The following is a conversation with Konstantin Batygin, planetary astrophysicist at Caltech,
interested in, among other things, the search for the distant, the mysterious Planet 9 in the
outer regions of our solar system. Quick mention of our sponsors, Squarespace, Literati, Onnit,
and Ni. Check them out in the description to support the podcast.
As a side note, let me say that our little sun is orbited by not just a few planets in the
planetary region, but trillions of objects in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud that extends
over three light years out. This to me is amazing. Since Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our
sun, is only 4.2 light years away, and all of it is mostly covered in darkness. When I get a chance
to go out swimming in the ocean, far from the shore, I'm sometimes overcome by the terrifying
and the exciting feeling of not knowing what's there in the deep darkness. That's how I feel
about the edge of our solar system. One day, I hope humans will travel there, or at the very
least, AI systems that carry the flame of human consciousness. This is the Lux Friedman podcast,
and here's my conversation with Konstantin Batygin.
What is Planet Nine? Planet Nine is an object that we believe lives in the solar system beyond
the orbit of Neptune. It orbits the sun with a period of about 10,000 years, and is about five
earth masses. So that's a hypothesized object. There's some evidence for this kind of object.
There's a bunch of different explanations. Can you give an overview of the planets in our solar
system? How many are there? What do we know and not know about them at a high level?
All right. That sounds like a good plan. So look, the solar system basically is comprised of two
parts, the inner and the outer solar system. The inner solar system has the planets Mercury, Venus,
Earth, and Mars. Now, Mercury is about 40% of the orbital separation of where the Earth is.
It's closer to the sun. Venus is about 70%. Then Mars is about 160% further away from the sun than
is the Earth. These planets that we, one of them we occupy, are pretty small. They're
to leading order, sort of heavily overgrown asteroids, if you will. This becomes evident
when you move out further in the solar system and encounter Jupiter, which is 316 earth masses,
right? 10 times the size. Saturn is another huge one, 90 earth masses at about 10 times
the separation from the sun as is the Earth. And then you have Uranus and Neptune at 20 and 30,
respectively. For a long time, that is where the kind of massive part of the solar system ended.
But what we've learned in the last 30 years is that beyond Neptune, there's this expansive field
of icy debris, a second icy asteroid belt in the solar system. A lot of people have heard
of the asteroid belt, which lives between Mars and Jupiter, right? That's a pretty common thing
that people like to imagine and draw on lunchboxes and stuff. But beyond Neptune, there's a much
more massive and much more radially expansive field of debris. Pluto, by the way, it belongs to that
second icy asteroid belt, which we call the Kuiper belt. It's just a big object within that
population of bodies. Pluto, the planet. Pluto, the dwarf planet, the former planet, you know.
Why is Pluto not a planet anymore? I mean, it's tiny. We used to-
For size matters when it comes to planets. 100%. It's actually a fascinating story.
When Pluto was discovered in 1930, the reason it was discovered in the first place is because
astronomers at the time were looking for a seven-Earth mass planet somewhere beyond Neptune.
It was hypothesized that such an object exists. When they found something, they interpreted that
as a seven-Earth mass planet and immediately revised its mass downwards because they couldn't
resolve the object with the telescope. It looked like just a point mass star rather than a physical
disk. They said, well, maybe it's not seven. Maybe it's one. Then over the next 40 years,
Pluto's mass kept getting revised downwards, downwards, downwards until it was realized
that it's 500 times less massive than the Earth. Pluto's surface area is almost perfectly equal
to the surface area of Russia, actually. Russia is big, but it's not a planet.
Well, actually, we can touch more on that. That's another discussion. In some sense,
earlier in the century, Pluto represented our ignorance about the edges of the solar system.
Perhaps Planet Nine is the thing that represents our ignorance about now the modern
set of ignorances about the edges of our solar system. That's a good way to put it.
By the way, just imagining this belt of debris at the edge of our solar system is incredible.
Can you talk about it a little bit? What is the Kuiper belt and what is the Oort cloud?
Yeah. Okay. Look, the simple way to think about it is that if you imagine Neptune's orbit like
a circle, maybe a factor of one and a half, 1.3 times bigger on a radius of 1.3 times bigger,
you've got a whole collection of icy objects. Most of these objects are sort of the size of
Austin, maybe a little bit smaller. If you then zoom out and explore the orbits of the most
long period, the Kuiper belt object, these are the things that have the biggest orbits
and take the longest time to go around the sun, then what you find is that beyond a critical
orbit size, beyond a critical orbit period, which is about 4,000 years, you start to see
weird structure. All the orbits sort of point into one direction. All the orbits are kind of
tilted in the same way by about 20 degrees with respect to sun. This is particularly pronounced
in orbits that are not heavily affected by Neptune. There you start to see this weird dichotomy
where there are objects which are stable, which Neptune does not mess with gravitationally,
and unstable objects. The unstable objects are basically all over the place because they're
being kicked around by Neptune. The stable orbits show this remarkable pattern of clustering.
We, back I guess five years ago, interpreted this pattern of clustering as a gravitational
one-way sign, the existence of a planet in a distant planet, something that is shepherding
and confining these orbits together. Of course, you have to have some skepticism when you're
talking about these things. You have to ask the question of, okay, how statistically significant
is this clustering? There are many authors that have indeed called that into question. We have
done our own analyses. Basically, just like with all statistics where there's multiple ways to
do the exercise, you can either ask the question of, if I have a telescope that has surveyed this
part of the sky, what are the chances that I would discover this clustering? That basically tells you
that you have zero confidence. That does not give you a confident answer one way or another.
Another way to do the statistics, which is what we prefer to do, is to say we have a whole night
sky of discoveries in the Kuiper Belt. If we have some object over there, which has
right ascension and declination, which is a way to say it's there on the sky, and it has
some brightness, that means somebody looked over there and was able to discover an object
of that brightness or brighter. Through that analysis, you can construct a whole map on the sky
of where all of the surveys that have ever been done have collectively looked. If you do the
exercise this way, the false alarm probability of the clustering on which the Planet 9 hypothesis
is built is about 0.4%. Wow. Okay. So there's a million questions here. One, when you say bright
objects, why are they bright? Are we talking about actual objects within the Kuiper Belt or the stuff
we see through the Kuiper Belt? This is the actual stuff we see in the Kuiper Belt. The way you go
about discovering Kuiper Belt objects is pretty easy. I mean, it's easy in theory, hard in practice.
All you do is you take snapshots of the sky, choose that direction and take the high exposure
snapshot, then you wait a night and you do it again, and then you wait another night and you
do it again. Objects that are just random stars in the galaxy don't move on the sky,
whereas objects in the solar system will slowly move. This is no different than if you're driving
down the freeway, it looks like trees are going by you faster than the clouds. This is parallax.
That's it. It's just they're reflecting light off of the sun and it's going back and hitting this.
There's a little bit of a glimmer from the different objects that you can see
based on the reflection from the sun. So there's actual light, but it's not darkness.
That's right. These are just big icicles, basically, that are just reflecting sunlight
back at you. It's then easy to understand why it's so hard to discover them because light has
to travel to something like 40 times the distance between the earth and the sun and then get
reflected back. Was it like an hour travel? Yeah, that's right. That's something like that,
because the earth to the sun is eight minutes, I believe. Yeah, in that order of magnitude.
So that's interesting. So you have to account for all of that. And then there's this huge amount of
data pixels that are coming from the pictures. And you have to integrate all of that together
to paint a high estimate of the different objects. Can you track them? Can you be like,
that's Bob? Yes, exactly. In fact, one of them is named Joe Biden. This is not even a joke.
Okay. Is there a Trump one or no? No. Actually, I don't know. I haven't checked for that, but
the way it works is if you discover one, you right away get a license plate for it.
Okay. So the first four numbers is the first year that this object has appeared in the data set,
if you will. And then there's this code that follows it, which basically tells you where
in the sky it is. So one of the really interesting Kuiper Belt objects, which is very much part
of the Planet Nine story is called VP113, because Joe Biden was vice president at the time, got
nicknamed Biden. VP113, got nicknamed Biden. Beautiful. What's the fingerprint for any particular
object? Like how do you know it's the same one? Or you just kind of like, yeah, from night to night,
you take a picture. How do you know it's the same object? Yeah. So the way you know is it appears
in almost exactly the same part of the sky except for moves. And this is why actually you need at
least three nights, because oftentimes asteroids, which are much closer, will appear to move only
slightly, but then on the third night will move away. So the third night is really there to detect
acceleration. Now, the thing that I didn't really realize until I started observing together with
my partner in crime and all this, Mike Brown, is just the fact that for the first year when you
make these detections, the only thing you really know with confidence is where it is on the night
sky and how far away it is. That's it. You don't know anything about the orbit, because over three
days, the object just moves so little. That whole motion on the sky is entirely coming from motion
of the earth. So the earth is kind of the car. The object is the tree and you see it move. So then
to get some confident information about what its orbit looks like, you have to come back a year later
and then measure it again. Oh, it's interesting to do three nights and come back a year later and
do another three nights. So you get the velocity, the acceleration from the three nights and then
you have the maybe the additional information. Because an orbit is basically described by six
parameters. So you at least need six independent points. But in reality, you need many more
observations to really pin down the orbit well. And from that, you're able to construct for that one
particular object and orbit. And then there's, of course, like how many objects are there?
There's like four-ish thousand now. But like in the future, that could be like millions?
Oh, sure. Oh, sure. So in fact, these things are hard to predict, but there's a new observatory
called the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is coming online maybe next year. I mean, with COVID, these
things are a little bit more uncertain, but they've actually been making great progress
with construction. And so that telescope is just going to scan the night sky every day
automatically. And it's just it's such an efficient survey that it might increase the
census of the distant Kuiper Belt, the things that I'm interested in by a factor of 100.
I mean, that would be really cool. And yeah, that's an incredible...
I mean, they might just find Planet 9 too. I mean, that's almost like literally pictures,
like visually. I mean, sure. Yeah. Like the first detection you make, all you know is where it is
in the sky and how far away it is. If something is, you know, 500 times away from the sun,
as far away from the sun as the earth, you know that's Planet 9. That's when the story concludes.
And then you can study it. Now you can study it. Yeah. By the way, I'm going to use that as like,
I don't know, a pickup line or a dating strategy, like see the person for three days
and then don't see them at all and then see them again in a year to determine the orbit.
And over time, you figure out if sort of from a cosmic perspective, this whole thing
works. Yeah. I have no dating advice to give. I was going to use this as a metaphor to somehow
to map it onto the human condition. Okay. You mentioned the Kuiper Belt. What's the ore cloud?
If you look at the Neptune orbit as one, then the Kuiper Belt is like 1.3 out there. Yeah.
And then we get farther and farther into the darkness. So, okay, you've got the main Kuiper
Belt, which is about, say, 1.3, 1.5. Then you have something called the Scattered Disc,
which is kind of an extension of the Kuiper Belt. It's a bunch of these long,
very elliptical orbits that hug the orbit of Neptune but come out very far. So, the Scattered Disc
with the current senses, like some of the longest orbits we know of,
have a semi-major axis, so half the orbit length, roughly speaking, of about a thousand,
thousand times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Wow. Now, if you keep moving out,
eventually, once you're at sort of 10,000 to 100,000 roughly, that's where the ore cloud is.
Now, the ore cloud is a distinct population of icy bodies and is distinct from the Kuiper Belt.
In fact, it's so expansive that it ends roughly halfway between us and the next star.
It's edge is just dictated by, to what extent, does the solar gravity reach?
Solar gravity reaches that far. So, it has to, wow.
Imagining this is a little bit overwhelming. So, there's going to be a giant,
like, vast, icy rock thingy.
It's like a sphere. It's almost spherical structure that encircles the Sun,
and all the long period comets come from the ore cloud. The way that they appear,
for already, I don't know, hundreds of years, we've been detecting that occasionally,
like, a comet will come in and it seemingly comes out of nowhere. The reason these long
period comets appear is that on very, very long time scales, these ore cloud objects that are
sitting 30,000 times as far away from the Sun as is the Earth, actually interact with the gravity
of the galaxy that tied, effectively, the tide that the galaxy exerts upon them and their orbits
slowly change in a long gate to the point where once they, their closest approach to the Sun,
starts to reach a critical distance where ice starts to sublimate, then we discover them as
comets because then ice comes off of them, they look beautiful on the night sky, etc. But they're
all coming from, you know, really, really far away. So, are any of them coming our way from
collisions? Like, how many collisions are there? Or is there a bunch of space for them to move
around? Yeah, it's completely collisionless. Out there, the physical radii of objects are
so small compared to the distance between them, right? It's just, it is truly a collisionless
environment. I don't know. I think that probably in the age of the solar system,
there have literally been zero collisions in the world cloud. Wow. When you, like, draw a picture
of the solar system, everything's really close together. So, everything, I guess, here's spaced
far apart. Do rogue planets like flying every once in a while and join? Not rogue planets,
but rogue objects from out there. Oh, sure. Oh, sure. Yeah. Join the party? Yeah, absolutely.
We've seen a couple of them in the last three or so years, maybe four years now. One, the first one
was the one called Ua Moa Moa. It's been all over the news. The second one was Comet Borisov,
discovered by a guy named Borisov. Yeah, so the way you know they're coming from elsewhere is,
unlike solar system objects, which travel on elliptical paths around the sun, these guys travel
on hyperbolic paths. So, they come in, say hello, and then they're gone. And the fact that they
exist is totally, like, not surprising, right? The Neptune is constantly ejecting
Kuiper belt objects into interstellar space. Our solar system itself is sort of leaking icy debris
and ejecting it. So, presumably, every planetary systems around other stars do exactly the same
thing. Let me ask you about the millions of objects that are part of the Kuiper belt and
the part of the ORE cloud. Do you think some of them have primitive life? It kind of makes you sad
if there's like primitive life there and they're just kind of like lonely out there in space.
Yeah. Like, how many of them do you think have life, like bacterial life?
Probably a negligible amount. Zero, you know, like zero with like a plus on top, right?
Zero plus plus.
Yeah. So, you know, if you and I took a little trip to the interstellar medium,
I think we would develop cancer and die real fast, right?
That's rough.
Yeah. It's a pretty hostile radiation environment. You don't actually have to go to the interstellar
medium. You just have to leave the Earth's magnetic field too, and then you're not doing
so well suddenly. So, you know, this idea of, you know, life kind of traveling between places,
it's not entirely implausible, but you really have to twist, I think, a lot of parameters.
One of the problems we have is we don't actually know how life originates, right? So,
it's kind of a second order question of survival in the interstellar medium and how resilient it is,
because we think you require water, and that's certainly the case for the Earth, but, you know,
we really don't know for sure. That said, I will argue that the question of, like,
are there aliens out there is a very boring question, because the answer is, of course,
there are. I mean, like, we know that there are planets around almost every star.
Of course, there are other life forms. Life is not some specific thing that happened on the Earth,
and that's it, right? That's a statistical impossibility.
Yeah, but the difficult question is, before even the fact that we don't know how life
originates, I don't think we even know what life is, like, definitionally, like, formalizing a
kind of picture of, in terms of the mechanism we would use to search for life out there,
or even when we're on a planet to say, is this life? Is this rock that just moved from where it
was yesterday, life, or maybe not even rock, something else? I got to tell you, I want to
know what life is. Okay, and I want you to show me. I think there's a song to basically accompany
every single thing we talk about today, and probably half of them are love songs,
and somehow we'll integrate George Michael into the whole thing. Okay, so your intuition is there's
life everywhere in our universe. Do you think there's intelligent life out there?
I think it's entirely plausible. I mean, it's entirely plausible. I think there's intelligent
life on earth. So yeah, taking that, like, say, whatever this thing we got on earth,
whether it's dolphins or humans, say that's intelligent. Definitely dolphins. I mean,
have you seen the dolphins? Well, they do some cruel stuff to each other. So if cruelty
is a definition of intelligence, they're pretty good. And then humans are pretty good in that regard.
And then there's like, pigs are very intelligent. I got actually a chance to hang out with pigs
recently. And they're, aside from the fact they were trying to eat me, they love food.
They love food, but there's an intelligence to their eyes that was kind of like haunts me,
because I also love to eat meat. And then to meet the thing, I later ate. And it was very
intelligent and almost charismatic with the way it was expressing it himself, herself, itself,
was quite incredible. So all that to say is, if we have intelligent life here on earth,
if we take dolphins, pigs, humans, from the perspective of like planetary science,
how unique is earth? Okay. So earth is not a common outcome of the planet formation process.
It's probably something on the order of maybe a 1% effect. And by earth, I mean,
not just an earth mass planet. I mean, the architecture of the solar system
that allows the earth to exist in its kind of very temperate way.
One thing to understand, and this is pretty crucial, right, is that the earth itself formed
well after the gas disk that formed the giant planets had already dissipated. You see,
stars start out with the star and then a disk of gas and dust that encircles it.
From this disk of gas and dust, big planets can emerge. And we have over the last two,
three decades discovered thousands of extra solar planets as an orbit of other stars.
What we see is that many of them have these expansive hydrogen helium atmospheres.
The fact that the earth doesn't is deeply connected to the fact that
earth took about 100 million years to form. So we miss that train, so to speak,
to get that hydrogen helium atmosphere. That's why actually we can see the sky.
That's why the sky is, well, at least in most places, that's why the atmosphere is not completely
opaque. With that kind of thinking in mind, I would argue that we're getting the kind of
emergent pictures that the earth is not everywhere. There's sort of the sci-fi
view of things where we go to some other star and we just land on random planets and they're all
earth-like. That's totally not true. But even a low probability event, even if you imagine that
earth is a 1 in a million or 1 in 10 million occurrence, there are 10 to the 12 stars in the
galaxy. So you always win by large numbers. That's right, by supply.
They save you. Well, you've hypothesized that our solar system wants to possess the
population of short period planets that were destroyed by the evil Jupiter,
migrating through the solar nebula. Can you explain?
If I was to say, what was the kind of the key outcome of searches for extra solar planets,
it is that most stars are encircled by short period planets that are few earth masses.
So a few times bigger than the earth and have orbital periods that kind of range from days to
weeks. Now, if you go and ask the solar system, what's in our region, in that region, it's
completely empty. It's just astonishingly hollow. And thank you. From the sun is not some special
star that decided that it was going to form the solar system. So I think the natural thing to
assume is that the same processes of planet formation that occurred everywhere else also
occurred in the solar system. Following this logic, it's not implausible to imagine that the
solar system once possessed a system of intra-mercurian compact system of planets. So then we asked
ourselves, would such a system survive to this day? And the answer is no. At least our calculations
suggest it's highly unlikely because of the formation of Jupiter. And Jupiter's primordial
kind of wandering through the solar system would have sent this collisional field of debris that
would have pushed that system of planets onto the sun. So was Jupiter this primordial wandering?
What did Jupiter look like? Why was it wandering? It didn't have the orbit it has today?
We're pretty certain that giant planets like Jupiter, when they form, they migrate. The reason
they migrate is on a detailed level, perhaps difficult to explain, but just in a qualitative
sense, they form in this fluid disk of gas and dust. So it's kind of like, if I pull up down a raft
somewhere in the ocean, will it stay where you plop it down or will it kind of get carried around?
It's not really a good analogy because it's not like Jupiter is being advected by the currents
of gas and dust. But the way it migrates is it carves out a hole in the disk and then
through by interacting with the disk gravitationally, it can change its orbit.
The fact that the solar system has both Jupiter and Saturn complicates things a lot because you
have to solve the problem of the evolution of the gas disk, the evolution of Jupiter's orbit in the
gas disk, plus evolution of Saturn's and their mutual interaction. The common outcome of solving
that problem though is pretty easy to explain. Jupiter forms, its orbit shrinks, and then once
Saturn forms, its orbit catches up basically to the orbit of Jupiter and then both come out.
So there's this inward outward pattern of Jupiter's early motion that happens within the last million
years of the lifetime of the solar system's primordial disk. So while this is happening,
if our calculations are correct, which I think they are, you can destroy this inner system of
few earth mass planets. And then in the aftermath of all this violence, you form the terrestrial
planets. Where would they come from in that case? So Jupiter clears out the space and then there's
a few terrestrial planets that come in and those come in from the disk somewhere, like one of the
larger objects. Yeah, what actually happens in these calculations is you leave behind a rather
mass depleted like remnant disk, only a couple earth masses. So then from that remnant population,
remnant annulus of material over a hundred million years, by just collisions, you grow the earth and
the moon and everything else. You said annulus? Annulus. Annulus. That's a beautiful word,
what does that mean? Well, it's like a disk that's kind of thin. It's something that is
a disk that's so thin it's almost flirting with being a ring.
Like, I was going to say this reminds me of Lord of the Rings. The word just feels like it belongs
in a token level. Okay, so that's incredible. And so that in your sense, as you said, like 1%,
that's the rare, the way Jupiter and Saturn danced and cleared out the short period
debris and then changed the gravitational landscape. That's a pretty rare thing too.
It's rare and moreover, like you don't even have to go to our calculations, you can just ask the
night sky, how many stars have Jupiter and Saturn analogs? And the answer is Jupiter and Saturn
analogs are found around only 10% of sunlight stars. So they are, they themselves, like you
kind of have to score an A minus or better on the test to, you know, on the planet formation test to
become a solar system analog, even in that basic sense. And moreover, you know, lower mass stars,
which are very numerous in the galaxy, so-called M dwarves, think like 0% of them, well, maybe like
some negligible fraction of them have giant planets. Giant planets are a rare, you know,
outcome of planet formation. One of the really big problems that remain unanswered is why.
We don't actually understand why they're so rare.
How hard is it to simulate all of the things that we've been talking about, each of the things we've
been talking about, and maybe one day all of the things we've been talking about and beyond,
meaning like from the initial primordial solar system, you know, a bunch of disks with, I don't
know, billions, trillions of objects in them, like simulate that such that you eventually get a Jupiter
and a Saturn, and then eventually you get the Jupiter and the Saturn that clear out a disk,
change the gravitational landscape, then Earth pops up, like that whole thing, and then be able
to do that for every other system in the, every other star in the galaxy, and then be able to do
that for other galaxies as well. Yeah, so maybe start from the smallest simulation, like what is
actually being done today. I mean, even the smallest simulation is probably super, super
difficult. Even just like one object in the Kuiper ball is probably super difficult to simulate.
I mean, I think it's super easy. I mean, like, it's just not that hard. But, you know, let's
ask the most kind of basic problem. Okay, so the problem of having a star and something in orbit
of it, that you don't need a simulation for, like, you can just write that down on a piece of paper.
There's gravity would like, yeah, I guess, I guess it's important to try to, you know, one way to
simulate objects in our solar system is to build the universe from scratch. Okay, we'll get to
building the universe from scratch in a sec. But let me just kind of go through the hierarchy of
what, you know, what we do. Two objects. Two objects, analytically solvable, like, we can figure
it out very easily. If you just, you don't even, I don't think you, yeah, you don't need to know
calculus. It helps to know calculus, but you don't necessarily need to know calculus. Three
objects that are gravitationally interacting, the solution is chaotic. Doesn't matter how many
simulations you do, you, the answer loses meaning after, after some time. I feel like that is a
metaphor for dating as well, but gone. Yeah, so, so the fact that you go from analytically solvable
to unpredictable, you know, when you were, when your simulation goes from two bodies to three
bodies should immediately tell you that the exercise of trying to engineer a calculation
where you form the solar, the entire solar system from scratch and hope to have some predictive answer
is, is a futile one, right? We will never succeed at such a simulation.
I feel like excited to clarify. You mean like explicitly having a clear equation
that generalizes the whole process enough to be able to make a prediction? Or do you mean
actually like literally simulating the objects as a hopeless pursuit once it increases beyond three?
The simulating them is not a hopeless pursuit, but the outcome becomes a statistical one.
What's actually quite interesting is I think we have all the equations figured out, right? Like,
you know, in order to really understand this, the formation of the, the solar system suffices to
know gravity and magnetohydrodynamics. I mean, like the combination of Maxwell's equations and,
you know, Navier-Stokes equations for the fluids, you need to know quantum mechanics to understand
opacities and so on. But we have those equations in hand. It's not that we don't have that
understanding. It's that putting it all together is A, very, very difficult and B, if you were to
run the same evolution twice, changing, you know, the initial conditions by some infinitesimal amount,
some, you know, minor change in your calculation to start with, you would get the, you would get
a different answer. This is one, this is part of the reason why planetary systems are so diverse.
You don't have like a, you know, very predictive path for you start with a disc of this mass and
it's around this star. Therefore, you're going to form the solar system, right? You start with this
and therefore you will form this huge outcome, huge set of outcomes and some percentage of it
will resemble the solar system. You mentioned quantum mechanics and we're talking about
cosmic scale objects. You've talked about that the evolution of astrophysical discs
can be modeled with Schrodinger's equation. I sure did. Why? How does quantum mechanics
become relevant when you consider the evolution of objects in the solar system?
Yeah. Well, let me take a step back and just say it. I remember being, you know,
utterly confused by quantum mechanics when I first learned it and the Schrodinger equation,
which is kind of the parent equation of that whole field, you know, seems to come out of nowhere,
right? The way that, the way that I was sort of explaining it, I remember asking, you know,
my professor is like, but where does it come from? He's like, well, just like, don't worry about it
and just like calculate the hydrogen, you know, energy levels, right? So it's like, I could do
all the problems. I just did not have any intuition for, for where this parent, you know,
super important equation came from. Now, down the line, I was, remember, I was preparing for
my own lecture and I was trying to understand how waves travel in self-gravitating discs. So,
you know, again, there's a very broad theory that's already developed, but I was looking for
some simpler way to explain it really for the purposes of teaching class. And so I thought, okay,
what if I just imagine a disc as an infinite number of concentric circles, right, that interact with
each other gravitationally? That's a problem in some sense that I can solve using methods from
like this late 1700s, right? I can write down Hamiltonian, well, I can write down the energy
function basically of their interactions. And what I found is that when you take the continuum limit,
when you go from discrete circles that are talking to each other gravitationally to a
continuum disc, suddenly this gravitational interaction among them, right, the governing
equation becomes the Schrodinger equation. I had to think about that for a little bit.
Did you just unify quantum mechanics and gravity?
No, this is not the same thing as like, you know, fusing relativity and quantum mechanics.
But it did get me thinking a little bit. So the fact that waves in astrophysical discs
behave just like wave functions of particles is kind of like an interesting analogy because for
me it's easier to imagine waves traveling through, you know, astrophysical discs or really just
sheets of paper. And the reason this is that analogy exists is because there's actually
nothing quantum about the Schrodinger equation. The Schrodinger equation is just a wave equation.
And all of the interpretation that comes from it is quantum, but the equation itself is not a
quantum being. So you can use it to model waves. It's not turtles, it's waves all the way down.
You can pick which level you picked the wave at. And so it could be at the solar system level that
you can use. Right. And also it actually provides a pretty neat calculational tool because it's
difficult. So we just talked about simulations, but it's difficult to simulate the behavior of
astrophysical discs on timescales that are in between a few orbits and their entire evolution.
So it's over a timescale of a few orbits, you have, you do a hydrodynamic, you know,
simulation, right? You do that. Basically, that's something that you can do on a modern computer,
on a timescale of say a week. When it comes to their evolution over their entire lifetime,
you don't hope to resolve the orbits. You just kind of hope to understand how the system behaves.
In between, right, to get access to that, as it turns out, it's pretty cute. You can use
the Schrodinger equation to get the answer rapidly. So it's a calculational tool.
That's fascinating. By the way, the astrophysical discs, how, what are they, how broad is this
definition? Okay. So astrophysical discs span a huge, huge amount of ranges. They start maybe
at the smallest scale, they start with actually Kuiper Belt objects. Some Kuiper Belt objects have
rings. So that's maybe the smallest example of an astrophysical disc. We've got this little
potato-shaped asteroid, you know, which is, you know, sort of the size of LA or something. And
around it is, are some rings of icy matter. That object is a small astrophysical disc. Then you
have Saturn, the rings of Saturn. You have the next set of scale. You have the solar system itself
when it was forming. You have a disc. Then you have black hole discs. You have galaxies. Discs
are super common in the universe. And the reason is that stuff rotates, right? I mean, that's,
everybody works. So, and those rings could be the material that composes those rings could be,
it could be gas, it could be solid, it could be anything. That's right. So the disc that made
from which the planets emerged was predominantly hydrogen and helium gas. On the other hand,
the rings of Saturn are made up of, you know, icicle, ice, little like ice cubes this big,
about a centimeter across. That sounds refreshing. So that's incredible. Hydrogen and helium gas.
So in the beginning, it was just hydrogen and helium around the sun. How does that lead to
the first formations of solid objects in terms of simulation? Okay. Here's the story. So you're
like, have you ever been to the desert? Yes, I've been to the Death Valley and actually
was terrifying, just as a total tangent, I'm distracting you. But I was driving through it
and I was really surprised because it was at first hot. And then as it was getting into the
evening, there's this huge thunderstorm, like it was raining and it got freezing cold. I'm like,
what the hell? It was the apocalypse. I still like, just sit there listening to Bruce Springsteen,
I remember, and just thinking, I'm probably going to die. And I was okay with it because Bruce
Springsteen was on the radio. Look, when you've got the boss, you know, you're ready to meet the
boss. It's a good line. It's true. Yeah, by the way, to continue on this tangent,
I absolutely love the Southwest for this reason. During the pandemic, I drove from LA to New Mexico
a bunch of times. The madness of weather. Yeah, the chaos of weather, the fact that, you know,
it will be blazing hot one minute and then it's just like, we'll decide to have a little thunderstorm,
maybe we'll decide to go back momentarily to like a thousand degrees and then go back to the
thunderstorm. It's amazing. That, by the way, is chaos theory in action. But let's get back to
talking about the desert. So, in the desert, tumbleweeds have a tendency to roll because the
wind rolls them. And if you're careful, you'll occasionally see this family of tumbleweeds where
like there's like a big one and then a bunch of little ones that kind of hide in its wake, right?
And are all rolling together and almost look like, you know, a family of ducks crossing a street or
something. Or, for example, you know, if you watch Tour de France, right, you've got a whole bunch
of cyclists and they're like cycling, you know, within 10 centimeters of each other. They're
not BFFs, right? They're not trying to be trying to ride together. They are riding together to
minimize the collective, you know, air resistance, if you will, that they experience. Turns out solids
in the protoplanetary disk do just this. There's an instability wherein solid particles, right?
Things that are a centimeter across will start to hide behind one another and form these clouds.
Why? Because cumulatively, that minimizes the solid component of the disk,
aerodynamic interaction with the gas. Now, these clouds, because they're kind of a favorable, energetic
condition for the dust to live in, they grow, grow, grow, grow, grow until they become so massive
that they collapse under their own weight. That's how the first building blocks of planets form.
That's how the big asteroids got there. That's incredible. So that, is that
simulatable or is it not useful to simulate? No, no, that's simulatable. And people
do these types of calculations. It's really cool. That's actually, that's one of the many
fields of planet formation theory that is really, really active right now. People are trying to
understand all kinds of aspects of that process. Because of course, I've explained that, you know,
like as if there's one thing that happens, turns out it's a beautifully rich dynamic.
But qualitatively, formation of the first building blocks actually follows the same sequence as
formation of stars. Stars are just clouds of gas, hydrogen helium gas that sit in space
and slowly cool. And at some point, they, you know, contract to a point where their gravity
overtakes the thermal pressure support, if you will. And they collapse under their own weight,
and you get a little baby solar system. That's amazing. So do you think one day
it'll be possible to simulate the full history that took our solar system to what it is today?
Yes, and it will be useless. Okay. So you don't think your story, many of the ideas that you have
about Jupiter clear in the space, like retelling that story in high resolution is not that important.
I actually think it's important, but at every stage, you have to design your experiments,
your numerical computer experiments, so that they test some specific aspect of that evolution.
I am not a proponent of doing huge simulations, because even if we forget
the information theory aspect of not being able to simulate in full detail the universe,
because if you do, then you have made an actual universe. It's not the simulation, right?
By simulation is in some sense a compression of information. So therefore, you must lose detail.
But that point aside, if we are able to simulate the entire history of the solar system in excruciating
detail, I mean, it'll be cool, but it's not going to be any different from observing it,
right? Because theoretical understanding, which is what ultimately I'm interested in,
comes from taking complex things and reducing them down to some mechanism that you can actually
quantify. That's the fun part of astrophysics. Just kind of simulating things in extreme detail
is we'll make cool visualizations, but that doesn't get you to any better understanding
than you had before you did the simulation. If you ask very specific questions, then you'll be able
to create very highly compressed, nice, beautiful theories about how things evolved, and then you
can use those to then generalize to other solar systems, to other stars and other galaxies and
say something generalizable about the entire universe. How difficult would it be to simulate
our solar system such that we would not know the difference? Meaning, if we are living in a
simulation, is there a nice, think of it as a video game, is there a nice compressible way
of doing that? Or just kind of like you intuited with a three-body situation is just a giant mess
that you cannot create a video game that will seem realistic without actually building your
solar system. I'm speculating, but one of the... Yeah, I know you have a deep understanding
of this, but for me, I'm just going to speculate that for at least in the types of simulations
that we can do today. Inevitably, you run into the problem of resolution. It doesn't matter
what you're doing, it is discrete. Now, the way you would go about asking, what we're observing,
is that a simulation or is that some real continuous thing, is you zoom in and try and
find the grid scale, if you will. It's a really interesting question. Because the solar system
itself and really the double pendulum is chaotic, pendulum sitting on another pendulum
moves unpredictably once you let them go. You really don't need to inject any randomness
into a simulation for it to give you stochastic and unpredictable answers. Weather is a great
example of this. Weather has a lapen of time of... Typical weather systems have a lapen
of time of a few days. There's a fundamental reason why the forecast always sucks two weeks
in advance. It's not that we don't know the equations that govern the atmosphere, we know
them well. Their solutions are meaningless though after a few days.
The zooming in thing is very interesting. I think about this a lot, whether there'll be a time
soon where we would want to stay in video game worlds, whether it's virtual reality or just
playing video games. I mean, I think that time came in the 90s and it's been that time.
Well, it's not just came, it's accelerated. I just recently saw that WoW and Fortnite were
played 140 billion hours. Those are just video games. That's increasing very, very quickly,
especially with the people coming up now and being born now and become teenagers and so on.
Let's have a thought experiment where it's just you and a video game character inside a room.
Where you remove the simulation, they need to simulate a lot of objects. If it's just you
and that character, how far do you need to simulate in terms of zooming in for it to be
very real to you as real as reality? First of all, you mentioned zooming in, which is fascinating
because we have these tools of science that allow us to zoom in in all kinds of ways
in the world around us, but our cognitive abilities like our perception system as humans
is very limited in terms of zooming in. So we might be very easily fooled.
Some of the video games on the PS4 look pretty real to me. I think you would really have to
interrogate. I think even with what we have today, Ace Combat 7 is a great example. The way that the
clouds are rendered, it looks just like when you're flying on a real airplane, the kind of
transparency. I think that our perception is limited enough already to not be able to tell
some of the differences. There's a game called Skyroom. It's an Elder Scrolls role-playing
game. I played it for quite a bit. I think I played it very different than others. There'll be
long searches of time where I would just walk around and look at nature in the game. It's
incredible. Oh, sure. It's just like the graphics is like, wow, I want to stay there. It was better.
I went hiking recently. It was as good as hiking.
So look, I know what you mean. Not to go on a huge video game tangent, but the third Witcher game
was astonishingly beautiful, especially playing on a good hardware machine. It's like,
this is pretty legit. That said, I don't resonate with the I want to stay here.
You know, one of the things that I love to do is to go to my boxing gym and box with a guy.
There's nothing quite like that physical experience.
That's fascinating. That might be simply an artifact of the year you were born.
Maybe. Because if you're born today, it almost seems like stupid to go to a gym.
Yeah. Like you're going to a gym to box with a guy. Why not box with Mike Tyson when you
yourself, like in his prime, when you yourself are also an incredible boxer in the video game
world. For me, there's a multitude of reasons why I don't want to box with Mike Tyson.
No, no, no. I enjoy tea, you know, and I want to have an ear.
No, but your skills in this meat space, in this physical realm is very limited
and takes a lot of work and you're a musician, you're an incredible scientist. You only have
so much time in the day, but in the video game world, you can expand your capabilities and all
kinds of dimensions that you can never have possibly have time in the physical world.
And so that it doesn't make sense to be existing, to be working your ass off in the physical world
when you can just be super successful in the video game world.
But I still, you enjoy sucking and stuff. Yeah, I really struggling to get better.
I sure do. I mean, I think like these days with music, music is a great example, right? We just
started, you know, practicing live with my band again, you know, after not playing for a year.
And, you know, it was just, it was terrible. Like, it was just kind of a lot of the nuance, you know,
a lot of the detail is just that detail that takes, you know, years of collective practice to develop
is just lost. But it was just an incredible amount of fun, way more fun than all the,
like, studio, you know, sitting around and playing that I did, you know, throughout the
entire year. So I think there's something, there's something intangible, or maybe,
maybe tangible about being, being in person. I, I sure hope you're wrong. And that, you know, we,
that's not something that will get lost, because I think there's like such a large part of the
human condition is to hang out. If we were doing this interview on zoom, right? I mean, I'd already
be, I'd already be bored out of my mind. Exactly. I mean, there's something to that. I mean,
I'm almost playing devil's advocate, but at the same time, you know, I'm sure people talk about
the same way at the beginning of the 20th century about horses, where they're, they are much more
efficient. They're much easier to maintain than cars. It doesn't make sense to have, you know,
all the ways that cars break down. And there's not enough infrastructure in terms of roads for cars.
It doesn't make any sense. Like horses and like nature, you could do the nature like where,
you know, you should be living more natural life. Those are real. You don't want machines in your
life to go into your mind and the minds of young people, but then eventually just cars took over.
So in that same way, it just seems going back to horses. I'm just, you know,
well, you can be, you can play, uh, uh, was it Red Dead Redemption? Redemption. And you can ride
horses in the video game world. So let me return us back to planet nine. Uh-huh. Always a good place
to come back to. So now that we did a big historical overview of our solar system, what is planet nine?
Okay. Planet nine is a hypothetical object that orbits the solar system, right? At an orbital
period of about 10,000 years. And an orbit which is slightly tilted with respect to the plane of
the solar system, slightly eccentric. And the object itself, we think is five times more massive
than the earth. We have never seen planet nine in a telescope, but we have gravitational evidence
for it. And so this is where all the stuff we've been talking about, this clustering ideas, maybe
you can speak to the approximate location that we suspect. And also the question I wanted to ask is,
uh, what are we supposed to be imagining here? Because you said there are certain objects in
the Kuiper Belt that are kind of have a direction to them that they're all like, like flocking in
some kind of way. So that's the sense that there's some kind of gravitational object, not changing
their orbit, but kind of confining them, right? Yeah. Like grouping their orbits together. See,
what would happen if planet nine were not there is these orbits that roughly share a common
orientation, they would just disperse, right? They would just become as a mutally symmetric
point everywhere. Planet nine's gravity makes it such that these objects stay in a state that's
basically anti-aligned with respect to the orbit of planet nine and sort of hang out there and
kind of oscillate on timescale of about a billion years. That's one of the lines of evidence for
the existence of planet nine. There are others. That's the one that's easiest to maybe visualize
just because it's fun to think about orbits that all point into the same direction. But I should,
you know, emphasize that, for example, the existence of objects, again, Kuiper Belt objects,
that are heavily out of the plane of the solar system, things that are tilted by, say, 90 degrees.
That's not, uh, we don't expect that as an outcome of planet formation. Indeed, planet
formation simulations have never produced such objects without some extrinsic gravitational
force. Planet nine, on the other hand, generates them very readily. So that provides kind of an
alternative, you know, population of small bodies in the solar system that also get produced by
planet nine through an independent kind of gravitational effect. So there are kind of,
there's basically five different things that planet nine does individually that are like
kind of maybe a one sigma effect where you'd say, yeah, okay, if that's all it was, maybe it's not,
no reason to jump up and down, but because it's a multitude of these puzzles that all
are explained by one hypothesis. That's really the magnetism, the attraction of the planet nine
model. So can you just clarify? So most orbit, most planets in the solar system orbit
and approximately the same so that it's flat. Yeah, it's like one degree. They, the difference
between them is about one degree. So, but nevertheless, if we looked at our solar system,
it would look and like could see every single object, it would look like a sphere.
The inner part where the planets are would look like, you know, flat, right? The Kuiper belt
and the asteroid belt have a larger. It gets fatter and fatter and fatter.
Yeah, it's kind of like the sphere. That's right. And if you look at the very outside,
it's polluted by this, you know, quasi-sferoidal thing. Nobody's, of course, ever seen the
Oort cloud, right? We've only seen comments that come from the Oort cloud. So the Oort cloud,
which is this right population of distant debris, its existence is also inferred. You could say
alternatively, there is, you know, there's a big cosmic creature that occasionally, you know,
sitting at 20,000 AU and occasionally throws an icy rock towards the sun like that.
Spaghetti monster, I think it's called. Okay. I mean, so it's a mystery in many ways,
but you can kind of infer a bunch of things about it. It's, by the way, both terrifying and
exciting that there's this vast darkness all around us that's full of objects that they're just
throwing. Just there, yeah. It's actually kind of astonishing, right? That we have only explored
a small fraction of the solar system, right? That really kind of baffles me because, remember,
as a student, you know, studying physics, you know, you do the problem where you put the earth
around the sun, you solve that, and like, it's one line of math, and you say, okay, well, that
surely was figured out by Newton. So like, all the interesting stuff is not in the solar system,
but that, it's just plainly not true. There are mysteries in the solar system that are remarkable
that we are only now starting to just kind of scratch the surface of.
And some of those objects probably have some information about the history of our solar system.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Like, a great example is, you know, small meteorites, right? Small
meteorites are melted, right? They have, they're differentiated, meaning some of the iron sinks
to corn. You say, well, how can that be? Because they're so small that they wouldn't have melted
just from the heat of their accretion. Turns out the fact that the solar nebula, the disk that made
the planets was polluted by aluminum-26 isn't itself a remarkable thing. It means the solar
system did not form an isolation. It formed in a giant cloud of thousands of other stars
that were also forming, some of which were undergoing, you know, going through supernova
explosions, some of, and releasing these unstable isotopes that, of which we now see kind of the
traces of. It's so cool. Do you think it's possible that life from other solar systems was injected
and that that was what was the origin of life on Earth? Yeah, the panspermy idea.
That scene is a low probability event by people who studied the origin of life, but that's because
then they would be out of a job. Well, I don't think they'd be out of the job because you just
then say, you have to figure out how life started there. But then you have to go there. We can study
life on Earth much easier. We could study it in the lab much easier because we could replicate
conditions that are from an early Earth much easier. From a chemistry perspective, from a biology
perspective, you can intuit a bunch of stuff. You can look at different parts of Earth and just
to an extent, I mean, the early Earth was completely unlike the current Earth, right? There was no
oxygen. So one of my colleagues at Caltech, Joe Kirschnick, is certain, something like 100%
uncertainty that life started on Mars and came to Earth on Martian media rights. This is not
a problem that I like to kind of think about too much like the origin of life. It's a fascinating
problem, but it's not physics and I just don't love it. It's the same reason you don't love
I thought you're a musician. Music is not physics either. So why are you so into it? 100% physics.
Okay. In all seriousness though, there are a few things that I really, really enjoy. I genuinely
enjoy physics. I genuinely enjoy music. I genuinely enjoy martial arts and I genuinely enjoy my family.
I should have said that all in a reverse order or something, but I like to focus on these things
and not worry too much about everything else. You know what I mean? Yes. Just because there is a,
like you said earlier, there's a time constraint. You can't do it all. There's many mysteries all
around us and they're all beautiful in different ways. To me, that thing I love is artificial
intelligence that perhaps I love it because eventually I'm trying to suck up to our future
overlords. The question of, you said there's a lot of kind of little pieces of evidence for this
thing that's Planet Nine. If we were to try to collect more evidence or be certain, like a paper
that says like you drop it, clear, we're done, what does that require? Does that require us
sending probes out or do you think we can do it from telescopes here on earth? What are the
different ideas for conclusive evidence for Planet Nine? The moment Planet Nine gets imaged
from a telescope on earth, it's done. I mean, it's just there. Can you clarify, because you
mentioned that before, from an image, would you be able to tell? Yes. From an image, the moment you
see something, something that is reflecting sunlight back at you and you know that it's
hundreds of times as far away from the sun as the earth, you're done.
So you're thinking, so basically, if you have a really far away thing that's big,
five times the size of earth, that means that is Planet Nine. Could there be multiple objects
like that? I guess... In principle, yeah. I mean, there's no law of physics that doesn't allow you
to have multiple objects. There's also no evidence at present for there being multiple objects.
I wonder if it's possible, so just like we're finding exoplanets where they're given the size
of the oar cloud, there's basically, it's rare and rare, but they're sprinkled Planet Nine,
10, 11, 12, like these some... Got 13. Yeah, it goes after that. I can just keep counting.
So just something about the dynamic system, it becomes lower and lower probability event,
but they gather up. Would they become larger and larger maybe? Something like that.
I wonder if like discovering Planet Nine will just be almost like a springboard. It's like,
well, what's beyond that? It's entirely plausible. The oar cloud itself probably
holds about five earth masses or seven earth masses of material, right? So it's not nothing.
And it all ultimately comes down to at what point will the observational surveys
sample enough of the solar system to reveal interesting things? There's a great analogy
here with Neptune and the story of how Neptune was discovered. Neptune was not discovered by
looking at the sky, right? It was discovered mathematically, right? So yeah, the orbit of
Uranus, when Uranus was found, this was 1781, it's the kind of tracking of both the tracking of
the orbit of Uranus as well as the reconstruction of the orbit of Uranus immediately revealed
that it was not following the orbit that it was supposed to, right? The predicted orbit
deviated away from where it actually was. So in the mid-1800s, right, a French mathematician
by the name of Orban Le Verrier did a beautifully sophisticated calculation which said,
if this is due to gravity of a more distant planet, then that planet is there, okay? And then they
found it. But the point is the understanding of where to look for Neptune came entirely out of
celestial mechanics. This case with Planet 9 is a little bit different because what we can do,
I think relatively well, is predict the orbit and mass of Planet 9. We cannot tell you where it is
on its orbit. The reason is we haven't seen the Kuiper Belt objects complete an orbit,
but their own orbit even once because it takes 4,000 years. But I plan to live on as an AI being,
and I'll be tracking those orbits as-
So it takes 4,000 or 5,000 years. I mean, it doesn't have to be AI. It could be longevity.
There's a lot of really exciting genetic engineering research. So you'll just be a brain
waiting for the, your brain waiting for the orbit to complete for the basic Kuiper Belt objects.
That's right. That's like kind of the worst reason to want to live a long time.
Can the brain smoke a cigarette? Can you just light one up while you're waiting?
But you're making me actually realize that the one way to explore the galaxy
is by just sitting here on Earth and waiting. So if we can just get really good at waiting,
it's like a moa moa or these interstellar objects that fly in, you can just wait for them to come
to you. Same with the aliens. You can wait for them to come to you. If you get really good at waiting,
then that's one way to do the exploration because eventually the thing will come to you.
Maybe that's the, maybe the intelligent alien civilizations get much better at waiting. And
so they all decide, so game theoretically, to start waiting. And it's just a bunch of like
ancient intelligent civilizations of aliens all throughout the universe are just sitting there
waiting for each other. Look, you can't just be good at waiting. You got to know how to chill.
Like you can't just like sit around and do nothing. You got to be, you got to know how to
chill. I honestly think that as we progress, if the aliens are anything like us, we enjoy
loving things we do. And it's, it's very possible that we just figure out mechanisms
here on earth to enjoy our life. And we just stay here on earth forever, that exploration becomes
less and less of an interesting thing to do. And so you basically, yes, wait and chill. You get
really optimally good at chilling. And thereby exploring is not that interesting. So in terms
of 4,000 years, it would be nothing for scientists will be chilling and just all kinds of scientific
explorations will become possible because we'll just be here on earth. So chill.
You have a paper out recently because you already mentioned some of these ideas, but I'd love
it if you could dig into it a little bit. The injection of inner or cloud objects into the
distant Kuiper Belt by Planet Nine. What is this idea of Planet Nine injecting objects into the
Kuiper Belt? Okay, let me take a brief step back and say when we do calculations of Planet Nine,
when we do the simulations, as far as our simulations are concerned, sort of the Neptune,
like kind of the transneptunian solar system is entirely sourced from the inside, namely the
Kuiper Belt gets scattered by Neptune and then Planet Nine does things to it and aligns the
orbits and so on. And then we calculate what happens on the lifetime of the solar system.
During the pandemic, one of the kind of questions we asked ourselves, and this is indeed something
we, Mike and I, Mike Brown, who's a partner in crime on this, and I do regularly is we say,
how can we, A, disprove ourselves and B, how can we improve our simulations? Like what's missing?
And one idea that maybe should have been obvious in retrospect is that all of our simulations
treated the solar system as some isolated creature, right? But the solar system did not form an
isolation, right? It formed in this cluster of stars. And during that phase of forming together
with thousands of other stars, we believe the solar system formed this almost spherical population
of icy debris that sits maybe at a few thousand times the separation between the Earth and the
Sun, maybe even a little bit closer. If Planet Nine's not there, that population is completely
dormant. And these objects just slowly orbit the Sun. Nothing interesting happens to them
ever. But when we realize that if Planet Nine is there, Planet Nine can actually grab some
of those objects and gravitationally re-inject them into the distant solar system. So we thought,
okay, let's look into this with numerical experiments. Do our simulations, does this
process work? And if it works, what are its consequences? So it turns out, indeed, not
only does Planet Nine inject these distant inner or cloud objects into the Kuiper belt,
they follow roughly the same pathway as the objects that are being scattered out. So there's
this kind of two-way river of material. Some of it is coming out by Neptune scattering, some of
it is moving in. And if you work through the numbers, you kind of, at the end of the day,
has an effect on the best fit orbit for Planet Nine itself. So if you realize that the data set
that we're observing is not entirely composed of things that came out of the solar system,
but also things that got re-injected back in, then turns out the best fit Planet Nine slightly
more eccentric. That's kind of getting into the weeds. The point here is that the existence of
Planet Nine itself provides this natural bridge that connects an otherwise dormant population
of icy debris of the solar system with things that we're starting to directly observe.
So it can flow back. So it's not just the river flowing one way. It's maybe a smaller stream go
back and you want to backwash. You want to incorporate that into the simulations, into your
understanding of those distant objects when you're trying to make sense of the various
observations and so on. Exactly. That's fascinating. I gotta ask you, some people think
that many of the observations that you're describing could be described by a primordial
black hole. First, what is a primordial black hole and what do you think about this idea?
Yeah. So primordial black hole is a black hole which is made not through the usual pathway
of making a black hole, which is that you have a star, which is more massive than 1.4 or so
solar masses. Basically, when it runs out of fuel, runs out of its nuclear fusion fuel,
it can't hold itself up anymore and just the whole thing collapses on itself.
Right? You create a, I mean, one, I guess, simple way to think about it is you create
an object with zero radius that has mass, but zero radius, singularity. Now, that's such black
holes exist all over the place. In the galaxy, there's in fact a really big one at the center
of the galaxy that's there. That one's always looking at you when you're not looking.
Okay? And it's always talking about you.
And when you turn off the lights, it wakes up.
That's right. So such black holes are all over the place. When they merge,
we get to see incredible gravitational waves that they emit, et cetera, et cetera.
One plausible scenario, however, is that when the universe was forming, basically during the
Big Bang, you created a whole spectrum of black holes, some with masses of five Earth masses,
some with masses of 10 Earth masses, like the entire mass spectrum size, some the mass of
asteroids. Now, on the smaller end, over the lifetime of the universe, the small ones kind of
evaporate and they're not there anymore. At least this is what the calculations tell us. But five
Earth masses is big enough to not have evaporated. So one idea is that planet nine is not a planet,
and instead it is a five Earth mass black hole. And that's why it's hard to find. Now,
can we right away from our calculations say that's definitely true or that's not true? Absolutely
not. In fact, our calculations tell you nothing other than the orbit and the mass. And that means
the black hole, I mean, it could be a five Earth mass cup. It could be a five Earth mass
hedgehog or a black hole or really anything that's five Earth masses will do because the gravity of
a black hole is no different than the gravity of a planet. If the sun became a black hole tomorrow,
it would be dark, but the Earth would keep orbiting it. This notion that black holes suck
everything in, that's like a sci-fi notion. It's just mass. What would be the difference between
a black hole and a planet in terms of observationally? Observationally, the difference would be that you
will never find the black hole. The truth is, I never looked into this very carefully,
but there are some constraints that you can get just statistically to say, okay, if the sun
has a binary companion, which is a five Earth mass black hole, then that means such black holes would
be extremely common and you could sort of look for lensing events and then you say, okay, maybe
that's not so likely. But that said, I want to emphasize that there's a limit to what our
calculations can tell you. That's the orbit and the mass. So I think there's a bunch like Ed Whitten,
I think, wishes. It's a black hole because I think one exciting thing about black holes in our solar
system is that we can go there and we can maybe study the singularity somehow because that allows
us to understand some fundamental things about physics. If it's a planet, it's a planet nine,
we may not, and we go there, we may not discover anything profoundly new. The interesting thing,
perhaps you can correct me about planet nine is like the big picture of it, the whole big story
of the Kuiper Belt and all those kinds of things. It's not that planet nine would be somehow
fundamentally different from Neptune in terms of the kind of things we can learn from it.
So I think that there's kind of a hope that it's a black hole because it's an entirely new kind
of object. Maybe you can correct me. Well, yeah, of course here my own biases creep in because
I'm interested in planets around other stars. And I would say, I would disagree that we wouldn't
find things that would be truly fundamentally new because as it turns out, the galaxy is really good
at making five or three earth mass objects. The most common type of planet that we see,
that we discover orbiting around other stars is a few earth masses. In the solar system,
there's no analog for that. We go from one earth mass object, which is this one,
to skipping to Neptune and Uranus, which themselves are actually relatively poorly
understood, especially Uranus from the interior structure point of view. If planet nine is a
planet, going there will give us the closest window into understanding what other planets look like.
And I'll say this, that planets in terms of their complexity on some logarithmic scale
fall somewhere between a star and an insect. And the insect is way more complicated than a star.
All kinds of physical processes and really biochemical processes that occur inside of an
insect that just make a star look like somebody is playing with the spring or something.
Right? So I think it would be arguably more interesting to go to planet nine if it's a
planet because black holes are simple. They're basically macroscopic particles.
Just like the style you mentioned in terms of complexity. So it's possible that planet nine
is supposed to be homogenous, is like super heterogeneous, is a bunch of cool stuff going
on that could give us an intuition. I never thought about that, that it's just basically
earth number two in terms of size and gives us, starts giving us intuition that could be generalizable
to earth like planets elsewhere in the galaxy. I mean, yeah, Pluto is also in the sense like,
you know, Pluto is a tiny, tiny thing, right? Just like you would imagine that it's just a tiny
ball of ice like who cares. But the New Horizons images of Pluto reveal so much remarkable structure,
right? They reveal glaciers flowing and these are glaciers not made out of water ice, but you
know, CO ice, it turns out at those temperatures, right, of like 40 or so Kelvin, water ice looks
like metal, right, just doesn't flow at all. But then ice made up of carbon monoxide starts to
flow. I mean, there's just like all kinds of really cool phenomena that you otherwise just
wouldn't really even imagine that occur. So yeah, I mean, there's a reason why I like planets.
Well, let me ask you, I find, as I read the idea that Ed Whitton was thinking about this kind of
stuff fascinating. So he's a mathematical physicist who's very interested in string theory, won the
field's medal for his work in mathematics. So I read that he proposed a fleet of probes accelerated
by radiation pressure that could discover a planet nine primordial black holes location.
What do you think about this idea of sending a bunch of probes out there?
Yeah, look, the way the idea is a cool one, right, you go and you say, you know, launch them
basically isotropically you track where they go. And if I understand the idea correctly,
you basically measure the deflection and you say, okay, that must be something
there since the probe trajectories are being altered.
Oh, so the measurement, the basic sensory mechanism is the, it's not like you have senses on the
probes, it's more like you're, because you're very precisely able to capture, to measure the
trajectory of the probes, you can then infer the gravitational fields.
Yeah, I think, I think that's the basic idea. You know, back a few years ago, we had conversations
like these with, you know, engineers from JPL, they more or less convinced me that this is
much more difficult than it seems because you don't, at that level of precision, right,
things like solar flares matter, right, solar flares, right, are completely chaotic. You can't
predict which, where a solar flare will have that will drive radiation pressure gradients.
You don't know where every single asteroid is. So like actually doing that problem,
I think it's possible, but it's, it's not a trivial matter, right?
Well, I wonder, not just about Planet Nine, I wonder if that's kind of the future of doing
science in our solar system is to just launch a huge number of probes. So like a whole order of
magnitude, many orders of magnitude, larger numbers of probes, and then start to infer a
bunch of different stuff, not just gravity, but everything else.
So in this regard, I actually think there is a huge revolution that's to some extent already
started, right? The standard kind of like timescale for a NASA mission is that you like
propose it and it launches, I don't know, like 150 years after you're proposing, I'm overexaggerating,
but it's just like some huge development cycle and it gets delayed 55 times.
That is not going away, right? The really cutting edge things, you have to do it this way because
you don't know what you're building, so to speak. But the CubeSat kind of world is starting to
provide an avenue for launching something that costs a few million dollars and has a turnaround
timescale of like a couple of years. You can imagine doing PhD theses where you design the
mission, the mission goes to where you're going and you do the science all within a time span of
five, six years. That has not been fully executed on yet, but I absolutely think that's on the
horizon and we're not talking a decade, I think we're talking like this decade.
Yeah, and the company is accelerating all this with Blue Origin and SpaceX. There's a bunch of
more CubeSat-oriented companies that are pushing this forward. Let me ask you on that topic,
what do you think about either one? Elon Musk with SpaceX going to Mars, I think he wants
SpaceX to be the first to put a first human on Mars, and then Jeff Bezos got to give him props,
wants to be the first to fly his own rocket out into space.
You know, wasn't there a guy who built his rocket out of garbage? This was like a couple
years ago and somewhere in the desert, he launched himself.
I'm not tracking this closely, but I think I am familiar with folks who built their own rocket
to try to prove the earth is flat. Yes, that's the guy. He was also like he also jumped some limousine.
Truly revolutionary mind. You have to
greater men than either you or I. So look, it's been astonishing to watch how really over the
last decade, the commercial sector took over this industry that traditionally has really
been like a government thing to do. Motivated primarily by the competition between nations,
like the Cold War, and now it's motivated more and more by the natural forces of capitalism.
Yes, that's right. So, okay, here I have many ideas about I think on the one hand,
like what SpaceX has been able to do, for example, phenomenal. If that brings down
the price of SpaceX, turn around timescale for space exploration, which I think it inevitably
will, that's a huge boost to the human condition. The same time, if we're talking
astronomy, there also, it comes at a huge cost. And the Starlink satellites is a great example
of that cost. At one point, in fact, I was just camping in the Mojave with a friend of mine,
and they saw this string of satellites just appear and then disappear into nowhere. So that
is beginning to interfere with earth-based observations. So I think there's tremendous
potential there. It's also important to be responsible about how it's executed.
Now, with Mars and the whole idea of exploring Mars, I don't have strong opinions on whether a
manned mission is required or not required. But I do think the thing to keep in mind is that
I'm not signed on, if you will, to the idea that Mars is some kind of a safe haven that we can
escape to. Mars sucks. Living on Mars, if you want to live on Mars, you can have that experience
by going to the Mojave Desert and camping, and it's just not a great...
It's interesting, but there's something captivating about that kind of mission of us
striving out into space. And by making Mars in some way habitable for at least months at a time,
I think would lead to engineering breakthroughs that would make life in many ways much better
on earth. It will come up with ideas we totally don't expect yet, both on the robotic side,
on the food engineering side, maybe we'll switch from... There'll be huge breakthroughs in insect
farming as exciting as I find that idea to be. In the ways we consume protein, maybe
it'll revolutionize, we do factory farming, which is full of cruelty and torture of animals,
we'll revolutionize that completely because of our... We shouldn't need to go to Mars to
revolutionize life here on earth, but at the same time, I shouldn't need a deadline to get
shit done, but I do need it. And then the same way, I think we need Mars. There's something about
the human spirit that loves that longing for exploration. I agree with that thesis. Going to
the moon and that whole endeavor has captivated the imagination of so many, and it has led to
incredible, kind of incredible ideas really, and probably in nonlinear ways, not like,
okay, we went to the moon, therefore, some person here has thought of this. And in that similar
sense, I think space exploration, there's some real magnetism about it, and it's on a genetic
level. We have this need to keep exploring when we're done with a certain frontier, we move on
to the next frontier. All that I'm saying is that I'm not moving to Mars to live there permanently
ever. And I'm glad you noted the degradation of the earth. I think that is a true leading
order challenge of our time. Yeah, a great engineer. That's a bunch of engineering problems.
I'm most interested in this space because as I've read extensively, it's apparently very
difficult to have sex in space. And so I just want that problem to be solved because I think
once we solve the sex in space problem, we'll revolutionize sex here on earth, thereby increasing
the fun on earth. And the consequences of that can only be good. I mean, you've got a clear plan,
right? And it sounds like... I'm submitting proposals to NASA as we speak. I keep getting
rejected. I don't know why. Okay. You need better diagrams. Better pictures. I should have thought
of that. You a while ago mentioned that there's certain aspects in the history of the solar system
and earth that resulted... It could have resulted in an opaque atmosphere, but it didn't. We can
see the stars. And somebody mentioned to me a little bit ago, it's almost like a philosophical
question for you. Do you think the human society would develop as it did or at all if we couldn't
see the stars? It would be drastically different. If it ever did develop. So I think some of the
early developments of like... Fire and... Fire. First of all, that atmosphere would be so hot
because if you have an opaque atmosphere, the temperature at the bottom is huge. So we would
be very different beings to start with. We'd have very different... It could be cloudy in
certain kinds of ways that you could still get. Okay. Think about like a greenhouse, right? A
greenhouse is cloudy effectively, but it's super hot. Yeah, it's hard to avoid having an atmosphere.
If you have an opaque atmosphere, it's hard to... Venus is a great example. Venus is,
I don't remember exactly how many degrees, but it's hundreds in Celsius, right? It's not 100,
it's hundreds. Even though it's only a little bit closer to the sun, that temperature is entirely
coming from the fact that the atmosphere is thick. So it's just a sauna of sorts. Yeah. You go there,
you know, you feel refreshed after you come back. But if you stay there, I mean, so, okay,
take that as an assumption. This is a philosophical question, not a biological one. So you have a
life that develops under these extremely hot conditions. Yeah. So let's see. So much of
the early evolution of mankind was driven by exploration, right? And the kind of interest
and stars originated in part as a tool to guide that exploration, right? I mean, that in itself,
I think would be a huge differential in the way that we are our evolution on this planet.
Yeah. I mean, stars, that's brilliant. So even in that aspect, but even in further aspects,
astronomy just shows up in basically every single development in the history of science up until
the 20th century, it shows up. So I wonder without that, if we would have, if we would even get like
calculus. Yeah, look, that's a great, I mean, that's a great point. Newton in part developed
calculus because he was interested in understanding, explaining Kepler's laws, right? In general,
that whole mechanistic understanding of the night sky, right? Replacing a religious understanding
where you interpret, you know, this is, you know, this whatever fire god writing his, you know,
little chariot across the sky as opposed to, you know, this is some mechanistic set of laws,
that transformed humanity and arguably put us on the course that we're on today, right?
The entirety of the last 400 years and the development of kind of our technological world
that we live in today was sparked by that, right? Abandoning an effectively, you know,
a non-secular view of the natural world and kind of saying, okay, this can be understood.
And if it can be understood, it can be utilized. We can create our own variants of this. Absolutely,
we would be a very, very different species without astronomy. This I think extends
beyond just astronomy, right? There are questions like why do we need to spend money on X, right?
Where X can be anything like paleontology, right? The meeting patterns of penguins.
Yeah, that's like, that's right. I think, you know, there's a tremendous under appreciation
for the usefulness of useless knowledge, right? I mean, I didn't come up with this. This was a
little book by the guy who started the Institute for Advanced Studies. But, you know, it's so true,
so much of the electronics that are on this table, right, work on Maxwell's equations. Maxwell
wasn't sitting around in the 1800s saying, you know, I hope one day, you know,
we'll make, you know, a couple of mics. So, you know, a couple, you know, a couple guys can have
this conversation, right? That was at no point was that the motivation. And yet, you know,
it gave us the world that we have today. And the answer is if you are a purely
pragmatic person, if you don't care at all about kind of the human condition, none of this,
the answer is you can tax it, right? Like the useless things have created way more capital
than useful things. And the sad thing, I mean, first of all, it's really important to think about
and it's brilliant in the following context. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson has this book about
the role of military-based funding in the development of science. And then so much of
technological breakthroughs in the 20th century had to do with humans working on different military
things. And then the outcome of that had nothing to do with military. It had some military application,
but their impact was much, much bigger than military.
The splitting of the atom is kind of a canonical example of this. We all know the tragedy that,
you know, arises from splitting of the atom. And yet, you know, so much, I mean,
the atom itself does not care for what purpose it is being split. So,
I wonder if we took the same amount of funding as we used for war and poured it into
like totally seemingly useless things, like the mating patterns of penguins. We would get the
internet anyway. I think so. I think so. And, you know, perhaps more of the internet would have
penguins, you know? So, we're both joking, but in some sense, I wonder, it's not the penguins,
because penguins is more about sort of biology, but all useless kind of tinkering and all kinds of
in all kinds of avenues. And also, because military applications are often
burdened by the secrecy required. So, it's often like so much, the openness is lacking. And if
we learned anything from the last few decades is that when there's openness in science,
that accelerates the development of science.
That's right. That's true. The openness of science truly, you know, it benefits everybody,
the notion that if, you know, I share my science with you, then you're going to catch up and like
know the same thing. That is a short-sighted view point, because if you catch up and you open,
you know, you discover something, that puts me in a position to do the next step, right? It's just,
so I absolutely agree with all of this. I mean, the kind of question of like military funding
versus non-military funding is obviously a complicated one. But at the end of the day,
I think we have to get over the notion as a society that we are going to pay for this,
and then we will get that, right? That's true if you're buying like, I don't know,
toilet paper or something, right? It's just not true in the intellectual pursuit. That's not how
it works. And sometimes it'll fail, right? Like sometimes like a huge fraction of what I do,
right? I come up with an idea. I think, oh, it's great. And then I work it out. It's totally not
great, right? It fails immediately. Failure is not a sign that the initial pursuit was worthless.
So failure is just part of this kind of this whole exploration thing. And we should fund more
and more of this exploration, the variety of the exploration. I think it was Linus Pauling or somebody
from, you know, that generation of scientists, you know, a good way to have good ideas is to have
a lot of ideas. So that's, I think that's true. If you are conservative in your thinking, if you
worry about proposing something that's going to fail and oh, what if, you know, like, I,
there's no science police that's going to come and arrest you for proposing the wrong thing.
And, you know, it's also just like, why would you, why would you do science if you're afraid of,
you know, taking that step? It'd be so much better to propose things that are plausible,
they're interesting. And then for a fraction of them to be wrong, then to just kind of,
you know, make incremental progress all your life, right? Speaking of wild ideas,
let me ask you about the thing we mentioned previously, which is this interstellar object
Amor Moa. Could it be space junk from a distant alien civilization?
You can't immediately discount that by saying absolutely it cannot. Anything can be space junk.
I mean, from that point of view, can any of the Kuiper Belt objects we see be space junk,
anything on the night sky can in principle be space junk.
And Kuiper Belt would catch interstellar objects potentially and like force them into an orbit
if they're like small enough? Not the Kuiper Belt itself, but you can imagine like Jupiter family
comets being captured, you know, so you can actually capture things. It's even easier to do
this very early in the solar system, like early in the solar system's life while it's still in
a cluster of stars. It's unavoidable that you capture debris, whether it be natural debris or
unnatural debris or just debris of some kind from other stars that it's like a daycare center,
right? Like everybody passes their infections on to other kids. You know, or more and more,
there's been a lot of discussion about it. There's been a lot of interest in this over,
like, is it aliens or is it not? But let's like, if you just kind of look at the facts,
like what we know about it is it's kind of like a weird shape and it also accelerated,
you know, right? Like that's the two, those are the two interesting things about it. There are
puzzles about it and perhaps the most daring resolution to this puzzle is that
it's not, you know, aliens or it's not like a rock, it's actually a piece of hydrogen ice.
So this is a friend of mine, you know, Daryl Seligman and Greg Laughlin came up with this
idea that in giant molecular clouds that are just clouds of hydrogen helium gas that live in,
live throughout the galaxy at their cores, you can condense ice to become these hydrogen,
you know, icebergs, if you will. And then that explains many of the aspects of,
in fact, I think that explains all of the one mystery, how it becomes elongated because basically
the hydrogen ice sublimates and kind of like a bar of soap that, you know, slowly kind of elongates
as you strip away the surface layers, how it was able to accelerate because of a jet that
is produced from, you know, the hydrogen coming off of it, but you can't see it because it's
hydrogen gas, like all of this stuff kind of falls together nicely. I'm intrigued by that idea,
truly, because it's like, if that's true, that's a new type of astrophysical object.
And it would be produced by what's the monster that produced it initially, that kind of object.
So these giant molecular, molecular clouds, they're everywhere. I mean, they are,
the fact that they exist is not... Are they rogue clouds or are they part of like an
oar cloud? No, no, no, they're rogue clouds. They're just floating about. Yeah. So if you go,
like, a lot of people imagine the galaxy as being a, you know, a bunch of stars, right? And
they're just orbiting, right? But the truth is, if you fly between stars, you run into clouds.
They don't have any large object that creates orbits, they're just floating about.
They're just floating. But why are they floating together? Are they just
floating together for time and not? Well, so these are the, these eventually
become the nurseries of stars. So as they cool, they contract and, you know, then collapse into
stars or into groups of stars. But some of them, the starless molecular clouds, according to the
calculations that Daryl and Greg did, can, can create these like icicles of hydrogen ice.
I wonder why they would be flying so fast? Because they seem to be moving pretty fast
at a quick pace. A more and more. Oh, that's just because of their acceleration due to,
due to the sun. If you stop, it means like, take something really far away, let it go,
and the sun is here. By the time it comes close to the sun, right, it's moving pretty fast.
So that's an attractive explanation, I think, not so much because it's cool, but it makes a clear
prediction, right, of when Verrubin Observatory comes online next year or so. We will discover
many, many more of these objects, right? And they have, so I like, I like theories that are
falsifiable and not just testable, but falsifiable. It's good to have a falsifiable theory where
you can say that's not true. Aliens is one that's fundamentally difficult to say, no, that's not
aliens. Well, the interesting thing to me, if you look at one alien civilization,
and then we look at the things it produces, in terms of if we were to try to detect the alien
civilization, there's like, say there's 10 billion aliens, there would probably be trillions of dumb
drone type things produced by the aliens, and there'd be many, many, many more orders of magnitude
of junk. So like, if you were to look for an alien civilization, in my mind, you would be looking
for the junk. That's the more efficient thing to look for. So I'm not saying Amua Amua has any
characteristics of space junk, but it kind of opened my eyes to the idea that we shouldn't
necessarily be looking to the queen of the ant colony. We should be looking at, I don't know,
I don't know, like the traces of alien life that doesn't look intelligent in any way may not even
look like life. It could be just garbage. We should be looking for garbage. Just generically.
Well, garbage that's producible by unnatural forces. For me, at least that was kind of interesting,
because if you have a successful alien civilization, that we would be producing many more orders of
magnitude of junk, and that would be easier potentially to detect. Well, so you have to
produce the junk, but you have to also launch it. So this is where garbage disposal.
Yeah. But let's imagine we are a successful civilization that has made it to space. We
clearly have, right? And yes, we're in the infancy of that pursuit, but we've launched,
I don't know how many satellites. Probably, if you count GPS satellites, it must be at least
thousands. It's certainly thousands. I don't know if it's over 10,000, but it's on that order.
But it's on that, like a large order of magnitude. How many of the things that we've launched
will ever leave the solar system? I think two. It's two so far. Well, maybe the Voyager,
the Voyager 1, Voyager 2. I don't know if the Pioneer, so maybe three. There's also a Tesla
Roadster out there. That one will never leave the solar system. I think that one will eventually
collide with Mars. That can be SpaceX's first Mars. But look, so there's an energetic cost to
interstellar travel, which is really hard to overcome. And when we think about,
generically, what do we look for in an alien civilization? Oftentimes, we tend to imagine
that the thing you look for is the thing that we're doing right now. So I think that if I look
at the future, and for a while, we was like, okay, if aliens are out there, they must be
broadcasting in radio. That radio, the amount that we broadcast in radio has diminished tremendously
in the last 50 years. But we're doing a lot more computation. What are the signs of
computation? That's an interesting question to ask. I don't know. I think
something on the order of a few percent of the entire electrical grid last year went to mining
Bitcoin, right? There could be a lot of, in the future, different consequences of the computation,
which, I mean, I'm biased, but it could be robotics. It could be artificial intelligence. So
we may be looking for intelligent-looking objects. That's what I meant, probes,
like things that move in kind of artificial ways.
But the emergence of AI is not an if, right? It's happening right in front of our eyes,
and the energetic costs associated with that are becoming a tangible problem. So I think,
if you imagine kind of extrapolating that into the future, what becomes the bottleneck?
Right? The bottleneck might be powering the AI, broadly speaking, not one AI, but powering that
entire AI ecosystem. So I don't know. I think space junk is an interesting idea, but it's
heavily influenced by like sci-fi of the 1950s, where by 2020, we're all like flying to the moon.
And so we produce a lot of space junk. I'm not sure if that's the pathway that alien civilizations
take. I've also never seen an alien civilization.
That's true. But if your theory of chill turns out to be true, and then we don't necessarily
explore, we seize the exploration phase of, like alien civilizations quickly seize the
exploration phase of their efforts, then perhaps they'll just be chilling in a particular space,
expanding slowly, but then using up a lot of resources and then have to have a lot of garbage
disposal that sends stuff out. And the other idea was that it could be a relay that you'll
almost have like these GPS like markers, these sent throughout, which I think is kind of interesting.
It's similar to this probe idea of sending a large number of probes out to measure gravitational,
to measure basically, yeah, the gravitational field, essentially. I mean, a lot of people
at Caltech or in MIT are trying to measure gravitational fields. And there's a lot of
ideas of sending stuff out there that accurately measures those gravitational fields to have
a greater understanding of the early universe. But then you might realize that communication
through gravity is actually much more effective than radio waves, for example, something like that.
And then you send out, I mean, okay, if you're an alien civilization that's able to
have gigantic masses, like basically... We're getting there as a civilization?
No, we're not even close. Well, I mean, I mean, like be able to sort of play with black holes,
that kind of thing. So we're talking about a whole nother order of magnitude of masses,
then it may be very effective to send signals via gravitational waves.
I actually, my sense is that all of these things are genuinely difficult to predict.
And I don't mean to kind of shy away. I really mean, if you take
imagination of what the future looked like from 500 years ago, it's just...
It is so hard to conceive of the impossible. So it's almost like... It's almost limiting to try
and imagine things that are an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude ahead in terms of
progress just because you mentioned cars before. If you were to ask people what they wanted in
1870, it's faster buggies. So I think the whole alien conversation inevitably gets limited by our
entire kind of collective astrophysical lack of imagination.
So to push back a little bit, I find that it's really interesting to talk about these wild ideas
about the future, whether it's aliens, whether it's AI, with brilliant people like yourself
who are focused on very particular tools of science we have today to solve very particular
like rigorous scientific questions. And it's almost like putting on this wild dreamy hat like some
percent of the time and say, what would alien civilizations look like? What would alien trash
look like? What would our own civilization that sends out trillions of AI systems out there,
like how 9,000 but 10,000 out there, what would that look like? And you're right, any one prediction
is probably going to be horrendously wrong, but there's something about creating these
kind of wild predictions that kind of opens up... No, there's a huge magnetism to it. And some of it,
you know, I mean, some of the Jules Verne novels did a phenomenal job predicting the
future, right? That actually was a great example of what you're talking about,
like allowing your imagination to run free. I mean, I just hope, I just hope there's dragons,
that's... I love dragons. Yeah, dragons are the best.
But see, the cool thing about science fiction and these kinds of conversations,
it doesn't just predict the future, I think. Some of these things will create the future,
planting the idea. The humans are amazing, like fake it till you make it. Humans are really good
at taking an idea that seems impossible at the time. And for any one individual human,
that idea is like planting a seed that eventually materializes itself. It's weird. It's weird how
like science fiction can create science fiction. It drives some of the... It drives the science.
I agree with you. And I think in this regard, I'm like a sucker for sci-fi. It's all I listen to
like now when I run. And some of it is completely implausible, right? And it's just like, I don't
care. It's so... It's both entertaining and it's just like, it's imagination.
You know about the Black Clouds book? I think it's by Fred Hoyle. This is like,
this has great connections with sort of a lot of the advancements that are happening in NLP
right now, with transformer models and so on. But it's this Black Cloud shows up in the solar
system and then people try to send regular... And then it learns to talk back at you. So anyway,
we don't have to talk at all about it, but it's just something worth checking out.
With that on the alien front with the Black Cloud, to me and the exact on the LLP front,
and also just explainability of AI, it's fascinating. Just a very question. Stephen
Wolfram looked at this with the movie Arrival. It's like, what would be the common language
that we would discover? The reason that's really interesting to me is we have aliens
here on Earth now. Japanese. Japanese is the obvious answer.
Japanese, yeah. That would be the common... Maybe it would be music actually. That's more likely.
It wouldn't be language. It would be art that they will communicate. But I do believe that we have...
I'm with Stephen Wolfram on this a little bit, that to me, computation, like programs we write,
that they're kind of intelligent creatures. And I feel like we haven't found the common
language to talk with them. Like our little creations that are artificial are not born
with whatever that innate thing that produces language with us. And coming up with mechanisms
for communicating with them is an effort that feels like it will produce some incredible
discoveries. You can even think of... If you think that math has discovered, mathematics in itself is
a kind of... Oh, yeah. It's an innate construction of the world we live in. I think we are,
you know, a part of the way there because pre-1950, computers were human beings that would carry out
arithmetic. And I think it was Ulam who worked in Los Alamos at the time, like towards the end of
the Second World War, wrote something about how in the future computers will not be just arithmetic
tool, but will be truly an interactive thing with which you could do experiments. At the time,
the notion of doing an experiment not like in the lab with some beakers, but an experiment
on a computer designing an experiment on a miracle experiment was a new one. That's
70% of what I do is I write code, terrible code to be clear, but I write code that creates
an experiment, which is a simulation. So in that sense, I think we're beginning to interact with
the computer in a way that you're saying, not as just a fancy calculator, not as just a call and
request type of thing, but something that can generate insights that are otherwise completely
unattainable. They're unattainable by doing analytical mathematics. Yeah. And there's with
AlphaFol2, we're now starting to crack open biology. So being able to simulate at first
trivial biological systems and hopefully down the line complex biological systems,
my hope is to be able to simulate psychological, like sociological systems like humans. A large
part of my work at MIT was on autonomous vehicles. And the fascinating thing to me was about
pedestrians, human pedestrians interacting with autonomous vehicles and simulating those systems
without murdering humans will be very useful, but nevertheless is exceptionally difficult.
Yeah, I would say so. When is my Mustang going to drive itself?
Right. I'm not even joking. It turns out it's much more difficult than we imagined.
Yeah. And I suppose that's the kind of the progress of science is just like, you know,
going to Mars, it's probably going to turn out to be way more difficult than we imagined.
Sending out probes to investigate planet nine at the edge of our solar system might turn out to
be way more difficult than we imagined, but we do it anyway. We figured out in the end.
It's actually, Mars is a great, I mean, sending humans to Mars
is way more complicated than sending humans to the moon. You'd think just like naively,
but they're in space. Who cares? Like, if you go there, why don't you go there?
You know, just life support is an extremely expensive thing. Yeah.
There's a bunch of extra challenges, but I disagree with you. I would be one of the
early people to go. I used to think not. Yeah.
I used to think I'd be one of the first maybe million to go once you have a little bit of a
society. I think I'm upgrading myself to the first like $10,000.
Yeah. That's right. Front of the cabin.
Not completely front, but like, it would be interesting to die. I'm okay with death sucks,
but I kind of like the idea of dying on Mars.
Of all the places to die, I got to say in this regard, like, I don't want to die on Mars.
I don't. No, no. I would much rather die on Earth. I mean, death is fundamentally boring,
right? Like death is a very boring experience. I mean, I've never died before, so I don't know
from firsthand experience. As far as you know. Yeah.
It could be a reincarnation, all those kinds of things. So you mean, where would you die?
If you had to choose. Oh, man.
Okay. So I would definitely, you know, there's a question of who I'd want to die with.
You know, I'd prefer not to die alone, but like, you know, surrounded by family would be preferable,
where I think Northern New Mexico, and I'm not even joking. Like this is not a random place.
It's just like. Would that be your favorite place on Earth?
Not necessarily like favorite place on Earth to, to, to reside at, you know, indefinitely,
but it is, it is one of the most beautiful places I've, I've ever been to. So, you know,
there's something, I don't know, there's something attractive about, about going, you know.
Returning to nature in a beautiful place. Let me ask you about another aspect of your life
that is full of beauty. Music. Okay. You're a musician. The absurd question I have to ask,
what is the greatest song of all time? Objectively speaking. The greatest song of all time.
I suppose that could change moment to moment, day to day. But if you were forced to answer for
this particular moment in your life, that's something that pops to mind. This could be
both philosophically, this could be technically as a musician, like what you enjoy, maybe lyrics.
Like for me, it's lyrics is very important. So, I would probably be, my choice would be lyrics
based. I don't want to answer in terms of just technical, you know, technical prowess. I think
technical prowess is impressive, right? It's just like, it's impressive what can be done.
I wouldn't place that into the category of the greatest music ever written.
And some classical music that's written is undeniably beautiful, but I don't want to
consider that category of music either, just because, you know, so if I have to limit
the scope of this philosophical discussion to, you know, the kind of music that I listen to,
you know, probably What's My Age Again by Blink 182. It's just, you know, it's a solid one.
It's got, you know.
Said nobody ever. That's a good song. I don't even know if you're joking.
No, no, I am joking. It's a good one, but it's, yeah, I mean.
Oh, it's like the back is a close second.
What's my age again? Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, it would probably, you know, songwriting wise, I think the Beatles came
pretty close to the influential to you. I was like the Beatles.
Yeah. Love the Beatles. I love the Beatles.
But it'd be yesterday. Yeah.
Like strong. I think strawberry feels forever is, is one, you know what one of my favorite
Beatles songs is? It's, you know, in my life, right? That's how it's hard to imagine how
whatever a 24 year old wrote that. It is one of the most introspective pieces of music ever.
You know, I'm a huge Pink Floyd fan. And so I think, you know, if you were to,
you can sort of look at the entire dark side of the moon album and as, you know,
getting pretty close up there to the pinnacle of what, you know, can be created.
So, you know, Time's a great song. Yeah. It's a great song. Just the entirety of,
just the instruments, the lyrics, the feeling created by a song like Pink Floyd
can create feelings, the entire experience. I mean, you have that with the wall of just
transporting you into another place. Songs don't, not many songs could do that as well.
Not many artists can do that as well as Pink Floyd did.
There are a lot of bands that you can kind of say, oh, yeah, like if you take Blink 182,
right? If you have no idea, like if you are listening to sort of that type of pop punk for
the first time, it's difficult to differentiate between Blink 182 and like some 41 and the
thousand of other like lesser known bands that all sounded, they all had that sparkling production.
Feel, they all kind of sounded the same, right? With Pink Floyd, it's hard to find another band
that you're like, well, is this one Pink Floyd? Like, you know, when you're listening to Pink Floyd,
when you're listening to. The uniqueness, that's fascinating. You know, in the calculation
of the greatest song in the greatest band of all time, you could probably, you'd probably
actually quantify this like scientifically is like how unique, if you play different songs,
how well are people able to recognize whether it's this band or not? And that, you know,
that's probably a huge component to greatness. Like if the world would miss it if it was gone.
Yes. Yes. So, but there's also the human story, things like I would say output Johnny Cash's
cover of Hurt as one of the greatest songs of all time. And that has less to do with the song.
But your interaction with it?
Well, interaction with it, but also the human, the full story of the human. So like,
it's not just, if I just heard the song, it'd be like, okay, that, but if it's the full story of
it, also the video component for that particular song. So like that, you can't discount the full
experience of it. Absolutely. You know, I have no confusion about not about being, you know,
anywhere, you know, in that lean, but I just like, I sometimes think about, you know, music that is
being produced today feels oftentimes feels like, like kind of close, like close that you buy
at, like H&M and you wear it three times before they rip and you throw away. So like, so much of it
is, it's not bad. It's just kind of forgettable, right? Like the fact that we're talking about Pink
Floyd in 2021 is in itself an interesting question. Why are we talking about Pink Floyd?
And it's, there's something unforgettable about them and unforgettable about the art that they
created. That could be the markets that like, so Spotify has created this kind of market where
the incentives for creating music that last is much lower because there's so much more music.
You just want something that shines bright for a short amount of time, makes a lot of money and
moves on. And I mean, the same thing you see with the news and all those kinds of things,
we're just living in a shorter and shorter, shorter like time scale in terms of our attention spans.
And that nevertheless, when we look at the long arc of history of music, perhaps there will be
some songs from today that will last as much as Pink Floyd. We're just unable to see it.
Yeah, just the collected works of Nickelback. Exactly. You never know. You never know,
Justin Bieber, it could be a contender. I've recently started listening to Justin Bieber,
just to understand what people are talking about. And I'll just keep my comments to myself on that
one. It's too good to explain. The words cannot capture the greatness that is the Bebes. You
as a musician, so you write your own music, you play guitar, you sing. Maybe can you give an
overview of the role music has played in your life? You're one of the, you're a world class
scientist. And so it's kind of fascinating to see somebody in your position who is also a great
musician and still loves playing music. Yeah, well, I wouldn't call myself a great musician.
One of the best of all time. That's right. We were saying offline confidence is like the most
essential thing about being a rock star. Exactly. It's the confidence and kind of like moodiness,
right? Yeah, look, I mean, music plays an absolutely essential role in everything I do,
because I lose, if I stop playing for one reason or another, say I'm traveling,
I notably lose creativity in every other aspect of my life. There's something,
I don't view playing music as a separate endeavor from doing science or doing whatever.
It's all part of that same creative thing, which is distinct from, I don't know,
pressing a button or like- So it's not a break from science. It's part of your science.
It's absolutely is a part of it. I would say it's the thing that enables the science, right?
The science would suck even more than it does already without the music.
And that means like the creating of the writing of the music or is it just even playing other
people's stuff? Is it the whole of it? Yeah, it's definitely both. Yeah, and also just,
I love to play guitar. I love to sing. My wife tolerates my screeching singing and even kind
of likes it. Yeah, so people should check out your stuff. You have a great voice,
so I love your stuff. Is there something you're super busy? Is there something you can say about
practicing for musicians, for guitar, for you're also in a band? So like that whole
how you can manage that? Is there some tricks or some hacks to being a lifelong musician while
being like super busy? So I would say the way that I optimize my life is I try to do the thing
that I'm passionate about in a moment and put that at the top of the priority list.
There are moments when you feel inspired to play music and if you're in the middle of something,
if you can avoid, if that can be put on hold, just do it, right? There are times when you
get inspired about something scientific. I do my best to drop everything, go into that
mode, that isolated mode and execute upon that. So it's a chaotic, I think I have a pretty chaotic
lifestyle where I'm always doing kind of multiple things and jumping between what I'm doing. But
at the end of the day, it's not like those moments of inspiration are actually kind of rare,
right? Like most of the time, all of us are just doing the stuff that needs to get done.
If you do the disservice to yourself of saying, oh, I'm inspired to do this calculation,
figure this out, but I've got to answer email or just do something silly.
That is nothing more than disservice. And also, I have some social media presence,
but I mostly stay off of social media to just frankly, because I don't enjoy the mental cycles
that it takes over. Yeah, it robs you of those precious moments that could be filled with
inspiration in your other pursuits. But there's something to maybe you and I are different
in this. I tried to play at least 10 minutes of guitar every day, almost on the technical side,
keeping that base of basic competence going. And I mean, the same way writers will get in
front of a paper no matter what, that kind of thing. It just feels like that for my life
has been essential to the daily ritual of it. Otherwise, days turn into weeks, weeks turn
into months, and you haven't played guitar for months. No, no, I understand. For me,
I think it's been like if we have a gig coming up. You need deadlines.
Yeah, that's right. No, we will sharpen up definitely, especially coming up to a gig.
And it's like, we're not trying to make money with this. This is just for
that satisfaction of doing something and doing something well, right? But overall,
I would say I play guitar most days. Most days. And when I put kids to sleep, I play guitar with
them and we just make up random songs about a cat or something. We just do kind of random stuff.
But music is always involved in that process.
Yeah, keeping it fun. You have Russian roots?
I sure do. Were you born in Russia?
I was. Yeah.
When did you come here?
So I came to the US in the very end of 99. So I was almost 14 years old. But along the way,
we spent six years in Japan. So we moved from Russia to Japan in 94, and then to the US in 99.
So like elementary school in Japan. So elementary school in Japan.
Yeah. So that's interesting, dad. Do you still speak Russian?
Sure.
Okay. Do you speak Russian?
Yeah, of course.
Okay. Maybe I'll let me ask you in Russian, what do you remember about Russia?
That'd be interesting to hear you speak.
Well, in general, I remember, I mean, I was eight when we left. And, of course, I remember
everything in the first year, including the transition from 1991 to 1992, this turbulent period, and
of course, 1993. So I still remember very well how Pepsi-Cola appeared at some point.
And then Coca-Cola appeared. I remember I was, I don't know, six years old. I thought,
how can it be that Coca-Cola stole the product and did the same thing? I mean, I never thought for a long time
that Pepsi and Coca-Cola were invented in 1992.
So for people who don't speak Russian, Konstantin was talking about basically his first in 1992
interaction with capitalism, which is Pepsi. And at first he discovered Pepsi, and then he
discovered Coke, and it was confused how such theft could occur.
Like an intellectual property theft. And remember, Pepsi arrived to the Soviet Union first.
And there was some, there's some complicated story, which I don't quite understand the details of.
For a while, Pepsi commanded submarines or something. Yeah, Pepsi had like a fleet of
Soviet submarines. They were sponsoring tanks and this vesting. And I remember,
there's certain things that trickled in like McDonald's. I remember that was a big deal.
Oh, yeah, I remember. Certain aspects of the West.
Absolutely. So I mean, we went to McDonald's and we stood in line. I mean, this is absurd, right,
from kind of looking at it from today's perspective, but we stood in line for like six hours to get
into this McDonald's. And I remember inside, it was just like a billion people. And I'm just taking
a bite out of that Big Mac. I mean, like, wow. What was it an incredible experience for you?
So like, what is the taste of the West like? Did you enjoy it? I enjoyed the fact that,
I mean, this is like, this is getting into the weeds, but I really enjoyed the fact that the
top of the bun had those seeds. And I remember how on the commercials, like the Big Mac would kind
of bounce. I was like, the seeds, how do they inject the seeds into the bread? Like, amazing,
right? So I think it was... Artistry. Yeah, you enjoyed the Artistry of the Culinary Express.
Exactly. It was the, you know, it was the food art that is the Big Mac.
Actually, I still don't know the answer to that. How do they get the sesame seeds on the bun?
It's better to not know the answer. You just wander the mystery of it all. Yeah,
I remember it being exceptionally delicious, but I'm with you. I don't know. You didn't
mention how transformative Pepsi was, but to me, basically sugar-based stuff,
like Pepsi was or Coke. I don't remember which one we partook in, but that was an incredible
experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. And, you know, I think it's, you know, it was an
important and formative period. I sometimes, I guess, rely on that a little bit, you know,
in my daily life, because I remember like the early 90s were real rough, you know, like my
parents were kind of on the bottom of the spectrum in terms of, you know, in terms of
financial well-being. So kind of like just when I run into trouble, not like, you know,
money trouble, just any kind of trouble these days, it just kind of is not particularly meaningful
when you compare it to that turbulent time of the early 90s. And the other thing is,
I think there's like an advantage to being, you know, an immigrant, which is that you get,
you go through the mental exercise of changing your environment completely early in your life,
right? You go, it's by no means, you know, pleasant in the moment, right? But like going
into Japanese elementary school, right? Like I didn't go to some like private, you know,
thing. I just went to a regular, like Japanese public elementary school and that was the
non-Japanese person in my class. So just like the learning Japanese and just kind of
cool. So that's a super humbling experience in many ways. Was when you like made fun of all
that kind of stuff, being the outsider? Oh, absolutely. But, you know, you kind of do,
you kind of do that. And then you kind of, then you just kind of are okay with, with stuff, you
know what I mean? And so like doing that again in middle school in the US, it was arguably easy
because I was like, yeah, well, I've already done this before. So I think it kind of prepares you
mentally a little bit for, for switching up for whatever, you know, changes that will come up for
the rest of your life. So I wouldn't trade that, that experience really for anything. It's a huge
aspect of, of who I am. And I'm sure you can relate to a lot of this. Yes. Is there advice
from your life that you can give to young people today, high school, college, you know,
about their career, or maybe about life in general? I'm not like a career coach by
life coach, right? Like I'm definitely not a life coach. I don't have it all figured out.
But I think there's a, there's a perpetual cycle of, you know, thinking that there is a,
there's kind of like a template for success, right? Maybe there is, but in my experience,
I haven't seen it, right? You know, I would say people in high school, right?
So much of their focus is on getting straight A's, filling their CV with this and this and
this so that it looks impressive, right? That, that is not, I think, a good way to optimize
your life, right? Do the thing that fills your life with passion. Do the thing that fills your
life with interest and, you know, do that perpetually, right? A straight A student, you know,
is really impressive, but also, you know, somewhat boring, right? So, so I, I think, you know,
injection of more of that kind of interest into, into the lives of young people would go a long
way in, in just both upping their level of happiness and then just kind of ensuring that
looking forward, they are not suffering from a, you know, perpetual condition of, oh, I have to
satisfy these like, you know, check boxes to, to do well, right? Because you can lose yourself in
that whole process for the rest of your life. But it's nice if it's possible, like Max Tecmark
was exceptionally good at this at MIT, figure out how you can spend a small part of your
percent of your efforts that, such that your CV looks really impressive.
Yeah, absolutely. There's no, like, without a doubt, like, that's a, that's a baseline that you need
to have. And then spend, so like, spend most of your time doing like amazing things you're
passionate about, but such that it kind of like Planet Nine produces objects that, that feed your
CV, like slowly over time. So getting good grades in high school, maybe doing extracurricular
activities or, or in terms of like, you know, for programmers that's producing code that you can
show up on GitHub, like leaving traces, like, throughout your efforts, such that your CV looks
impressive to the rest of the world. In fact, I mean, this is somewhat along the lines of what
I'm talking about. See, like, getting like good grades is important, but grades are not a tangible,
like, product. Like, you cannot out, you know, show your A and have your A live a separate life
from you. Code very much does, right? Music very much takes on, you know, provided somebody else
listens to it, right? Provide, like, takes on a life of its own. That's kind of what I mean,
right? Doing, doing stuff that, that can then get separated from, from you is, is exceptionally
attractive, right? It's like, it's like a fun. And it's, and it's also very impressive to others.
I think we're moving to a world where grades mean less and less, like certifications mean less and
less. If you look at, especially again, in the computing fields, getting a degree, finishing your,
currently just get it, finishing your degree with it, whether it's masters or masters of
PhD is less important than the things you've actually put out into the world. Right, right.
And that's a fascinating kind of, that's a, that's great that in that sense, the meritocracy
in its richest, most beautiful form is, is starting to win out. Yeah, it's weird because, like,
you know, my understanding, and I'm not like, I don't know the history of science well enough to,
to speak very confidently about this, but, you know, the advisor of my advisor of my advisor
from undergrad, like, didn't have a PhD, right? So I think it was a more common thing back in the day,
even in the academic sector to, you know, not have, you know, Faraday, like Faraday didn't
know algebra and drew diagrams about, you know, magnetic fields like his Faraday's law was derived
entirely from intuition. So it is interesting to how the world of academia has evolved into a
way, you got to do this and then get PhD, then you have to postdoc once and twice and maybe
thrice and then like you, you move on. So, you know, it does, I do wonder, you know, if we're,
you know, if there's a better approach. I think we're heading there, but it's a fascinating
historical perspective, like that we might have just tried this whole thing out for a while where
we put a lot more emphasis on grades and certificates and degrees and all those kinds of things.
I think the difference historically is like we can actually, using the internet, show off
the show off ourselves and our creations better and better and more effectively,
whether that's code or producing videos or all those kinds of things.
That's right. You can become a certified drone pilot.
Of all the things you want to pick, yeah, for sure. Or you could just fly and make YouTube
videos against hundreds of thousands of views with your drone and never getting a certificate.
That's probably illegal. Don't do it. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing?
So, you look at planets, they seem to orbit stuff without asking the why question and for
some reason life emerged on earth such that it led to big brains that can ask the big why question.
Do you think there's an answer to it? I'm not sure what the question is.
Meaning of life? The meaning of life. It's 42.
But aside from that, I think the question you're asking is why we do all this.
Why we do all this? It's part of the human condition.
Human beings are fundamentally, I feel like, sort of stochastic and fundamentally interested
in expanding our own understanding of the world around us.
And creating stuff to enable that understanding. So, there's just a bunch of randomness that
really doesn't seem like it has a good explanation and yet there's a kind of direction
to our being that we just keep wanting to create and to understand.
That's right. I've met people that claim to be anti-science and yet in their anti-science
discussion, they're like, well, if you're so scientific, then why don't you explain to me
how, I don't know, this works. And it always, there's that fundamental seed of curiosity
and interest that is common to all of us. That is absolutely what makes us human.
And I'm in a privileged position of being able to have that be my job.
I think as time evolves forward, the kind of economy changes, I mean, we're already starting
to see a shift towards that type of creative enterprise as merging and taking over a bigger
and bigger chunk of the sector. It's not yet, I think, the dominant portion of the economy by any
account. But if we compare this to time when the dominant thing you would do would be to
go to a factory and do the same exact thing, I think there is a tide there and things are
sort of headed in that direction. Yeah, life's becoming more and more fun. I can't wait.
Honestly, what happens next? You can't wait to just chill. Just chill.
The terminal point of this is to just chill and wait for those Kuiper Belt objects to complete
one orbit. I'm going to credit you with this idea. I do hope that we definitively discover
a proof that there is a Planet Nine out there in the next few years. So you can sit back with a
cigar, a cigarette, or vodka, or wine, and just say, I told you so. That's already happening.
I'm going to do that later today. As I mentioned, confidence is essentially
to being a rock star. I really appreciate you explaining so many fascinating things to me
today. I really appreciate the work that you do out there. And I really appreciate you talking
with me today. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Konstantin Batigin. And thank you to Squarespace, Literati, Onit, and N.I. Check them
out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from
Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Far out in the uncharted backwaters of
the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly 92 million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green
planet whose ape-descendant life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think
digital watches are a pretty neat idea. Thank you for listening. I hope to see you next time.