Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #348
my friend is telling me that the volcano seems to be starting to rot if that volcano goes up we have nowhere to go that got my attention so if you say scared I would say that I got the realization that what that meant I went called for like a fraction of a second but that meant that just my adrenaline started to kick in and it was a very very strange experience because now you have tunnel vision it's about survival the following is a conversation with Natalie Cabral an astrobiologist and scientist at The seti Institute directing the Carl Sagan center for the study of Life in The Universe She explores some of the harshest places on Earth including free diving in volcanic Lakes all in the pursuit of understanding living organisms beyond Earth for this she holds the woman's world record for diving at altitude both scuba and freediving she's amazing this is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Natalie cabal you are the director of the Carl Sagan Center for research at The seti Institute Saidi of course stands for search for extraterrestrial intelligence one of the things you do as part of that is travel to some of Earth's most extreme and dangerous environments in search of organisms that live in conditions analogous to those on Mars first let me ask what the job posting for the work you do looks like is it like shackleton's ad in 1900 that said people wanted for hazardous Journey to the South Pole small wages a bit of cold long months of complete darkness constant danger and also where do I apply that's funny because there was not really a job application in fact when you're a scientist you have questions in your mind and you have hypotheses and you start to list the kind of thing you need to answer and then when you you see the kind of thing you have to answer then you kind of know the places where you need to go to do that as far as science is concerned started with analyzing data from the Mars missions and I had written a PhD about water on Mars first looking at channels and the history evolution of of water but then during my postdoc I started to look where that water was spawning interestingly enough everybody was about channels and water and whether catastrophic or whatnot or seepage but when you are talking about pounding water like lakes or ocean people were studied waving their arms a little bit so it was a little bit of a ill battle interestingly enough yeah but that got us on track with my husband uh we were working together and we started developing the idea the concept of lakes in impact craters so why an impact crater is just because the Viking Mission at the time which is what we were working with the resolution and the topography were so poor that there was really no way of telling where you had a real low in the topography the only thing you knew was a hole in the ground was an impact crater so when you sell valleys what was the Viking Mission the Viking Mission landed on Mars in 1976 and there were two lenders and two orbiters so they were really our first fit on the ground on Mars but they were under they were not moving they were not going and that was the data you were looking at it was already in the 90s but we didn't have yet the Mars Global surveyor and whatnot we still work for 20 years we worked on that I did my master and my PhD thesis on bike ignitions you mentioned that the places you go to are defined by the questions you want to ask let's just step back what questions have always tugged at your heart well that's the thing that's why I was looking at those images and saw some likes and then came time where we started talking about sending lenders and and Rovers on Mars and looking maybe at the possibility that Mars was habitable and lakes are particularly good places to look for those questions so this is how it all ties up so you were always curious about life out there I have been always curious about life in the universe and about questions on how we got to be here and and the bigger question now with 25 years more and you know in in that business it's more about understanding the origin and nature of life rather than whether there is life or not on Mars I mean this was really for me a stepping stone to bigger questions but they were definitely important because they helped me frame my way of thinking about this question and so looking at Mars Alex understanding what the conditions were 3.5 billion years ago or close to 4 billion years ago then I knew the type of environment I needed to explore here on Earth as analogous to be able to understand what type of life still survives in those environment and what kind of instrument and what kind of resolution do I need to actually detect it so this is how the whole thing started and it started with a small Grant literally 40K it was a discretionary fund and this is how I got started in my in my career and so many of these questions you can answer by looking at life in extreme conditions here on Earth but let's let's step back a little bit and look at Mars and lakes on Mars just going back to your PhD and before and maybe today what do we understand about life on Mars what do we understand about Lakes on Mars is there water on Mars what do we understand about the conditions from four billion years ago on Mars well we've gone a long way remember from from the Viking where we had no resolution well we'll had a little bit more resolution with than with Mariners what did you think at that time sorry to interrupt it was just take us back to that mindset it was really the exploration like the your first look at a planet you have to remember that the first mission that successfully snapped some pictures of Martha was Mariner for and then everybody at that time was still under the spell of you know it's Wells and and the idea that Mars looked with telescope so similar to the Earth polar caps we could see them with a telescope and we knew it had season the actual tilt is pretty much the same as the one for Earth so when Mariner 4 left everybody pre not everybody but a lot of people thought that we would see the crystal cities and domes and stuff that another civilization might have evolved in parallel to us in the solar system and of course when the first images came back and Mars looked with that kind of resolution it I had uh like the Moon it was a huge disappointment then minor 9 came and that changed everything there is there was a little bit of drama because Mars started the one of the biggest storm it ever experienced and so for three months we had an orbiters circling around Mars and not seeing anything but then when the dust cleared all of a sudden we started discovering volcanoes valleys ancient channels Dune Fields polar caps and see what I'm talking to you I don't need to invent any words to describe Mars and although the myth of extraterrestrial civilization on Mars was gone all of a sudden the imagination of the scientists started to pick up because right away we were seeing something that was familiar that we could describe so right away Viking would put on The Fast Track and the idea was so Mars looks so much like Earth could have been although it's arid and there is little atmosphere Etc could there be life and of course behind this at the time there were people like a Klein and Sagan called Sagan uh just you know uh thinking about how can we test the idea of biology of Life on Mars so this is what Viking did but of course at the time when the two lenders arrived on Mars we didn't have the context of the geology of the environment we didn't have much data at all so the data that Viking send back was very confusing some people still think today that we discovered Life on Mars at the time because some of the experiment turned out to show a strange signal but most of the community think that it can be explained by a chemical reaction that we see today so it was so confusing that NASA decided to say okay if we want to be serious about looking for Life on Mars we have to understand the environment because life and environment co-evolve so as cause or effect a planet is going to give you the physical chemical environment for life to happen these are the boundaries but once life is here it's going to change everything one of the biggest impact of life was to inject oxygen into the atmosphere of the earth three two billion years ago and that changed everything including our signature in space so there is this coevolution so if you want to understand one you have to remove the other from the equation this kind of a two unknown equation so even though oxygen changes our signature today what if all life on Earth died and now we fast forward a billion years what would be the traces left it so the question I'm trying to ask is if life had existed on Mars what would be the signs we would look for that's a very good question the thing is that if you draw the parallel with Earth it took 82 percent of Earth's history geological history to go from very simple life microbial life to complexity and when I'm saying complexity I'm not even talking about us I'm talking about animals so Marcy smaller lost its magnetic field very fast and lost its atmosphere is very fast life also appeared on Earth very fast so the condition being quite similar at that time between the Earth and Mars it's assumed for a moment that life appeared on Mars it would have been Simple Life when conditions started to degrade which was less than a billion year after the planet had formed so everything at the surface would have disappeared except maybe for morphological traces of the interaction between life and its environment so on Earth the best example are what we call stromatolites these are rock formation that are built by microbes so we know that we we know how to recognize them you could have chemical traces as well there is some interesting question marks right now about carbon Isotopes at Crater because we found an abundance of C12 which normally is used by life on Earth but it can produce be produced by other things so it's not that it's a real bio signature in itself but it's intriguing we have now the C12 and we have methane but uh going back it's a Time on Mars 3.5 billion years ago where you have lots of distractions where you have lots of impact cratering Etc so but we still have very old rocks that are that survive from that time so these are good uh good places that's why we're sending the Rovers in those places ancient lakes and impact craters and and places where you have very old rocks So when you say ancient lakes and impact craters the simple question so impact Creator is a Creator created by a giant rock hitting the planet and yes a big rock that can be metal or rock or it can be a comet as well mostly eyes so is that good for life or bad for life it's actually both um interestingly enough the building blocks of life the bricks the stuff we are made of carbon hydrogen oxygen and nitrogen and phosphorus they were included on our planet they were built in just because our planet is made of this kind of rocks asteroids and comets coming together by what we call a Christian so they were built in when an asteroid comes there is a lot of Destruction going on but at the same time those rocks they bring with them those bricks of life and they create lots of energy and if the environment around is favorable you might possibly be have some sitting going on that's one of the aspect of what we call panspermia which is the fact that comets and asteroid have the building blocks of life and better than them and that given favorable condition they might be able to see planets this is a theory what percent of you when you're looking up at the stars and wondering about this stuff thinks that past Premier has is what happened on mars or or on Earth which is the building blocks of life came from elsewhere well but you know that's the thing panspermia is a vector potential Vector which means that it actually distributes the stuff of life left and right but it doesn't explain the origin of life it does it's not the environment itself it just promotes maybe and we still have to prove this but what we know is that the stuff we are made of is very abundant all over the place including in interstellar medium so it's all over it's all over the idea is that maybe it just waits to have the proper environment and we know what it needs here on Earth it needs water it needs energy shelter and nutrient so you're fundamentally interested in the origin of life and the big leaps that in evolutionary history that could be like an origin of something origin of eucharia's origin of photosynthesis origin of whatever I just think if we're a civilization here on Earth and we survive another few hundred years I think it would be a good idea to take a big gun and just shoot life out there like a lifegun basically try to create panspermia that's a good backup solution so one way is to actually uh copy our brains and actual humans some complex information and send it out there another way to preserve life is just to like send the basic building blocks send them a bacteria a bunch of whatever the rugged organisms are on earth just send a bunch of those these are not the building blocks they are actual organism so what is that a nice shortcut or do we want to because you said building blocks are everywhere yeah freaks of Life the carbon hydrogen Etc uh they they wear uh produced by the death of precious Stars so this is how they were produced and um stars like arson uh started to form 10 billion years ago that doesn't mean that the the sun is the only kind of star that produce you know life or an evil life but actually was produced in uh 10 billion years ago now what you're talking about is is a little different right now there are many um many efforts to do the type of thing you are talking about which is to put our DNA on whatever kind of substrate and preserve it involves either in different place on Earth or on the moon some people are already thinking about putting DNA on the moon as far as brain is concerned and it's drawing towards transhumanism which is uh the enhancement of who we are through Ai and machine learning of course having backups is a good thing for me I would say that taking care of our planets and going back to a place where we are in equilibrium with our environment would be also maybe the best backup possible and let Evolution do its things right now we are like teenagers with enough brain to create Cool Tools but we don't have enough brain to understand yet the consequences of what we are doing and right now we are paying for this so uh the question is whether we are going to be able to move forward and learn from the mistakes we are making to become a mature civilization you probably heard of the Drake equation that would be the L at the very end the duration the duration of intelligent civilization exactly and and or at least uh the length of time a civilization remains detectable it can disappear from the radar screen literally for a number of reasons the first one is destroy itself or being destroyed by external uh events or it can become so in tune and with the universe and so Advanced that it disappears because it melts really in the background and it's not visible anymore uh there are some wild theories out there saying that um civilization might be so Advanced that you cannot distinguish them from physical processes and uh that was an example doesn't say that this is the case but some people say imagine that in fact all the dark matter that we we see or we we theorized about is in fact some sort of a biological uh process so you can think about a number of things personally I believe that what you talk about about preserving our information is kind of what life does we we need to look at ourselves uh as not different of what the little cell that started off was and this is what tells you not about the origin of life but in fact the nature of life which is a lot more interesting to me because it is the nature of life is really what is going to give you some Universal signature to look for it all over the place and not only around ponds of water for Life as we know it but the nature of life is telling you that life wants to get the most information possible around its surroundings and complexities in fact the ability to gather and exchange and preserve the most information possible and and so what you're saying is kind of preserving the kind of information we have so in the things that we are doing as life happened and I say happen because we don't know what life is uh we have 123 definitions of life and some people are saying we don't have any definition we only have descriptions of life and and that's true and that's true so think about it for two minutes we are looking for something we don't know it is but we have a few clues about the nature of life there are some really good theories the first one was Schrodinger right uh in the 40s right now there is a guy named Jeremy England it's another biophysical theory of life it says life is the inevitable resolve of thermophysics this is the best way to beat entropy to fight entropy but when you look at what we are doing if you want to know what the nature of life is look at our languages and they can be very different languages but they all have the same purpose right exchange information understand you know store information and and uh also whether it is with somebody at the outside or thought in yourself that's the same thing the cell was doing but now when you're looking at life and at the structure of our languages life started with anatom so it's an atom they get together to create inorganic molecules then you have complex inorganic molecules then you get to organic molecules complex in organic molecules and then you have RNA DNA Etc look at the structure of our language we created alphabets letters that's your anthem then we put them together to create syllables right those syllables get together to create words tell you something but they are nothing without a verb that gives the direction that's RNA and DNA and and then you can put all the complements you want our languages are built exactly as life is built we are repeating patterns I call this the mandelbrot universe and the fractal Universe because this is exactly what it is uh I I would say that as much as I do believe to sending probes to explore the Universe I say we should also look inward to find the uh the answer to some of the profound question of who we are what's life what's the nature of life because we are expressing life so searching not for life but for the nature of Life the nature of absolutely I am more interested in that because the day we understand the nature of life then we have a universal um by your signature and it doesn't matter whether this life respond to the same kind of biochemical processes as we do although it makes sense I I told you about the generational aspect of the bricks of Life the stuff we are made of the sun is part of the youngest generation of stars and the first two generations of stars didn't produce the kind of elements we are made of they were stars that were either uh without metal just made of allium and hydrogen or poor in metals so the stars died off and stars like the sun were born from those and this is why we have elements like carbon hydrogen oxygen that is running now um and and that's the life we're built on so I I think it's not stupid to be looking for something that looks like us because right now in the universe this is the stuff that's the most abundant and we see with the exoplanet with Kepler with tests and and now with gem swipe we see that there are many many different type of planets that may be habitable in the habitable zone of their stars there are countless stars like the Sun but more interestingly enough there are other type of stars where you do have habitable zone as well and where the duration of the Stars sometimes a thousand times more than our sun so you can imagine all sorts of things and you can imagine what type of life would be on around those Stars the biochemistry might be quite similar in fact and especially for the simple life because Simple Life Starts really quickly on Earth so my take on this is that the universe is full of cyanobacteria but as far as intelligent life it takes more time so that can take different you know aspect do you think it's possible that the universe it's full of bacteria and even those stars that last a thousand times longer than the Sun even even on the planets that orbit those Stars maybe it's bacteria and four billions and billions and billions of years we actually don't know what triggered the evolution to complexity on Earth that's still a big question mark is that the most impressive invention on Earth to you is that Cambrian Revolution is really what took us towards what we are and in the meantime there were the dinosaurs Etc the dinosaurs were wiped out so the evolution could have taken a completely different turn uh it's always I would say mass extinction that are going to drive what's the end game but um yeah you take two planets and you change you know those asteroid impacts all those big geological events that wipe out like 90 of Life at any time the thing that seemed to be um interesting there are two things the first one is where you are located on our galaxy uh matters a lot we actually are in the habitable zone of our galaxy and if you are too close to the center then it's a lot denser and remember we have the Oort cloud around our solar system and if you are in the region of the Galaxy that's too populated then you are going to run interaction gravitational interaction with all these stars and since it's more dense you will have more of the Comets that are living in the old Cloud being ejected from the Oort cloud and coming towards the inner solar system and collide with planets so you will have more of these impacts if you are too close to the center of the Galaxy not to mention the radiation there is a place in our galaxy where it's a really bad neighborhood you don't want to be there you wouldn't be able to have life but what really matters is extinctions but also um the climate history of a planet has a role to play and it seems that it's a theory it still has to be backed up by more observation but there is a good correlation between not only the passage of the solar system towards the center of the Galaxy there is one place where we get hit by asteroid because of the interaction I was telling you about but the other one is the climate with the minankovic Cycles big jumps in life's Evolution seem to be associated with snowball Earth episodes we don't know why yet snowball episode intuitively you would think that they are connected to a decrease in life because the whole earth is covered in ice but for some reason there were big jumps in evolution right after each of those episodes and and today there are other things like why all of a sudden you have mutation that seems to be responsible for you know a big jump in evolution we are not clear yet so all of those things when you're thinking about life elsewhere are going to come into play and I cannot tell you that a planet that remains habitable for much longer than the earth will have an evolutionary path that's the same or different depends on extension depends on climate depends on but not it's a little bit surreal there were two descendants of apes figure out what what the heck is going on and I mean we're very biased even as a so you uh we're biased as humans you're less biased as a scientist uh but we still love Earth we still don't know anything but this Earth and so even though you tried to get escape from thinking of what life is in the search for the nature of life we still kind of connected to the way we understand the nature of life here on Earth so I think that it's a little different than that we are biased when it comes to the origin of Life yes because well we are the only model we know and as I said it makes sense because it seems that a lot of you know uh stars like the sun appear till billion years ago and there are lots of words that really resemble the Earth and lots of water out there and lots of condition that could be a repeat of what we know and we know that this biochemistry works so as a again as I mentioned what is going to change is really the evolution of a planet Extinction geology Etc but our model is probably very abundant I'm not saying that the end game is going to resemble us because of all this extensions Etc but this is a good bias it's one that has the number for it you know the principle of mediocrity I I think that in that case it really applies where the Earth is representative of an abundance of other words now of course there can be other biochemistry we have some examples in our own solar system Titan might be a representative of that we are not very clear of the kind of biochemistry that can come out of a world where you have hydrocarbon likes and rains and and things like that but we are going there so we will learn something about this so the bias is right there the nature of life is different if really life is the best way the universe has to fight entropy there is no bias there because physics is the same all across the universe at least the universe we know there might be other universes but the one we know works with the same physics so if life is the the best way to fight entropy you can imagine life permeates the entire universe and then the question might change to like flavors of ice cream what are the flavors of complexity that this process this nature of Life leads to and there we might have bias about what complexity looks like what beautiful complexity looks like we'll look at humans that operate a certain physical scale and uh time scale and we think this is intelligence we have another problem we don't know what life is we don't know what intelligence is and we don't know what Consciousness is but we are trying to tackle the big question but do you know what complexity is also you know no I I think that we have to be honest and as a scientist and I'm going to step back and talk about intelligence for me bacteria that has survived like cyanobacteria that has survived just like us 4 billion years in one Incarnation or another and actually they are very similar to the one that they wear 3.5 billion years ago it has some intelligence about its environment so for complexity it might be that we need to take the world literally which is an assemblage or additional capacity to gather collect store information maybe this is something like that or actually use that information to do something with it but I do completely agree with you when you talk about flavor of ice cream I think this is exactly it and I have a basic education about what physics is doing right now and I'm look at quantum physics and what it says about the universe and about the connection about an atom here and another hair a photon here in the Forum there and I am starting to put Maybe wrongfully two and two together but in my mind and of course it's nothing until I can prove it but in my mind the universe is connected everywhere in all different places so this life connection is something that as you said pyramid the universe and the way to find life might be very different than to look for the origins of life I think it's a good thing to go out there and look for the original glass somewhere else because it's the manifestation of the nature of life that's all of a sudden becomes apparent evident to our eye but what I think would be our greatest achievement is that if we can find that process of life because at that point in my mind the universal is sudden is going to illuminate itself with actually it's living Force what I can only call a living Force to me this is what we are looking at a universe that becomes more and more complex with time more and more able to gather information and interestingly enough why to understand itself so Sagan was right when he was selling we are the universe trying to understand itself and the more we go the more the universe become alive may be intelligent and maybe also conscious conscious self-aware exactly through us it does make me a little bit sad as a human just watching all the breakthroughs on artificial intelligence side when applied to Natural Sciences now more and more to physics that the creatures that will solve the question of the origin of the nature of life or just the process the nature of life will be AI systems it makes me a bit sad to I don't think so uh because you think humans will at this point in time remember who was behind AI you know I I'm not buying in the singularity thing yet um to AI is not aware AI is being built by humans so so um AI is a tool an extremely smart tool as long as we build it and as long as we use it as a tool it remains a tool and I think there is a lot of brouhaha and of course science fiction and movies they don't help see I got to push back a little bit yes I agree with you for the most part in terms of boo haha and sci-fi but there is like in the work of Deep Mind we can look at chess so we can look at protein folding so chess is a simple one to First Look at what uh Alpha zero or which is their game playing engine was able to discover in our stockfish about Chess humbles the best human players not just is better than them it comes up with ideas that the humans don't understand and so the AI now is telling you uh even though it's programmed by humans the AI is saying like sacrificing a pawn here is a good idea sacrificing a queen or a bishop here's a good idea and then you start to kind of Intuit as a human why but you don't deeply understand and you can say that AI is not conscious it doesn't deeply understand the way humans do but there's still a wisdom and a depth of knowledge in that chess playing program that humans don't have and the same with the alpha fold with protein folding there's a and now they're applying it to physics to simulating nuclear reactions and so on it feels like there might be a way to understand the nature of life that we can kind of Intuit poetically as humans but the the true understanding will come from a system that's much more computational sophisticated again you know I would push back and my turn because I still think that you men give themselves ability to do that by building that tool so the idea that the tool you know we are getting into the Carter shift scale and and the Dark Forest and all these things we can see the world this way uh at this point in time for me I still see a great tool now uh whether the Sci-Fi scenario is going to you know uh happen Etc I still think that we are far away from from this but if that tool is capable of giving me A New Perspective uh it's just that we are starting to jump into a deeper uh cognition of of what the universe is whether it's through our brain or through a different way of gathering information remember this is what we do yeah human variables actually build tools and then like integrate them enter their way of thinking maybe another generation has to be born that is raised with those tools but we seem to like take for granted all the cool Technologies you integrate into your way of thinking a lot of people are growing up now their mind is integrated with the internet you basically reconfigure the way you memorize things you no longer have to memorize a lot of facts because you can look them up really quickly yeah and so like uh so you uh reallocate a lot of resources for uh thinking versus memory of just strict facts that kind of stuff and we integrate all of that yeah and you know there I would completely agree with you in fact I wrote about this again uh um in this new book that's coming out when is the book coming out in January it's it will be in French actually uh to start with you wrote it in French actually I wrote it first in English yes and I translated into French so the the English version is already pretty much ready to go uh if we found a publisher in uh in the US but anyways um the point uh being here that I looked at this as a relationship with technology as a complete change to me this is the singularity more than anything else which is the co-evolution of human with technology not anymore with their environment while we are messing up the environment right now why we don't respond to pandemic the way we should because we are disconnected to the environment we are taking our information from and we were adapting from right now exactly as you said we take the information from the web from the phones Etc we have no filter over that information before you were out in the environment the information you get is the one the planets is sending you now this information is coming from different way you have no way of knowing and information is correct or not yeah I gotta push back on that no you look at this as a nickel system and it explains a lot about Behavior see I like the you said teenagers so we the technology I think when we move past the teenager stage enriches our ability to sense the Earth to understand what's going on with the environment it's just that we're very so it's not that technology disconnects us from the environment it gives us more tools with which to understand what's going on with the environment that's true for the people who are building the tools and know how to use it take those tools now put them in the general public with no filter which is happening with social media which is happening with a lot of things and you see the disaster this is creating and it's not the disaster it is challenges you sound like a parent talking about a teenager yes did you it's it's The Growing Pains of a civilization that is becoming deeply connected with our we can communicate all across the world even through the pandemic the good thing about technology this is also something I wrote It's not the tools we create that are bad it's the way we use them yes and we're learning well this is the cool thing and we hopefully we'll do all their learning before it's too late because our response to what's going on in the environment our response to pandemics is deeply connected to this disconnect we have with nature anyways we all agree that we are in growing pains and hopefully we can move forward because there is a fantastic Universe something absolutely magical around us and I'm talking as a scientist I mean there is Magic not in sense of you know trickery but in sense of wonder around us and there are so many signs where we are getting so close to Revolutions in cosmology in astrobiology in astronomy which I think to me this is where the hope lies and also an Awakening of understanding that we need to be in equilibrium with a planet if we want to move forward because even though we have these Big Dreams of going on Mars and the moon and listen I am a planetary geologist so I am all for exploration right now the moon or Mars is not going to save your butt because for the logistics will still depend very much on the earth and for a long time I think this time we are living in will be remembered as a pivot in our history for for a number of reasons uh a time where there is a growing Consciousness where we are creating tools that are going a little bit ahead of us that we have some some difficult time to catching up uh on with where we have to deal with the population that's way uh too big for the planet we have we need to really learn a sense of balance and and a maturity as a civilization so how is this going to unfold right now I have no clue I draw a lot of optimism from the similar things that happened and many decades ago when nuclear weapons were developed boy was that at the time even more terrifying you just now created weapons that could destroy the entirety of life on Earth or not entirety but a lot of it and we somehow found a balance and the threat constantly is out there and that threat has been made more visceral in recent times because the war in Ukraine but we find a balance somehow so I have a threat of optimism for human civilization that we that we figure it out we're clever teenagers I think we are clever teenagers there is definitely a threat of optimism but I think it's thin is sin because something that has changed as well is the mentality of of humans um although the threat was terrifying when uh nuclear weapons were were created um there was a sense of limits you were willing to push in the threats um there were there was a sense of decency of moral values it was not perfect but it was at least a time where people could come together from very different perspective and agree that something was more important than destroying everything but that's so hilarious you say that yes you're talking about a small Slither of humans which is the scientists in the Manhattan Project perhaps no absolutely that was also the time when over a hundred million people were tortured or murdered no no I agree with that in Europe absolutely absolutely I'm not talking about scientists here actually I'm talking about politicians we've gone beyond that point now this is what I'm worried about I mean torture Etc unfortunately well we are Apes exactly what you said so I think that you know there is a lot to be not not to blame Grandpa for that but because we can always get better Grandpa was a wild man but we have to improve a lot on that side before we can claim that we are a mature civilization when you uh just because you mentioned the magic uh when you look out there perhaps this is not a scientific question but you don't have to be scientific all the time yeah well this you said magic so there's a there's a magic to Magic that is in part scientific and in part I don't know whatever whatever fills us with all as humans when we look up at the stars do you think the universe is full of life or not like you know when you're sitting drinking some wine looking up at the stars and and wandering as a human uh do you think we're alone or do you think it's life is everywhere I am going to make such an unmagical response to that my response is that's the scientific response yeah that if we are alone then the universe is a statistical absurdity yeah and and I have no doubt in my mind and that is an unscientific response as well but I have no doubt in my mind that the universe is steaming with life what if it keeps dying this is what life does but unfortunately so so the so me that Extinction is as a process as a part of the process of Life Extinction seems to be a fundamental both negative and positive component uh so what if all the complex life out there just keeps dying and not making a way for like we're actually uh statistical anomaly in us being able to survive that l in the Drake equation being able to survive long enough to form complex organisms of the kind like mammals are things with brains things Ellie's not about that L is about how long a civilization is capable of being detectable which means that rich Technologies and you know being detectable okay so there's a more nuanced things to L because you can have intelligent civilizations that are not very detectable yeah we had civilization for thousands of years we started to be detectable 150 years ago so it's about technology technology that we can actually capture from from space you become visible to your neighbors uh and and this is all about the Fermi Paradox right it takes time obviously if we're taking again ourselves as a model but this is the only one we have um to get to the point where we become detectable but look at the age of the universe even if life as we understand it not not saying even as we know it but as we can understand it started 10 billion years ago and it takes four billion years to get to uh the point where it becomes detectable that means that the first planet where those civilizations started off starting to be depictable when we were still cyanobacteria in ponds so they were you know throwing messages and that were passing above our heads at that point and those civilization when you look at them now close to 10 billion years after the start so their son would be dead okay in the best case scenario they move somewhere else and what that means is that Civilization are going to rise die or move and transform themselves we can see ourselves changing we know that humans are still changing as a species the human being in in a thousand or even 500 years from now might not be looking a lot like we are doing uh right now who knows where where we will be will might be migrating into our planetary system we might be migrating somewhere else well you said migrating but it seems when you look at life it doesn't necessarily migrate it it expands so it's not or place a or or place B is place a and plays B it could be we are talking about the human civilization here so there are different factors if you are a cyanobacteria or any type of even a mammal that doesn't have the technology to escape the planet we were born on then it's plan a it is right there you know whatever happens to your planet you are tied to it you cannot Escape it for a human it's a little different yeah it's a and b or whatever you know we can so we have to expect that a number of the civilization extraterrestrial civilization that might be technologically advanced a number of them will have disappeared just because they run the course of their evolution or because their son run out of fuel and they didn't have a way to escape or they were wiped out by any kind of event and then they will there will be those that survive everything I've seen from life it seems obvious that there's life everywhere out there in fact maybe I don't understand the jump from bacteria enough but it seems obvious that there's intelligent civilizations out there now I don't know what intelligence how to define intelligence but there's beautiful complexity like when you look at a I've looked at enough cellular automata which is a very primitive mathematical construction that when you run complexity emerges I've looked at that enough to know that it just seems like there's complexity everywhere out there so I that's why I'm deeply puzzled by the the Fermi Paradox it makes no sense to me I mean uh that have trivial answers to it why haven't aliens at scale not shown up I think the the two possible options for me is either we're too dumb to see it they're already here they've been talking to us through processes we just don't understand like like what we experience as a life here on Earth is actually they're everywhere conscious aliens could be consciousness that when we feel love for one another that could be aliens when we I don't know or feel fear or whatever that could be aliens I have to agree with you none of this is scientifically provable right now we talked a little bit already about that but I would say that I do not adhere to the Fermi Paradox because it's very entreprene morphic it's you know it's an interesting exercise let's put it that way but it's a typical example of seeing the universe through our own eyes and this is what the limitation is understanding what's going on with complexity as you said and looking at the biophysical model and theories for the nature of life I would agree that probably this extraterrestrial message is all around us we're not yet capable of picking it up but I think unfortunately even though that makes me sad the way to pick it up is by studying life here on Earth doing some of the science you're doing better understand the nature of life until you realize uh holy crap the thing I was looking for all along has been has been here all along right well you know a good example of that and it doesn't need to be an extraterrestrial civilization look at something that I really you know whether or not is real I don't care because in terms of intellectual exercise I think it's fantastic look at the shadow biosphere the idea that life didn't appear only once on Earth but there were many different Pathways of it and today we know when we study the tree of life that led to us from Luca to us and the shadow biosphere is telling us that there is or there are other pathways that came up at the time where life originated but they are so different that we cannot recognize them as being living and we cannot pick them up in our test because our tests are being built to recognize Life as we know it and for me again I don't know if this Theory will be verified or it would be discredited but what I like about it is that it forces me to think on how do I look for life I don't know so that starts here on our planet not even with little green man uh it starts with very simple life that be can be so different that it might be just right in front of our nose and we don't see it so that probably starts with the the scientific humility of always realizing that we might be too biased in understanding of what is the phenomena we're trying to study yeah I don't like the term bias because it involves some moral connotation that you know in terms of scientific pathway intellectual framework definitely what do you think about the UFO sightings so the widespread experiences that people have and seeing different phenomena that they sort of that are mysterious that people project ideas about whether it's aliens or not but they can't explain it and there's pictures and data and then the government is involved in releasing footage and all that kind of stuff and that seems to Captivate the public it always imagine it always do I mean you know there are a number of things that uh Captivate people especially children actually dinosaurs and aliens still a child yeah we are also child at heart and so about UFOs I am a Scientist and I'm a citizen so I'm going to tell you a couple of things first I don't mind talking about that at all because I think as a scientist this is extremely interesting because the thing I don't know I want to learn about it this is more knowledge so we all know the statistics about UFOs 95 of them are just natural phenom feminine or things that are being misinterpreted we know that then you have the two percent that might be secret programs by whatever government it's out there another person say is about natural phenomenon that we don't know about yet that we cannot explain and then there is this tiny percentage that don't fall into all these categories of thing and I think that the re the report about the uaps falls into the same kind of scheme except that now they have at least some patterns of speed of other things that were in the report today we don't know if these sightings are part of military program or actual UFOs I always run into that question because of course as the Director of the car second Center at the study Institute I received a number of emails about the subject people actually confused about what the study Institute is we are not studying UFOs we are studying we are actually looking for messages the way I put it you know usually is that we are studying extraterrestrial in their natural habitat yes and and the UFO people are trying to understand whether they invaded our aerial space yes so this is very two very different things and unfortunately over the years I actually respect very much people who are trying to go to the bottom of what UFO are following some very scientific ways of doing this they are very very credible agencies doing this unfortunately there is a folklore around UFOs and this has been a huge disservice to the scientific community and this is why you have been having that much pushback for a long time by the scientific Community because no Congressman in the world wants to tell their taxpayer that they are supporting something that looking for flying saucers and you know when you see what's happening it's terrifying and I am actually concerned you know about that relationship that people do between folklore and real search for extraterrestrial intelligence in fact it's been so bad that until today there is no government agency that is actually funding the city search it is a private funded endeavor what NASA funds right now which is a progress is a search for techno signature which means that when you are looking at the atmosphere of a planet you look for some disequilibrium that could tell you that something is there but it's not going to found a an Institute or whatnot that is looking for messages or or other things like that does that just have to do with the taboo associated with the folklores yes and I think there was a pushback from the political Arena decades ago about that at the time where all the Flying Saucer were coming out and then the city Institute got it started so but now there is more of a willingness to look at the UAP uh Uso phenomenon from a scientific standpoint so much so that the government is actually seeking some help from a scientific institution and there are programs to start looking into those phenomenon and as a scientist I am interested what I'm not interested in again Carl Sagan comes back here I don't want to believe I want to know and so to know you have to have a real experiment you have to have observation and you have uh things that are done the right way I don't want to have somebody that start with what if as a question and then turns this what if in to the only argument and the only conclusion there is you understand but still I think it's valuable to appreciate the mystery and not deny the mystery so no the mystery is there but what I don't want is people taking advantage of the public and making money out of folklore well let me flip that I understand but so there's a folklore and like the stuff I do Ai and Robotics for example there's a clear fear Terminator and movies and all those kind of stuff you could say that I'm very concerned about this miscalibrated uh understanding of the public of what robots role are in society or you could see it as a let's use a metaphor of a wave you can say this giant wave they'll call folklore is a really bad idea we need to uh avoid it we need to hide we need to build dams or you can be a surfer and ride the wave as a scientist to me the fact that people are wondering about the mystery of UFOs it means they're wondering no they are but the thing I I will stop surfing that wave when it comes back to bite an entire scientific discipline that's the science sure for now the past 60 years we were not able to raise money from the government no grants it's a discipline that has no postdoc of very little postdoc just because there is a fear of that folklore on the political Arena people don't want to be associated with that because they confuse the two so I stopped there and as the Director of the Carl Sagan Center I am just very happy to see now that there is a course correction in the government seeking scientific investigators for this kind of issues and hopefully that will write the ship there I love it I love to see it but I want and I love her a little disagreements I'm I'm doing so obviously respectfully with love and it's it makes it for a fun conversation but I think you know just like with surfing a wave there there's some level of if the more you resist it the worse it is so I we didn't resist it yes it didn't come from us and we paid the price I just think that the role of a scientist in part in the 21st century when we talked about social media it's to direct this sense of wonder that people have into a direction of the rigors of science I think we do that pretty well I would disagree I don't think Society does much better but there's other places in science where the sexual life is fair it's fairly easy place to you know draw The Wonder of people yes because it's a profound question that pretty much everybody has but I think I just want to highlight the fact that I think a lot of scientists my colleagues friends think that all you need to do is science all you need to do is this the the scientific process the peer review process the the data and so on but I think communication is actually a fundamental part of the process um because it has to do with funding but also has to do like where where a bunch of humans trying to ask big questions trying to figure this whole puzzle out and nobody agree we do have more Public Presentation at The Institute than peer-reviewed articles and believe me we have a lot of peer-reviewed Articles so our scientists are out there and they are sharing The Wonder of discoveries and it's so easy these days I mean there is not one day tell me about writing a book right now about the search for life in the universe I mean it's almost every single day I had to correct something in the chapters I was writing so study in terms of both signatures and signals is a pretty active field so it's getting better right now uh it's getting better but remember that the city Institute is not only about the search for experience is your intelligence this is the root of the historical route of the Institute but it's about 10 percent of what we do in fact we are searching for life in the universe from the origins of life to extraterrestrial intelligence so ninety percent of everything else is exoplanet uh for instance we have a good chunk of the capital team that is actually with the study Institute and they are working with tests right now some already have some time on the gems web we have astrobiologists we have astronomers and those are looking for data for signals for planets out there go outside of ourselves and yeah go to analog places to try and understand the type of life that survive in planetary type environments I mean people are always surprised when I tell them you know whatever flies in the solar system as one or will be flying we are involved so this is not something that pops in everybody's mind when they are thinking about the the sari Institute because we started off as the search for extraterrestrial intelligence but the Institute has really blown into the search for Life along the Drake equation all the terms of the Drake equation just to clarify Because by the way you're saying a bunch of terms sometimes it's good to return to the basics when you're saying whatever's flown seti is a part of the things that are flown so we because we're using we elusive sometimes it's that we humans and sometimes we study yeah so the studies is really broadly involved a lot of the fingertips reaching out there towards the stuff think about Mars involved in landing site selection in instruments that are actually on board some of the mission in science teams for instance uh Cassini uh New Horizon also missions that will be coming it's the search for life we do this all across the Drake equation so uh studies part of it and it's a root and it's expanding a little bit right now we hope it will continue to expand so this is this is a good time uh for the Institute and it also uh in my mind was the very first astrobiology Institute because we have this multi disciplinary approach where I can bring many of these scientists from different domains and disciplines to think about the question and as you know discoveries happen at the Nexus of disciplines and it's really a privilege when when you are in an Institute like that you've dived in volcanic Lakes at high altitudes to study the creatures within can you tell me the technical the fun the human story of that effort the the image that is associated with the scientist is the person with the white coat in the lab in fact um a number of us at Institute are athletes doing extremes what would be considered extreme stuff uh uh and not I mean it's fun it's a little dangerous too but it's to get data and more knowledge so there are so many stories I don't even know it was the first time you did a dangerous thing with a volcano oh so the the first one Associated to uh the search for Life understanding was in 2002 uh where I started climbing those High volcanoes in the Andes that are 20 000 Footers The View out there is just beautiful you get I is so hilarious at spending almost no time on some epic things I love this okay with this volcano okay how tall these volcanoes what are you doing with the volcano what's required to prepare for that what does a mission look like that look like I mean how do I mean that is true that this is science embodied it's like Athletics and it's science and you're studying the extreme conditions of life on Earth extreme beauty of life on Earth in those conditions so what what was what was them what are we talking about with this volcano what how big is it remember when we were talking about how do I understand how I search for Life on Mars this is how it started for me and then I looked at environment in my head started you know going through the environment on Earth that would be good analysis and then you only have a few and the Andes in that case are some of the best in the world just because of the aridity of the place and the higher you go the least atmosphere you have the more UV radiation you have and the Andes are volcanic hydrothermal plus you have the climate change that's coming you have evaporation it's a picture of Mars 3.5 billion years ago and so now you are actually entering a time machine basically so um remember I'm a diver and the first time I got in 2002 to the places uh we wanted to explore all of a sudden I was standing at 14 000 foot looking at twenty thousand feet and saying okay well I need to get up there are you scared no no because we are prepared and the only thing I didn't know is if I was going to be able to make it to the top because now you're dealing with high altitude you can deal with high altitude sickness you can deal with a number of thing and for God's sake these are volcanoes and they are dorm and they are not extinct that can buy to buy toast a couple of times what was your preparation for that kind of I mean this is there is a lot of uh you know hiking and trekking and I altitude around here but not so high because we don't have anything closer to those elevations around here in the U.S but in in volcanic environment climbing volcanoes here we have plenty of those diving as well I am a free diver so this is where it's going to be hilarious because I started with a completely rational fear of pressurized vessels that comes from an incident in my childhood and so I became a freediver to avoid having to carry oxygen tanks on my back free diving is diving without without anything just your lungs right that was that started from childhood yeah no it was to the point where when I I saw a pressure vessel like a metal tanks or anything I would be you know going around and put a lot of distance between me and that tank so I was not going to carry any oxygen tank um and in the first time I actually died at the summit of that like was free diving people look at me like I'm nuts well maybe I am a little bit people that work with you as well I mean that that kind of seems kind of nuts no uh we deal with the risk actually it's a lot of less of a risk than uh getting with conventional air and I can explain that but uh ultimately what decided me to certify Scuba and go over my fear was that as a scientist I needed more time at the bottom of the lake to sample you know rationally take my time to think and I can stay quite long enough as a free diver and the water but the last thing you want to do at twenty thousand feet is to come up at the surface with empty lungs because there is not much you can breathe out there to replenish your oxygen so definitely your time in the water is cut short just for safety and I realized that it was not a good trade-off for me at some point so I I certified scuba and after three years of exploring that Lake free diving we finally came up with a full scuba diving Expedition but we were diving with rebreathers which means that we dived with pure oxygen so Rivers give you a bag with stuff that looks like cat leaders in it which is basically to absorb the CO2 uh that you are expelling when you're breathing and their recycling oxygen this way so basically you are rebreathing your own respiration wow yeah how long can you do that so what's what's the what's interesting about the technology so it's very interesting because then that completely avoids the potential issues you may have with the binds when you are diving the risk of bubbles uh trapped in your lungs because of different pressures and different gases oh so there's there's a complexity to the flow of oxygen underwater when you are breathing regular air when you are scuba diving here you know that you have to do some uh different when you're coming back when you are diving deep and you have conventional air then you need to stop so that you can equalize the gases in your lungs if you come back too fast then you can have air bubbles stuck and then you can raise the binds which you can wish to be paralyzed you can reach a number of nasty issues and we want it absolutely to avoid that so diving with pure oxygen avoids this completely and it has a another uh benefit and I altitude is that well the greater risk when you are at high altitude is altitude sickness what is altitude sickness is just you not having enough oxygen in your blood so these you know this was a good benefit it was a good trade-off we were lucky enough to be also trained by the military so we came up with not the civilian rebreather which is the big thing on on the back that you carry on your back we actually uh we're given Navy Seals Commando rebrievers you worked with Navy Seals for this the director of military operations yes we were trained we were trained like astronauts for three months I spend more time I had a joke that if somebody wanted to reach me they better put a phone line at the bottom of the swimming pool because this is where I was so we trained and we trained and our manual about the safety was about that thick so it was a real operation that was three years into into it because when you are free diving in the Years prior there is no risk you don't have any other gas in your lung that what you're breathing the only Rises come short of air and then you're in trouble which happened to me uh one time seriously so tell me about that time I got to ask you about free diving before we return to the rebreathers well all these legs I had altitude they are called they are at the minimum temperature that you can have on bodies of water uh clear bodies of water which is for degree C it's very very cold and so you can take a nice bath yeah so you cannot um just dive with a wetsuit so the idea was to take a dry suit and I learned how to free dive with a dry suit which is really the worst thing you can do what's a wetsuit what's address so a dry suit a wetsuit is usually what you use in the ocean when it's not too cold you can use also dry suit but the wetsuit basically is going to keep you warm because water is getting into the suit and at the contact of your skin is getting to body temperature and so for a while you can you know dive like that and need in the ocean here that's fine that that that's fine the dry suit is the opposite it's completely closed which means that you don't have any contact with the water outside and you keep your warmth through your body temperature and even clothing that you can put into it so this dry suit they are used by either go really deep in very cold water and need to stay a long time underwater so what's the bad part the bad part is that when you have those uh dry suit you have a lot of air that can be trapped in it usually we do what we call burping the suit it's not very pleasant expression but you get in the water and as soon as you get in the water you can see the air pockets all over the place right so you burp the suit you open the valve and the air comes out once you have done that then you look with your lead belt and and you know when you're ready to go down and so what happened that day is that I actually did verb the suit but didn't realize that worked it completely and so I went down and immediately I felt an air pocket going to my legs so basically air was trapped in the suit and went on my legs as I was diving like that and so I didn't pay too much attention to that because you're diving down yeah I was driving down and so didn't pay too much attention about that as I was you know busy at just an awkward position but um then I wanted to turn and go up well no can do I was just like a buoy and I was like that so uh the first time I say okay I tried a second time and the third time and by the fourth time I kind of realized I was in trouble and the fifth time I say okay now you better give it your best try otherwise it's gonna be big trouble um and you're this is free diving I was free diving and then you can and I cannot what are you feeling I mean is there a panic or no there is no panic because you can't you cannot afford to be panicking in fact you are always thinking because there is training this is the best part about training your training allows you that space to keep you cool and and compose which you need to be in that kind of situation and so finally after the fifth time I was able to rectify the position and get myself up but when I got up my lungs were empty I had been in the water for quite some time and I of I knew what was going to happen so I decided to just be the plank you know not move and don't do anything just open my mouth and try to suck oxygen but obviously oxygen at six thousand meters 20 000 feet there is not that much it's about a little it's a 48 of what you breathe at sea level so although it was noon at that time the skies that pretty dark and starry oh my God yes uh the funny thing was and that's the first time you've experienced that kind of uh I mean do you can you possibly train for that like because can you also pass out oh you could I mean the fact that I was already seeing dark was a real sign that my brain was starved of oxygen and I had one of my uh friends or colleagues on the on the shore just telling me because I'd been under for a little while and say is everything okay and I I remember trying to say something and and I was just like oh that's I think the best lie I ever ever I get the thumbs up you were lying to the friend and maybe to yourself uh no uh because I knew I was going to be okay but it took me to be still just for a few minutes well can you talk about free diving I mean what's the technical skill involved here it just seems um it seems exceptionally difficult like for most people that swim you go underwater it's it's hard so what what's the skill there you know I think you probably can get good or better at freediving by training so you have different techniques uh you can train in swimming pool and you can say you know frankly for me um I go at the bottom of the swimming pool and I sit there and then you have relaxation uh techniques some people meditate I can't I am not a good person that can meditate or if I do I don't know about it and but um my way of doing things and and taking my mind off the situation I'm in is by singing my head I I love music or hearing music and in fact knowing the kind of song I'm singing I know about the length of time that I'm staying on the water as well so this is how you know so this is my own way people have different ways what kind of music are we talking about all sorts of Music can be classical can be pop music and you know just songs when you really know that you are relaxed and something I experience actually at 20 000 feet which was the greatest experience of my life uh in those in those terms is when you forget that you have water around you at that point uh you cannot tell whether you are the water or water is you there is actually no separation anymore and I felt that uh when I was training in a swimming pool I never could have imagined that I would feel that way once on top of that volcano and it happened and it was absolutely amazing it was you know we were talking about how life Consciousness permeates the universe at that point in time on that volcano that day it took me by surprise I was not expecting it everything around me the lake was Arctic blue with all the ray of the Suns you can you could tell them apart every single one of them I was surrounded by Golden darts and it was the most incredible experience and I don't know if it's that kind of environment that led me to just you know go into whatever state of meditation or whatnot but all of a sudden there was no separation anymore between me the water the volcano and if I came with questions they didn't matter anymore because for that fraction of a second it seemed that I had all the answers of the in the universe was it the connectedness with everything you can call it that way I still don't know what it means you know literally but it is a moment where you feel that it doesn't matter it really doesn't matter anymore it was a absolutely absolute peace absolute understanding and it was incredible it was an absolute uh awareness could you describe it as beautiful that could go beyond that I think that there is clearly in my mind today no words that can express how perfect this was it does that start to speak to why you love diving or is there something special about that place diving at such elevations and volcanoes you know I started diving pretty much this is the first thing I did when I was near water in fact there is a very fun little incident with my parents me being on the shore of the lake on vacation I was three years old maybe and I had this little Life Savers you know on my arms and my parents were not watching and in my little brain I still can't remember today saying well nothing bad can happen to me I cannot drown if I go underwater see that's the logic of a three-year-old yes yeah it kind of works I mean that's yeah well pretty brilliant so I removed the Lifesavers that I had and I just went in the water my mom said before she could do anything I was under and it was like a natural thing and for me I felt immediately at home and and you know as little as I was completely and it goes beyond that and you know this sense of connectiveness or Oneness or whatever I always felt good and and uh underwater so it doesn't matter really if it's 20 000 feet that the thing that's better at that point is that you need to get there so you need to get with all the gears with your hiking tracking equipment High mountaineering gears and when you get on top of that you have to remove all that and don't a suit is there something uh you can speak to the challenging aspects of that process or is it just like this rigorous process that's well designed you have to go through and you don't think this is where most of the risk is because you can be well prepared but for one reason or another you get sick you know and you can get sick not only because of high altitude sickness it can be a number of things or you can be tired or you can catch a cold and then of course you have the mountain itself we had a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hitting one day when we are 50 meters away from the summit so you can't obviously plan for that no you can't and that's the acts of God you know uh working with NASA uh although I am the director of the city Institute I my grants are coming from NASA so I'm a NASA contractor and every time we go to those environments we have to go through the rigorous process of training with NASA and checking all the boxes for safety so they are training and training and training us and I have to thank them because a lot of those trainings are the things that are in your brain when these kind of things happen you know how to react and you are not freaking out but in all of the things they are training us for you have the green risk the yellow risk and the red risk so the green risks are basically the don't be stupid that don't do the kind of thing you wouldn't be doing at home like it's jumping you know on rocks that are not stable you can tweak your ankle you know and then you have other risks like high altitude sickness how you prepare for that how you recognize that these are the yellow risks and then the red risk the red bricks are what they call the acts of gods the kind of thing that they can happen you know there is nothing you can do about it and then you accept that when you do that so those are volcanic eruptions when you're in this kind of environment earthquakes and everything that an Avalanches for instance so you're in this Giant mountain and it's shaking no it's not shaking that's the interesting part of it there was a whole background of things that happened that day when we we started off but we got to 50 meters from the summit and I have part of my Logistics team that is at the foot of the mountain and being so close to the summit we have to go under other hand of lava so it's just like we are just under this big Vault of lava and it's actually beautiful if you want something beautiful is the ultiplano scene from 20 000 feet it's just absolutely stunning The Colors the colors are that of early Earth which means primordial Earth it occurs yellows oranges browns with a dark blue sky and so you're just you know it's a time machine you're just out there and you're climbing 42 degree slopes so all of a sudden I'm right next behind the guide and the guy that's been with us its family you know we've been together for 10 years and he's starting to do that I don't discuss when Macario do that you know I I listen and I asked the team to do the same thing where maybe half a dozen and then I want to talk to him and say what's going on is on the radio and then he gives me the radio I'm talking to my logistic chief officer who was at the bottom and he said we're having a tremendous earthquake uh it was saying that the uh actually the ground was waiting it was so bad and it was freaking out because he said everything is avalanching and I'm very puzzled because we are in a very dangerous part of the volcano nothing's happening I turn around and then this is when I realized there is just absolutely everywhere everything that I saw two minutes before it's gone just disappeared into a wall of dust but nothing's happening where we are and uh our our friends down uh they were freaking out because they were seeing everything avalanching and especially the other side of the mountain we were on was a Vanishing so they have no visuals they have no visual they thought that we are caught in the Avalanche so I said no but some uh so at that point they thought you were screwed yeah and I said okay so if this is what's happening then I'm taking everybody to the summit because we have a very large crater that will take care of avalanching will be safe and I'm waiting for the Aftershock because this is what you do uh you know when you have earthquakes so here we go taking everybody in the crater and now you have half a dozen scientists in the crater with the Cradle Lake and this is why we came for so we just had a 7.8 earthquake and what do you think they do well of course they do the signs they came to to do so the only thing is that I couldn't because my radio was only working when I was on the rim of the crater but I had a little assistant with me a a young Bolivian teenager had been shadowing me for three weeks so I knew exactly what to do and he said no you don't no problem give me your back I'll do the sampling for you so I was monitoring uh the situation and I'm scared I wasn't at that point and there was another moment my friend downstairs I could you know at the foot yeah we've known each other as I said we're family this team is family we've known each other I am the gunmather as kids so we we are close and I could feel for the first time in in my life that he actually was scared and he was calling me every 30 seconds telling me stuff I said you have to stop this now just call me to give me information that is useful for me to make decisions and so um I say okay what's going on all right it tells me you know there is still a balancing Etc and then a few minutes later he calls me say I think that last car is erupting so now I have to tell you we are on a volcano the next volcano we share a slope with it is a low a little lower but that's the most temperamental volcano of the entire chain and this one as an history of eruption and then my friend is telling me that the volcano seems to be starting to erupt if that volcano goes up we have nowhere to go that got my attention so if you say scared I would say that I got the realization that what that meant I went called for like a fraction of a second but that meant that just my adrenaline started to kick in and it was a very very strange experience because now you have tunnel vision it's about survival and I say okay now you are going to tell me what I need to know you know tell me what do you see say I see smoke say what kind of smoke you say it's white I say no big deal that's water vapor okay where it's going it's going to Argentina that was the opposite direction where we are I said okay I'm staying where I am because right now there is no you know no danger and there are still the issue of the Aftershock I didn't want to have the team caught in the Gully in the central Gully of the volcano with the Netherlands coming eras so sit there and he called me after that and say well you know it's still going to Argentina fine okay um and then a little later he calls me and say Natalie um things are changing here say okay what's going on I say well the clad is a little yellow and I was thinking myself yeah what does it mean when it's yellow sulfur and then when you have sulfur mixed with the water vapor or the water in your lungs this turns into sulfuric acid then you're really screwed and I say okay um where thank you for the information where where is the club going is it the wing is Shifting it's coming your direction so yeah that was a day like that you know and I am talking to him on the radio and I'm turning around and as I turn around I see the cloud starting to pop on the opposite side of the rim you know so at that time we had no choice anymore because now you have to figure out what's going to kill you first and so there was the risk or the potential of an avalanche but at least you can see the rocks the guest is going to kill you before you can see it yeah so I called everybody back we got our stuff um I didn't give too much detail but I say it's time to go downhill and fast so which we did we stopped only when we were at Mid camp and then at that point we saw the cloud just completely covering the summit where we were so we did well to bail out but that was 500 meter 500 meter high over than we were so we are safe I was just making sure that it would not go down the slope where we were we were safe so we stayed and you know just rested for a little while and after that we descended and it was all on adrenaline I can tell you what I had two on my crew with headaches as part of one of them was because of the altitude we climbed very fast the other one was because of the cloud she was the closest to the cloud when uh it happened so we didn't send it fast wow that was close that was close and it's interesting how the human body and mind works because I know that from the moment my friend told me that the volcano seemed to be erupting I was going on adrenaline but when we got close to them and I saw him we are getting close to the cars I saw him come in towards me and the slope all of a sudden all the adrenaline went away I was a mess I had to find the first rock and sit down yeah it was gone I mean fascinating so you just basically physically mentally collapsed once you saw so there's nothing left of me I got in the car and I felt in the cars we were heading back towards a camp I could have passed out I really fought back and I'm not the kind of passing out really you know easy but there was nothing left I had no energy no nothing it's fabulous how you react and how this is embedded in your brain from and of evolution of reaction to a dangerous situation basically the drive to survive yeah something like that you just told us one heck of a story and as you said such story comes along with many of the diving Expeditions that you do but on the science side what is that world that simulates that travels back in time into the Martian landscape what is the science reveal so the science reveals that I feel resilient when I started that project I told my husband I said this is going to be very fast we are going in such nasty environment that we're not going to find anything and you know world back home uh fairly soon so 20 years later we are still studying those environments that was a gut feeling like nothing not much can possibly survive well the the UV environment is so nasty but there you find the same microorganism that made the very first fossils on Earth 3.5 billion years ago and they keep surviving they developed an adaptation Swiss armina if you prefer and so you learn about that you learn about what they are how they adapt through times and through environmental changes which is really important what are their signatures we learn to recognize them we learn what kind of instrument we need what kind of of signature whether it's chemical or morphological or whatnot so basically we learn how to explore but I would say that to me and this is a realization interestingly enough that came three years into the project uh I really woke up literally one morning saying you know we have been coming here for three years now try and understand how to search for Life on Mars but what this place is showing us is what's happening right here right now on our own planet and uh by exploring those extreme environments we are also reaching to places not too many people go and so we're learning more about our own biospheres and uh the diversity of our own life here on Earth so these are the two main things you know that I would say what kind of life survives up there well there's volcanoes it's about bacteria you know mostly is there something specific about that bacteria that's able to be so rugged yes um they have adapted to very high UV radiation and it's not only because they are at high altitude it's because early Earth didn't have an ozone layer so when those the ancestors of those bacteria originated they have to survive a world where you had lots of short UV coming down at the surface and also lots of hydrothermal environments you know volcanoes and hot water lots of salt and you see all these toolbox Steel embedded in those microorganisms today 4 billion years later it's just amazing and depending on the environment they are going to switch some of these defenses adaptation on or off the UV situation there is so nasty that here you have bacterias like that cyanobacteria you find them everywhere it's really something you find all over the place but if you find them here in California they will turn their protection against UV during the day in summer and they will switch it off at the end of the day there in the Andes it's so nasty is that that thing stays on all the time but if you take samples and bring them back here and start to culture them like we did on top of a building leaving them you know you will see the second generation of this organism they are starting to switch on and off again so they're extremely adaptable extremely rugged and that's why they are still here and probably that's why we are here because life found sways so is there some degree to which the harshness of the conditions enables flourishing of life versus shuts it down well it will shut down those that cannot survive obviously you know this is a statement that's Captain Obvious right there but it's also the survival of the fittest and this is what evolution is all right so they are here because they were the most deductible and so evolution is going to show the path of the fittest the one that cannot resist they might have a good time for a little while but then you know we've seen this at much different scale and with complex life not so long ago a hundred thousand years ago meanderthal was side by side by Homo sapiens but nandatho was completely adapted to a cold Earth to a glacial Earth of the end of the pleistocene and when condition change it couldn't last you think I mean there's still some Mysteries around that right like exactly exactly what were the harshness of the conditions um I still really suspicious what did Homo sapiens do no no no I really want to know no no I I'm Shady stuff that happened yeah shitty stuff happened they met they bred together they fought against each other what humans do you had to expect that but the thing is that Neanderthal was completely adapted for a very long time to leave at the edge of those glaciers there were probably in a weekend situation when Homo sapiens came uh and and started to spread so um basically this is what life does it adapts and if you cannot add apps anymore it disappear and something else takes over thank you hold the women's world record for diving at altitudes both scuba and freediving so I have to ask what can you describe the details of those records I never looked for those I I'm not after records at all in fact I didn't know I had broken those records when that happened um we did that as part of our Expedition our scientific Expedition so it's basically sport in the name of science versus no it's science in the name of Science and it's just a very physical thing that you have to do so we train ourselves like athletes yeah but to get the job done to get the job done you're holding your breath underwater for a very long time like with free diving what what are we talking about do you do you think in terms of time is there like layers where you know through training you're in a good place like I'm sure you take time off and you get rusty right I and I had I have not been diving in a while so probably I need to go back to you know the drawing board and at the bottom of the swimming pool but having training from the past I think you know it will pick up much more faster than um basically I would never have those altitude that would never go over three minutes that would be suicidal so the altitude is much tougher than the pool back at ground level it is but it's because when you come up yeah that's not the going in the water when I'm on the water I'm fine and if I wanted I could stay longer but it wouldn't be very wise uh you've written about the history of Life on Mars like you said you've kind of exploring that by looking at the Lakes here um do you think there's been Life on Mars do you think there is life on Mars right so when you're looking at the environment of Mars early on it's fairly similar to that of early Earth never was exactly the same because Mars was always father from the Sun uh than the earth right so it was always a little cooler but you have to imagine maybe the Arctic during the summer that would be early Mars with a lot going on for it in terms of environment very favorable to even Life as we know it so we don't know how fast life happen on Earth they are signs right now showing that it might have actually originated only 200 million years after the crust cooled down yeah uh this still has to be verified but that that's the closest and these are indirect evidence like carbon left by the activity of life not life itself and there is a Twist in the story for Mars is that it seems that Mars came together as a planet faster than the earth and had water earlier than the earth so it may be that Mars was habitable and might have seen the beginning of Life earlier than the Earth so all of this is speculation obviously we haven't found any evidence or solid evidence yet I would say unambiguous evidence but unambiguous evidence of life is going to be something uh interesting to prove because we don't know what life is remember so I always joke that the only way we would know that there is life on Mars if there was a rabbit jumping in front of the of the Rover but we might be you know Gathering we have what we call a ladder of Life detection which is that you have a series of uh rungs that you know you need to go through that actually are not proving you that you've discovered life but are making um the possibility that what you discovered was made only by the environment more and more and probable so we are trying to prove the contrary right so this is what we have right now and as far as I'm concerned continuing all the unknowns we have I think there was as much chance that life originated on Mars that they did on Earth and um if it was at the surface then it got in trouble after 500 million years because of The Disappearance of the magnetosphere the loss of the magnetosphere and the atmosphere but as we know you know life doesn't only stay in one place as soon as it's out there it's going to adapt it's going to give itself more chance to survive and that to me means that if life appeared I would say it's still there and probably on the ground where it can be you know in an environment that's more stable so I don't know how stability is good or not it might not be so good but they might be in a different type of metabolism through dormancy you know waiting for different climate cycles and there is the fact that Mars changes but it's faster than the earth and climate changes are a lot stronger in magnitude so there might be a place on Mars we know that there is a place on Mars deeper in the subsurface where temperature and pressure are good for liquid water to stay there so these would be good places for a stable habitat over time no matter what happens at the surface but if uh life is also caught between that deep Zone and the surface there is an active layer there is a lot of ice in the subsurface of Mars and when the climate changes when the obliquity goes beyond 30 degrees then at that point you will have some activation of that zone you have following of the eyes so all this region is reactivated and maybe that's a way where you have Pathways for life to move from the deep Zone to closer to the surface this is why I am one of those scientists who thinks that life might not be so far from the surface than we think so we don't have to dig very far to find it we probably won't and the reason I'm not so amazing I I'm thinking of that just because of this experience as well of extreme environments you know you have to sit and look and listen basically the story of my life if I want to understand where microbes are located on Mars I have to become the microbe right this is the thought experiment and if I want to understand where ET is yeah then I have to become ET so it's a big stretch but in extreme environment you sit in the desert for a while and you just you know try to understand where the wind's coming from where the humidity when it's showing up and then you start to understand the patterns of those things what are the useful signals that you need for survival you need to know where water is where the source of energy is going to be uh drawn from you need to find shelters and shelters don't mean that for instance you can have a water column of a lake or a river or whatnot or the ocean it can be also a very thin layer of dust or it can be a translucent Rock and you see what we call endless these are the same cyanobacteria but the different version of them they live inside the Rocks inside those crystals because they have the best of Life they are into translucent crystals so that they receive the light from the sun they can do the photosynthesis but there is enough of that Crystal so that the nasty UV is being stopped and they are in their little house and um when you are looking at the temperature within those rocks they tend to make it toastier than the outside temperature so there is a lot of thing going on um so what I'm saying for Mars is that yeah right now you don't have an atmosphere very much 160 times thinner than the earth six midi bar is really not much but it's there um but you still have a lot of UV the short UV like the nasty one UVA UVB UVC that can really mess up your DNA uh and and destroy it Beyond repair but as soon as you have a little alcove into a rock or a cliff you know I'd be looking at those places but you have to understand Mars or any other planet for that matter at the level that matters for the microbe and is so then maybe one with the microbe one with the microbes which means that we have lots of orbital data which is good to understand habitability at the planet level or at the regional level but we have very little data right now that is very useful to understand habitability uh at the scale that matters for the microbes at this point in time so we need to uh to do a better job with that my ideas uh is to you know have arrays of environmental station that could have a lot of benefits one would be to give us that Vision at for the microbes that would be good for us through biology and second a collection of stations on Mars on Mars yeah that give us a good map yeah high resolution we can do that originally and on top of that so that's good for us through biology for the search for Life on Mars that's good about how to learn where microbes could be that can be a problem for contamination both ways so that's good for planetary protection and since those stations would have communication capabilities on them that excellent for human exploration because normally you have weather stations all over the place that can tell your astronauts you know learn the pattern when it's a good time to go out or not go out and also house and communicate uh when they they go and do sorties so there are a number of things we can do that can tell you lots of information that's rewind the clock a little bit you grew up in Paris I was just there Helen McDonald in her New York Times amazing profile piece of you writes to your teenage years were troubled so how did the challenging early years make the human being the scientist they are today everything I think that um this is what's taking me on top of those big mountains and the irony is for me to be looking for the origin and nature of life because I was so close to losing it but to me that was a great lesson learned and that helped me see through the beauty of life and going on the other side of that it became really what made me and helped me go through absolutely everything and anything in life climb mountains and tell me there is something I want to know and and you know um I am going to give it my best and I won't give up and I won't give in and this is a message that I carried all my life and I'm so very grateful that I did because all these things that I would have missed if I hadn't done that you know this is something that I wrote in my first book and part of it is the reason why I wrote it just because I felt that there were messages in in my path um oftentimes teenagers are troubled it can be one way or another or if it's not a troubled teenage you have times in your life where you doubt where you know you're just within your home and say what's the purpose what's the reason why carrying on and when I see all the things that I'm doing the dream that I was able to fulfill what a waste it would have been you know so there's in there was a point in your life where you thought about suicide oh yeah yeah and I did more than thinking about it and but I was a direct one for some reason I'm still here I still don't know why but I'm still here and the lesson for me was that never ever again because you have to give tomorrow a chance you never can think about tomorrow in the terms of the present you never know what can happen you know what is going to happen if you go through what you want to do tomorrow is never happening you know and I had I had a the other lesson came a few years later where actually somebody was drowning and I went after that person I almost died that day too not that I wanted to but it's just because the conditions were very very difficult that person died from there although we we took him out of the water but I had a a lot of difficulty coming out I came out but then I thought a lot about that guy he was in his 30s and it was like a sort of a echo from a few years before telling me that person would never have tomorrow that person would never be able to fulfill his dream or even have dreams of any kind and I was here and I was going to give myself the best chance to fulfill all the dreams I wanted to and go after all the questions I wanted to and this is what kept me going now you know so the advice there is even if you don't see a why an answer to the why question why I live uh today give tomorrow a chance always do you think about your death today do you think about your mortality not really you've been so close to this to me yeah yeah we know that's part of life and you know what if something happens to me what I'm doing the stuff I love what a way of going this will happen wherever it catches me I don't know I don't care it will be what it will be and I had the best of all Masters for that I had my husband my husband and I were 44 years apart in age and it was just a Pure Love Story and it never looked at his age never thought about himself or Define himself by his age in fact he reinvented the life for himself at an age where everybody retires we met when he was 66. and that was a blessing and a curse but a blessing most of it because we took every single day as if it was the last so we enjoyed life and right now it's not so much you know I have to really think of him it just passed away this August last August and and for me it's more like I have to draw from his example on him always telling me look forward trust life be happy live you know today every single day I have to remind several times a day of this it's not easy but he had the recipe he never thought about death because when you start thinking too much about that that prevents you from living foreign oh gosh we were so close I think we were it's more like one spirit and two bodies we were that close so missing him doesn't even cut it I mean it's it's the toughest Mountain I ever climbed what's the role of Love In The Human Condition I think I hope that this is the force that drives the universe although you know we might be experiencing the other side of it maybe just to learn how important love is that might be it you know um for me and my experience with my husband where I never had to wake up every single morning ever wondering if I was loved I had to look in his eyes and limb looking back at me to know it you know so when you get to that point where you don't question it anymore I would hope for Humanity to reach that point where you can feel the same love for the person that is unknown in the street that you feel for the people you love I think that at that point we are going to be reaching the maturity of that Civilization we are hoping for and seeing the universe through love uh that doesn't run spacecrafts of course but putting love into our intent of going into and settling into another planet instead of oh my God we need to escape because we are freaking uh messing up with our own Planet I think that this is the answer to so many things foreign is there a part of you that maybe just a little bit wants to step foot on Mars like you personally oh yeah of course I'm curious I'm a scientist and I've been working on on Mars I I was actually privileged to be working on Yusuf Creator and deciding for the landing side of the spirit rover which means that I worked on on that Landing site for 15 years and I got to see it from the ground that's the closest you know to being there and exploring of course that's not physically be present there um if you were giving me the opportunity of course I would go but I know one thing I would want to come back so given the option of dying on Mars or dying on Earth you'd visit Mars but you would like to spend your last days here yeah because of a number of things I think that first we are not ready to sit on Mars regardless of what being said it's it will happen it will happen and because we are explorers humans you know they're Explorers so this will happen and it's a good thing depending on how we go about this it can be a very good thing we're not waste time as much has been exploring continue to explore the big questions of origin and nature of life or exploring of a planet the love you are talking about love the love for my own planet has grown deeper and my concern about it has grown deeper so the data that I'm collecting to learn about other planets I'm also using it to understand better our home planet and trying to make it a little better for the next Generation so um if you were talking about love this is love that would drive me back here yeah this planet is just sometimes I just pause and I'm in awe the incredible thing we have here and just and I have deep gratitude for all the life forms here the the beautiful complexity of course this Darkness behind it all the Death all the extinction that led uh up to us to descendants of Vape sitting here today I feel that's a responsibility were the fittest that survived exactly right as the dominant species at least you know technologically Etc maybe not the wisest one but the dominant species we have a responsibility towards the entire biosphere because the decisions we are making now normally affect us they are affecting the entire biosphere and right now the choices we are making are leading to The Disappearance of 150 species every single day all the big mammals on this Earth today are on the brick of Extinction we are within the six greatest Max Extinction it's unfolding before our eyes and um I would strongly suggest that we use our smart to help a little bit this situation and we can do this I think we can do this we just need to redirect our energy in the Name of Love this was an incredible conversation I'm really honored that you sit with me um I've been a fan of your work for a long time now so this is this is really awesome thank you so much for talking you're very welcome thanks thanks for listening to this conversation with Natalie Cabral to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from stanislav Lam and Solaris how do you expect to communicate with the ocean when we can't even understand one another thank you for listening and hope to see you next time