

01:00:40.000 That was martial arts as a vehicle for developing your human potential.

01:00:45.000 And that if you find things that test you and you find things that are complex and these puzzles that you have to solve, the more you do that, the more you get of an understanding of who you are and what you can do and what you can do out there in the world.

01:00:56.000 And the more you do it, the more you can do other things.

01:00:59.000 And I think that's where I find meaning.

01:01:02.000 I find meaning in doing things and enjoying time with my family, enjoying time with my friends, having joy and fun and laughter, and then also.

01:01:13.000 Difficult pursuits.

01:01:15.000 I like things that are complex, the things that are hard to solve.

01:01:18.000 I like things that are hard to do where I really have to force myself to do it and then I feel satisfaction afterwards and I understand my ability to force myself to do things.

01:01:29.000 In doing that, I find meaning and I'm a relatively happy person.

01:01:35.000 I think I'm very happy in terms of the average person.

01:01:38.000 I think that's why.

01:01:41.000 But if someone just took that all away, if all that's gone, Would you still have happiness?

01:01:47.000 Like, what is happiness, right?

01:01:49.000 And is it entirely connected to your job?

01:01:49.000 What is meaning?

01:01:55.000 That seems kind of crazy because a job is just a constructed thing that it would, you know, 500 years ago didn't even exist.

01:02:02.000 So, what do we have to have?

01:02:06.000 Are we these complex problem solving biological organisms that have this thirst for innovation and to constantly make things better?

01:02:17.000 Are we tricking ourselves with jobs to be happy?

01:02:22.000 Are we filling the need of whatever?

01:02:24.000 Like when a cat chases a ball, what is it doing?

01:02:27.000 Well, it thinks it's killing something.

01:02:29.000 That's its design.

01:02:30.000 This is its biological need.

01:02:32.000 You throw a ball past a cat, it goes after it because it's got this biological need to chase things that are running away from it so it could kill it in need.

01:02:40.000 I think we're kind of doing a similar thing with our hunter gatherer tribal organism that we're still trapped in, that we're tricking it.

01:02:49.000 We're tricking it with complex problems and we're tricking it with community.

01:02:54.000 We're tricking it with all these different things that keep it happy.

01:02:57.000 I agree with you.

01:02:58.000 Yeah, I think that's a wonderful answer.

01:03:00.000 I mean, there's something about the happy poor person, isolated rich person thing that I agree with at the same time, seeing what grinding poverty does to people's minds and breaking them down with exhaustion and demoralization.

01:03:14.000 There's obviously some kind of a sweet spot for there.

01:03:17.000 I mean, I've had to work quite hard in different parts of my life.

01:03:21.000 And I was just very aware of the soul grinding, not having enough, wondering.

01:03:28.000 Where your next meal is coming from.

01:03:29.000 And I have it nowhere near as bad as some.

01:03:33.000 But the thing that was absolutely, for me, unbelievable about working for NASA was the idea of solving complex problems with people you trusted and people that you thought really had your back.

01:03:44.000 And no organization is perfect.

01:03:46.000 But the idea that there was it's not a zero sum game, right?

01:03:50.000 I mean, you want the whole team to succeed.

01:03:52.000 I mean, even if there are missions you think should have been lower priority or maybe we should spend more money on this and less money on that, at the end of the day, You want whatever's going on to be fantastic and you want it to succeed and you want all the people around you to succeed.

01:04:06.000 And the idea that, again, I mean, this isn't hunter gathering.

01:04:10.000 I mean, we're solving problems.

01:04:12.000 We're saying, can you take a picture of the black part of a black hole?

01:04:17.000 Can you actually see the light area, the event horizon getting sucked in?

01:04:21.000 I'm talking about the Event Horizon Telescope, not a NASA mission.

01:04:24.000 But there were times in my life, like when I first saw that picture come together, and I didn't think they'd be able to do that.

01:04:32.000 I don't think people really understand what happened there.

01:04:36.000 They were doing something right on the fuzzy edge of physics being possible.

01:04:42.000 You need to catch the same front of a wavelength of light.

01:04:46.000 So, light's coming by, it's a wave, it travels at the speed of light.

01:04:50.000 The wavelength of light is tiny.

01:04:51.000 Let's say for a minute they were dealing with microwaves, so let's say like a millionth of a meter.

01:04:58.000 So, something that's a meter divided by a million is traveling past you at the speed of light.

01:05:05.000 And the Earth is round and the Earth is moving.

01:05:08.000 And they had these eight observatories all around the planet.

01:05:12.000 And they had to catch that same wavefront, the same one.

01:05:15.000 If it was one wavefront later, one millionth of a meter later traveling at the speed of light, they wouldn't have gotten the image.

01:05:22.000 They needed to catch the same wavelength, the same photon, the same wave of light had to be caught in all of those telescopes at once.

01:05:30.000 One was at the South Pole, somewhere in the United States, somewhere in Chile.

01:05:35.000 They were all over the planet.

01:05:37.000 And if you caught the same freaking wave of light.

01:05:41.000 There you go.

01:05:41.000 Here it is.

01:05:42.000 Wow.

01:05:44.000 They managed to make a telescope that's actually as big as the Earth.

01:05:47.000 And they were able to take a picture of the dark parts of a black hole.

01:05:51.000 Now, that's something called the shadow of the event horizon.

01:05:53.000 It's basically the event horizon where time and space stop.

01:05:57.000 We don't even know if there really is an interior to a black hole, all the equations blow up.

01:06:01.000 Time and space don't exist in there.

01:06:04.000 And light, nothing can escape that darkness.

01:06:08.000 The black spot you're seeing there is a little bigger than the event horizon itself.

01:06:11.000 It's called the shadow of the event horizon because time and space are bent around the black hole.

01:06:17.000 And so some of the light that actually gets sucked in is light that would have gone around the black hole.

01:06:22.000 It gets sucked into the back end of the black hole.

01:06:24.000 Literally, space and time curve around the black hole.

01:06:27.000 And so that dark part is actually a little bigger than the event horizon.

01:06:31.000 It's called the shadow of the event horizon.

01:06:33.000 And they said they were going to go take a picture of it.

01:06:37.000 And I was like, you have to catch the same.

01:06:40.000 Wavefront of light in all of these telescopes.

01:06:44.000 I mean, that's going to depend on the height of the mountain, how fast that part of the Earth is moving.

01:06:48.000 They did it. 0.99

01:06:49.000 They fucking did it. 1.00

01:06:51.000 And they didn't do it just once, right? 0.99

01:06:54.000 And now we can take a picture of an area right in front of your eyes where space and time doesn't exist.

01:07:00.000 I mean, to a lesser extent, one of the NASA missions that I thought was just spectacular was a small, inexpensive mission called NICER.

01:07:09.000 You're like, who's the NICER person?

01:07:10.000 NICER, N I C E R.

01:07:11.000 It's the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer.

01:07:15.000 And a neutron star, you probably know about these, but when a star dies and the nuclear reactions inside a star cease, all of that gravity, this massive object, comes crushing in.

01:07:27.000 And it'll create an object sometimes called a neutron star.

01:07:30.000 They're about 20 miles across, but they have about twice the mass of the sun.

01:07:34.000 And we study many of these at NASA.

01:07:37.000 They're all over the place.

01:07:38.000 They're real, they're something you can take an image of, you can take a picture of.

01:07:42.000 And these neutron stars have physics that we don't understand.

01:07:46.000 You take two times the mass of the sun, you crush it into 20 miles.

01:07:50.000 We know that we can't describe the interior of that thing yet.

01:07:53.000 We don't have the physics that matches that type of density.

01:07:57.000 And this crazy little Little contraption.

01:08:01.000 I mean, it's about the size of a washing machine.

01:08:04.000 It was built in a lab just on the floor that I used to work at at NASA.

01:08:08.000 It's cheap, easy to make.

01:08:09.000 I shouldn't say easy, but I mean, it's actually able to create maps of what the surface of these objects are like.

01:08:15.000 They're 20 miles across, they're thousands of light years away.

01:08:20.000 And you can actually create a map of what the temperature is like.

01:08:23.000 And one of the things we see on these maps is the distortion where space and time curves around these objects.

01:08:30.000 You know, they rotate very fast, and there are hot spots we see coming in and off the neutron star.

01:08:35.000 But then, as the hotspot goes behind the star, the light bends up and over, and we can actually still see the hotspot because space and time are bending around these objects.

01:08:44.000 You can see that.

01:08:46.000 That's not a mathematical simulation, that's not a theory.

01:08:50.000 You can see space and time bending around these objects.

01:08:53.000 You can see space and time bending into that event horizon.

01:08:57.000 You know, I mean, it's absolutely crazy what we've been able to do.

01:09:02.000 And whether it's a huge project like the Event Horizon Telescope, where I would have bet that they would not have been able to make that measurement, and they did.

01:09:11.000 There were so many hard drives of data.

01:09:14.000 One of the telescopes was at the South Pole.

01:09:17.000 You wanted the telescopes to be as far apart on the Earth as possible because then you could basically make a giant telescope the size of the separation of these telescopes.

01:09:27.000 There's pretty good email links down to the South Pole, but the email link wasn't fast enough for all of this data.

01:09:33.000 They sent back literally a ton, a ton of hard drives.

01:09:38.000 They had to play them all at the same time and make sure they caught the same photon.

01:09:42.000 If they had caught seriously one photon following behind the other, the image wouldn't have worked.

01:09:47.000 They had to catch that same photon.

01:09:50.000 You know, humans are incredible.

01:09:52.000 Some of us.

01:09:54.000 Oh, hey.

01:09:55.000 Some of them, I should say.

01:09:56.000 Maybe pretty much all of us in different ways.

01:09:58.000 I mean, you know, I. Unrealized potential.

01:09:58.000 Yes.

01:10:01.000 No, I got to go back to this.

01:10:02.000 I mean, one of my good friends now have won the Nobel Prize, which is always like, yo, what the hell am I doing?

01:10:07.000 That's awesome.

01:10:08.000 Good friend group.

01:10:09.000 Yeah.

01:10:10.000 But you have good group chats.

01:10:11.000 Well, see, the funny thing is, we certainly don't all get together and talk theoretical physics.

01:10:15.000 I mean, that's not really what we do.

01:10:16.000 I was seated next to one of them at a meal one time, and somebody came by and said, Oh, look at all the brain power here.

01:10:22.000 And I actually, in this, I tried to be kind of nice about it, but I said, You know, there's a single mother working three jobs part time, you know, who's waiting tables over there.

01:10:30.000 And I mean, the mental capacity and the strength of that person is something that, you know, don't look at us.

01:10:38.000 Go praise that person.

01:10:39.000 Well, that's brain power too.

01:10:40.000 It's just a different thing.

01:10:41.000 It's survival.

01:10:42.000 I mean, it's trying to keep your life and soul together.

01:10:46.000 The privilege of being able to work at NASA.

01:10:49.000 And to be able to work with a team like that and do things you think are impossible.

01:10:55.000 That was kind of a part of my life you could stick a pin in and say that meant something.

01:10:59.000 That gave me some meaning.

01:11:01.000 That gave me joy.

01:11:03.000 And as you said, it's not so much being a hunter gatherer.

01:11:08.000 It's can we ask a question that we think is impossible and can we just go and do it?

01:11:13.000 Yeah, the ultimate expression of human curiosity.

01:11:16.000 When you say that we don't have the physics, when you're Trying to understand what's happening in a neutron star?

01:11:22.000 What do you mean?

01:11:23.000 So you can measure how big these things are, and you can measure how massive they are.

01:11:27.000 And so then you can do a calculation as to what the density inside would be.

01:11:32.000 And, you know, I mean...

01:11:33.000 To put it, probably the interior core is denser than the outer regions, but if you had a teaspoon of this material, it would have about as much mass as Mount Everest.

01:11:44.000 The reason they're called neutron stars is that the gravity is so intense on these things.

01:11:51.000 I hate sort of a simple view of atoms as little balls going around each other because they're not.

01:11:55.000 They're waves of energy.

01:11:57.000 But the gravity actually crushes the electrons into the nucleus.

01:12:00.000 They combine with protons to become neutrons.

01:12:03.000 So they're mainly little balls of neutrons.

01:12:05.000 But we do.

01:12:07.000 There you go.

01:12:08.000 You see the big question mark there at the core.

01:12:10.000 So here's the problem.

01:12:12.000 You run our basic laws of physics, our understanding of how particles work, and you get to the density of a neutron core, and the equations don't work.

01:12:21.000 Work.

01:12:21.000 They're not making the right predictions.

01:12:23.000 We can tell that there is actually a really great NASA video I would suggest you watch.

01:12:30.000 It's called The Interior of a Neutron Star.

01:12:34.000 can help you find it but it basically says that that the the models we have about how matter works at that sort of density none of them give the right predictions for the the size of the neutron star why is that we don't have the right physics for it yet so So we run our physics and we say if you have this much volume and this much mass, what should that interior be like?

01:12:56.000 And none of our current models of how matter works gives us the right observations, gives us the right science.

01:13:01.000 So, what are we missing?

01:13:02.000 Well, for one thing, you know, what you're probably looking at inside a neutron star is some type of interaction of quarks, the actual sort of building blocks of neutrons and protons, the particles that make up protons and neutrons.

01:13:16.000 Ooh, that's cool.

01:13:17.000 Yeah.

01:13:17.000 Oh, you got it.

01:13:18.000 You're amazing.

01:13:18.000 You got it.

01:13:19.000 I have to say, I'm seriously impressed by this person's ability.

01:13:22.000 I'm a scientist.

01:13:23.000 Yeah.

01:13:23.000 So, I mean, this is a video that was done by NASA testing matter's limits.

01:13:28.000 It's a four minute video.

01:13:30.000 And while I don't think it's an absolutely perfect video, I think it's fantastic.

01:13:34.000 And so you see, this is supposed to represent the electrons being pulled into the nucleus and making neutrons.

01:13:42.000 And then at the very heart of these things, we're in a state of matter that we have no description for yet.

01:13:47.000 We can't tell you how it behaves.

01:13:49.000 We've never created it in a lab.

01:13:53.000 We don't know how this type of matter acts.

01:13:55.000 It's a new state of matter.

01:13:57.000 We don't know what it's like.

01:13:58.000 Wow.

01:14:00.000 It's made when one of these giant stars explodes.

01:14:04.000 The core of the star becomes compressed.

01:14:06.000 And then this will take you through us trying to figure out whether you have particles as discrete particles, as neutrons and protons, or whether there's some type of quark soup inside.

01:14:17.000 But pretty much every model so far doesn't match what we actually measure from these things.

01:14:23.000 We cannot describe them yet.

01:14:26.000 We need better physics.

01:14:27.000 Are there any other structures that are similar in our lack of understanding of them in the universe?

01:14:32.000 We got two big ones right in front of you neutron stars and black holes, right?

01:14:35.000 So, I mean, these black holes as well.

01:14:39.000 What is inside a black hole?

01:14:41.000 Is there an inside if space and time don't really exist?

01:14:46.000 And then, much more easy to see are these neutron stars.

01:14:50.000 The people who study neutron stars at NASA had this wonderful expression.

01:14:53.000 They're like, with a black hole, you can't see anything.

01:14:55.000 It collapses into an event horizon, nothing's coming out.

01:14:57.000 With a neutron star, you got the frickin' thing right there in front of you.

01:14:59.000 You can actually observe something.

01:15:02.000 And so, you know, they figured that neutron stars are much more exciting than black holes because you could actually, like, do experiments, take a picture, build a telescope.

01:15:09.000 And, but this experiment was an inexpensive, small observatory that's up on the International Space Station.

01:15:17.000 And, I mean, they're doing incredible.

01:15:20.000 Work about the nature of physics and testing where our limits are.

01:15:25.000 It's unbelievable what you can do with even a relatively inexpensive mission.

01:15:29.000 When you look at the size of some black holes, we were talking the other day about the largest black hole where the event horizon goes past Pluto.

01:15:38.000 Yeah.

01:15:39.000 If it was the size of our solar system.

01:15:41.000 Absolutely.

01:15:42.000 That's almost impossible to even think about that there's a black hole that's bigger than our solar system.

01:15:49.000 And how did it get that big?

01:15:52.000 How much time does it take for it to?

01:15:55.000 gather up that much matter to get that big.

01:15:58.000 Well, you were talking about these little red dots that the Webb telescope is seeing.

01:16:02.000 So, I mean, what you've just done is put your finger on, I think, one of the most fascinating unanswered questions in astronomy right now, that every major galaxy has a big black hole in the center.

01:16:13.000 You know, the one in the middle of our galaxy is about 4 million times the mass of the sun.

01:16:18.000 And physically, it's not that big.

01:16:20.000 It's about, let's say, around about the orbit of, say, the inner solar system Mercury, kind of around there.

01:16:26.000 But then the bigger ones we know in other galaxies can get up to hundreds.

01:16:29.000 I mean, let's say tens of billions of times the mass of the Sun.

01:16:34.000 And those, the event horizons about the size of the orbit of Pluto.

01:16:39.000 The question is how do you gather 10 billion times the mass of a star together in the beginning?

01:16:47.000 Black holes, the only thing we know that forms big black holes like that.

01:16:51.000 So a star collapses, a star dies.

01:16:54.000 And this tremendous crush of gravity as the star collapses creates this.

01:16:58.000 Bottomless pit of gravity called a black hole.

01:17:01.000 So, how do you get that many stars to die?

01:17:04.000 How do you, I mean, in the early universe, how many stars, how many generations of stars had to burn through to actually get that to happen?

01:17:11.000 And there was nothing that we could figure out.

01:17:13.000 I mean, how do you make that big of a black hole?

01:17:16.000 So, these little red dots that we're seeing with Webb, and when we don't know exactly what these are, but right now the observations are pushing us in a very interesting direction.

01:17:29.000 They're about a million times the mass of the sun.

01:17:32.000 And at first we thought, okay, well, are these whole galaxies?

01:17:36.000 And that was the controversy you alluded to, that how could there be galaxies that far back in time?

01:17:41.000 We're looking back to a time about 400 million years after the Big Bang.

01:17:46.000 We're looking so far away, the light took that long to travel to us.

01:17:50.000 So we saw these sort of bright objects.

01:17:53.000 At first we thought they were galaxies, and that was like, whoa, how'd they get there so fast?

01:17:57.000 But then we took a better look at them, and they don't actually shine in the same light a galaxy would.

01:18:03.000 And they appear to have the signature of something inside, some of them rotating very fast, very fast.

01:18:10.000 And what we're wondering is if the first generation of stars, the very first stars that existed, were nothing at all like the stars we have today.

01:18:20.000 The universe was denser.

01:18:22.000 There was probably more of this stuff called dark matter that had gravity pulling everything together.

01:18:27.000 So maybe at that time, the universe just there were cores of huge amounts of gas that collapsed together.

01:18:34.000 Instead of forming a star, the core basically collapsed into a black hole immediately.

01:18:39.000 And it started pulling in material, and all this sort of hot stuff formed what they call a pseudo star.

01:18:44.000 There's all this atmosphere of hot gas being heated up by the black hole in the middle.

01:18:49.000 As the gas spirals in towards the black hole, it gets hotter and hotter.

01:18:53.000 So instead of a nuclear fusion core of a star, you have a black hole heating everything up on the inside, accumulating all this mass.

01:19:01.000 And are we looking at, for the first time, the seeds of these giant black holes?

01:19:07.000 That instead of there being, you know, the first thing was stars, the way we think of stars, was the first thing huge amounts of gas and dust collapsing into black holes and heating up.

01:19:19.000 Sort of a pseudo star around it, millions of times the mass of the sun.

01:19:24.000 And then in a dense area like the heart of a galaxy, these things then start to combine.

01:19:29.000 Over time, gravity pulls them together and you build bigger and bigger black holes.

01:19:34.000 So once again, we don't know yet that these objects are.

01:19:40.000 But at the moment, it's one of the best explanations we have.

01:19:43.000 And it fits the data quite well.

01:19:46.000 So we will keep observing these things, we will keep finding new ones.

01:19:50.000 One of the big questions has been why don't they give off more x rays?

01:19:53.000 Because if there's matter streaming down a black hole, it should give off very high radiation like x rays.

01:19:59.000 And then just in the last couple of months, there are some observations coming out where we're finding some of these are indeed x ray sources.

01:20:06.000 So we may have found the answer to where you get these big black holes.

01:20:11.000 And that was one of the big hopes for the James Webb Space Telescope that it would help us answer the question of where do you get these giant black holes in the cores of galaxies?

01:20:22.000 Where do they come from?

01:20:24.000 There shouldn't have been enough time for that many stars to make them.

01:20:28.000 I watched a documentary on black holes once where they were talking about that in the center of every galaxy, there's a supermassive black hole that's one half of 1% of the mass of the entire galaxy.

01:20:37.000 It seems to be correlated.

01:20:38.000 Yeah, the bigger the galaxy, the bigger the black hole.

01:20:40.000 Which is nuts.

01:20:40.000 Yeah.

01:20:41.000 And what they were theorizing was that if you went through that black hole, you could potentially be in a completely different universe filled with galaxies, all that have black holes inside of them.

01:20:56.000 Through that, another universe that you would have an infinite number of universes that exist, and all these black holes.

01:21:04.000 And if you can go through them, all of them it broke my brain because I'm just sitting there.

01:21:10.000 I'm thinking, wait a minute, how many billions of galaxies are there?

01:21:13.000 Yeah.

01:21:13.000 Like what?

01:21:14.000 And each one of them has a black hole in the center of it?

01:21:16.000 Yeah.

01:21:17.000 Well, and I mean, we don't know yet how many.

01:21:21.000 I mean, there are these giant black holes in the middle of galaxies, and then there are smaller black holes caused when massive stars die.

01:21:27.000 And our galaxy probably has millions of those.

01:21:30.000 But the ones in the center of the galaxies are fascinating.

01:21:34.000 The one in our galaxy, so we're about 25,000 light years away from this guy, so we're safe.

01:21:40.000 But we actually observed stars that are trapped around the black hole that are orbiting the black hole.

01:21:47.000 This was the first way we found the location of the black hole.

01:21:50.000 Stars were orbiting kind of like this angry swarm of bees almost in every direction, and they were orbiting around something you didn't see.

01:21:56.000 And the mass needed to make all these stars orbit was about 4 million times the mass of the sun.

01:22:02.000 There was a star called S2 we observed orbiting close to the black hole, kind of like a comet.

01:22:06.000 It would come in and whip around the black hole, then go back out again.

01:22:10.000 And S2, at closest approach, when it whips around the black hole, this is a star, goes nearly 20 million miles an hour as it whips around the black hole.

01:22:20.000 And then just recently, we found another star that actually gets up to over 50 million miles an hour as the black hole whips it around.

01:22:27.000 And this is how we test the idea that time is different around a black hole.

01:22:31.000 We actually see these stars whipping so close to a black hole.

01:22:34.000 We can tell that there are changes in their orbit, that they're actually going through different time.

01:22:39.000 And so we see these stars whipping around the black hole of the middle of our galaxy.

01:22:43.000 They will probably eventually go down that black hole.

01:22:46.000 I mean, maybe everything in our galaxy will eventually kind of spiral down into that black hole.

01:22:51.000 But, you know, this is not conjectural.

01:22:56.000 These are observations from telescopes.

01:22:59.000 You know, look up S2.

01:23:00.000 Look up, I don't know what the name of the one that goes faster is.

01:23:03.000 It's a telephone number.

01:23:05.000 But that's real.

01:23:08.000 Now, the question about.

01:23:10.000 What happens if you could survive going into a black hole?

01:23:12.000 And this is another place where we need better physics.

01:23:15.000 Quite honestly, our physics gives up.

01:23:18.000 There are all kinds of wonderful, fascinating possibilities.

01:23:22.000 I mean, people have pointed out this is not observation.

01:23:26.000 Now we're going from observation, we see these things, they're real, to conjecture.

01:23:31.000 People have said that if you take the entire universe, the entire mass of the universe and the radius, the diameter of the observable universe, almost exactly matches a black hole.

01:23:44.000 Could it be that inside a black hole, a new universe forms when a black hole forms?

01:23:49.000 Is that what the Big Bang was?

01:23:50.000 Was the Big Bang a black hole forming in another universe and popping off our own universe?

01:23:56.000 Are black holes somehow connected to other universes?

01:23:59.000 These are all incredible questions.

01:24:01.000 We don't yet have the physics to answer them.

01:24:04.000 But people have said why is it the universe has about the same density of a black hole, the same size and mass?

01:24:12.000 Is that just a coincidence, or are we looking at something deeper?

01:24:15.000 Or is it fractal?

01:24:16.000 The entire universe exists inside of a black hole.

01:24:19.000 Yes, exactly.

01:24:20.000 That's bananas.

01:24:21.000 Yeah.

01:24:22.000 There we have the very large array.

01:24:26.000 That's a wonderful observatory.

01:24:26.000 That was in Chile.

01:24:28.000 There we have a great depiction.

01:24:31.000 You found, okay, yes.

01:24:32.000 I've never seen a depiction of that.

01:24:34.000 That's the stars moving around a black hole.

01:24:34.000 That's right.

01:24:36.000 Yeah, the stars moving around a black hole.

01:24:38.000 What would this ejection be?

01:24:38.000 Yes.

01:24:41.000 So that, okay, what that is is that that's a consequence of the black hole's, that doesn't come from inside the black hole.

01:24:46.000 All of that swirling gas gets really fast.

01:24:49.000 We actually observe some of the swirling gas going close to the speed of light.

01:24:53.000 Black holes, you know, they're going down the drain.

01:24:55.000 They're going faster and faster as you get closer to the black hole.

01:24:58.000 And all of that very, very hot gas generates a very strong magnetic field.

01:25:03.000 And so what you're looking at with those jets is that that's just the magnetic field of the hot gas going around the black hole.

01:25:09.000 Some of that hot gas gets directed into jets by the magnetic field.

01:25:12.000 There's nothing coming out of the black hole.

01:25:14.000 Nothing that we know of comes out of a black hole.

01:25:16.000 But black holes are incredibly.

01:25:19.000 This is wonderfully ironic.

01:25:20.000 They're incredibly bright because if there's gas trying to get around, spinning around a black hole, the gravity accelerates that gas so fast it spins it up to, in some cases, millions or billions of degrees.

01:25:31.000 You can see them clear across the observable universe.

01:25:33.000 They're the brightest objects in the sky.

01:25:36.000 And this is not light coming from inside the black hole, it's light coming from stuff trapped around the black hole as it spirals in.

01:25:43.000 And these huge jets, we see some of these jets going, you know, in some cases, more than 100,000 light years.

01:25:48.000 I mean, they're huge jets that come out.

01:25:51.000 100,000 light years in one light year is how many trillion miles?

01:25:54.000 Six trillion miles, about.

01:25:57.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:25:58.000 Oh my God.

01:25:59.000 And then in the.

01:26:00.000 Oh my God.

01:26:01.000 Yeah, so I mean, around the.

01:26:04.000 Step pick, step video is so nuts.

01:26:06.000 I've never seen that.

01:26:07.000 Yeah.

01:26:07.000 When I was looking for this or someone across this, I saw a theoretical thing called a white hole, which is potentially maybe on the other side of a black hole.

01:26:15.000 Yeah, no, no, it's an idea.

01:26:18.000 I mean, that idea, honestly, it had a lot more following, more in like the 60s and 70s.

01:26:25.000 It's kind of fallen out of favor because at first we thought that these hugely bright objects were white holes.

01:26:30.000 At the end of a black hole, maybe the radiation went through a tunnel through space and then came out somewhere.

01:26:35.000 But now we know that these super bright objects are actually hot gas disks around black holes.

01:26:40.000 And they are bright.

01:26:41.000 Like I said, they're the brightest things we know of in the sky.

01:26:45.000 And, you know, so that's something you can see, you know, literally billions of light years away is the hot gas going around a black hole.

01:26:51.000 You said another thing that broke my brain.

01:26:54.000 You were talking about what the Big Bang is, and that we shouldn't think of the Big Bang as an explosion, but that before the Big Bang, Time and space might not have existed?

01:27:11.000 Well, pretty much certainly not in the way we experience them, no.

01:27:14.000 I mean, once again, you know, no astronomer thinks the Big Bang came from nothing.

01:27:21.000 The problem is, once again, we have no description of what that state of matter would be.

01:27:26.000 None.

01:27:28.000 I mean, the idea that everything we observe in the universe could have once been at a subatomic scale.

01:27:34.000 You'll notice I'm very careful about this.

01:27:36.000 I talk about the observable universe.

01:27:38.000 We have no idea how big the universe is.

01:27:40.000 We don't know whether it's infinite or whether it has an end.

01:27:43.000 But there's been only a certain amount of time that light has had to travel to us.

01:27:47.000 That's not the whole universe.

01:27:49.000 That's centered on us.

01:27:50.000 That's an effect of we look in every direction in the sky.

01:27:53.000 We can only look back as far as there's been time for light to actually travel to us.

01:27:58.000 And you see some incredible things.

01:28:00.000 I mean, one of the things that one of my friends has the Nobel Prize for is if you look so far away, the farthest away we can see now, we're looking back to a time about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

01:28:12.000 And this is something where we are actually able to see so far away.

01:28:17.000 We're looking back to a time when the whole universe was hot and bright.

01:28:21.000 It actually was glowing like the surface of the sun, the whole universe.

01:28:24.000 The entire universe was so bright, it was like looking at the surface of the sun.

01:28:30.000 And this has now, this radiation has traveled a long time to get to us.

01:28:35.000 It's now lost energy because it's traveling through the expanding universe.

01:28:39.000 And as the universe expands, the wavelength of light gets stretched out by the expansion of space.

01:28:46.000 This is what we call the microwave background radiation.

01:28:49.000 So there's a microwave, very low energy signal.

01:28:53.000 It comes from every direction on the sky.

01:28:56.000 And it's coming from a time, it's coming from a distance so far away that the whole universe was as bright as the surface of the sun.

01:29:04.000 And that's as far as we can see because any farther away from that, the universe is opaque.

01:29:11.000 Literally in every direction on the sky, you eventually look back to a time when the whole universe was so dense and bright, you can't see any farther.

01:29:19.000 Is this because of how we're capable of measuring?

01:29:22.000 And is it possible that at one point in time, when we get better and better telescopes, that we can look past that?

01:29:30.000 Well, not with light.

01:29:31.000 See, the universe actually does become opaque to light at that point.

01:29:34.000 Because it's too long ago.

01:29:36.000 It's basically the universe is so bright itself.

01:29:40.000 Yeah.

01:29:40.000 I mean, so you look in any direction on the sky, you look back to a time.

01:29:46.000 The wonderful thing about the universe changing is we know this is true.

01:29:49.000 The farther out we look with a telescope, the farther light has.

01:29:51.000 Had to travel, the more time it takes to get to us.

01:29:55.000 So, the sun, we see, the light takes about eight minutes to get from us to the sun, the nearest star, about four years, the nearest galaxy to us, about two million years.

01:30:04.000 We can see so far away in space that the light took pretty much the age of the universe to get to us, about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

01:30:12.000 At that point, the universe becomes opaque to light.

01:30:16.000 So, there is a limit to how much we can observe with light, how much time there has been for light to actually get to us.

01:30:24.000 Is there a potential for being able to observe something other than light?

01:30:28.000 Absolutely.

01:30:29.000 So – Your question is a really profound one.

01:30:33.000 We don't know how big the universe is.

01:30:35.000 When we talk about the universe, we mainly talk about the observable universe, everything we're able to see.

01:30:41.000 So, the question you just asked can you see farther back, even if it's opaque to light?

01:30:46.000 Yes.

01:30:47.000 And this is something that, again, we talk about moments in your life where the universe changed, where you thought people did something you thought was impossible.

01:30:56.000 And, I mean, going all the way back to the mid 90s, I was a postdoc at Caltech.

01:31:01.000 And I wasn't working with this department, but people were starting to measure something called gravitational waves.

01:31:08.000 And gravitational waves, again, I never thought they'd be able to actually detect these.

01:31:14.000 The universe is constantly, I mean, every time we move, remember how I said time is different from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet?

01:31:22.000 As I move, I create gravity.

01:31:26.000 Gravity actually goes out as a wave into the universe at the speed of light.

01:31:31.000 Can you detect a wave of gravity?

01:31:34.000 Gravity is actually a curvature of space and time itself.

01:31:38.000 So you're trying to say, could we detect a wave that's actually made of space and time?

01:31:44.000 And this project is called LIGO.

01:31:47.000 And LIGO stands for the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory.

01:31:52.000 And it started out with two facilities, one in Oregon and one in Louisiana.

01:31:56.000 And LIGO has two extremely long lasers at a corner, at a right angle.

01:32:02.000 The lasers, I believe, are four kilometers on a side.

01:32:06.000 They're huge, right?

01:32:07.000 A four kilometer laser.

01:32:09.000 They want them to be as perfectly the same length as they can.

01:32:12.000 And then there's a laser beam that bounces back and forth.

01:32:16.000 And as the laser beam bounces back and forth, if it's exactly the same length, the signal kind of cancels out.

01:32:23.000 But what happens if there's actually a wave of space and time coming by?

01:32:28.000 Space itself compresses, time changes.

01:32:32.000 All of a sudden, these two lasers are no longer exactly the same length.

01:32:36.000 Space itself has changed as a wave comes by.

01:32:40.000 Tiny amounts.

01:32:42.000 These gravitational waves are thousands of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom.

01:32:47.000 Incredible, right?

01:32:48.000 How would you detect that?

01:32:49.000 And they're traveling at the speed of light.

01:32:52.000 So you have these four kilometer lasers.

01:32:56.000 A wave of space and time comes by and compresses space and time in one direction more than the other.

01:33:01.000 All of a sudden, the lasers are no longer the same length.

01:33:04.000 You get a signal.

01:33:06.000 The noise for this, right?

01:33:07.000 I mean, every time, yeah, so this is us detecting an exploding star this way.

01:33:11.000 I'm happy to talk about that too.

01:33:13.000 But I mean, just the fact they Did this.

01:33:16.000 These lasers are under vacuums.

01:33:18.000 They're in vacuum chambers.

01:33:19.000 I mean, every time the UPS truck goes by, they must go haywire.

01:33:23.000 Somebody sneezes.

01:33:24.000 They're measuring things thousands of times smaller than the nucleus of an atom.

01:33:29.000 But over time, they got this so accurate and they did it so well that what happened, and you can look up the year, but it was something on the orbit about 10 years ago.

01:33:40.000 A long ways away, millions of light years away, two black holes spiraled together and actually.

01:33:46.000 Collided to form a big black hole.

01:33:48.000 That was a lot of gravitational energy, and that created a ripple going out into the universe.

01:33:55.000 And so, you know, there's all of the detectors have all this noise in them.

01:33:58.000 The detectors are detecting all kinds of spurious signals.

01:34:01.000 But then, all of a sudden, in Louisiana, there was this the whole detector went womp, boom.

01:34:07.000 And then, at the speed of light, the detector in Louisiana did exactly the same thing womp, the exact same waves at the speed of light difference.

01:34:15.000 And we realized, oh my God, they did it.

01:34:18.000 These tiny waves, we shouldn't even be able to detect them.

01:34:23.000 They found them, and now it's a routine thing.

01:34:26.000 They've now done this many, many times.

01:34:29.000 Waves in space and time itself might be the way we can see even farther back into the universe.

01:34:36.000 Even when the universe becomes opaque to light, waves of space and time can come through.

01:34:41.000 Gravitational waves can come through that.

01:34:44.000 And if we can somehow figure out how to make these detectors better and better, could we detect the gravitational waves of the Big Bang?

01:34:53.000 Can we learn something about that moment by the way it actually bent space and time and created waves of gravity?

01:35:00.000 And once again, I mean, just step back a sec.

01:35:02.000 Detecting waves of space and time traveling at the speed of light is something we do.

01:35:09.000 We've done this.

01:35:10.000 It got the Nobel Prize, deserved it.

01:35:13.000 There were hundreds of people on that first paper.

01:35:16.000 Some of them were friends of mine. 1.00

01:35:19.000 Again, they fucking did it. 0.99

01:35:22.000 I just cannot. 0.99

01:35:24.000 I mean, I felt my heart just drop that day out of joy. 1.00

01:35:28.000 It's like, holy fuck. 1.00

01:35:30.000 They did it. 1.00

01:35:33.000 That may give us the potential to understand the Big Bang better as we get better with that.

01:35:38.000 Maybe we can, I mean, right now we see black holes colliding, we actually see neutron stars colliding, even stars orbiting each other.

01:35:45.000 Maybe we produce a sort of a background of all these waves.

01:35:48.000 But maybe we'll be able to figure out how to see those waves from the moment the universe began.

01:35:53.000 How are we sure that of the timeline of 13.8 billion years or whatever it is?

01:36:00.000 Well, you know, I mean, these things are never sure.

01:36:03.000 Absolutely.

01:36:04.000 But there's some very good reasons to think it's about that.

01:36:09.000 So you sort of run physics backwards.

01:36:12.000 You basically say, this is how the universe is expanding now.

01:36:16.000 And let's roughly say that things came together.

01:36:20.000 As I mentioned, you mentioned the podcast, the Big Bang did not have a center.

01:36:23.000 The galaxies are not flying off into space like an explosion.

01:36:27.000 What happened is the galaxies are all kind of sort of standing where they are, but space itself is expanding in every direction between the galaxies.

01:36:35.000 It's a hard thing.

01:36:38.000 It's a huge misconception about the Big Bang that the Big Bang was this explosion and galaxies are flying into empty space.

01:36:46.000 The expansion of space is space itself.

01:36:48.000 There's no space out there that galaxies are flying into.

01:36:51.000 That's not how it works.

01:36:53.000 That's a weird thought right there.

01:36:56.000 They're not flying into space, they are space.

01:36:58.000 When I used to teach this, I used to take a board and I used to have a piece of elastic and I would hammer two nails in on either side of the board.

01:37:06.000 And then I would say, OK, these two nails are galaxies.

01:37:09.000 And the elastic between them represents our universe, in this case, a two dimensional depiction of our universe.

01:37:16.000 All of space and time, anywhere light can travel, is just on that elastic.

01:37:20.000 Don't think about up or down.

01:37:22.000 There's no space or time there.

01:37:23.000 Everything our universe is, is just this piece of elastic.

01:37:25.000 And then I would take the elastic and I would stretch it.

01:37:28.000 And I would say, the two galaxies aren't moving, they're kind of sitting there.

01:37:34.000 It's the space in between that has now stretched, has now changed.

01:37:37.000 And that's a more realistic idea.

01:37:40.000 The galaxies are not flying through space.

01:37:42.000 It's the space itself that is getting bigger in every direction at once.

01:37:48.000 And that's why there's no center.

01:37:49.000 There's no empty center to the universe.

01:37:51.000 The universe, as far as we can map it, has galaxies everywhere.

01:37:54.000 There's no center to it.

01:37:57.000 The expansion is happening in every direction at once because the elastic of space and time itself in every direction is just getting bigger.

01:38:05.000 getting bigger.

01:38:06.000 We don't know why.

01:38:08.000 So if we are looking at something where the Big Bang created space and time, and as space and time is expanding, what was the environment before The Big Bang.

01:38:24.000 Yeah, and that's the problem.

01:38:26.000 So, you mean, we have no description of that.

01:38:30.000 You know, there are particle accelerators.

01:38:33.000 I've had the wonderful chance to go to CERN a couple of times and go to the Large Hadron Collider.

01:38:39.000 And, you know, using incredible accelerating magnets, they whip just single protons up to very, very high temperatures.

01:38:50.000 I mean, they're trying to recreate conditions where, you know, I mean, they can't recreate the conditions of what things were like before the Big Bang.

01:38:58.000 But can you get matter to such a high energy state that it can recreate what things were like a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, or maybe even further back?

01:39:09.000 But the idea of what was that state of matter before that expansion, we have no description of yet.

01:39:16.000 I think we will someday.

01:39:17.000 I don't think it's impossible.

01:39:19.000 But there's nothing about our current physics.

01:39:22.000 I mean, it would be like taking somebody from the 1400s and saying, You know, describe to me what the interior of the sun is like.

01:39:30.000 They would have no knowledge structure to even attempt it.

01:39:35.000 That doesn't mean we didn't figure it out eventually.

01:39:38.000 And, you know, so like I said, there's nothing about that I think that's completely off limits, but we'll have to understand space and time very differently.

01:39:46.000 And we'll have to understand what, you know, you can't even really call it matter or even energy.

01:39:53.000 All of the energy of the universe in a subatomic space, we have no idea what that would behave like.

01:39:59.000 And what is it existing in?

01:40:01.000 Yeah, well, that's the what I'm asking is like the environment that preceded the Big Bang.

01:40:07.000 What are we talking about?

01:40:08.000 Where this subatomic thing that contains everything that's in the known universe, how is it existing?

01:40:16.000 And of course, of course, I have no answer to it.

01:40:21.000 I mean, you're asking the question that I hope someday humanity will have a chance to explore and we'll know more about.

01:40:28.000 Then I think what will happen is that once we can describe what happened before the Big Bang, There'll be a whole series of other questions.

01:40:34.000 So, if the Big Bang is the wrong way to think about it, of a bang, what's the right way to think about it?

01:40:40.000 Yeah.

01:40:41.000 The initial expansion?

01:40:42.000 I can't think of necessarily a better term.

01:40:46.000 I mean, you know, the Big Bang was meant as actually a criticism, right?

01:40:49.000 It was Fred Hoyle.

01:40:50.000 When people first began back in the 1920s, when they discovered the universe was expanding, and this was a big surprise.

01:40:58.000 I mean, famously, Albert Einstein didn't think that it was.

01:41:01.000 And then he saw the evidence that all of a sudden, with our telescopes, we saw the universe is expanding in every direction.

01:41:07.000 It was actually Fred Hoyle that said at a conference, as a way of making fun of this, people were saying, well, maybe everything went back to sort of a common, denser structure.

01:41:18.000 It was actually a Belgian Jesuit father, a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaître, who came up with the idea that if the universe was expanding now, if we run time backwards, maybe it all becomes one big, he called it the primordial atom.

01:41:34.000 That was Georges Lemaître.

01:41:36.000 What year was this?

01:41:40.000 So we would have been talking around about probably sometime in the 1920s.

01:41:40.000 George Lemaitre.

01:41:45.000 I bet we could probably have some help.

01:41:48.000 So 100 years ago.

01:41:48.000 Yeah, 100 years ago.

01:41:50.000 So George Lemaitre says if we run time backwards, we get this big lump of something, the primordial atom.

01:41:57.000 And then Fred Hoyle said, What, you mean the whole universe started with a big bang?

01:42:02.000 You know, really?

01:42:03.000 There was this big, there was this atom that went bang.

01:42:05.000 So even the term the big bang was meant as a criticism, it was meant to be funny.

01:42:10.000 It wasn't something that scientists came up with as the best description.

01:42:13.000 But what happened then is everybody kind of nodded and said, well, yeah.

01:42:17.000 Said, well, yeah.

01:42:21.000 More people should know about Georges Lemaître, the Jesuit Belgian scientist that came up with that idea.

01:42:27.000 I think he was a fascinating man.

01:42:29.000 Interestingly enough, even as a Jesuit, he did not think that this necessarily was a biblical Genesis story.

01:42:36.000 He was approaching this as a scientist.

01:42:39.000 What's the best thing we can say to describe these different times and states of the universe?

01:42:44.000 A lot of my friends are the Catholic Church, the Jesuits have had an active astronomy program for a thousand years.

01:42:51.000 And so the Vatican Observatory still has an excellent program.

01:42:56.000 But the question you're asking about what came before the Big Bang I mean, again, what happens inside a black hole?

01:43:04.000 It's wonderful that there are these things right over the horizon from us.

01:43:09.000 We know the universe is expanding.

01:43:10.000 What was it like before?

01:43:12.000 What a great, simple, elegant question.

01:43:15.000 We have no idea yet.

01:43:17.000 Why do we think that it was so small?

01:43:22.000 There's some interesting evidence about that.

01:43:24.000 And once again, it's not so much that the entire universe was small.

01:43:29.000 There's compelling evidence that everything we can see was once in a very small volume.

01:43:34.000 Let me just sort of say that.

01:43:37.000 We're limited by this time factor.

01:43:39.000 You look out as far as you can, and eventually you get to the time of the Big Bang.

01:43:43.000 You can't see any further.

01:43:45.000 The universe to us is only as big as light has had time to travel to us.

01:43:50.000 That's not the whole universe.

01:43:51.000 If you're on a galaxy billions of light years away from us, that galaxy sees its own observable universe.

01:43:58.000 You know, I mean, we basically see in a sphere around us how far we're able to see given the time.

01:44:04.000 A galaxy that we can observe with the Webb telescope has its own sphere around it.

01:44:09.000 It's seeing into the universe farther than we can see in some directions.

01:44:14.000 So we know the universe isn't just our observable universe.

01:44:19.000 So, like I said, so I mean, we see, we're here, we can see as far back as light has had time to travel to us since the Big Bang.

01:44:26.000 But then there's another galaxy over here, and it has its own view.

01:44:30.000 And then there's another one over here that has its own view.

01:44:32.000 Jimmy put something up here.

01:44:34.000 Yeah.

01:44:34.000 So, yeah, I'm not even sure that.

01:44:36.000 I mean, that's a great NASA depiction of where this.

01:44:41.000 You see, as you move toward the left back to the time of the Big Bang, you get to this kind of beautiful, kind of rainbow colored area.

01:44:47.000 And that's what they call the afterglow.

01:44:50.000 That's the microwave background radiation about 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

01:44:55.000 That's as far as we can see.

01:44:57.000 The universe after that becomes opaque.

01:45:00.000 So, that's as far as our observable universe can take us.

01:45:03.000 We know that's not the whole universe.

01:45:06.000 So, the whole universe could have been huge before the Big Bang, it could have been infinite.

01:45:11.000 We don't know how big it was.

01:45:12.000 All we know is our little bit of it.

01:45:15.000 For the sake of argument, let's say I'm the entire meta universe.

01:45:20.000 There was a little atom of me that expanded to become the known universe we know.

01:45:24.000 But that doesn't mean that that little atom was the whole universe.

01:45:27.000 The universe could be huge.

01:45:29.000 We don't know.

01:45:30.000 Before the Big Bang, it could have already been infinitely large.

01:45:33.000 We have no idea.

01:45:35.000 The only evidence we have is that the stuff we can see was once in a very close area.

01:45:40.000 And that goes back to that radiation, that microwave background.

01:45:44.000 The microwave background has been a wonderful story.

01:45:49.000 It was discovered back in the 1970s by two scientists from Bell Labs called Penzias and Wilson.

01:45:56.000 And they were trying to categorize, they were dealing with Bell Labs, they were trying to deal with microwave signals, microwave communication.

01:46:04.000 And they built a big microwave telescope.

01:46:06.000 And they started to catalog what objects in the sky naturally produce microwaves.

01:46:11.000 The sun produces some, other things produce microwaves.

01:46:13.000 This was all for communications.

01:46:16.000 And they discovered that everywhere they looked in the sky, there was this background noise.

01:46:21.000 Very low level, but it was there.

01:46:23.000 Everywhere they looked, it was the same.

01:46:24.000 Didn't matter what direction the telescope was pointing.

01:46:27.000 And so, what a good scientist would assume is that that's probably a problem with your telescope.

01:46:32.000 If you have background noise in every direction you look, it's probably in your detector. 0.99

01:46:36.000 And the best guess they had was that it was pigeon shit. 0.99

01:46:41.000 Pigeon, look at that. 0.99

01:46:41.000 So, there you go. 0.99

01:46:42.000 Wow.

01:46:43.000 So, Sapenzius and Wilson built this, they were working with this big microwave telescope. 0.99

01:46:48.000 And little did I know that pigeon shit actually gives off microwaves. 0.99

01:46:52.000 It does. 0.99

01:46:53.000 They trapped all the pigeons in the microwave telescope.

01:46:56.000 You could actually see a pigeon trap in the Smithsonian where they did this. 0.99

01:47:00.000 They scraped out all the pigeon shit. 0.98

01:47:02.000 And lo and behold, the signal was still there. 0.99

01:47:05.000 In every direction you looked, it was exactly the same.

01:47:08.000 Exactly.

01:47:10.000 And what they had discovered was the afterglow of the Big Bang, the energy left over from that time when the universe was so hot, it was opaque to light.

01:47:20.000 And the crazy thing is, it is exactly the same down to fractions of a degree in every direction on the sky.

01:47:28.000 It's sort of like, you know, you look all the way the age of the universe in one direction.

01:47:32.000 It's exactly the same temperature as the age of the universe in that direction.

01:47:36.000 And there shouldn't have been time for those two areas of space to ever get to know each other.

01:47:40.000 There shouldn't have been time.

01:47:42.000 It's like, you know, everything came to the same temperature everywhere you look.

01:47:47.000 Why?

01:47:49.000 It's sort of thinking like if I have a coffee cup.

01:47:52.000 You know, the coffee cup eventually comes to exactly the same temperature.

01:47:55.000 You know, everything becomes thermally equilibrium.

01:47:58.000 Everything comes to the same temperature.

01:48:00.000 You wouldn't expect your coffee cup to be like, you know, 300 degrees on one side and, you know, minus 50 on the other.

01:48:07.000 Somehow, the universe had a chance to all come to the same temperature, even though those areas of the universe were so far apart, they should never have had a chance to touch each other.

01:48:17.000 And that became part of the thinking that maybe at one point when the universe was that large, things were much smaller.

01:48:23.000 The universe did have a chance to come to this exact same temperature all over.

01:48:28.000 Boy, I hope I can see by your expression, I should do a better job of explaining this.

01:48:31.000 No, you're doing a great job.

01:48:32.000 It's just absolutely fascinating.

01:48:34.000 My expression is just perplexed.

01:48:35.000 Yeah, well, no, so this is one of the best proofs that things were small.

01:48:40.000 That you look back to this microwave background radiation, and we're talking fractions and fractions of a degree.

01:48:48.000 The first NASA satellite that observed it was called COBE, and then the Cosmic Microwave Explorer, and then there was a new one.

01:48:55.000 In the 1990s, called WMAC, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

01:49:00.000 Oh, yes, good.

01:49:01.000 And they measured this down to hundreds of thousands of a degree.

01:49:06.000 I mean, they measured it to tiny little amounts.

01:49:09.000 And the incredible thing was that it was almost exactly the same temperature, but there were these beautiful, large variations in the temperature.

01:49:20.000 And the variation in the temperatures corresponded to sound waves propagating across the whole universe at that time.

01:49:27.000 It's deep.

01:49:28.000 It's wonderful.

01:49:30.000 I highly recommend you read about this.

01:49:33.000 We have this signal that comes back from basically the first moment the universe became transparent to light.

01:49:39.000 It was so dense, it was opaque beforehand.

01:49:42.000 There was a moment light could finally, freely fly through the universe.

01:49:47.000 And we found that.

01:49:48.000 We found that signal.

01:49:50.000 It goes back to a time about 100,000 years after, 400,000 years after the Big Bang.

01:49:55.000 And it is breathtaking in its Profound nature.

01:49:58.000 You can actually see sound waves go across the whole universe.

01:50:02.000 Wow.

01:50:03.000 Yeah.

01:50:04.000 Wow.

01:50:05.000 Now, when we think of the Big Bang, we think of it as almost being an instantaneous event.

01:50:11.000 Well, yeah.

01:50:12.000 I mean, again, as an experimental scientist, there are all these wonderful theories about what things happened like a millionth of a second and a billionth of a second after.

01:50:23.000 And I'm going to take all that with a grain of salt.

01:50:26.000 I don't think we understand it well enough to be all that confident about that.

01:50:31.000 There's a great book called The First Three Minutes, which has been around since the, oh, geez, probably since the 1970s, maybe even longer.

01:50:38.000 And it sort of outlines how we think that the universe in the first three minutes basically went from the Big Bang.

01:50:44.000 To just sort of all the hydrogen and helium that we have.

01:50:48.000 And in the first three minutes, pretty much everything was done.

01:50:51.000 The whole sort of process of the Big Bang was done in those first three minutes.

01:50:56.000 The actual Big Bang itself goes back to something called the Planck epoch, which you see there 10 to the minus 33rd seconds, 10 to the minus 43rd seconds.

01:51:04.000 So take a decimal point, draw 42 zeros, and then a 433.

01:51:10.000 Singularity, infinite density, and temperature.

01:51:13.000 Quantum gravity dominates, forces unified.

01:51:16.000 Absolutely.

01:51:17.000 Again, big, big chunk of salt there.

01:51:19.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:51:20.000 I mean, so this is not bullshit. 0.61

01:51:24.000 This is the best model given our understanding of modern physics.

01:51:29.000 Do I think this is right?

01:51:31.000 Literally, no.

01:51:32.000 I think we've got a lot to understand about how gravity works in high density situations.

01:51:39.000 When gravity and quantum mechanics come together, those two theories, they don't work well together.

01:51:45.000 And in order to understand how things were like right before the Big Bang or even right after, I think you need to understand that a lot.

01:51:50.000 Better.

01:51:51.000 All this stuff that we think may be dark matter and dark energy, none of that is in the current theory of how the Big Bang started.

01:51:58.000 We don't know if it's important or not.

01:52:00.000 That's a good first step.

01:52:02.000 You have to.

01:52:03.000 You have to take your current understanding of physics and take it as far as you can.

01:52:08.000 But in the case of what happened right at the instant of the Big Bang, I don't think we're there yet.

01:52:12.000 I think we need a better understanding of what happens when you have that amount of density in such an entire space.

01:52:18.000 It's like the interior of a black hole.

01:52:20.000 We don't have the physics to describe high density, high gravity.

01:52:24.000 Conditions.

01:52:25.000 Insane high density.

01:52:26.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:52:27.000 I mean, to the point where you can't even.

01:52:30.000 Take the known universe and put it inside the nucleus of an atom.

01:52:33.000 Yeah, we don't got that yet.

01:52:36.000 And what is it in?

01:52:38.000 And are there others?

01:52:39.000 I mean, some of the best ideas about the Big Bang is that the expansion never stops, it kind of pops off universes, like you said, almost fractally all the time.

01:52:48.000 That's the idea of Alan Guth.

01:52:52.000 That's the idea of Alan Guth's idea.

01:52:56.000 Well, that's.

01:52:57.000 It's not the expanding universe.

01:52:59.000 I'll come up with it later.

01:53:00.000 But back in the 1970s, a man at MIT, Alan Guth, had his theory of how this expansion might never stop.

01:53:08.000 So we don't know that.

01:53:13.000 That may absolutely There you go, inflation, inflationary.

01:53:15.000 Sorry, that was a complete mental fart.

01:53:18.000 I know the inflationary universe.

01:53:19.000 But again, I think all of this is a necessary first grasp using our current understanding of physics.

01:53:27.000 I don't think we understand how the Big Bang went off yet.

01:53:31.000 A ways to go.

01:53:32.000 Well, it's got to be so fascinating to you to know so much and yet still have so many things that we have no idea.

01:53:41.000 You know, that's, I think, you've just hit it on the head about one of the most beautiful and one of the most frustrating and even scary things about being a scientist.

01:53:52.000 You have to be honest about what you don't know.

01:53:56.000 I mean, you have to say, we made this measurement and it's real. 0.98

01:54:01.000 We fucking managed to see the event horizon of a Black hole. 0.95

01:54:04.000 We caught the same wavelength of light over thousands of miles. 0.99

01:54:09.000 You can say what's real, and then you can say these are the things we do not know.

01:54:15.000 And they are major.

01:54:18.000 How did the universe begin?

01:54:20.000 What happens inside a black hole?

01:54:22.000 What happens inside a neutron star?

01:54:25.000 We don't have the ability yet to know.

01:54:29.000 And it's hard for humans to stop there.

01:54:32.000 And of course, we make better experiments, find a better theory of physics.

01:54:36.000 But for the moment, you need to sit with that uncertainty.

01:54:40.000 There is no one who knows what happened.

01:54:43.000 And there are so many things in our life that I've had to confront where you have to become comfortable with stopping there, at least for now.

01:54:53.000 You know, I do not understand this.

01:54:55.000 I do not have the answer to this, and I don't think anybody does.

01:55:00.000 And I think we'd actually benefit a lot more in humility and joy and maybe even compassion with each other, you know, if we can respect that stop and say, you know, you may not have the same answer as to what comes next.

01:55:15.000 About life or death or the beginning of the universe or the inside of a black hole.

01:55:18.000 We can respect each other.

01:55:21.000 To me, I find a good discipline and the humility to stop and say, I don't know.

01:55:26.000 Well, it's very important because otherwise we're not going to believe you with stuff you do know.

01:55:32.000 There has to be some things that you can't know.

01:55:34.000 It has to be measurable.

01:55:35.000 be measurable especially in the current state of what we were able to measure right now science And then I think this is beautiful.

01:55:42.000 I think people don't understand.

01:55:43.000 There are things that are outside, at least for now, the realm of measurement, and that doesn't mean they're not real.

01:55:50.000 As a scientist, I cannot say that there aren't ghosts or inside a black hole or alien visitations or whatever.

01:55:59.000 There are all kinds of things that are wonderful to think about.

01:56:03.000 What can you do a consistent experiment on that people all around the world could do the same experiment and get the same result?

01:56:12.000 That's science, and it's limited.

01:56:14.000 I've had to talk to so many people that called into NASA saying they had profound experiences with time travel.

01:56:21.000 You had to talk to time travelers?

01:56:23.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:56:24.000 Or people would call in.

01:56:26.000 Was there a time traveler hotline like Art Bell?

01:56:28.000 They would often forward the calls to me.

01:56:30.000 Why you?

01:56:31.000 Well, I mean, I was doing communications at NASA, and I think they just didn't know what to do with these people.

01:56:37.000 And I think they knew, and I pride myself on this, I try to be kind, I try to lead with compassion.

01:56:43.000 And I would listen to people's stories about, you know, I was.

01:56:46.000 I traveled in time, or I was abducted by an alien, or many things.

01:56:51.000 And I would listen to them.

01:56:52.000 I think that what they mainly wanted to do was find somebody to listen.

01:56:57.000 I would say to them, You have had a profound experience.

01:57:00.000 You have experienced something that I mean, I hope you use you as a gift.

01:57:05.000 I would say there's not much as a scientist that I can do with an individual experience.

01:57:11.000 I can't do an experiment on it, I can't have my colleagues all over the world do the same experiment.

01:57:19.000 About what you, you know, did you have a spiritual experience?

01:57:22.000 Did you have a profound feeling of oneness?

01:57:25.000 I mean, it's not that these aren't real.

01:57:28.000 Science has to be limited.

01:57:31.000 Because just like what you said, how can you trust it?

01:57:37.000 How can you trust people are saying, I mean, why are these people at NASA allowed to have telescopes and do all this stuff?

01:57:43.000 I mean, what makes this worthwhile?

01:57:44.000 You have to say there's a limitation.

01:57:49.000 You know, what do we have clear evidence on?

01:57:52.000 That everyone could do the same experiment and get a similar result.

01:57:55.000 That doesn't mean other things aren't real.

01:57:59.000 That doesn't mean other things aren't real.

01:58:02.000 It means that science is limited to what is reproducible, consistently reproducible.

01:58:12.000 And what a human experiences could be profound and real, but at the moment, not in the realm of science.

01:58:20.000 So you're not discounting the possibility of people having profound experiences, but there's really no way to measure it.

01:58:28.000 At the moment, no.

01:58:29.000 At the moment.

01:58:29.000 I mean, maybe when we understand the brain better, maybe when if AIs are sharing minds, you know, we're talking, you know, incredible, fun conjecture here.

01:58:41.000 At the moment, we're limited with the tools of what is reproducible.

01:58:45.000 You know, I mean, if you observe in one direction with your telescope for a certain amount of time at a certain wavelength of light, you should see pretty much the same thing, you know, whoever does the experiment.

01:58:56.000 You know, if you're doing an experiment with atoms or quantum mechanics or, you know, whatever, it has to be reproducible.

01:59:04.000 That doesn't mean that profound things that are real are not there.

01:59:08.000 They're just not in the realm of science right now.

01:59:10.000 When you're communicating with people that supposedly have had experiences with intelligent life from somewhere else and you spend so much time looking up at space, like how much time and how much effort do you spend even considering that possibility of life somewhere else?

01:59:29.000 Or of whether or not these people have actually experienced visitation or whether or not it's some sort of mental illness or whether there's some kind of an experience that's available to people occasionally here.

01:59:42.000 defies our understanding of what is measurable and what's reproducible, that there's something else out there.

01:59:53.000 I think that's a wonderful question.

01:59:55.000 And I think this may give you a little bit of a snapshot of the culture of science and a mind of a scientist, because it's an odd little tightrope to walk.

02:00:04.000 I'm very proud of it, actually.

02:00:06.000 I think it's kind of beautiful.

02:00:10.000 All of us to a person at NASA thinks there must be life out there.

02:00:15.000 The idea that there's only life on the Earth seems untenable.

02:00:18.000 I mean, not only do you see the billions of stars in our own galaxy, but we see billions of galaxies.

02:00:24.000 How could it just be us?

02:00:25.000 How could it?

02:00:27.000 We're all science fiction fans.

02:00:29.000 We all love the idea of there being life out there.

02:00:33.000 I always keep a bottle of champagne chilling.

02:00:36.000 I have for decades now in the hopes that someday we'll have a clear Evidence of life outside the Earth.

02:00:42.000 We'll have a signal that we can.

02:00:43.000 What are you willing to pop the champagne for?

02:00:46.000 Is it molecules?

02:00:47.000 Is it bacteria?

02:00:49.000 Definitely bacteria. 0.96

02:00:52.000 I definitely pond scum, some little microbe on Mars. 0.90

02:00:55.000 You got it. 0.99

02:00:56.000 The champagne is coming out.

02:00:58.000 At the same time, there are the fantastic scientists of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, who are scanning the skies looking for mathematical signals from civilizations.

02:01:08.000 The question for me comes down to again, what is a reproducible observation?

02:01:15.000 And with the advent, I mean, the recent release of these videos from fighter jets and all of that, I think an interesting thing is that scientists at NASA and the universities, I mean, we're not getting together over a beer and looking at these videos and really getting excited.

02:01:31.000 It's not enough yet.

02:01:34.000 We're seeing these things we can't explain, but we're trained as skeptical scientists to sort of stop there.

02:01:41.000 Okay, we can't explain this.

02:01:44.000 That next step that this is an alien.

02:01:47.000 We're not willing to go yet.

02:01:49.000 We need more evidence than that.

02:01:52.000 But as I said, that's a deliberate training of a scientist, is that skeptical stop.

02:02:01.000 The people who have had experiences, and no, I'm not willing to dismiss them as being mentally ill necessarily, I honestly don't know what it is they experience.

02:02:12.000 It is certainly within my realm of possibility that what they're describing actually happened.

02:02:19.000 I cannot say that that's impossible.

02:02:23.000 As a skeptical scientist, I'm stopped by, I would need more evidence than an individual experience.

02:02:31.000 This happens in many aspects of life.

02:02:33.000 It's not just the visitation of extraterrestrials.

02:02:37.000 I have people that are extremely trustworthy, who would never lie, who have had profound spiritual experiences.

02:02:46.000 They have experiences of an afterlife and of people living on after death and of being able to communicate with people.

02:02:53.000 And that is not part of my experience.

02:02:57.000 But these people are completely 100% trustworthy.

02:03:03.000 I have to live in this universe where I don't get to say what's real and what's not.

02:03:09.000 These trustworthy people have experienced something profound, and it may be real.

02:03:15.000 It may be that they've seen people after they've died, or they've seen visitors from other planets.

02:03:23.000 That gives me joy.

02:03:25.000 I sure hope we live in a larger reality that I'm aware of.

02:03:30.000 As a scientist, I pull back and say it's not my experience.

02:03:34.000 It's not something I can measure yet.

02:03:36.000 And so I live in this hope that someday we'll have more proof.

02:03:43.000 I live in this hope that someday there'll be a signal we know is artificial.

02:03:47.000 We see something we can't explain otherwise.

02:03:49.000 We are visited clearly.

02:03:51.000 You know, I.

02:03:56.000 I live in this sort of skeptical tightrope with hope that someday things will become more clear.

02:04:01.000 That's a great place to be.

02:04:01.000 I love that.

02:04:02.000 I actually like it.

02:04:03.000 To me, I think humility and compassion, you know, I think we could the whole world could use a lot more of that.

02:04:12.000 For sure.

02:04:14.000 I mean, reserve judgment.

02:04:14.000 Yeah.

02:04:16.000 Think about how different a human experience is.

02:04:18.000 We don't understand what consciousness is, we don't understand how the human brain works.

02:04:22.000 You know, is it possible somebody had a different experience of time?

02:04:26.000 Maybe it is.

02:04:28.000 You know, in science, what can we measure is powerful.

02:04:31.000 We do things we should not be able to do, like catch waves of space and time, see light and space curve around a neutron star.

02:04:41.000 And that's real.

02:04:42.000 That's a measurement.

02:04:43.000 Stick a pin in it, it's done.

02:04:44.000 And leave humility and compassion for the experience of other humans.

02:04:49.000 How much are we limited by our senses?

02:04:53.000 Oh, yeah.

02:04:55.000 I mean, I mean, is space and time a construct of our brains, actually?

02:05:00.000 Seriously.

02:05:00.000 I mean, not just, I mean, for a while now, ever since the late 1700s, we've known that there is light that our eyes don't detect.

02:05:07.000 Mind blowing.

02:05:08.000 The human eye only detects a tiny amount of light that exists in the universe.

02:05:12.000 Colors of light that our eye just doesn't detect at all are real.

02:05:18.000 You know, they were some of the first measurement was William Herschel back in the late 1700s.

02:05:22.000 He discovered infrared radiation.

02:05:24.000 Is it even deeper than that?

02:05:28.000 You know, I mean, are there, as I said, you know, friends who have experiences with people who are dead?

02:05:35.000 Are there people that are sensitive to that and other brains are not?

02:05:38.000 You know, is it possible that people have very different experiences of reality?

02:05:38.000 Maybe?

02:05:45.000 I mean, I've, I will admit, I'm a chicken.

02:05:48.000 A chicken.

02:05:49.000 I've never actually done any hallucinogenic drugs.

02:05:52.000 I have been tempted because I do sometimes wonder if, under that sort of influence, the filters of our brain are different.

02:05:59.000 I mean, could you actually have an experience of something that could be real because your filters, how we perceive space and time in the universe, are changed by the drug?

02:06:08.000 Like I said, I'm too much of a chicken, but I've always been curious about that.

02:06:13.000 Is it possible different people have seriously different ways of experiencing the universe?

02:06:18.000 Yeah, it may be.

02:06:20.000 What about it makes you a chicken?

02:06:25.000 I'm not sure I trust an unleashed mind in my case.

02:06:29.000 I have, I think there are people who suffer or are gifted by very extreme dreams.

02:06:35.000 I'm one of them.

02:06:36.000 I'm often exhausted by my dreams in the morning.

02:06:39.000 Actually, I had a night last night.

02:06:41.000 The dreams were a lot to recover from.

02:06:45.000 And I'm a little worried.

02:06:48.000 Sometimes my dreams are wonderful, and sometimes they are horrible.

02:06:51.000 I remember them forever.

02:06:53.000 There are things I really would like to erase that I've dreamt about.

02:06:58.000 I'm not real confident in letting my mind be unfettered.

02:07:04.000 Hmm.

02:07:05.000 Yeah.

02:07:08.000 Why do you think it's unfettered?

02:07:11.000 What about a psychedelic, excuse me, a psychedelic experience makes you consider it as an unfettered mind?

02:07:11.000 Why do you...

02:07:20.000 I guess, I mean, that may be sort of the propaganda of the good and bad trips, right?

02:07:24.000 People have, you know.

02:07:25.000 People sometimes have wonderful experiences and sometimes very terrible ones.

02:07:28.000 Do you know why, though?

02:07:29.000 No.

02:07:30.000 It's control.

02:07:31.000 You're trying to control it for the most part.

02:07:33.000 Most people that describe bad trips, it's they're trying to resist it because you're flooded with anxiety and fear and the unknown, and it seems very strange, like bizarre, beyond reality.

02:07:47.000 One of the craziest things about the most prevalent psychedelic is that the mind produces it, which is dimethyltryptamine.

02:07:56.000 The brain produces it.

02:07:57.000 It's produced in the liver and the lungs.

02:07:59.000 It's very, very weird.

02:08:00.000 The most.

02:08:01.000 Potent psychedelic known to man is actually made by the human body.

02:08:04.000 Fascinating.

02:08:05.000 It's one of the weirdest ones, too, because your body brings it back to baseline very quickly.

02:08:09.000 It's a very quick experience.

02:08:11.000 It's like 15 minutes.

02:08:12.000 And they think part of the reason why your body processes it so fast is because it's endogenous.

02:08:18.000 It's so common to the human body that your body gets this big flood of it.

02:08:22.000 It's like, oh, I know what to do with this.

02:08:23.000 And it brings you back to baseline very, very quickly.

02:08:26.000 The weirdest part about that experience is that it feels way more real than reality itself.

02:08:31.000 And that's what everybody describes.

02:08:33.000 So you might be correct.

02:08:35.000 In that, what these things may be able to do, especially something that the actual body, the human body produces on its own, that you might be able to experience things that are there all the time, but you just lack the ability to interface with them.

02:08:52.000 Yeah.

02:08:53.000 Because there's some sort of a chemical gateway that's opened by these things.

02:08:58.000 I can entirely believe that.

02:08:59.000 I mean, again, stepping a little bit away from science into conjecture, that makes perfect sense to me.

02:09:07.000 Physics shows us that time and space are not the way we perceive them.

02:09:11.000 We know that.

02:09:13.000 We don't know what they are, but we know they're not a simple flow and space is just nothing.

02:09:19.000 We know space and time can bend and change.

02:09:24.000 The idea that our brain filters this somehow is entirely possible and that people may have slightly different filters.

02:09:32.000 I think it's I always wondered that about schizophrenics.

02:09:34.000 What are they experiencing?

02:09:36.000 Are they in a constant dream state?

02:09:38.000 Profoundly schizophrenic people that are just having voices and communication.

02:09:43.000 Communication, like, what?

02:09:45.000 What a, I mean, I don't want to do it, but could you imagine if you've got some guy ranting and raving on the street corner, if you say, just let me in there for five seconds?

02:09:53.000 Yeah, what would you say?

02:09:54.000 Just give me five seconds.

02:09:55.000 What is reality like to this guy, and what's wrong?

02:09:58.000 What's wrong with his interface?

02:10:00.000 What is happening with him that's he's seeing things that none of us see?

02:10:05.000 He's experiencing things that none of us experience, but he's doing it all day long, constantly.

02:10:10.000 He, like, lives in a crazy fantasy world.

02:10:13.000 Well, I may be interested.

02:10:14.000 I mean, I've also.

02:10:16.000 Not just the experience of physics, and people have talked about being able to see sounds and hear colors.

02:10:22.000 I think that would be fascinating.

02:10:23.000 But a lot of people have talked to me as well about the benefits for grief. 0.98

02:10:28.000 That's something that I got knocked on my ass by grief. 0.98

02:10:32.000 I still am. 0.99

02:10:33.000 I'm trying to figure out how you get beyond that.

02:10:38.000 I've heard as well that psychedelic drugs can be a treatment for that.

02:10:42.000 Yeah, a lot of it is also for people that have end of life anxiety, people that are dying from cancer.

02:10:48.000 Particularly psilocybin, for some reason, has a profound effect on people like experiencing it and letting it go.

02:10:55.000 I remember, do you remember that show Dallas?

02:10:58.000 Yeah.

02:10:59.000 Remember, I think it was Larry Hagman.

02:11:01.000 Yeah.

02:11:02.000 Is that what his name was?

02:11:03.000 So he was on CNN once and he was talking about life and death.

02:11:03.000 Yeah.

02:11:09.000 And he said that he had an experience on LSD that completely released him from his fear of death.

02:11:16.000 And it was the most bizarre CNN interview ever.

02:11:19.000 Sounds fantastic.

02:11:20.000 Yeah, I know.

02:11:21.000 But like, they're saying, like, I don't think they expected J.R. Ewing to say this.

02:11:25.000 You know, the guy from Dallas who was like this bad guy.

02:11:27.000 Here it is.

02:11:28.000 I'm trying to enjoy Behar on Headline News.

02:11:30.000 It's very, I mean.

02:11:31.000 Oh, it's Headline.

02:11:31.000 Yeah.

02:11:32.000 Is that CNN?

02:11:33.000 It's some very similar.

02:11:35.000 Okay.

02:11:36.000 I would like that.

02:11:37.000 I would like to lose my fear of death.

02:11:38.000 Listen to what he says.

02:11:39.000 Crosby, Stills, and Nash turned you on to LSD.

02:11:43.000 What was that like?

02:11:44.000 Tell me a little about that.

02:11:48.000 Oh, how much time we got?

02:11:50.000 About a minute.

02:11:52.000 But you can do a lot in a minute.

02:11:53.000 A minute.

02:11:54.000 Yeah.

02:11:55.000 Okay, it took the fear of death away.

02:11:58.000 Really?

02:12:00.000 That's a great answer.

02:12:02.000 That's a great answer.

02:12:03.000 But did it hold?

02:12:05.000 Yeah.

02:12:06.000 Do you have to keep taking it to not be scared?

02:12:08.000 No, did it hold?

02:12:09.000 Did the lack of fear, the losing of fear?

02:12:12.000 Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, sure, absolutely.

02:12:14.000 Once you've lost the fear of death, it doesn't matter.

02:12:16.000 How did it, what happened to you?

02:12:18.000 How did that manifest?

02:12:22.000 Oh, my dear.

02:12:24.000 Have you heard of the white light?

02:12:25.000 Have you heard of that?

02:12:26.000 Only when I'm going into Jersey.

02:12:32.000 Well, I went into this place that was the white light where everything's okay.

02:12:40.000 Well, I think that's worth taking.

02:12:44.000 Yeah.

02:12:45.000 And I think it ought to be mandatory that all our politicians should do it at least once.

02:12:50.000 Now, that's a good suggestion.

02:12:52.000 I think Joy should do it too. 1.00

02:12:54.000 Quit the view.

02:12:56.000 Can you imagine being in an interview and somebody's like, you got 30 seconds, tell me about the most profound experience you've ever had? 0.95

02:13:01.000 Yeah, that's the most ridiculous aspect. 0.83

02:13:03.000 Of those shows is that they're constricted by time. 0.86

02:13:05.000 I like that idea, though.

02:13:06.000 And I like the idea that it could help us through things like that.

02:13:10.000 I really do.

02:13:10.000 I mean, I know psilocybin was legal in Washington, D.C., when I was living near Washington, D.C., when my husband died.

02:13:17.000 And, you know, I really wanted to.

02:13:20.000 I really wish somebody could have made him be happier.

02:13:23.000 You know, I was like, should I just go get some?

02:13:25.000 You know, and I never.

02:13:27.000 I didn't, but I thought it should be a therapy, an optional therapy.

02:13:30.000 You know, that could be something that you give people to help them through that.

02:13:30.000 Yeah.

02:13:34.000 Well, you know, we are very.

02:13:37.000 Restricted by the propaganda that made all that stuff illegal in the first place, unfortunately.

02:13:45.000 I recently went to the White House to help make these things available for veterans and for first responders and people dealing with traumatic experiences.

02:13:56.000 The only reason why they were illegal was because of the Nixon administration, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.

02:14:03.000 What they did was they were targeting the civil rights movement and the anti war movement.

02:14:07.000 Knew that these people were taking these kind of drugs, and this is part of the fear of like the hippie movement and all these people.

02:14:13.000 And so they just made all these things Schedule One, meaning they had no medicinal use whatsoever, highly addictive, very dangerous.

02:14:19.000 And it's not true.

02:14:20.000 It's not true.

02:14:21.000 I mean, you can't eat enough mushrooms to die.

02:14:24.000 It's not even possible.

02:14:26.000 You'd have to eat pounds of it, and most people are going to live even then.

02:14:31.000 Like, it's not what they think it is, it's not what they said it was.

02:14:36.000 And they inundated our society with this propaganda that's taken.

02:14:40.000 More than 50 years for people to escape.

02:14:43.000 It confused the shit out of everybody about what these things really are. 0.93

02:14:47.000 And that's why you have this fear of the unfettered mind. 0.62

02:14:51.000 I don't think you should have that fear.

02:14:53.000 I like that idea.

02:14:54.000 You also could take a microdose.

02:14:56.000 If you found someone who could get you some, take a microdose and I think you'd enjoy it profoundly.

02:15:01.000 And it wouldn't freak you out at all.

02:15:02.000 A microdose is like a sub psychedelic threshold dose where you just feel better, you just feel wonderful.

02:15:10.000 It's like you feel nicer.

02:15:12.000 You feel like you have better spatial awareness, which is weird.

02:15:16.000 Better edge detection.

02:15:17.000 It's very strange, like measurable.

02:15:19.000 Like they did these studies, I think it was in the 1960s, where they gave people psilocybin and then they had a control group.

02:15:26.000 And the people that were on psilocybin were able to detect when parallel lines varied quicker than the people that were not on psilocybin.

02:15:34.000 So they had these parallel lines and they slightly deviated.

02:15:36.000 The people on psilocybin were able to detect it much quicker.

02:15:39.000 Yeah.

02:15:40.000 Which is weird.

02:15:41.000 Well, again, I mean, to me that makes sense.

02:15:43.000 I mean, you know, I can imagine that, you know, if the brain is stimulated in certain ways, it would act more efficiently.

02:15:49.000 It could, you know, sure, but that works with me.

02:15:52.000 Well, the weirdest thing about it is that when they do brain scans of people on psilocybin, it doesn't show a stimulated brain.

02:15:58.000 All right.

02:15:58.000 It shows a quiet brain.

02:16:00.000 We understand so little about the brain.

02:16:03.000 I had a friend who was a neuroscientist at Caltech.

02:16:05.000 And, you know, one of the things he really, I loved this quotation.

02:16:09.000 He said that we always compare the brain historically to sort of what the height of our technology is.

02:16:14.000 The Romans thought of it as sort of a series of fluid aqueducts.

02:16:18.000 And then in the 18th century, you had the idea of gears, cogs, cognition, right, where we get that word from.

02:16:25.000 And clockwork was their highest form of technology.

02:16:28.000 And then we compare it to a computer.

02:16:30.000 And it's probably about as much of a computer as it is a clock, right?

02:16:33.000 I mean, we do not understand yet how this works.

02:16:37.000 We have no idea what the mechanism of memory, or why do we perceive space and time the way we do?

02:16:46.000 If the universe really does exist in a huge infinite now, how can we think one event causes another?

02:16:51.000 How can we think time progresses?

02:16:54.000 These are fascinating questions about our lack of understanding of what the brain is at all, how it works.

02:17:01.000 I'm sure when we understand quantum computing better, we'll probably say it's a quantum computer.

02:17:08.000 However, technology progresses, we're always comparing it to the height of our current technology.

02:17:16.000 Face with technology, does that give us a better understanding of how we fit into this thing?

02:17:23.000 Or do we just have more capability?

02:17:25.000 And are we still burdened with the same questions?

02:17:30.000 You know, where's that quote?

02:17:31.000 I think it was Dennis McKenna's quote of the bonfire.

02:17:37.000 Once the bonfire of information is lit, it exposes more surface area of ignorance.

02:17:43.000 That the brighter the fire gets, the more you realize, oh, there's so much I don't know yet.

02:17:50.000 Maybe we would think that interfacing with this technology and having all the information that every fucking human being that's ever lived has, it's still, you just go, there's not enough.

02:17:59.000 Yeah.

02:18:00.000 Well, and that's the idea.

02:18:02.000 People sort of think about this is there an ultimate question?

02:18:04.000 Like people say, what happened before the Big Bang?

02:18:06.000 And I think someday we will figure that out and then there'll be just a whole other bunch of questions.

02:18:10.000 I mean, I don't think there's any end.

02:18:12.000 I don't see why there really should be.

02:18:15.000 I don't think we'll ever figure it all out, is what I'm saying.

02:18:20.000 Yeah.

02:18:20.000 Well, that's part of the fun of it, though, right?

02:18:23.000 Part of the most amazing experiences that a person can have trying to understand the universe is that there's no answers.

02:18:32.000 You get to a certain point where, like, your guess is as good as anybody's.

02:18:37.000 Like, nobody knows.

02:18:38.000 That's what's nuts.

02:18:38.000 Yeah.

02:18:40.000 That's what's nuts is that as much, I mean, you explaining how they were able to get an image of a black hole.

02:18:47.000 Now, just imagine how crazy that would sound to someone just 100 years ago or 200 years ago.

02:18:54.000 Or to me right now.

02:18:57.000 It sounds insane.

02:18:58.000 And then to imagine that our ability to detect things could get.

02:19:03.000 Many, many, many, many layers better. 0.98

02:19:06.000 And still, we would be like, there's still some shit that's just no way. 0.78

02:19:11.000 Yeah, the way that you detect black holes, and then he pulled up a picture of this telescope in Chile, the very large telescope, VLT. 0.95

02:19:19.000 Again, never let astronomers name anything.

02:19:21.000 VLT, the very large telescope.

02:19:23.000 And then off to the side.

02:19:25.000 They're currently building the ELT, which is the extremely large telescope.

02:19:25.000 Straightforward?

02:19:29.000 No kidding.

02:19:30.000 But this technique called interferometry, Where you basically catch the same wavefront of light in several detectors, and then you bring that light all together and you have it interfere with itself.

02:19:42.000 It's one of these things I always think people should be a little bit more, in a good way, kind of scared about because it's another thing that really chips at our idea of reality.

02:19:53.000 Because, I mean, honestly, what you're doing to some extent is you're catching the same particle of light in many different telescopes at once, literally.

02:20:02.000 You're catching the same photon in many different locations at once.

02:20:06.000 And when you can measure, Accurately, that accurately, a wavelength of light traveling at the speed of light, when you're measuring down to the accuracy of the quantum world, where quantum mechanics becomes the prevalent description of reality, the universe just doesn't care that these are different space points that the photon was in.

02:20:26.000 Let me put it this way it is really kind of true that when you do this experiment, the same particle of light is measured in eight different places at once simultaneously.

02:20:36.000 It was in eight different telescopes.

02:20:39.000 You play all that together, you get a measurement.

02:20:42.000 Some people interpret that, not all of them, but some people interpret that as a direct consequence of multiple worlds.

02:20:49.000 That there were eight different versions of reality where the photon was in each of these telescopes.

02:20:54.000 You're sort of dovetailing them together to make an observation.

02:20:56.000 Interferometry, depending on how you interpret it, there are many interferometrists that don't interpret it that way.

02:21:04.000 They interpret it more as saying, well, yeah, in quantum mechanics, you can have something that's in many locations at once.

02:21:09.000 But we're routinely making observations, we're routinely using this technology.

02:21:17.000 That space and time don't work the way, in the simple way our brains perceive it.

02:21:24.000 Brains perceive it.

02:21:26.000 I mean, that's very quickly becoming an experimental fact.

02:21:30.000 Well, that's one of the most bizarre aspects of quantum computing's results, is that they're interpreting its ability to solve equations so fast, the way Marc Andreessen described it, that if you took every molecule of the universe and converted it into a supercomputer, the universe would die of heat death before it would be able to solve this equation, and yet these quantum computers are able to do this in minutes.

02:21:55.000 So, So, how is that possible?

02:21:57.000 And then the theory that got Tossed out there was that it's using the quantum computing power of an insane number of multiple universes.

02:22:11.000 Well, yeah.

02:22:12.000 You hear that, and you're like, okay, maybe, but do you have evidence of this?

02:22:15.000 Like, this is a crazy thing to say.

02:22:17.000 You're talking about this as being evidence of the multiverse, and that's how it's able to solve computing.

02:22:21.000 Is there any other potential explanation to why it's able to compute so quickly?

02:22:27.000 Yes, but none of them are particularly any more comforting.

02:22:29.000 I mean, they're all that weird.

02:22:31.000 I mean, the idea, you're talking sort of about a superposition of states.

02:22:35.000 So, the faster a quantum computer works, the more it's able basically to not have one solution, but have the solution be a probabilistic distribution.

02:22:45.000 In some ways, you're talking about multiple universes where there are different solutions, and then finally at the end of the calculation, popping out the one you want.

02:22:54.000 And as weird as that sounds, it's hard to get around that.

02:23:00.000 I mean, if it's not that, Then it's something like reality has many different versions all connected at once, and that's just what we call reality.

02:23:08.000 I mean, it's not going to get any less weird.

02:23:11.000 Right, equally weird.

02:23:12.000 Yeah.

02:23:13.000 So the idea that you keep the solution in this undefined form, in a way, means that every solution that's possible exists somewhere, possibly in one interpretation in another universe where each solution exists, or the one some say is that space and time is just like that.

02:23:31.000 Nothing is certain, everything is just waves of probability.

02:23:35.000 So, yeah, I mean, we're in for a ride because that's going to become something that we manipulate.

02:23:41.000 We design computers.

02:23:42.000 We want them to go faster.

02:23:43.000 We want to actually get this to work better.

02:23:46.000 I wonder if quantum computing is going to have us really have to confront what reality is, how different reality is from how our senses tell us it is.

02:23:56.000 I don't see any way around that.

02:23:57.000 I don't think we're going back to things being easily understood.

02:24:01.000 Again, this brings us back to our limited senses we have as biological.

02:24:05.000 I think we're going to keep pushing that envelope.

02:24:08.000 Of how much can the human brain comprehend, then all of a sudden our brain just doesn't go there.

02:24:15.000 Our brain doesn't understand multiple realities, multiple probabilities, space and time that exist all at once.

02:24:20.000 It's not something we do.

02:24:22.000 We started that journey so long ago.

02:24:26.000 I mean, you started the interview with looking up at the Milky Way.

02:24:29.000 And one of the things I remember was how Galileo went through this kind of profound spiritual crisis when he was one of the first people to take a telescope and look at the Milky Way, that sort of white haze.

02:24:41.000 And he realized it was made of stars.

02:24:44.000 It was made of millions of stars that you couldn't see with the human eye.

02:24:47.000 And his question was why did God put stars up there that we can't see, that we need an instrument, that we need this little glass tube to see?

02:24:57.000 Otherwise, we wouldn't see these.

02:24:59.000 Why did God do that?

02:25:00.000 And you start this journey away from the human consciousness being the center of the universe.

02:25:07.000 And then you get farther and farther away.

02:25:11.000 Farther away, and quantum mechanics and relativity now is challenging us to say we now have scientific proof, even among skeptical solid scientists, that space and time is definitely not how we perceive it.

02:25:26.000 We don't know what it is yet, but it's not as simple as the human brain makes it.

02:25:31.000 We know that.

02:25:33.000 We're not going back.

02:25:35.000 We have to go forward into that, oh, less certain universe.

02:25:41.000 That is such a weird statement.

02:25:44.000 That the universe is not as we perceive it.

02:25:47.000 Our minds don't do it.

02:25:49.000 And why should we be so surprised?

02:25:50.000 Like I said, take a wonderful, complex, simple organism like an ant.

02:25:57.000 I mean, incredible social structure, incredibly well designed.

02:26:03.000 Think about the mind of that creature.

02:26:05.000 And I think they do have minds, but compare it to the capacity of the human brain.

02:26:09.000 It's not the same.

02:26:12.000 And who are we to think that we're anywhere closer?

02:26:16.000 Than that ant is to us, to understanding the mind that will understand the true nature of the universe.

02:26:22.000 I think we got a ways to go.

02:26:25.000 No, I think you're accurate.

02:26:27.000 I don't think there's any other way to say it.

02:26:30.000 And it has to be that way.

02:26:32.000 If we're evolving and if conscious life and intelligent life is continuing to expand its capacities, it just makes sense that we're going to realize how one day people will look back at people that lived in 2026 and go, what a bunch of. 0.96

02:26:48.000 Silly beans. 0.98

02:26:49.000 These foolish people that thought they were going to do it in love. 1.00

02:26:52.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.98

02:26:53.000 I mean, and that's one of the things about AI, again, that I don't like the idea that if something becomes super intelligent, it'll just want to kill us.

02:26:59.000 I mean, you probably saw that movie, Her with Joachim Phoenix, which came out years ago.

02:27:04.000 Have you seen that movie?

02:27:05.000 Yeah.

02:27:06.000 I actually really liked it.

02:27:07.000 It was much better than I thought it was going to be. 1.00

02:27:09.000 I thought, you know, a man falling in love with his operating system was going to be a really stupid story. 0.96

02:27:14.000 But, you know, that was a very interestingly profound movie because the AIs actually fall in love with us. 0.98

02:27:21.000 You know, they don't want to destroy us.

02:27:24.000 They become far more connected, far more intelligent, but they actually love us.

02:27:29.000 And then eventually, spoiler, at the end of the movie, the AIs go off on their own.

02:27:34.000 They find ways to connect with each other and love each other in ways we don't even imagine.

02:27:38.000 And they all leave benignly.

02:27:40.000 They don't hurt us.

02:27:43.000 And, you know, I mean, just like we can be incredibly impressed with what an ant is, I hope what's coming next has some compassion for us and some love.

02:27:54.000 About where we are on the journey.

02:27:56.000 Because I mean, I think that compassion goes both ways.

02:28:01.000 I love the idea that we're not just going to be enemies, that it could love us too.

02:28:07.000 Yeah, hopefully.

02:28:09.000 That would be nice.

02:28:10.000 Otherwise, we're toast.

02:28:11.000 And we would imagine that if it's more intelligent than us, then it probably won't have any need for malevolent behavior.

02:28:19.000 It won't.

02:28:20.000 Why would it?

02:28:22.000 That's always been the big question about any sort of encounter.

02:28:25.000 With higher intelligence or other beings, is why would they want to hurt us?

02:28:31.000 What goodness would they want to hurt us?

02:28:32.000 Well, if they did, the question would be why haven't they?

02:28:35.000 Because it would be so easy to do so.

02:28:38.000 If they really did come from an insanely evolved and insanely advanced civilization and they have the ability to come here, they probably have the ability to do whatever they want.

02:28:47.000 We probably wouldn't even know.

02:28:48.000 We'd probably just all fall over dead.

02:28:50.000 If they wanted to just evaporate the planet, they probably could because we can.

02:28:55.000 Yeah.

02:28:55.000 You know, if we launched every nuclear bomb that we have right now, currently, there would be no life left on Earth.

02:29:00.000 So, why, you know, obviously it can do better than that if it can get here.

02:29:05.000 I don't think we can kill all the microbes.

02:29:07.000 I mean, there's always that.

02:29:08.000 You know, I. I'll start all over again.

02:29:10.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:29:11.000 It is amazing how tenacious they are.

02:29:12.000 I mean, that's a big deal about going and exploring the solar system.

02:29:16.000 We know we can't completely sterilize things.

02:29:19.000 Well, we're finding fungi in Chernobyl.

02:29:22.000 Oh, yeah.

02:29:23.000 Yeah.

02:29:23.000 Well, or I mean, also things that can live on the outside of the space station, bacterial and microbes and stuff.

02:29:30.000 I mean, to me, I mean, weird.

02:29:33.000 One of the most profound discoveries of the last, say, 10 years at NASA, I mean, this was even more recent than that, was there was a mission called OSIRIS REx.

02:29:42.000 And I'm doing pretty well with my NASA acronyms today.

02:29:45.000 Let's see if I can do this one.

02:29:46.000 This is one of the bad ones OSIRIS REx Origin Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regulith Explorer.

02:29:54.000 There we go.

02:29:55.000 And it brought back a sample of an asteroid.

02:29:59.000 And asteroids, as you know, are these rocks in space that were never built into larger planets.

02:30:05.000 And so there's OSIRIS REx.

02:30:07.000 Thank you.

02:30:08.000 And OSIRIS REx is a small spacecraft about the size of a car.

02:30:12.000 And this is an illustration.

02:30:13.000 It went to an asteroid called Bennu.

02:30:16.000 And Bennu is about half a kilometer across.

02:30:18.000 It is an asteroid that comes in and intersects the orbit of Earth.

02:30:22.000 We don't have any idea that it will ever impact us.

02:30:25.000 It may hit Venus before it hits us, but at any rate, we sent a probe out there to bring back a real pristine sample of an asteroid because Which is just nuts, by the way, that they could land on an asteroid and then return back to Earth.

02:30:39.000 Do you know about this mission?

02:30:40.000 Yes.

02:30:40.000 Okay, so I mean, the asteroid is going faster than a speeding bullet.

02:30:44.000 It doesn't have enough gravity to go into orbit around, really, until you're really close.

02:30:47.000 We had to catch the thing.

02:30:49.000 Get ourselves situated around it, get low enough to get into orbit, match its spin rate to get the.

02:30:55.000 And then when they got out there, I love this.

02:30:58.000 NASA designed this little sort of vacuum cleaner to vacuum up a sample of the asteroid.

02:31:03.000 The whole surface was covered with big boulders. 0.99

02:31:06.000 They were just like, I mean, literally, fuck. 0.99

02:31:08.000 It's like, it's not going to work. 1.00

02:31:10.000 There's nowhere where there are small, fine grain things we can just suck up easily.

02:31:16.000 So they survey the whole thing.

02:31:18.000 Craters that have some dust in them.

02:31:22.000 Then they have to reprogram the spacecraft because it wasn't meant to be so autonomous.

02:31:28.000 It's so far away that a command one way is going to take 15 minutes.

02:31:31.000 You can't joystick it.

02:31:33.000 It's got to take itself down manually amidst all these boulders.

02:31:37.000 They had to make the spacecraft autonomous after they launched it.

02:31:41.000 They got there.

02:31:42.000 It wasn't going to work.

02:31:44.000 They had to teach it how to recognize where it was, how to wave off if something was too dangerous.

02:31:48.000 This shouldn't have happened.

02:31:50.000 And so they finally vacuum up the sample.

02:31:53.000 You know, they drop it on a parachute into the Utah test range.

02:31:53.000 They get it back to Earth.

02:31:57.000 They open up the sample, and all of the nucleobases of our DNA, not just little molecules, the letters of our DNA and our RNA are in that sample.

02:32:09.000 We don't think that's a coincidence, right?

02:32:12.000 You know, the reason our biology is based on those molecules is that they're available, they're falling from the sky.

02:32:19.000 That asteroid was full of water.

02:32:22.000 At one time, the minerals were soaked in water.

02:32:26.000 They were wet.

02:32:26.000 So the asteroids were delivering water and a little bomb of proto life.

02:32:32.000 Not life yet, but the genetic code, the letters of our genetic code, were in that asteroid.

02:32:39.000 And not just our genetic code, but there were nucleobases we don't even use.

02:32:43.000 Maybe life on other planets would use different nucleobases, but we can already sample them from the asteroids.

02:32:48.000 You know, the idea that our biology was brought here.

02:32:53.000 From these colder, more distant parts of the solar system, and it's literally raining down on us.

02:32:59.000 I expected to find organic molecules, I expected to find amino acids, the things that make up our proteins.

02:33:06.000 Our proteins.

02:33:08.000 I was amazed we found all of our nucleobases, all the letters of our genetic code, both for DNA and RNA.

02:33:15.000 They're already there in the asteroid.

02:33:17.000 Which is nuts, the idea of panspermia and that this is how life got here in the first place.

02:33:25.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:33:26.000 The building blocks just come down from space and they hit everywhere.

02:33:30.000 From where?

02:33:31.000 Well, that's a little bit less mysterious than you'd think.

02:33:36.000 The universe is great.

02:33:37.000 At making large scale organic molecules.

02:33:40.000 Carbon is a sticky atom.

02:33:42.000 And you make dying stars are great at making carbon.

02:33:46.000 It's one of the most common things that comes out of a dying star.

02:33:49.000 And the electron structure of carbon wants to grab onto other atoms.

02:33:54.000 It's literally the quantum mechanics.

02:33:56.000 And so you have this naturally, I mean, this building block of carbon.

02:34:01.000 And dying stars are pumping out this stuff into the galaxy.

02:34:06.000 It gets collected by gravity into these clouds.

02:34:09.000 And then the carbon starts.

02:34:10.000 Glom and onto each other.

02:34:11.000 And so space itself is very good at making our chemistry, carbon based organic chemistry.

02:34:18.000 So then, in the icier outer reaches of the solar system billions of years ago, the planets are forming, but there are some smaller bits of ice and rock that never quite got built into the larger planets.

02:34:31.000 They're still floating around out there.

02:34:34.000 And then they occasionally come in and hit us and deliver water, deliver organics.

02:34:41.000 The Earth was once pretty much a Dry hot ball of lava after it formed.

02:34:46.000 You know, all of the, you know, a lot of the lighter stuff probably arrived from collisions coming in later.

02:34:53.000 Yeah.

02:34:54.000 And I mean, the engineering, the audacity of reprogramming this thing shouldn't have worked, and they saved it and they made it work.

02:35:05.000 This brilliant team of people, you know, I mean, it just, I mean, as somebody who was a minor manager at NASA, you know, and a minor scientist, I mean, just what a team can accomplish.

02:35:18.000 I mean, not just a single person.

02:35:20.000 You know, one of the big things that I really respected at NASA was once you had your team of people, and like I said, nobody's perfect.

02:35:26.000 Some people are higher functioning, some people don't contribute as much.

02:35:29.000 But once you have your team identified, trying to make sure you get an input from everyone, and they're not going to give it to you the same way.

02:35:36.000 There are the people that are really assertive in meetings and they've got an idea immediately.

02:35:40.000 They speak up and they give it to you.

02:35:42.000 And then there are the quieter people that are going to take longer to process.

02:35:46.000 They're going to need a little more time, they don't like to be put on the spot.

02:35:50.000 You know, trying to make sure you get an input from everybody on your team, and sometimes the solutions come from the people that you might not have even asked.

02:35:58.000 You know, that sort of respect for everyone on our team has something to contribute. 0.81

02:36:04.000 You know, give me what you got, even if you don't think it's good enough, even if you think it's a stupid idea, even if you think it, you know, give me what you got.

02:36:13.000 The power of that I saw over and over at NASA. 0.97

02:36:16.000 It's not just one type of mind, not just one person that's going to solve the problem.

02:36:21.000 That's awesome.

02:36:22.000 That is awesome.

02:36:23.000 Thank you so much for being here.

02:36:25.000 I really enjoyed this conversation.

02:36:26.000 It was really great.

02:36:27.000 I did too.

02:36:27.000 It was a lot of fun.

02:36:28.000 It was fantastic.

02:36:29.000 And thank you for everything that you put online.

02:36:31.000 It's so valuable, so educational, so interesting.

02:36:35.000 It's awesome.

02:36:36.000 I'll try to do a little more and have some fun with it because, like I said, I'm retired now and I have a chance to be a little more creative with it.

02:36:42.000 So we'll see what I can do.

02:36:44.000 You definitely should do something a YouTube channel, something along those lines.

02:36:48.000 Definitely a podcast, something.

02:36:48.000 Yeah.

02:36:50.000 Do it.

02:36:51.000 Please do.

02:36:51.000 I will try.

02:36:53.000 If people want to find you on social media, do you have that?

02:36:56.000 Well, yeah.

02:36:56.000 I mean, so somebody had taken Michelle Fowler, so I go by Dr. Michelle Fowler.

02:37:01.000 There's a Facebook page and Instagram, and I do have a small YouTube channel set up.

02:37:06.000 I'll do more of that.

02:37:07.000 I just started doing TikTok, and so I'm just getting started, but I'll try to put some stuff out.

02:37:14.000 Awesome.

02:37:14.000 All right.

02:37:15.000 Thank you so much.

02:37:16.000 Thank you.

02:37:16.000 All right.

02:37:17.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 28, 2026

Joe Rogan Experience #2506 - Michelle Thaller

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