The following is a conversation with Clara Sousa Silva, a quantum astrochemist at Harvard,
specializing in spectroscopy of gases that serve as possible signs of life on other planets,
most especially the gas phosphine. She was a co-author of the paper that in 2020
found that there is phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus and thus possible extraterrestrial life
that lives in its atmosphere. The detection of phosphine was challenged, reaffirmed, and is now
still under active research. Quick mention of our sponsors, Onit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I think
the search for life on other planets is one of the most important endeavors in science. If we find
extraterrestrial life and study it, we may find insights into the mechanisms that originated life
here on Earth, and more than life, the mechanisms that originated intelligence and consciousness.
If we understand these mechanisms, we can build them. But more than this, the discovery of life
on other planets means that our galaxy and our universe is teeming with life. This is humbling
and terrifying, but it is also exciting. We humans and natural explorers. For most of our history,
we explored the surface of the Earth and the contents of our minds. But now, with space-faring
vessels, we have a chance to explore life beyond Earth, their physics, their biology, and perhaps
the contents of their minds. This is the Lux Friedman podcast, and here is my conversation
with Clara Sousa Silva. Since you're the world expert in, well, in many things, but one of them
is Phosphine, would it technically be correct to call you the Queen of Phosphine? I go for Dr.
Phosphine. Queen is an inherited title, I feel. But you still rule by love and power, so while
having the doctor title. Yeah, kindness. Kindness. In September 2020, you co-authored a paper
announcing possible presence of Phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus, and that it may be a
signature of extraterrestrial life. Big maybe. Big maybe. There was some pushback,
of course, from the scientific community that followed friendly, loving pushback.
Then in January, another paper from University of Wisconsin, I believe, confirmed the finding.
So, where do we stand in this saga, in this mystery of what the heck is going on on Venus
in terms of Phosphine and in terms of aliens? Let's try to break it down.
The short answer is we don't know. I think you and the rest of the public are now witnessing
a pretty exciting discovery, but as it evolves, as it unfolds, we did not wait until we had
years of data from 10 different instruments across several layers of the atmosphere.
We waited until we had two telescopes with independent data months apart. But still,
the data is weak. It's noisy. It's delicate. It's very much at the edge of instrument sensibility
to sensitivity. And so, we still don't even know if it is Phosphine. We don't even really
know if the signal is real. People still disagree about that. And I think the more philosophical
end of how this happened, I think it is a distinction, and myself and other co-authors,
we're talking about this. It's a distinction between hypothesis generation and hypothesis
testing. Now, hypothesis testing is something that I think is the backbone of the scientific method.
But it has a problem, which is if you're looking through very noisy data and you want to test the
hypotheses, you may, by mistake, create a superior signal. The safest, more conservative approach
is hypothesis generation. You see some data, and you go, what's in there? With no bias. Now,
this is much safer, much more conservative. And when there's a lot of data, that's great. When
there isn't, you can clean the noise and take out the signal with it. The signal with a bath
water or whatever the equivalent of the analogy would be. And so I think the healthy discourse
that you described is exactly this. There are ways of processing the data, completely legitimate
ways, checked by multiple people and experts where the signal shows up, and then Phosphine
is in the atmosphere of Venus, and somewhere it doesn't. And then we disagree what that signal means.
If it's real and it is an ambiguously Phosphine, it is very exciting because we don't know how to
explain it without life. But going from there to Venusians is still a huge jump.
Venusians. So that would be the title for the civilization if it is a living and thriving
on Venus's Venusians.
Until we know what they call themselves, and that that's the name, yes.
So this is the early analysis of data or analysis of early data. It was nevertheless,
you waited until the actual peer-reviewed publication to announce.
Of course. And analysis of the two different instruments months apart. So that's ALMA and
JCMT, the two telescopes.
I mean, it's still, I mean, it's really exciting. What did it feel like sort of sitting on this data,
like kind of anticipating the publication and wondering, and still wondering, is it true?
Like, how does it make you feel that a planet in our solar system might have Phosphine in the atmosphere?
It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts.
In the best possible way?
I've been working on Phosphine for over a decade.
Before it was cool.
Before it was cool. Before anyone could spell it or heard of it. And at the time,
people either didn't know what Phosphine was or only knew it for being just possibly the most
horrendous molecule that ever graced the earth. And so no one was a fan. And I had been considering
looking for it because I did think it was an unusual and disgusting, but very promising
sign of life. I've been looking for it everywhere. I really didn't think to look in the solar system.
I thought it was all pretty rough around here for life. And so I wasn't even considering
the solar system at all, never my next door Venus. It was only the lead author of the study,
Jane Greaves, who thought to look in the clouds of Venus and then reached out to me to say,
I don't know Phosphine, but I know it's weird. How weird is it? And the answer is very weird.
And so the telescopes we're looking at, this is visual data. That's what you mean by visual.
You wouldn't see the Phosphine. Well, but I mean, it's a telescope. It's remote. It's remote.
You're observing, you're zooming in on this particular planet. I mean, what does the sensor
actually look like? How many pixels are there? What does the data kind of look like? It'd be nice
to kind of build up intuition of how little data we have based on which, I mean, if you look at like,
I've just been reading a lot about gravitational waves. And it's kind of incredible how from
just very little, like probably the world's most precise instrument, we can derive some very
foundational ideas about our early universe. And in that same way, it's kind of incredible how
much data, how much information you can get from just a few pixels. So what are we talking about
here in terms of based on which this paper saw possible signs of Phosphine in the atmosphere?
So Phosphine, like every other molecule, has a unique spectroscopic fingerprint,
meaning it rotates and vibrates in special ways. I calculated how many of those ways it can
rotate and vibrates in 16.8 billion ways. What this means is that if you look at the spectrum of light
and that light has gone through Phosphine gas on the other end, there should be 16.8 billion
tiny marks left, indentations left in that spectrum. We found one of those on Venus,
one of those 16.8 billion. So now the game is, can we find any of the other ones?
Yeah. But they're really hard to spot. They're all in terrible places in the electromagnetic
spectrum. And the instruments we use to find this one can't really find any other one. There's
another one of the 16.8 billion we could find, but it would take many, many days of continuous
observations. And that's not really in the cards right now. I mean, how do you, there's all kinds
of noise, first of all. There's all kinds of other signal. So how do you separate all of that out
to pull out just this particular signature that's associated with Phosphine?
So the data kind of looks somewhat like a wave. And a lot of that is noise and it's a baseline.
And so if you can figure out the exact shape of the wave, you can cancel that shape out
and you should be left with a straight line. And if there's something there, an absorption,
so a signal. So that's what we did. We tried to find out what was this baseline shape,
cleaned it out and got the signal. That's part of the problem. If you do this wrong,
you can create a signal. But that signal is at 8.904 wave numbers. And we actually have more digits
than that. But I don't remember by heart. And ALMA in particular is a very, very good telescope,
array of telescopes. And it can focus on exactly that frequency. And in that frequency, there are
only two known molecules that absorb at all. So that's how we do it. We look at that exact spot
where we know Phosphine absorbs the other molecules SO2.
If there is extraterrestrial life, whether it's on Venus or on exoplanets where you looked before,
how does that make you feel? How should it make us feel? Should we be scared? Should we be excited?
Let's say it's not intelligent life. Let's say it's microbial life. Is there a threat to us?
Are we a threat to it? Or is it only, not only, but mostly a possibility to understand something
fundamental, something beautiful about life in the universe?
Hard to know. You would have to bring on a poet or a philosopher on the show.
I feel those things. I just don't know if those are the right things to feel. I don't,
certainly don't feel scared. I think it's rather silly to feel scared. Definitely don't touch them.
Sometimes in the movies, don't go near it. Don't interfere. I think one of the things with Venus
is because of Phosphine, now there is a chance that Venus is inhabited. In that case,
we shouldn't go there. We should be very careful with messing with them, bringing our own stuff
there that contaminates it. Venus has suffered enough. If there's life there, it's probably
the remains of a living planet, the very last survivors of what once was potentially a thriving
world. I don't want our first interaction with alien life to be massacre. I definitely wouldn't
want to go near out of a, let's say, galactic responsibility, galactic ethics. I often think
of alien astronomers watching us and how disappointed they would be if we messed this up.
I really want to be very careful with anything that could be life, but certainly I wouldn't be
scared. Humans are plenty capable of killing one another. We don't need extraterrestrial help
to destroy ourselves. Scared mostly of other humans. Exactly. But this life, if there is life
there, it does seem just like you said, it would be pretty rugged. It's like the cockroaches or
Chuck Norris, I don't know. It's something that survived through some very difficult conditions.
That doesn't mean it would handle us. It could be like war of the worlds.
You come just because you're resilient in your own planet. It doesn't mean you can
survive another. Even our extremophiles, which are very impressive. We should all be very proud
of our extremophiles. They wouldn't really make it in the Venusian clouds. I wouldn't expect,
because you're tough, even Chuck Norris tough, that you would survive on a alien planet.
From the scientific perspective, you don't want to pollute the data gathering process,
but it should be showing up there. The observer can affect the observed. How heartbreaking would
it be if we found life on another planet? Then we're like, oh, we brought it with us. It was my
sandwich. But that's always the problem, right? And it's certainly a problem with Mars because we
visited that if there is life on Mars or like remains of life on Mars, it's always going to be
a question of like, well, maybe we planted it there. Let's not do the same with Venus. It's
harder because when we try to go to Venus, things melt very quickly. It's a little harder to
pollute Venus. It's very good at destroying foreigners.
Yeah. Well, in terms of Elon Musk and terraforming planets, Mars is stop number one. Venus maybe
after that. Can we talk about phosphine a little bit? Love phosphine.
Love phosphine. What's your Twitter handle that's like Dr. Phosphine? It's Dr. Phosphine,
yes. You will be surprised here. It wasn't taken already. I just grabbed it. Didn't have to buy
it off anyone. Yeah. So what is it? What's phosphine? You already mentioned it's pretty toxic and
troublesome. And outside? Trouble site. No, I love it. I'm going to start calling it Trouble
site. So maybe what are some things that make it interesting chemically and why is it a good sign
of life when it's present in the atmosphere like you've described in your paper aptly titled
the phosphine as a biosignature gas in exoplanet atmospheres. I suppose you wrote that paper before
Venus. I did, yes. And no one cared. In that paper I said something like, if we find phosphine on
any terrestrial planet can only mean life. And everyone's like, yeah, that sounds about right.
Let's go. And then Venus shows up and I was like, are you sure? I was sure before I was sure. Now
that it's right here, I'm less sure now that my claims are being tested. So phosphine,
phosphine is a fascinating molecule. So it's shaped like a pyramid with a phosphorus up top
and then three hydrogens. It's actually quite a simple molecule in many ways. It's the most
popular elements in the universe, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur.
When you add hydrogen to them, it makes quite simple, quite famous molecules. You do it to
oxygen, you get water. You do it to carbon, you get methane. You do it to nitrogen, you get ammonia.
These are all molecules people have heard of. You do it to phosphorus, you get phosphine.
People haven't heard of phosphine because it's not really popular on Earth. We really shouldn't
find it anywhere on Earth because it is extremely toxic to life. It interacts with oxygen metabolism
and everything you know and love uses oxygen metabolism. And it interacts fatally, so it kills
in several very imaginative and very macabre ways. So it was used as a chemical warfare agent
in the First World War and most recently by ISIS. So really bad. Most life avoids it.
Even life that might not avoid it, so life that doesn't use oxygen metabolism, anaerobic life,
still has to put crazy amounts of effort into making it. It's a really difficult molecule to
make thermodynamically speaking. It's really difficult to make that phosphorus want to be together
with that hydrogen. So it's horrible. Everyone avoids it. When they're not avoiding it, it's
extremely difficult to make. You would have to put energy in, sacrifice energy to make it. And if you
did go through all that trouble and made it, it gets reacted with the radicals in the atmosphere
and gets destroyed. So we shouldn't find it anywhere and yet we do. This is kind of
a weird molecule that seems to be made by life and we don't even know why. Life clearly finds
a use for it. It's not the only molecule that life is willing to sacrifice energy to make,
but we don't know how or why life is even making it. So absolutely mysterious, absolutely deadly,
smells horrifically when it's made. It produces other kind of diphosphines and it's been reported
as smelling like garlicky fishy death. Once someone referred to it as smelling like the,
let me see if I remember, the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan.
Oh, very nice.
Yeah, very, very vivid.
So you're a poet after all.
I didn't call that someone else did. And so it's just this horrific molecule,
but it is produced by life. We don't know why. And when it is produced by life,
it's done with an almost sacrifice and the universe does not sacrifice. Life sacrifices.
And so it's this strange contradictory molecule that we should all be avoiding and yet seems
to be an almost unambiguous sign of life on rocky planets.
Okay. Can we dig into that a little bit on rocky planets? Is there biological
mechanisms that can produce it? And is there, you said that why is unclear? Why life might
produce it? But is there an understanding of what kind of mechanisms might be able to produce it,
this very difficult to produce molecule?
We don't know yet. The enzymatic pathways of fossil production by life are not yet known.
This is not actually as surprising as it might sound. I think something like 80% of all the
natural products that we know of, so we know biology makes them, we don't know how. It is much
easier to know life produces something because you can put bacteria in a petri dish and then watch,
and then that gas is produced to go, oh, life made it. That actually happened with phosphine.
But that's much easier to do, of course, than figuring out what is the exact
metabolic pathway within that life form that created this molecule. So we don't know yet.
Phosphine is really understudied. No one had really heard of it until now-ish.
What you were presenting is the fact that life produces
phosphine, not the process by which it produces phosphine. Is there an urgency now? If you were
to try to understand the mechanisms, the enzymatic pathways that produce phosphine, how difficult
is that of a problem to crack? It's really difficult. If I'm not mistaken, even the scent
of truffles, obviously a billion-dollar industry, huge deal. Until quite recently,
it wasn't known exactly how those scents, those molecules that create this incredible smell were
produced, and this is a billion-dollar industry. As you can imagine, there is no such pressure.
There's no phosphine lobby or anything that would push for this research. I hope someone picks it
up and does it. And it isn't crazy because we know that phosphine is really hard to make.
We know it's really hard for it to happen accidentally, even
lightning and volcanoes that can produce small amounts of phosphine. It's extremely difficult
for even these extreme processes to make it. It's not really surprising that only life can do it
because life is willing to make things at a cost. Maybe on the topic of phosphine,
again, you've gotten yourself into trouble. I'm going to ask you all these high-level poetic
questions. I apologize. No, I would love it. Okay. When did you first fall in love with phosphine?
It wasn't love at first sight. It was somewhere between a long relationship and Stockholm syndrome.
When I first started my PhD, I knew I wanted to learn about molecular spectra and how to
simulate it. I thought it was really outrageous that we as a species couldn't detect molecules
remotely. We didn't have this perfect catalogue ready of the molecular fingerprint of every molecule
we may want to find in the universe. And something as basic as phosphine, the fact that we didn't
really know how it interacted with light and so we couldn't detect it properly in the galaxy,
just I was so indignant. And so initially, I just started working on phosphine because
people hadn't before. And I thought we should know what phosphine looks like. And that was it.
And then I read every paper that's ever been published about phosphine. It was quite easy
because there aren't that many. And that's when I started learning about where we had already
founded in the universe and what it meant. I started finding out quite how little we know
about it and why. And it was only when I joined MIT and I started talking to biochemists that
it became clear that phosphine wasn't just weird and special and understudied and disgusting.
It was all these things for oxygen-loving life. And it was the anaerobic world that would welcome
phosphine. And that's when the idea of looking for it on other planets became crystallized.
Because oxygen is very powerful and very important on Earth, but that's not necessarily going to be
the case on other exoplanets. Most planets are oxygen-poor. Overwhelmingly, most planets are
oxygen-poor. And so finding the sign of life that would be welcomed by everything that would live
without oxygen on Earth seemed so cool. But ultimately, the project that first was born
out of the idea that you want to find that molecular fingerprint of a molecule. And this
is just one example. And that's connected to then looking for that fingerprint elsewhere in a remote
way. And obviously, at that time where exoplanets already, when you were doing your PhD, and by
those you say your PhD thesis was on phosphine. It was all on phosphine, 100% on phosphine. With a
little bit of ammonia, I have a chapter that I did where I talked about phosphine and ammonia.
But no, phosphine was very much my thesis. But at that time, when you're writing it,
there's already a sense that exoplanets are out there and we might be able to be looking for
biosignatures on those exoplanets. Pretty much. So I finished my PhD in 2015. We found the first
exoplanets in the kind of mid to late 90s. So exoplanets were known. It was known that some
had atmospheres. And from there, it's not a big jump to think, well, if some have atmospheres,
some of those might be habitable. And some of those may be inhabited.
So how do you detect, you started to talk about it, but can we linger on it? How do you detect
phosphine on a faraway thing, rocky thing, rocky planet? What is spectroscopy? What is this molecular
fingerprint? What does it look like? You've kind of mentioned a wave, but what are we supposed to
think about? What are the tools? What are the uncertainties? All those kinds of things.
So the path can go this way. You've got light, kind of pure light. You can crack that light
open with a prism or a spectroscope or water and make a rainbow. That rainbow is all the colors
and all the invisible colors, the ultraviolet, the infrared. And if that light was truly pure,
you could consider that rainbow to just cover continuously all of these colors. But if that
light goes through a gas, we may not see that gas. We certainly cannot see the molecules within that
gas. But those molecules will still absorb some of that light, some, but not all. Each molecule
absorbs only very specific colors of that rainbow. And so if you know, for example, that shade of
green can only be absorbed by methane, then you can watch. As a planet passes in front of a star,
the planet is too far away. You can't see it. And it has an atmosphere. That atmosphere is far
too small. You definitely can't see it. But the sunlight will go through that atmosphere. And
if that atmosphere is methane, then on the other side, that shade of blue, I can't remember if I
said blue or green, that color will be missing because methane took it. And so with phosphine,
it's the same thing. It has specific colors, 16.8 billion colors, that it absorbs it and nothing
else does. And so if you can find them and notice them missing from the light of a star that went
through a planet's atmosphere, then you'll know that atmosphere contains their molecule. How cool
is that? That's incredible. So you can have this fingerprint within the space of colors. And there's
a lot of molecules. And I mean, I wonder, that's a question of how much overlap there is. How close
can you get to the actual fingerprint? Can phosphine unlock the iPhone with its lights on?
It says 16.8 billion. So presumably this rainbow is discretized into little segments somehow.
Exactly. How many total are there? How a lot is 16.8 billion?
It's a lot. We don't have the instruments to break these, break any light into this many tiny
segments. And so with the instruments we do have, there's huge amounts of overlap. Methane is an
example. A lot of the ways it's detectable is because the carbon and the hydrogens, they
vibrate with one another, they move, they interact. But every other hydrocarbon,
acetylene, isoprene, has carbon and hydrogens also vibrating and rotating. And so it's actually
very hard to tell them apart at low resolutions. And our instruments can't really cope with
distinguishing between molecules particularly well. But in an ideal world, if we had infinite
resolution, then yes, every molecule's spectral features will be unique.
Yeah, like almost too, like it would be too trivial.
At the quantum level, they're unique. At our level, there's huge overlap.
Yeah. But then you can start to then try to disambiguate the fact that certain colors are
missing. What does that mean? And hopefully they're missing in a certain kind of pattern where you
can say, was some kind of probability that it's this gas, not this gas. So you're solving that
gaseous puzzle. I got it. Okay.
We can go back to Venus actually and show that. So with this, I mentioned those two molecules
that could be responsible for that signal, the resolution that we have. It was phosphine and
SO2, sulfur dioxide. And that resolution could really be one of the other. But in that same
bandwidth, so in the same observations, there was another region where phosphine does not absorb,
we know that. But SO2 does. So we just went unchecked and there was no signal. So we thought,
oh, then it must be phosphine. And then we submit to the paper. The rest is history.
I got it. Well, yeah, that's beautifully told. So the telescopes we're talking about are sitting
on Earth. What can it help solving this fingerprint molecular fingerprint problem
if we do a flyby? Does it help if you get closer and closer? Or are telescopes pretty damn good
for this kind of puzzle solving?
Telescopes are pretty good, but the Earth's atmosphere is a pain. I mean, I'm very thankful
for it. But it does interrupt a lot of measurements and a lot of regions where
phosphine would be active, they are not available. The Earth is not transparent in those wavelengths.
So being above the atmosphere would make a huge difference. Then proximity matters a lot less,
but just escaping the Earth's atmosphere would be wonderful. But then it's really hard to stay very
stable. And if there is phosphine on Venus, there's very little of it in the clouds. And so
the signal is very weak. And the telescopes we can use on Earth are much bigger and much more
stable. So it's a bit of a trade-off.
So is it, are you comfortable with this kind of remote observation? Is it at all helpful
to strive for going over to Venus and grabbing a scoop of the atmosphere?
Or is remote observation really a powerful tool for this kind of job? Like the scoop is not
necessary? Well, a lot of people want to scoop. I get it. I get it completely.
That's my natural inclination, yeah. I don't want to scoop specifically because if it is life,
I want to know everything I can remotely before I interfere. So that's my,
I've got ethical reasons against the scoop more than engineering reasons against the scoop.
But I have some engineering reasons against the scoop. Scoop is not a technical term,
but I feel like now it's too late. Thank you for going along with this.
It's too late to take it back. I appreciate it.
We don't understand the clouds well enough to plan the scoop very well.
Because it's not that saturated. Like there's not that much of it present.
No. And the place is nasty. It's not going to be easy to build something that can do the task
reliably and can be trusted. The measurements can be trusted and then pass that message on.
So actually, I'm for an orbiter. I think we should have orbiters around every solar system body
whose job is just to learn about these places. I'm disappointed we haven't already got an orbiter
around every single one of them. It's small. It can be a small satellite.
Yeah, yeah.
Just cutting data, figuring out how do the clouds move, what's in them,
how often is there lightning and volcanic activity? Where's the topography? Is it changing?
Is there a biosphere actively doing things? We should be monitoring this from afar.
Yeah. And so I'm for over the atmosphere, hopefully around Venus. That would be my choice.
Okay. So now, recently, Venus is all exciting about phosphine and everything. Is there other
stuff maybe before we were looking at Venus or now looking out into other solar systems?
Is there other promising exoplanets or other planets within the solar system
that might have phosphine or might have other strong biosignatures that we should be looking for
like phosphine?
There's a few, but outside the solar system, all our promising candidates, we know so little
about them. For most of them, we barely know their density. Most of them, we don't even know if they
have an atmosphere. Never mind what that atmosphere might contain. So we're still very much at the
stage where we have detected promising planets, but they're promising in that they're about the
right size, about the right density, they could have an atmosphere, and they're about the right
distance from their host star. But that's really all we know. Near future telescopes will tell us
much more, but for now, we're just guessing. So you said near future. So there's hope that
there'll be telescopes that can see that far enough to determine if there's an atmosphere and
perhaps even the contents of that atmosphere? Absolutely. JWST, launching later this year,
will be able to get a very rough sense of the main atmospheric constituents of planets
that could potentially be habitable. And that's this here. What's the name? JWST, the James Webb
Space Telescope. Okay. And that's going to be out in space past the atmosphere? Yes. Is there
something interesting to be said about the engineering aspect of the telescope?
I mean, it's an incredible beast, but it's a beast of many burdens. So it's going to do...
See, you are a poet. Yeah, I love it. This is very eloquent. You're speaking to the audience,
which I appreciate. So yeah, so it's a giant engineering project, and is it orbiting something?
So it's going to be above the atmosphere, and it will be doing lots of different astrophysics.
And so some of its time will be dedicated to exoplanets. But there's an entire astronomy field
fighting for time before the cryogenic lifetime of the instrument. And so
when I was looking for the possibility of finding phosphine on distant exoplanets,
I used JWST as a way of checking with this instrument that we will launch later this year.
Could we detect phosphine on an oxygen-poor planet? And there I put very much a hard stop where
some of my simulations said, yes, you can totally do it, but it will take a little
under the cryogenic lifetime of this machine. So then I had to go, well, that's not going to...
No one's going to dedicate all of JWST to look for my molecule that no one cared about.
So we're very much at that edge. But there'll be many other telescopes in the coming decades
that will be able to tell us quite a lot about the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets.
So you mentioned simulation. This is super interesting to me. And this perhaps could be
a super dumb question, but... Not such a thing.
I am going to prove you wrong on that one. You simulate molecules to understand how they
look from a distance is what I understand. What does that simulation look like? So it's
a... It's talking about which colors that the rainbow will be missing. Is that the goal of the
simulation? That's the goal, but it's really just a very, very nasty Schrodinger's equation.
So it's a quantum simulation. Also, it's simulating at the quantum level.
Yes. So I'm a quantum astrochemist. Hi, I'm Clara. I'm a quantum astrochemist.
Can you... It's how we should have started this conversation.
Can you describe the three components of that quantum astro and chemist and how they interplay
together? So I study the quantum behavior of molecules, hence the quantum and the chemist,
specifically so I can detect them in space and see astro. So what I do is I figure out the
probability of a molecule being in a particular state. There's no deterministic nature to the
work I do. So every transition is just a likelihood. But if you get a population of that molecule,
it will always happen. And so this is all of the quantum level. It's a Schrodinger equation on,
I think, 27 dimensions. I don't remember it by heart. And what this means is I'm solving these
giant quantum matrices. And that's why you need a lot of computer power, giant computers,
to diagonalize these enormous matrices, each of whom describes a single vibrational behavior
of a molecule. So I think phosphine has 17.5 million possible states it can exist in.
And transitions can occur between pairs of these states. And there's a certain likelihood that
they'll happen. This is the quantum world. Nothing is deterministic. There's just a likelihood
that it'll jump from one state to another. And these jumps, they're transitions,
and there's 16.8 billion of them. When energy is absorbed, that corresponds to this transition,
we see it in the spectrum. This is more quantum chemistry than you had asked for, I'm sorry.
No, no, I'm sorry. Brain's broken. So when the transitions happen between the different states,
somehow the energy maps the spectrum. Exactly. Energy corresponds to a frequency,
and a frequency corresponds to a wavelength, which corresponds to a color.
So there's some probability assigned to each color then?
Exactly. And that probability determines how intense that transition will be, how strong.
And so you run this kind of simulation for particular, so that's 17.5 square or something
like that. Exactly. 17.5 million energies, each one of whom involves diagonalizing a giant matrix
with a supercomputer. Which I wonder what the most efficient algorithm for diagonalization is.
But there's some kind of... There's many.
Depends on kind of the shape of the matrix. So they're not random matrices. So some are more
diagonal than others, and so some need more treatment than others. Most of the work ends up
going in describing this system, this quantum system, in different ways until you have a matrix that
is close to being diagonal, and then it's much easier to clean it up.
So how hard is this puzzle? So you're solving this puzzle for phosphine, right?
Is this... Are we supposed to solve this puzzle for every single molecule?
Oh boy. Yes, I calculated if I did the work I did for phosphine, again, for all the molecules for
which we don't have spectra, for which we don't have a fingerprint, it would take me 62,000 years,
a little over. 62,000 years. What time flies when you're having fun? Okay. But you write that
there are about 16,000 molecules we care about when looking for a new Earth or when we try to
detect alien biosignatures. If we want to detect any molecules from here, we need to know their
spectra, and we currently don't. Solving this particular problem, that's my job.
What was that? I mean, that's absolutely correct. I could have not said it better myself. Did you
take that from my website? Yeah, I think I stole it. And your website is excellent, so it's worthy
place to steal stuff from. Thank you. How do you solve this problem for the 16,000 molecules we care
about, of which phosphine is one? Yes. And so taking a step a little bit out of phosphine,
is there... But we were having so much fun. We were having so much fun. No, we're not saying...
No, no, no, I... It's sticking around. I'm just saying we're joining more friends coming to the
party. How do you choose other friends to come to the party that are interesting to study as we
solve one puzzle at a time through the space of 16,000? So we've already started. Out of those 16,000,
we understand water quite well, methane quite well, ammonia quite well, carbon dioxide.
I could keep going. And then we understand molecules like acetylene, hydrogen cyanide,
more or less. And that takes us to about 4% of those 16,000. We understand about 4% of them,
more or less. Phosphine is one of them. But the other 96%, we just really have barely any idea
at all of where in the spectrum of light they would leave a mark. I can't spend the next 62,000
years doing this work. And I don't want to, even if somehow I was able, that wouldn't feel good.
So one of the things that I try to do now is move away from how I did phosphine. So I did
phosphine really the best that I could, the best that could be done with the computer power that
we have, trying to get each one of those 16.8 billion transitions mapped accurately calculated.
And then I thought, what if I do a worse job? What if I just do a much worse job?
Can I just make it much faster and then it's still worth it? How bad can I get
before it's worthless? And then could I do this for all the other molecules? So I created exactly
this terrible, terrible system. So what's the answer to that question,
that fundamental question I ask myself all the time in other domains?
How crappy can I be before I'm useless? Before somebody notices.
Turns out pretty crappy because no one has any idea of what these molecules look like.
Anything is better than nothing. And so I thought, how long will it take me to create
better than nothing spectra for all of these molecules? And so I created rascal, rapid,
approximate spectral calculations for all. And what I do is I use organic chemistry and
quantum chemistry and kind of cheat them both. I just tried to figure out what is the fastest
way I could run this. And I simulate rough spectra for all of those 16,000. So I've managed to get
it to work. It's really shocking how well it works considering how bad it is.
Is there insights you could give to the tricks involved in making it fast? Like what are the
maybe some insightful shortcuts taken that still result in some useful information about the spectra?
The insights came from organic chemistry from decades ago. When organic chemists wanted to
know what a compound might be, they would look at a spectrum and see a feature and they would go,
hmm, I've seen that feature before. That's usually what happens when you have a carbon
triple bonded to another carbon. And they were mostly right. Almost every molecule that has a
carbon triple bonded to another one looks like that. Has other features different from that
distinguish them from one another, but they have that feature in common. We call these functional
groups. And so most of that work ended up being abandoned because now we have mass spectrometry,
we've got nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. So people don't really need to do that anymore.
But these ancient textbooks still exist. And I've collected them all as many as I could.
And there are hundreds of these descriptions where people have said, oh, whenever you have
iodine atom connected to this one, there's always a feature here. And it's usually quite sharp.
And it's quite strong. And some people go, oh, yeah, that's a really broad feature every time
that combination of atoms and bonds. So I've collected them all. And I've created this giant
dictionary of all these kind of puzzle pieces, these Lego parts of molecules. And I've written a
code that then puts them all together in some kind of like Frankenstein's monster of molecules.
So you ask me for any molecule and I go, well, it has these bonds and this atom dangling off this
atom and this cluster here. And I tell you what it should look like. And it kind of works.
So this creates a whole portfolio of just kind of signatures that we could look for.
Rough, very rough signatures. But still useful enough to analyze the atmospheres,
the telescope generated images of other planets.
Close. Right now, it is so complete. So it has all of these molecules that I can tell you,
say, you look at an alien atmosphere and there's a feature there. It can tell you, oh,
that feature, that's familiar. It could be one of these 816 molecules, best of luck.
There's the middle. Yes.
So I think the next step, which is what I'm working on, is telling you something
more useful than it could be one of those 816 molecules. That's still true. I wouldn't say
it's useful. So I can tell you, but only 12% of them also have a feature in this region,
so go look there. And if there's nothing there, it can't be those and so on. It can also tell
you things like, you will need this much accuracy to distinguish between those 816.
So that's what I'm working on. But it's a lot of work.
So this is really interesting, the role of computing in this whole picture,
you mentioned code. So you, as a quantum astrochemist, there is some role for programming
in your life, in your past life, in your current life, in your group.
Oh yeah, almost entirely. I'm a computational quantum astrochemist, but that doesn't roll
off the tongue very easily.
So this is fundamentally computational. If you want to be successful in the 21st century
and doing quantum astrochemistry, you want to be computational?
Absolutely. All quantum chemistry is computational at this point.
Okay. What does machine learning play a role at all? Is there some extra shortcuts that
can be discovered through, like, you see all that success with protein folding, right?
A problem that thought to be extremely difficult to apply machine learning to because it's,
I mean, mostly because there's not a lot of already solved puzzles to train on.
I suppose the same exact thing is true with this particular problem,
but is there hope for machine learning to help out?
Absolutely. Currently, you've laid out exactly the problem. The training set is awful.
And because there's so, a lot of the data that I'm basing it on is literally many decades old.
The people who worked on it and data that I get, often they're dead.
And the files that I've used, some of them were hand drawn by someone tired in the 17th century.
Yes. So I could, of course, have a program training on these,
but I would just be perpetuating these mistakes without hope of actually verifying them.
So my next step is to improve this training set by hand and then try to see if I can apply
machine learning on the full code and the full 16,000 molecules and improve them all.
But really, I need to be able to test the outcomes with experimental data,
which means convincing someone in a lab to spend a lot of money putting very dangerous gases
in chambers and measuring them at outrageous temperatures. So it's a work in progress.
And so collecting huge amounts of data about the actual gases.
So you're up for doing that kind of thing too. So actually doing the full end-to-end thing,
which is like having a gas, collecting data about it, and then doing the kind of analysis
that creates the fingerprint, and then also analyzing using that library, the data that
comes from other planets. So you do the full. Full from birth to death.
Interesting. Yes, I worked in an industrial chemistry laboratory when I was much younger
in Slovenia. And there I worked in the lab actually collecting spectra and predicting spectra.
Was it like to work with a bunch of gases that are not so human friendly?
Terrifying. It's horrific. It's so scary. And I love my job. I'm willing to clearly sacrifice
a lot for it. Job stability, money, sanity. But I only worked there for a few months.
It was really terrifying. There's just so many ways to die. Usually you only have a handful
of ways to die every day. But if you work in a lab, there's so many more. Or there's a magnitude
more. And I was very bad at it. I'm not a good hands-on scientist. I want a laptop connected
to a remote supercomputer or a laptop connected to a telescope. I don't need to be there to believe
it. And I am not good in the lab. Yeah, when there's a bunch of things that can poison you,
a bunch of things that could explode and they're gaseous. And they're often maybe they might not
even have a smell or they might not be visible. It's like... So many of them give you cancer.
It's just so cruel. And some people love this work. But I've never enjoyed experimental work.
It's so ungrateful. It's so lonely. Well, most, I mean, so much work is lonely if you find the
joy in it. But you enjoy the results of it. Yes. I'm very thankful for all the experimentalists
in my life. But I'll do the theory. They do the experiment. And then we talked one another and
make sure it matches. Okay, beautiful. What are spectroscopic networks? Those look super cool.
Are they related to what we were talking about? The picture looked pretty. Oh, yes, slightly.
So remember when I mentioned the 17.5 million energy levels? Yes. There are rules for each molecule
on which energy levels they can jump from and to and how likely it is to make that jump.
And so if you plot all the routes it can take, you get this energy network which is like a ball.
So these are the constraints of the transitions that could be taken. Exactly for each molecule.
Interesting. And no, they're not. So it's not a fully connected. It's like, it's sparse somehow.
Yes, you get islands sometimes. You get a molecule can only jump from one set of states to another
and it's trapped now in this network. It can never go to another network that could have
been available to other siblings. Is there some insight to be drawn from these networks?
Like something cool that you can understand about a particular molecule because of it?
Yes, some molecules have what we call forbidden transitions, which aren't really forbidden
because it's quantum. There are no rules. No, there are rules. It's just the rules are very
often broken in the quantum world. And so forbidden transitions doesn't actually mean
they're forbidden. Low probability. Exactly. They just become deeply unlikely.
Yeah, cool. And then so you could do all the same. Like I'm coming from a computer science world,
you know, I love graph theory. So you can do all the same like graph theoretic kind of analysis
of like clusters or something like that. Exactly. All those kinds of things.
And draw insights from it. Cool. And they're unique for each molecule. So the networks that
you mentioned, that's actually not too difficult a layer of quantum physics. By then all the energies
are mapped. So we've had high school children work on those networks. And the trick is to not
tell them they're doing quantum physics until like three months in when it's too late for them to
back out. And then you're like, you're a quantum physicist now. And it's really nice.
Yeah. Okay. But like the promise of this, even though it's $16,000, even just a subset of them,
that's really exciting because then you can do as the telescope day to get better and better,
especially for exoplanets, but also for Venus, you can then start like getting your full,
like, you know how you get like bloodwork done or like you get your genetic testing to see what
your ancestors are. You can get the same kind of like high resolution information about interesting
things going on on a particular planet based on the atmosphere, right? Exactly. How cool would that
be if we could, you know, scan an alien planet and go, oh, this is what the clouds are made of.
This is what's in the surface. These are the molecules that are mixing. Here are probably
oceans because you can see these types of molecules above it. And here are the Hadley cells. Here are
how the biosphere works. We could map this whole thing.
Wouldn't it be cool if the aliens are aware of these techniques and like would spoof like the
wrong gases just to like pretend that's how they can be, it's like an invisibility cloak.
They can generate gases that would throw you off or like, or do the opposite. They pretend
they would artificially generate phosphine. So like the dumb apes on Earth again,
like go out like flying in different places because it's just fun. It's like some teenager alien
somewhere just pranking. Yeah. I was asked that exact question this Saturday by a seven-year-old boy
in Canada. Seven. Yes. But it was the first time I'd been asked that question, the second in a week.
We're kindred spirits, him and I. We can. They can prank us to some extent,
but this work of interpreting an alien atmosphere means you're reading the
atmosphere as a message and it's very hard to hide signs of life in an atmosphere because
you can try to prank us, but you're still going to fart and breathe and somehow metabolize the
environment around you and call that whatever you call that and release molecules. And so that's
really hard to hide. You can go very quiet. You can throw out some weird molecule to confuse us
further, but we can still see all your other metabolites. It's hard to fake. You kind of
mentioned like water. What other gases are there that we know about that are like high likelihood
as biosignatures in terms of life? I mean, what are your other favorites?
So we've got phosphine, but what else is a damn good signal that you think about that we should
be looking for if we look at another atmosphere? Is there gases that come to mind or are there all
sort of possible biosignatures that we should love equally? There's many. So there's water.
We know that's important for life as we know it. There's molecular oxygen on Earth that's probably
the most robust sign of life, particularly combined with small amounts of methane.
And it's true that the majority of the oxygen in our atmosphere is a product of life. And so
if I was an alien astronomer and I saw Earth's atmosphere, I would get a Nobel, I think.
What would you notice? I mean, this is really...
I would be very excited about this.
About the oxygen. About finding 20%, 21% of oxygen atmosphere. That's very unusual.
So would that be the most exciting thing to you from an alien perspective about Earth
in terms of analyzing the atmosphere? Like what are the biosignatures of life on Earth,
would you say, in terms of the contents of the atmosphere? Is oxygen high amount of oxygen
pretty damn good sign? I mean, it's not as good as the TV signals we've been sending out.
Those are slightly more robust than oxygen. Oxygen on its own has false positives for life.
So there's still ways of making it. But it's a pretty robust sign of life in the context
of our atmosphere with the radiation that the Sun produces, our position in relation to the Sun,
the other components of our atmosphere, the volcanic activity we have, all of that together
makes the 20% of oxygen extremely robust sign of life. But outside that context,
you could still produce oxygen without life. But phosphine, although better in the sense of
it is much harder to make, it has lower false positives, still has some. So I'm actually against
looking for specific molecules unless we're looking for like CFCs. If we find CFCs, that's
definitely aliens. I feel confident chlorofluorocarbons. And so if aliens have been watching us,
they would have been going, oh, no, CFCs. I mean, they're not going to last long. Let's,
you know, everyone's writing their thesis on the end of the Earth. And then we got together,
we stopped using them. I like to think they're really proud of us. They literally saw our ozone
hull shrinking. They've been watching it and they saw it happen. I think to be honest,
they're more paying attention to the whole nuclear thing. I don't think they care. It's not going
to bother them. Oh, I mean, worried about us. Oh, yes. No, worried about us. They, I mean,
this is why the aliens have been showing up recently. It's like, if you, if you look at,
I mean, there is interest, I mean, it's probably there's a correlation with a lot of things.
But what the ufologists quote unquote often talk about is that there seems to be a much
higher level of UFO sightings since like in the nuclear age. So like if aliens were indeed
worried about us, like if you were aliens, you would start showing up when the living
organisms have first discovered a way to destroy the entire, the entire colony.
Couldn't the increase in sightings not have to do with the fact that people now have more cameras?
It's an interesting thing about science. Like with UFO sightings, it's like either 99.9% of them
are false or 100% of them are false. The interesting thing to me is that in that 0.01% there's a lot
of things in science that are like these weird outliers, they're difficult to replicate. You have
like, there's even physical phenomena, ball lightning, there's difficult things to artificially
create in large amounts or observe in nature in large amounts in such a way that you can do to
apply the scientific method. There could be just things that like what happened like a few times
like or once and you're like, what the hell is that? And that that's very difficult for science
to know what to do with. I'm a huge proponent of just being open minded because when you're open
minded about aliens, for example, is it allows you to think outside of the box in other domains as
well. And somehow that will result like if you open mind about aliens, and you don't, you know,
don't laugh it off immediately, what happens is somehow that's going to lead to a solution to
a p equals on p or p not equals on p. Like in ways that you can't predict, the open mindedness has
tertiary effects that will result in progress, I believe, which is why I'm a huge fan of aliens
because it's like, because too many scientists roll their eyes at the idea of aliens, alien life.
And to me, it's one of the most exciting possibilities in the biggest, most exciting questions
before all of human civilization. So to roll your eyes is not the right answer to roll your eyes
presumes that you know anything about this world, as opposed to just knowing point zero zero zero
one percent of this world. And so being humble in the face of that, being open to the possibility
of aliens visiting earth is a good idea. Not everything though, I'm not so open minded to
the flat earth hypothesis is there's a growing number of people believing in, but even then
or the inner earth, I've got shouted at in a public talk about it. So like the earth is hollow?
Yeah, my understanding is that there's this conspiracy theory that as far as I can tell
has no grounding in reality is that there's a slightly smaller earth inside this one, which is
just too cute as a concept. That's awesome. And you can access it, I think, from Antarctica.
And that's where we keep, and I quote, the mammoths and the Nazis.
Yeah, I mean, that one is ridiculous. But like, I do like-
Hey, I thought you were keeping an open mind. I am. This is just-
I genuinely think that's more likely than aliens visiting the earth. And I say this
as someone who has dedicated her life to finding alien life. And so that's how
improbable I think the visitations are. Because interstellar distances are so huge
that it's just not really worth it. See, I have a different view on this whole thing. I think
the aliens that look like little green men are like extremely low probability event.
Like mammoths and Nazis under? Yeah, that's similar.
But other kind of ideas, like the sad thing to me, and I think,
in my view, if there's other alien civilizations out there and they visited earth,
neither them or perhaps just us would be even able to detect them. Like, we wouldn't be open
minded enough to see it. Because our understanding of what is life. And I just
talked to Sarah Walker, who's- You know, Sarah?
Yeah. We talked for three hours about the question of what is life.
Sarah's a good person to talk to about what is life.
But like the whole point is we don't really- we have a very narrow-minded view of what is life.
And when it shows up, and it might be already here, trees and dolphins and so on,
or mountains, or I don't know, or the molecules in the atmosphere, or
like I- people make fun of me. But I do think that ideas are kind of aliens themselves,
or consciousness could be the aliens, or it could be the method by which they communicate.
We don't know shit about the way our human mind works. And the fact that this thing is-
Could be a quantum process.
Please don't. I understand this. It's not woo-woo. I'm not-
But it very well could be. There could be something at the physics level, right?
It could be at the chemical or the biological level. Things that are happening that we're
just close- too close-minded. Because our conception of life is at the level of,
like us, like at the jungle level of mammals. And on the time scale, that's the human time scale,
we may not be able to perceive what alien life is actually like. The scale at which their
intelligence realizes itself, we may not be able to perceive. And the other thing that's really
important about alien visitations, whether it happened or not, is especially after COVID in 2020,
I'm losing a little bit of faith of our government being able to handle that well. Not our government,
but us as a society, as a collective, being able to deal with new things in an effective way that's
inspiring, that's efficient, that, like, whether it's- if it's a dangerous thing to deal with it,
to alleviate the danger, whether it's the possibility of new discoveries and something
inspiring to ride that wave and make it inspiring, all those kinds of things. I honestly think if
aliens showed up, they would look around, everybody would ignore them, and the government might hide
it, try to keep it from the Chinese and the Russians, if it's the United States, to call it
a military secret in a very close-minded way. And then the bureaucracy would drown it away to where,
through paperwork, the poor aliens would just waste away in a cell somewhere.
Like, there's a certain- That would never happen. Part of the reason
that I feel so confident that aliens have not visited is because they would have had to visit
just to have a look remotely, you know, from Neptune or something, which makes no sense,
because interstellar travel is so difficult that it would be quite a ridiculous proposition,
but that's the bit that I think is technically possible. If they did come here and they were
visible by anyone, detectable by anyone, the thought that any government, no matter, or any
military could just contain them, these beings are capable of traveling interstellar distances
when we can barely go to the moon, like barely go to the moon.
These things would be way, way, way, way. Way. And the fact that we think our puny
military of any, even if all the military in the world got together, and the fact that they
could somehow contain this, it's- It's like ants trying to contain a human that visited them.
Exactly. Exactly. And scientists, you would have to bring scientists on board.
You've met a lot of scientists. Yeah.
How good are they at keeping secrets? Because in my experience, they're absolutely appalling
at keeping secrets. Yeah, that's terrible.
Even the Fossianon Venus thing, which was a pretty well-kept secret.
Oh, this is true. You had a bunch of people that were-
I told my dad, my dad knew, and hopefully didn't tell anyone. But if it had been an alien visiting,
he probably would have told the mate. And so these secrets could not be kept by any
scientist that I know, and certainly not collaborative scientists, which would be
needed. You would need all sorts of scientific teams. So between the pathetic power of any
world's military compared to any civilization capable of traveling, and our absolute inability
to keep secrets, absolutely not. I will bet everything that we have not been visited,
because we are too pathetic to hold that- Well, let me put it back if we're making
like a $10 bet. The possibility here that the main alien, say there exists one alien civil,
other intelligent alien civilization in the galaxy. To me, if they visit Earth,
what's going to visit Earth is like the crappy, like the really crappy- Short straw.
Yeah, yeah. Like this really dumb thing that's, I don't know, like the early Game Boys or
something. I think there's a cartoon about this. There's an alien that gets sent to Earth,
Commander Spiff or something, and it's kind of a punishment or something. But that's not
possible. That's the thing, because interstellar distances are so hard to cross- You have to
do it on purpose. You have to do on purpose. It has to be a big, big deal. And we know this
because, yes, you're right. We don't know enough about galactic biology. We don't know what the
universal rules of biology or biochemistry are, because we only have the Earth. But we do know
that the laws of physics are universal. We can predict behavior in the universe and then see
it happen based on these laws of physics. We know that the laws of chemistry are universal.
We know the periodic table is all they have to choose from. So yes, they may be some sort of
unimaginable intelligence, but they still have to use the same periodic table that we have access
to. They still have a finite number of molecules they can do things with. So they still have to
use the resources around them, the stars around them, the universe around them. And we know how
much energy is in these places. And so, yes, they may be very capable, capable beyond our
wildest dreams, but they're still in the same universe. And we know a lot of those rules.
We're not completely blind. But there's a colleague here at Harvard, Kamran Vafa,
he's a theoretical physicist, I don't know if you know him. I've only joined Harvard about
six months ago. Okay. It's time to meet all the theoretical physicists. So he's a string theorist,
but his idea is that aliens that are sophisticated enough to travel interstellar like those kinds
of distances will figure out actually ways to hack the fabric of the universe enough to have fun
in other ways. Like this universe is too boring. Like you would figure out ways to create other
universes like you go outside the physics as we know it. So the reason we don't see aliens
visiting us all over the place is they're having fun elsewhere. This is like way too boring. We
humans think this is fun, but it's actually mostly empty space that no fun is happening. Like there's
no fun in visiting Earth for a super advanced civilization. So he thinks like if alien civilizations
are out there, they found outside of our current standard models of physics ways of having fun
that don't involve us. That's probably true. But even the notion of visiting, that's so literally
pedestrian. Of course, we want to go there because going there is the only thing we know.
We see a thing we want, we want to go there and get it. But that is probably something they've
no longer gotten need for. I specifically don't particularly want to go to space.
Sounds awful. None of the things I like are going to be there. And my whole work is my whole
career is finding life and understanding the universe. So I care a lot. But I care about
knowing about it. And I feel no need to go there to learn about it. And I think as we develop
better tools, hopefully people will feel less and less in need to go everywhere that we know about.
And I would expect any alien civilization worth assault have developed observation tools and
tools that allow them to understand the universe around them and beyond without having to go there.
This going is so wasteful. Yeah. So more focus on the knowledge and learning versus the colonization
like the conquering and all those kinds of things. That's beneath them. That's beneath them.
I mean, that said, do you think there's any hopeful search for life through phosphine and other
gases? Do you think there's other alien civilizations out there? First, do you think
there's other life out there? First, do you think there's life in the solar system?
Second, do you think there's life in the galaxy? And third, do you think there's intelligent life
in the solar system or the galaxy outside of Earth? So intelligent life, I have no idea.
It seems deeply unlikely possible, but I'm not even sure if it's plausible.
So that's a special thing to you about Earth is how intelligent life came to be.
Yes. And it's only very briefly, probably extremely briefly.
Uh-oh. You mean it's always going to be like we're going to destroy ourselves?
Exactly. Oh boy.
And life will continue on Earth happily, probably more happily.
The trees and the dolphins will be here. I'm telling you.
And the cockroaches and the incredible fungi, they'll be fine. So life on Earth was fine before us
and will be fine after us. So I'm not that worried about intelligent life, but I think it is unlikely.
Even on Earth is unlikely out of what is it, five billion species across the history of the Earth.
There's been one, an intelligent one, and for a blink of an eye, possibly not much longer than that.
So I wouldn't bet on that at all, though I would love it, of course. I wanted to find aliens,
since I was a little girl. And so of course, I initially wanted to find ones that I could be
friends with. And I've had to let go of that dream, because it's so deeply implausible.
But see, the nice, I'm sorry to interrupt, but the nice thing about intelligent alien civilizations,
they may have more biosignatures than non-intelligent ones. So they might be easier to detect,
that would be the hope.
On Earth, that's not the case, but it could be the case elsewhere.
Oh, it's not the case on Earth. Most of the biosignatures we have on Earth are created by
quite simple life, if you don't count pollution. Pollution is all us babies.
So you don't see polluting gases as a possible, like...
I look for polluting gases. I would love to find polluting gases. Well, you know,
I'll be worried for them, of course, the same way I think about my alien colleagues all the time,
looking at us, and I'm sure they worry about our pollutions. But it would be a really good,
robust, unambiguous sign of life if we found complex pollutants. So I look for those too.
I just don't have any hope of finding them. I think intelligent life in the galaxy,
at the same time that we're looking, is deeply implausible. But life, I think, is inevitable.
And if it is inevitable, it is common. So I think there'll be life everywhere in the galaxy.
Now, how common that life is, I think will depend a lot on whether there's life in the
solar system beyond Earth. So I'll adjust my expectations very much based on there being
life in the solar system. If there's life in the Venusian clouds, if there are biosignatures
coming out of the plumes of Enceladus, if there's life on Titan. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah,
plumes of Enceladus. That's the Saturn one. It's the moon that has the geysers that come out. And
so you can't see that under the subterranean oceans. So it would be in the atmosphere. I was
going to ask you about that one. Have you looked at that? Is that a hope for you to use the tools
you're using with Rascal and other ways for detecting the 16,000 molecules that might be
biosignatures to look at Enceladus? Yes, that's absolutely the plan.
Is that what's the limiting factor currently? Is it the quality of the telescopes? What's the
quality of the data? Yeah, the quality of the data, the observational data, and also the quality
of Rascal and other associated things. So we're missing a lot of fundamental data to interpret
the data that we get, and we don't have good enough data. But hopefully in the coming decades,
we'll get some information on Titan. We have Dragonfly going over. We'll get the plumes of
Enceladus. We will look at the clouds of Venus, and there's other places. And so if we find any
life or any sign of life ever, like on Mars, then I'll adjust my calculations, and I'll say
life is not just inevitable and common, but extremely common. Because all of these places
we've mentioned, the subterranean oceans on Enceladus, the methane oceans of Titan, the clouds of
Venus, the acidic clouds of Venus, these are places that are very different from the places
where we find life on Earth, even the most extreme places. And so if life can originate in all of
these completely different habitats, then life is even more resourceful than we thought, which
means it's everywhere. That's really exciting if it's everywhere. If there's life on just one of
the moons, if it's on Mars. Anywhere. Anywhere in the solar system. And I will bet everything I own
that every solar system, every planetary system has a potential for habitability. Because even
if they don't have a habitable planet, they'll have moons around other giant planets, and
there'll be so much life. So for me, that's the only thing to figure out now, whether life is
inevitable and quite common throughout the galaxy or everywhere. But it's somewhere between those
two. Intelligent life, I make no bets. And if I had to bet, I would be against.
Yeah, to me, like two discoveries in the 21st century would change everything.
One is, and maybe I'm biased, but one is the discovery of life in the solar system.
I feel like that would change our whole conception of how unique we are in the universe.
I think I'm much more eager than you are to jump from basic life to intelligent life. I feel like
if there's life everywhere, like the odds are, there has, like we cannot...
Oh, I see. You're saying there could have been many intelligent civilizations out there,
but they just keep dying out. It's like little... Yeah, I was detecting them, ships in the night.
Ships in the night. That's ultra sad. Just like... Is it sad? A graveyard. The earth is not better
for having us. Is it... It doesn't owe us anything. Would you be sad to find alien giraffes?
Would you be disappointed if you found alien giraffes? Because I would not.
No. Well, giraffes, first of all, they look goofy with their necks and everything, but...
No, we do not shit on giraffes. Giraffes are wondrous animals that are deeply understudied.
We still know so little about them because no one does PhDs and giraffes. I am, this is the
point I made at PhD in phosphine, when people aren't doing PhDs and giraffes. We do not know
enough about giraffes. I think it was like Ricky Gervais that did a whole like long thing.
You don't trust Ricky Gervais to talk about giraffes. That is not his expertise.
Yeah, but it's a stupid necks. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, that's fine. Giraffes are
very resourceful animals who do incredible things and can kick a lion in the face.
Why don't you climb the tree? Why don't you climb the tree? You don't need to grow
through the lengthy evolutionary process. You don't need to be shitting on giraffes.
Giraffes are wondrous animals. I would very appreciate it. Take it back. I take it back.
I apologize. I trust your expertise on this. The thing that makes humans really fascinating,
and I think the earth, but I'm a human, is we create things that are, yes, there's all the
ugliness in the world. There's all the biological and the chemical level. There's the pollution,
but we create beauty. If you, even from a physics perspective, look at symmetry
as somehow capturing beauty, the breaking of symmetry, stuff grounded in all the different
definitions of symmetry, we're good at like creating things. So as fighters.
But not giraffes. There are spiders that create little bubbles of air so they can breathe under
water. They can literally scuba dive. There are spiders that can create parachutes so they can
glide and talk about symmetry. Look what spiders can do. I just thought of spiders, but if I was
an alien species coming to earth, there'll be plenty to wonder and we would just be one.
One of the things. Yeah, clunky, naked monkey. Yeah, the ants might be even more fascinating.
The ants. Ants can figure out exactly through some emergent consciousness what the maximum
distance between their trash, their babies, and their food is just from, without any of them knowing
how to do this. And collectively, they've learned how to do this. If I was an alien species,
I'll be looking at that. Well, so that was the other thing I was going to mention. The second
thing is, I tend to believe we can engineer consciousness, but at the basic level, understand
the source of consciousness. Because if consciousness is unique to humans, and if we can engineer it,
that gives me hope that it can be present elsewhere in the universe. That's the other thing that makes
it's an open question that makes humans perhaps special is not maybe the presence of consciousness,
but somehow a presence of elevated consciousness. It does, again, maybe human-centric,
but it feels like we're more conscious than giraffes, for example, in spiders.
Yes, I won't deny that. There is something special about humans. They're my favorite species.
They are. They are. Some of my best friends are humans. I think Kylie of humans. It's great.
I just don't have great hope for our longevity. And specifically, I don't have great hope given
that we're the only species that are five billion that did this cool consciousness trick. I don't
want to bet on finding a kinship elsewhere. That's quite interesting to think about. I don't think
I've even considered that possibility that there would be life in the solar system. So that indicates
that, very possibly, life is literally everywhere. Yeah, everywhere can happen. It does. Especially
what we're discovering with the exoplanets now, how numerous they are, or Earth-like habitable
quote-unquote planets. They're everywhere. The most common type of planet is rocky, it seems.
But I didn't consider the possibility that life is literally everywhere, and yet intelligent life
is nowhere long enough to communicate with each other, to form little clusters of civilizations
that expand beyond the solar system and so on. Man, maybe becoming a multi-planetary species
is a less likely pursuit than we imagined. I agree. But one of the things that makes humans
beautiful is we hope. But I hope for humanity. And one of the things I hope for is that we become
less obsessed with conquering, and we become less obsessed with spreading ourselves. I hope that we
transcend that, that we're happy with the universe without having to go and take it.
So, you can hope for the species without hoping for a multi-planetary existence. That is only,
I think, the drive of our most primitive instincts to go and take, to go and plant a flag somewhere.
We love planting a flag somewhere. And maybe we could overcome that minor drive.
And once we do, the AI systems we build will destroy us because we're too peaceful,
and they will go and conquer and plant the flags. Best of luck to them. The cockroaches
will be happy to keep to the business as they always have. I tend to believe that robots can have
the same elegance and consciousness and all the qualities of kindness and love and hope and fear
that humans have. In principle, they could, yes. I don't really trust the people who make them.
This is about the giraffe comment, isn't it? Okay. I haven't forgiven you for shitting on
giraffes. What have they done to you? Just as a small tangent, your master's thesis is also
fascinating. Maybe we could talk about it for just a little bit. It's titled, Influence of a Star's
Evolution on its Planetary System. So this interplay between a star and a planet, is there
something interesting you could say about what you've learned about this journey that a star takes
and the planets around it? Well, when I was younger and I was told what would happen ultimately
to the Earth as the sun expands towards a red giant, and Mercury would just fall in,
and then Venus fall in, and the sun doesn't care. I felt so small. I felt like the Earth
and everything on it. The universe doesn't care. Even our sun doesn't care. I think I felt like
our sun should feel some sort of responsibility for its planets. It just felt like such a violent
and neglectful parent. It's like a parent eating its own children. It's horrible. It's just a horrible
notion. But it made me think, what if there's some sort of generation? And so at the time,
when I was doing my masters, there was a notion of the White Dwarf Cemetery, which is this idea
that when stars become white dwarfs, that death is so horrible that planets, potentially habitable
planets that could have been habitable before, they're now gone. There's no chance for life.
But then I thought, what if life returns? Now it's a white dwarf. It's calm down. It's not going to
go anywhere. White dwarfs are very stable across universal time scales. And so could you have planets
around a white dwarf that could themselves get life again? Life doesn't care. And so my work was
basically killing dozens of planets thousands of times. I just ran thousands and thousands of
and body simulations. Well, you simulated this? Yeah. So I simulated the star growing and just
eating all these planets up and just absolute chaos. The orbits of the planets would change
as the star loses mass. So you would have like Jupiter planets, like planets just crashing
into the other planets, throwing them into the sun early. It was terrifying to watch these
simulations. It was absolute carnage. But if you run thousands of these simulations,
some systems find new balance ways of staying alive. Some systems post-star death find stable
orbits again for billions of years, more than enough for life to originate again.
And so that was my idea during that time that thesis was trying to explore
this notion of life coming back and this idea of the universe doesn't care if you're here or not.
And it will go about its business. Andromeda will crash into us and doesn't care. No one cares if
you're alive in the universe. And so letting go of that preciousness of life I found very useful
at that stage of my career. And instead, I just thought, if life is inevitable, it doesn't matter
that it came by four billion years ago. It can start again four billion years later. And maybe
that is nice. Maybe that's where hope lies, the phoenix rising everywhere. Planets being destroyed
and created and we're here now. And others will be more or less here-ish billions of years later.
So accepting the cycle of death and life. And not taking it personally.
Not taking it personally. The sun doesn't owe us anything. It's not a bad parent. It's not a parent
at all. Yeah. I was looking at the work of Freeman Dyson and seeing how this universe eventually will
just be a bunch of supermassive black holes before they also evaporate. A bunch of tiny
black holes too. Absolutely quiet. Everyone, all the black holes a little too far away from one
another to even interact until it's just silence forever. But until then, many, many cycles of
death and destruction and rebirth. And rebirth. You kept bringing up sort of coding stuff up.
I wanted to ask two things. First of all, what programming language do you like and also what,
because you're as a computational quantum astrochemist. No. No, that's correct. That's right.
You're kind of, you could say you're actually understanding some exceptionally complicated
things with one of the things you're using is the tools of computation of programming.
Is there a device you can give to people? Because I know quite a few that have not
practiced that tool and have fallen in love with a particular science, whatever it's biology and
chemistry and physics and so on. And if they were interested in learning to program and learning to
use computation as a tool in their particular science, is there advice you can give on programming
and also just maybe a comment on your own journey and the use of programming in your own life?
Well, I'm a terrible programmer. A lot of scientists, that programming is bad because we
never learned formal programming. We learned science, physics, chemistry. And then we were told,
oh, you have to get these equations modeled and run through a simulation. And you're like,
okay, so I'm going to learn how to code to do this. And you learn just as much as you need
to run these simulations and no more. So they're rarely optimized. They're really clunky. Six
months later, you can't read your own code. My variable names are extremely embarrassing. I still
have error messages for different compilation errors that say things like, at least your dad
loves you, Clara. It doesn't help me at all. It's like humor. Yeah. Just like you suck at coding,
but there's other things in your life. So I'm a bad programmer. And so if that will give hope to
anyone else who's a bad programmer, I can still do pretty impressive science. But I learned,
I think I started learning MATLAB and Java when I was in college. It did me no good at all. It
has not been particularly useful. I learned some Fortran that was very useful, even though it's
really not a fun language because so much of legacy code is in Fortran. And so if you want to use
other people's code who have now retired, Fortran will be nice. And then I used IDL to visualize.
So that simulation and body simulation, those all Fortran and IDL. But thankfully,
since I've left college, I've just learned Python like a normal person. And that has been much nicer.
So most of my code now is in Python. I should also make a few quick comments as well. So one is,
you say you're sort of bad at programming. I've worked with a lot of excellent scientists that
are quote unquote bad at programming. They're not, it gets the job done. In fact, there's a
downside to sort of especially getting a software engineering education. If I were to give advice,
especially if you're doing a computer science degree and you're doing software engineering,
is not to get lost in the, in the like optimization of the correct, there's
an obsession, you can see it in like stack overflow of the correct way to do things.
And I think you can too easily get lost in constantly trying to optimize and do things
the correct way when you actually never get done. The same thing happens, you have like
communities of people obsessed with productivity, and they keep researching productivity hacks,
and then they spend like 90% plus of their time figuring out how to do things productively,
and they never actually do anything. So there's a certain sense if you focus on the task that needs
to be done, that's what programming is for. So not over optimizing, not, not focus, not thinking
about variable names in the, in the following sense. Sometimes you think, okay, I'm going to write code
that's going to last for decades. In reality, your code, if it's well written or poorly written,
will be very likely obsolete very quickly. And the point is to get the job done really well. So
there's a trade off there that you, you have to, you have to make sure to strike. I should also
comment as a public service announcement, or a request, if there's any world-class fortune or
cobalt programmers out there, I'm looking for them. I want to talk to you because I will not be me.
I'm a terrible fortune program. But it's fascinating because so much of the world
in the past and still runs programming languages. And there's like no experts on it. So they're
all retiring. Yeah. I, I disagree slightly in that I think because I can get the job done,
I'm a programmer. But because no one else can look at my code and know how I got my job done,
I'm a bad programmer. That's how I'm defining it. Yes. Including yourself. Including myself
six months later. I'm working with a new student right now and she sent me some messages on Slack
being like, what is this? What is this file that you've got with some functions around? And I was
like, I, I, this was from 2018. It wasn't that long ago. And I can no longer remember what that
code does. I'm going to spend now two days reading through my own code and trying to improve it.
And I do think that's frustrating. And so I think my advice to any young people who want to get into
astronomy or astrobiology or quantum chemistry is that I certainly find it much easier to teach
the science concepts to a programmer than the programming to a scientist. And so I would much,
much faster hire someone who knows programming but barely knows where space is than teach programming
to an astronomer. Oh, that's fascinating. Yeah. Okay. This is true. I mean, yeah, there's some
basics. I'm, I'm focusing too much on the silver lining because I have the people that were like
MATLAB code. Yeah. Single variable, single letter variable names, those kinds of things.
And it's accessibility, right? It's, I want my, my code to be open source. But, and it is,
it's on GitHub, anyone can download it. But is it really open source if it's written so cryptically,
so poorly that no one can really use it to its full functionality? Have I really
published my work? And that weighs on, on me, I feel guilty for my own inadequacies as a programmer.
Yeah. You can only do so much. I've already learned quantum chemistry and astrophysics. So, you know.
Yeah. I mean, there's, there's, there's all kinds of ways to contribute to the world. One of them
is publication, but publishing code is, is a fascinating way to contribute to the world,
even if it's very small, very basic element, great code. I guess I was also kind of criticizing
the software engineering process versus like, which is a good thing to do is code that's readable,
almost like without documentation, it's readable. It's understandable. The variable names, the structure,
all those kinds of things. And that's the dream. That's the dream. This is a dumb question. What do
you, all right, tell me. No, I'll tell you a dumb question. I want to hear it. Okay. I mean, okay,
this is the question about beauty. It's way too general. It's very impossible. It's like asking,
what's your favorite band? What's your favorite music band? Oh, I thought you meant wavelength
band. I was like, I definitely have favorite wavelength bands. Absolutely. Well, it's hard to
narrow down. Okay. What, what do you use the most beautiful idea in science?
It's not a dumb question. Do you want to try the question again proudly? Okay.
I have a really good question to ask you. Okay. Don't, don't oversell it. I've got an okay question
to ask you. Yeah. What, what do you, is the most beautiful idea in, in science, something you just
find inspiring or just maybe the reason you got into science or the reason you think science is cool?
My favorite thing about science is kind of the connection between the scales. So
when I was little and I wanted to know about space, I really felt that it would make me feel powerful
to be able to predict the heavens, something so much larger than myself that felt really powerful.
It was almost a selfish desire. And that's what I wanted. There was some control to being able to
know exactly what the sky would do. And then as I got older and I got more into astronomy and I
didn't just want to know how the stars moved. I wanted to know how the planets around them moved.
And, and then as I got deeper into that field, I really didn't care that much about the planets.
I wanted to know about the atmospheres around the planets and then the molecules within those
atmospheres and what that might mean. So I ended up shrinking my scale until it was literally the
quantum scale. And now all my work, the majority of my work is on this insane quantum scale.
And yet I'm using these literal tiny, tiny tools to try and answer the greatest questions
that we've ever been able to ask. And this crossing of scales from the quantum to the
astronomical. That's so cool, isn't it? Yeah. It spans the entirety, the tiny and the huge.
That's the cool thing about, I guess, being a quantum astrochemist is you're using the tools
of the tiny to look at the heavenly bodies, the giant stuff. And the potential life out there,
that this is the thing that connects us, that you can't escape the rules of the quantum world
and how universal they themselves are despite being probabilistic. And that makes me feel
really pleased to be in science, but in a really humbling way. It's no longer this thirst for power.
I feel less special the more work I do, less exceptional the more work I do. I feel like
humans in the earth and our place in the universe is less and less exceptional. And yet I feel so
much less lonely. And so it's been a really good trade-off that I've lost power, but I've gained
company. Wow, that's a beautiful answer. I don't think there's a better way to actually end it.
You're right. I asked a mediocre question and you came through. You made the question good
by a brilliant answer. That's what I wanted to hear.
You're the Michael Jordan and I'll be the Dennis Rodman. I don't know enough about basketball.
I mean, literally, you've reached the peak of my basketball knowledge because I know
though those people are basketball pros, I believe, but only because I watch Space Jam, I think.
Are there books or movies in your life long ago or recently? Do you have any time for books and
movies? Had an impact on you? What ideas did you take away?
I absolutely have time for books and movies. I try as best I can to not work very hard.
I mostly fail, I should point out. But I think I'm a better scientist when I don't work evenings
and weekends. If I get four good hours in a day, I often don't. I often get eight crappy hours,
emails, meetings, bad code, data processing. But if I can get four high-quality scientific
hours, I just stop working for the day because I know it's diminishing returns after that.
So I have a lot of time. I try to make as much time as I can.
Can you kind of dig into what it takes to be one productive, two to be happy as a researcher?
Because I think it's too easy in that world to... Because you have so many hats you have to wear,
so many jobs. You have to be a mentor, a teacher, a head of a research group, do research yourself.
You have to do service, all the kinds of stuff you're doing now with education and...
Interviews.
Yeah. So as a public science, like being a public communicator, that's a job.
The whole thing.
It's very poorly. I'll pay you in Bitcoin. Okay.
I'll take Bitcoin.
So is there some advice you can give to the process of being productive and happy as a researcher?
I think, sadly, it's very hard to feel happy as a scientist if you're not productive.
It's a bit of a trap, but I certainly find it very difficult to feel happy when I'm not being productive.
It's become slightly better if I know my students are being productive. I can be happy.
But I think a lot of senior scientists, once they get into that mindset,
they start thinking that their student science is theirs.
And I think this happens a lot of senior scientists. They have so many hats.
As you mentioned, they have to do so much service and so much admin
that they have very little time for their own science.
And so they end up feeling ownership over the junior people in their labs and their groups.
And that's really heartbreaking. I see it all the time.
And that I think I've escaped that trap.
I feel so happy even when I'm not productive, when my students are productive.
I think that sensation I was describing earlier, they only need to be half as productive as me
for me to feel like I've done my job for humanity.
So that has been the dynamic I've had to worry about.
But to be productive is not clear to me what you have to do.
You have to not be miserable otherwise.
I find it extremely hard when I'm having conflicts with collaborators, for example.
Kind of very hard to enjoy the work we do, even if the work is this fantastical
phosphine or things that I know I love, still very difficult.
So I think choosing your collaborators based on how well you get along with them
is a really sound scientific choice.
Having a miserable collaborator ruins your whole life.
It's horrible. It makes you not want to do the science.
It probably makes you do clumsy science because you don't focus on it.
You don't go over it several times. You just want it to be over.
And so I think in general, just not being a douchebag can get so much good science done.
Just find the good people in your community and collaborate with them.
Even if they're not as good scientists as others, you'll get better science out.
Yeah, don't be a douchebag yourself and surround yourself by other cool people.
Exactly. And then you'll get better science than if you would try to work with three geniuses
who are just hell to be around. Yeah, I mean, there's parallel things
like that. I'm very fortunate now. I was very fortunate at MIT to have friends and colleagues
there. They were incredible to work with. But I'm currently sort of...
I'm doing a lot of fun stuff on the side, like this little podcast thing.
And I mentioned to you, I think robotics related stuff. I was just at Boston Dynamics yesterday
checking out their robots. And I'm currently, I guess, hiring people to help me with a very
fun little project around those robots. Want to put an ad in?
I have more applications that I can possibly deal with. There's thousands.
So it's not an ad. It's the opposite.
We need to put an ad out for someone to help you go through the applications.
Well, that too is already there. That over 10,000 people applied for that.
An infinite master of application management.
But the point is, it's not exactly... The point is, what I'm very distinctly aware of is life is
short and productivity is not the right goal to optimize for, at least for me, the right goal
to optimize for is how happy you are to wake up on the day and to work with the people that you do.
Because the productivity will take care of itself.
Agreed.
And so it's so important to select the people well.
And I think one of the challenges with academia, as opposed to the sort of thing I'm currently doing,
is saying goodbye is sometimes a little bit tougher because your colleagues are there.
I mean, goodbye hurts. And then if you have to spend the rest for many years to come,
still surrounded by them in the community, it's tougher.
It kind of adds, puts extra pressure to stay in that relationship, in that collaboration.
And in some sense, that makes it much more difficult, but it's still worth it.
It's still worth it to break ties if you're not happy.
If there's not that magic, that dance, I talked to this guy named Daniel Kahneman.
Oh, I know. Danny Kahneman.
Danny, yeah. Boy, did that guy make me realize what a great collaborator is.
Well, he had Tversky, right?
Yeah. But they had, obviously, they had a really deep collaboration there.
But I collaborated with him on a conversation, just like talking about,
I don't know what we're talking about. I think cars, autonomous vehicles.
But the brainstorming session, I'm like a nobody. And the fact that he would,
with that childlike curiosity, and that dance of thoughts and ideas, and the push and pull,
and the lack of ego, but then enough ego to have a little bit of a stubbornness over an idea,
and a little bit of humor, and all those things, it's like, holy shit, that person,
also the ability to truly listen to another human. It's like, okay, that's what it takes to be a good
collaborator. It made me realize that I haven't been, I've been very fortunate to have cool people
in my life, but there's like levels even to the cool.
Yeah, I don't think you can compete with Danny Kahneman on cool. He's just incredible.
But it was like, okay, I guess what I'm trying to say is that collaboration is an art form.
But perhaps it's actually a skill, is allowing yourself to develop that skill, because that's
one of the fruitful skills. And praise it in students. And I think it is something you can
really improve on. I've become a better collaborator as the years have gone on. I don't have some innate,
collaborative skills. I think they're skills I've developed. And I think in science, there's this
really destructive notion of the lone wolf, the scientist who sees things where others don't,
then that's really appealing. And people really like either fulfilling that or pretending to be
fulfilling that. And first of all, it's mostly a lie. Any modern scientist, particularly an
astronomy, which is so interdisciplinary, any modern scientist as doing it on their own is doing
a crappy job, most likely, because you need an independent set of eyes to help you do things.
You need experts in the subfields that you're working on to check your work.
But most importantly, it's just a bad idea. It doesn't lead to good science, and it leaves
you miserable. I recently had some work that I was avoiding, and I thought, maybe I should pursue
this scientific project, because I don't care enough about the outcome, and it's going to be a
lot of hard work. And I was trying to balance these two things. It would be really difficult,
and the outcome is that maybe 10 people will cite me in the next decade, because it's not.
No one's asking for this question to be answered. And then I found myself working with this
collaborator, Jason Dipman, and I spent a whole afternoon, hours with him working on this, and
time flew by, and I just felt taller, and I could breathe better. I was happier. I was a better
person when it was done, and that's because he's a great collaborator. He's just a wonderful person
that brings out joy out of science that you're doing with him. And that's really the trick.
You find the people that make you feel that way about the science you're doing, and you stop
worrying about being the lone wolf. That's just a terrible dream that will leave you miserable,
and your science will be shit. And since I'm Russian, just murder anybody who doesn't
fall into that beautiful collaborative relationship. We were talking about books.
Books, yes. Is there books, movies? Why was I talking about my productivity? Oh,
you said you maybe don't have time for books and movies. And you said you must make time for books
and movies. Make time to not work. Make time to not work whatever that looks like to you.
But there's plenty. When I was younger, I found a lot of my scientific fulfillment in books and
movies. Now as I got older, I have plenty of that in my work, and I try to read outside my field.
I read about Danny Kahneman's work instead. But when I was little, it was contact, the book,
the Carl Sagan book, I really thought I was just like Ellie, and I was going to become Ellie. I
really resonated with me, their character, and the notions of life and space in the universe.
Even the idea of then the movie came out, and I got to put Jodie Foster in that,
which helped. But even the notion of if it is just us, what an awful waste of space,
I found extremely useful as a concept to think, maybe we are special, but that would suck is a
really nice way of thinking of the search for life, that it's much better to not be special
and have company. I got that from Carl Sagan. So that's where I always recommend.
Let me ask one other ridiculous question. We talked about the death and life cycle
that is ever present in the universe until it's not, until it's supermassive
and little black holes too, at the end of the universe. What do you think is the why,
the meaning of it all? What do you think is the meaning of life here on earth,
and the meaning of that life that you look for, whether it's on Venus or other exoplanets?
I think there's none. I find enormous relief in the absence of meaning. I think chasing for
meaning is a human desire that the universe doesn't give two shits about.
But you still enjoy? I enjoy finding meaning in my life. I enjoy finding
where the morality lies. I enjoy the complication of that desire, and I feel that is deeply human,
but I don't feel that it's universal. It's somehow absolute. We conjure it up.
We bring it to life through our own minds, but it's not in any kind of fundamental way real.
No. And the same way the sun is not to be blamed for destroying its own planets,
the universe doesn't care because it has no meaning. It owes us nothing, and looking for
meaning in the universe is demanding answers. Who are we? We're nothing. We don't get to demand
anything, and that includes meaning. And I find it very reassuring because once there is no meaning,
I don't have to find it.
Yeah. Once there's no meaning, it's a kind of freedom in a way. You sound a bit like...
I'm happy about it. This isn't a depressing outlook as far as I'm concerned.
It's happiness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I mean, there's, I don't know if you know who Sam Harris is,
but he, despite the pushbacks from the entirety of the world, really argues hard that there's
that free will as an illusion, that the deterministic universe, and it's all already been predetermined,
and he's okay with it. And he's happy with it, that he's distinctly aware of it, and that's okay.
The quantum world will disagree with him on the deterministic nature of nature.
Well, he's not saying it's deterministic, but he's saying that the randomness doesn't help either.
Like, randomness does not help in the experience of feeling like you're the decider of your own actions,
that he kind of is okay with being a leaf flowing on the river, like, or being the river,
right, as opposed to having or being like a fish or something. They can decide its swimming direction.
He's okay just embracing the flow of life. I mean, in that same way, it kind of sounds like your
conception of meaning. I mean, it just is. The universe doesn't care. It just is what it is,
and we experience certain things, and some feel good, and some don't, and that's life.
But I don't feel like that about life. I think life does have meaning, and it's laudable to
look for that meaning in life. I just don't think you can apply that beyond life and certainly not
beyond earth, that this notion of meaning is a human construct, and so it only applies within us,
and the other life forms and planet types that suffer from our intrusions or rejoice from our
interactions. But this meaning is ours to do as we please. We've created it. We've created a need
for it, and so that's our problem to solve. I don't apply it beyond us. I think we as humans
have a lot of responsibilities, but they're moral responsibilities, and a lot of those
responsibilities are much more easily fulfilled if you find meaning in them. So I think there's
value to meaning, whether it's real or not. I just think we gain nothing from trying to
anthropomorphize the entire universe, and also that's the height of hubris. That's not for us to do.
Yeah, it also could be, just like duality in quantum mechanics, it could be both
that there is meaning and that there isn't, and we're somehow depending on the observer,
depending on the perspective you take on the thing.
I mean, even on earth that's true, but whether things have meaning or not depends a lot on
who's looking. Whether it's us humans, the aliens, or the giraffes. Clara, this was an
incredible conversation. I mean, I learned so much, but I also am just inspired by the passion you
have. You're not finding meaning in the universe. I'm very passionate about not finding meaning
in the universe. You're the most inspiring nihilist I've ever met. I'm just kidding.
I mean, you are truly an inspiring communicator of everything from
phosphine to life to quantum astral chemistry. I can't wait to see what other cool things you do
in your career, in your scientific life. Thank you so much for wasting your valuable time with
me today. I really appreciate it. It was my pleasure. I had already got my four hours of
productivity before I got here, and so it's not a waste. It's all downhill from there. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Clara Sousa Silva, and thank you to
On It, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed. Check them out in the description to support
this podcast. And now, let me leave you with some words from Konstantin Zilkovsky.
The earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.