Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets | Lex Fridman Podcast #195
the following is a conversation with clara souza silva a quantum master chemist at harvard specializing in spectroscopy of gases that serve as possible signs of life on other planets most especially the gas phosphine she was a co-author of the paper that in 2020 found that there is phosphine in the atmosphere of venus and thus possible extraterrestrial life that lives in its atmosphere the detection of phosphene was challenged reaffirmed and is now still under active research quick mention of our sponsors onnit grammarly blinkist and indeed check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note let me say that i think the search for life on other planets is one of the most important endeavors in science if we find extraterrestrial life and study it we may find insights into the mechanisms that originated at life here on earth and more than life the mechanisms that originated intelligence and consciousness if we understand these mechanisms we can build them but more than this the discovery of life on other planets means that our galaxy and our universe is teeming with life this is humbling and terrifying but it is also exciting we humans and natural explorers for most our history we explored the surface of the earth and the contents of our minds but now with space-faring vessels we have a chance to explore life beyond earth their physics their biology and perhaps the contents of their minds this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with clara souza since you're the world expert in uh well in many things but one of them is phosphine would it technically be correct to call you the queen of phosphine i go for dr faustine queen is an inherited title i feel but you still uh rule by um love and power so while having the doctor title kindness kindness kindness in september 2020 you co-authored a paper announcing possible presence of phosphine in the atmosphere of venus and uh that it may be a signature of extraterrestrial life big maybe big maybe there was some pushback of course from the scientific community that followed friendly loving pushback then in january another paper from university wisconsin i believe confirmed the finding so where do we stand in this saga in this mystery of what the heck is going on on venus in terms of phosphine in terms of aliens okay let's try to break it down okay the short answer is we don't know um i think you and the rest of the public are now witnessing a pretty exciting discovery but as it evolves as it unfolds um we did not wait until we had you know years of data from 10 different instruments across several layers the atmosphere we waited until we had two telescopes with independent data months apart but still the data is weak it's noisy it's delicate it's very much at the edge of instrument sensibility sensitivity and so we still don't even know if it is phosphine we don't even really know if the signal is real people still disagree about that and i think it at the most more philosophical end of how this happened i think it is a distinction and myself and other co-authors were talking about this it's a distinction between hypotheses generation and hypothesis testing now hypothesis testing is something that i think is the backbone of you know the scientific method but it has a problem which is if you're looking through very noisy data and you want to test the hypotheses you may by mistake create a spurious signal the safest more conservative approach is hypothesis generation you see some data and you go what's in there with no bias now this is much safer much more conservative and when there's a lot of data that's great when there isn't you can clean the noise and take out the signal with it the signal with the bath water whatever the equivalent of the analogy would be and so i think the healthy discourse that you described is exactly this there are ways of processing the data completely legitimate ways checked by multiple people and experts where the signal shows up and then phosphene is in the atmosphere of venus and some where it doesn't and then we disagree what that signal means if it's real and it is an ambiguously phosphine it is very exciting because we don't know how to explain it without life but going from there to the nutrients is still a huge jump and so so that would be the the title for the civilization if it is a living and thriving and venus is venusians until we know what they call themselves and that that's the name yes so this is the early analysis of data or a data analysis of early data it was nevertheless you waited until the actual peer-reviewed publication of course and analysis of the two different instruments months apart so that's alma and jcmt the two telescopes and it's still i mean it's really exciting what what did it feel like sort of sitting on this data like kind of anticipating the publication and wondering and still wondering is it um is it true like how does it make you feel that a planet in our solar system might have phosphine in the atmosphere it's nuts it's absolutely nuts i mean in the best possible way i've been working on phosphine for over a decade before it was cool way before it was cool um before anyone could spell it or heard of it and at the time people either didn't know what phosphine was or only knew it for being just possibly the most horrendous molecule that ever graced the earth and so no one was a fan um and i'd been considering looking for it because i did think it was an unusual and disgusting but very promising sound sign of life i've been looking for it everywhere i really didn't think to look in the solar system i thought it was all pretty rough around here for for life and so i wasn't even considering the solar system at all never mind next door venus it was only the lead author of the study jane greaves who thought to look in the clouds of venus and then reached out to me to say i don't know phosphene but i know it's weird um how weird is it and the answer is very weird and so the telescopes were looking at this is visual data what do you mean by visual you wouldn't see the phosphene well but i mean it's uh well it's a telescope it's remote it's remote you're observing you're what's zooming in on this particular planet i mean what what what does the sensor actually look like how many pixels are there what does the data kind of look like it'd be nice to kind of build up intuition of how little data we have based on which i mean if you look at like i've just been reading a lot about gravitational waves and it's kind of incredible how from just very little like probably the world's most precise uh instrument we can derive some very foundational ideas about our early universe and in that same way it's kind of incredible how much data how much information you can get from just a few pixels so what are we talking about here in terms of based on which this paper saw possible signs of phosphate in the atmosphere so phosphine like every other molecule has a unique spectroscopic fingerprint meaning it rotates and vibrates in special ways i calculated how many of those ways it can rotate vibrate it is 16.8 billion ways what this means is that if you look at the spectrum of light and that light has gone through phosphine gas on the other end there should be 16.8 billion tiny marks left indentations left in that spectrum we found one of those on venus one of those 16.8 billion so now the game is can we find any of the other ones yeah but they're really hard to spot they're all in terrible places in the electromagnetic spectrum and the instruments we use to find this one can't really find any other one there's another one of the 16.8 billion we could find but it would take many many days of continuous observations and that's not really in the cards right now i mean how do you there's all kinds of noise first of all yes there's uh all kinds of other signal so how do you separate all of that out to pull out just this particular signature that's associated with phosphine so the data kind of looks somewhat like a wave and a lot of that is noise and it's a bass line and so if you can figure out the exact shape of the wave you can cancel that shape out and you should be left with a straight line and if there's something there an absorption so a signal so that's what we did we tried to find out what was this baseline shape cleaned it out and got the signal that's part of the problem if you do this wrong you can create a signal but that signal is at 8.904 wavenumbers and we actually have more digits than that but i don't remember by heart and an alma in particular is a very very good telescope array of telescopes and it can focus on exactly that frequency and in that frequency there are only two known molecules um that absorb at all so that's how we do it we look at that exact spot where we know fasting absorbs the other molecule is so2 if there is extraterrestrial life whether it's on venus or on exoplanets where you looked before how does that make you feel how should it make us feel should we be scared should we be excited let's say it's not intelligent life let's say it's microbial life it's uh is it a threat to us are we a threat to it or is it only not only but mostly a possibility to understand something fundamental something beautiful about life in the uni in the universe hard to know he would have to bring on a poet or a philosopher on the show uh i you don't feel i feel those things i just don't know if those are the right things to feel i don't certainly don't feel scared i think it's rather silly to feel scared definitely don't touch them um you know sometimes in movies you don't go near it don't interfere i think one of the things with venus is because of phosphine now there is a chance that venus is inhabited and in that case we shouldn't go there we should be very careful with messing with them and bringing our own stuff there that contaminates it and venus has suffered enough if there's life there it's probably the remains of a living planet the very last survivors of what once was potentially a thriving world and so i don't want our first interaction with alien life to be massacre so i definitely wouldn't want to go near out of a let's say galactic responsibility galactic ethics and i often think of you know alien astronomers watching us and how disappointed they would be if we mess this up so i really i really want to be very careful with anything that could be life but certainly i wouldn't be scared humans are plenty capable of killing one another we don't you know we don't need extraterrestrial help to destroy ourselves scared mostly of other humans exactly but these this life if there is life there it does seem just like you said it would be pretty rugged it's like the cockroaches or or chuck norris i don't know it's the some kind of um it's something that survived through some very difficult conditions that doesn't mean it would handle us you know it could be like war of the worlds you come just because you're resilient in your own planet doesn't mean you can survive another even our extremophiles which are very impressive we should all be very proud of our extremophiles they wouldn't really make it in the venusian clouds so i wouldn't expect because you're tough even chuck norris stuff that you would survive on an alien planet uh and and then from the scientific perspective you don't want to pollute the the data gathering process but we're showing up there the observer can can affect the observed how heartbreaking would it be if we found life on another planet and then we're like oh we we brought it with us it was my sandwich but that's always the problem right and it's certainly a problem with mars because we visited the that that if there is life on mars or like remains of life on ours it's always going to be a question of like well maybe we planted it there let's not do the same with venus it's harder because when we try to go to venus and things melt very quickly yeah and so it's pretty it's a little harder to pollute venus um it's very good at destroying foreigners yeah well in terms of elon musk and terraforming planets mars is stopped number one then venus may be after that so uh can we talk about phosphine a little bit um so you mentioned it's a pretty i love fossee what's your twitter handle that's like dr phosphene it's dr faustin yes you will be surprised here it wasn't taken already i could just i just grabbed it didn't have to buy it off anyone yeah so what uh what is it what's phosphine you already mentioned it's pretty toxic and um troublesome and what and outside so maybe what are some things that uh make it interesting chemically and why is it a good sign of life uh one is present in the atmosphere like you've described in your paper uh aptly titled the phosphine as a biosignature gas in exoplanet atmospheres i suppose you wrote that paper before venus i did yes it did and no one cared you know in that paper i said something like if we find phosphine on any terrestrial planet can only mean life and everyone's like yeah that sounds about right let's go and then venus shows up and i was like are you sure i'm like i was sure before i was sure now that it's right here um i'm less sure now that my claims are being tested so phosphine fascinating is a fascinating molecule so it's shaped like a pyramid with a phosphorus up top and then three hydrogens it's actually quite a simple molecule in many ways and you know it's the most popular elements in the universe carbon hydrogen nitrogen oxygen phosphorus sulfur when you add hydrogen to them it makes quite simple quite famous uh molecules you know you do it to oxygen you get water you do it to carbon you get methane you do it to nitrogen you get ammonia these are all molecules people have heard of but you do it to phosphorus you get phosphine people haven't heard of phosphene because it's not really popular on earth um we really shouldn't find it anywhere on earth because it is extremely toxic to life it interacts with oxygen metabolism and everything you know and love uses oxygen metabolism and it interacts fatally so it kills in several very imaginative and very macabre ways so it was used as a chemical warfare agent in the first world war and most recently by isis so really bad most life avoids it even life that might not avoid it so life that doesn't use oxygen metabolism anaerobic life still has to put crazy amounts of effort into making it it's a really difficult molecule to make thermodynamically speaking it's really difficult to make that phosphorus want to be together with that hydrogen so it's horrible everyone avoids it when they're not avoiding it is extremely difficult to make you would have to put energy in sacrifice energy to make it and if you did go through all that trouble and made it it gets um reacted with the radicals in the atmosphere and gets destroyed so we shouldn't find it anywhere and yet we do it's kind of weird molecule that seems to be made by life and we don't even know why life clearly finds a use for it it's not the only molecule the life is willing to sacrifice energy to make but we don't know how or why life is even making it so absolutely mysterious absolutely deadly smells horrifically when it's made it produces other kind of diphosphines and it's been reported as smelling like garlicky fishy death uh once someone referred to it as smelling like the let me see if i remember the the rancid diapers of the spawn of satan oh very nice yeah very very vivid and so you're a poet after all i didn't i didn't call it that someone else did and so it's just this horrific molecule but it is produced by life we don't know why and when it is produced by life is done with enormous sacrifice and the universe does not sacrifice life sacrifices and so it's this strange contradictory molecule that we should all be avoiding and yet seems to be an almost unambiguous sign of life on rocky planets okay can we dig into that a little bit so what on rocky planets what uh is there biological mechanisms that can produce it and is there is there you said the why is unclear why life might produce it but is there an understanding of what kind of mechanisms might be able to produce it this very difficult to produce molecule we don't know yet the enzymatic pathways of fossil production by life are not yet known this is not actually as surprising as it might sound i think something like 80 of all the natural products that we know of so we know biology makes them we don't know how it is much easier to know life produces something because you can put you know bacteria in a petri dish and then watch and then that gas is produced you go oh life made it that actually happened with phosphene but that's much easier to do of course than figuring out what is the exact metabolic pathway within that life form that created the this molecule so we don't know yet phosphene is really understudied um no one had really heard of it until nowish what you were presenting is the fact that life produces phosphate not the the process by which it produces fasting is there an urgency now like if you were to try to understand the mechanisms the what did you call enzymatic pathways that produce phosphine how difficult is that of a problem to crack it's really difficult if i'm not mistaken even you know the scent of truffles obviously a billion dollar industry huge deal until quite recently it wasn't known exactly how those scents those molecules that create this incredible smell were produced and this is a billion dollar industry as you can imagine there is no such pressure there's no phosphine lobby or anything that would push for this research but i hope someone picks picks it up and does it and it isn't crazy because we know that faucino is really hard to make we know it's really hard for her to happen accidentally you know even lightening and volcanoes that can produce small amounts of phosphine it's extremely difficult for even these extreme processes to make it so it's not really surprising that only life can do it because life is willing to make things at a cost so maybe on the topic of phosphine what uh again you're you've gotten yourself into trouble with that i'm going to ask you all these like high-level poetic questions i apologize no i would love it okay what when did you first fall in love with phosphine it wasn't love at first sight it was somewhere between a long relationship and stockholm syndrome yeah yeah when when i first started my phd i knew i wanted to learn about molecular spectra and how to simulate it i thought it was really outrage outrageous that we as a species couldn't detect molecules remotely we didn't have this perfect catalogue ready of the molecular fingerprint of every molecule we may want to find in the universe and something as basic as phosphine the fact that we didn't really know how it interacted with light and so we couldn't detect it properly you know in the galaxy just i was so indignant and so initially i just started working on phosphine because people hadn't before and i thought we should know what phosphine looks like that was it and then i read every paper that's ever been published about phosphine it was quite easy because there aren't that many and that's when i started learning about where we had already founded in the universe and what it meant um i started finding out quite how little we know about it and why and it was only when i joined mit and i started talking to biochemists that the that have been became clear that fossen wasn't just weird and special and understudied and disgusting it was all these things for oxygen loving life and it was the anaerobic world that would welcome phosphine and that's when the idea of looking for it on other planets became crystallized because oxygen is very powerful and very important on earth but that's not necessarily going to be the case on other exoplanets most planets are oxygen pole overwhelmingly most planets are oxygen poor and so finding the sign of life that would be welcomed by everything that would live without oxygen on earth seemed so cool and but ultimately the project the first is born of the idea that you want to find that molecular fingerprint of any of a molecule so and that this is just one example and that's connected to then looking at for looking for that fingerprint elsewhere in in a remote way and obviously that then at that time were exoplanets already when you were doing your phd and you by those should say your phd thesis was on it wasn't it's all on phosphine 100 with a little bit of pneumonia i have a chapter that i i did where i talked about phosphine and ammonia so i got it but no phosphine is very much my thesis um but at that that at that time when you're writing it there's already a sense that exoplanets are out there and uh we might be able to be looking for bio signatures for um on those exoplanets pretty much so i finished my phd in 2015 we found the first exoplanets in the kind of mid to late 90s so exoplanets were known it was known that some had atmospheres and from there it's not a big jump to think well if some have atmospheres some of those might be habitable and some of those may be inhabited so how do you detect you started to talk about it but can we linger on it how do you detect phosphine on a far away thing rocky thing rocky planet what uh what is uh spectroscopy what is this molecular fingerprint what does it look like you've kind of mentioned the wave but what are we what are we supposed to think about what are the tools what are the uncertainties all those kinds of things so the the path can go this way you've got light kind of pure light you can crack that light open with a prism or a spectroscope or water and make a rainbow that rainbows all the colors and all the invisible colors the ultraviolet the infrared and if that light was truly pure you could consider that rainbow to just cover continuously all of these colors but if that light goes through a gas we may not see that gas we certainly cannot see the molecules within that gas but those molecules will steal absorb some of that light some but not all each molecule absorbs only very specific colors of that rainbow and so if you know for example that shade of green can only be absorbed by methane then you can watch as a planet passes in front of a star the planet is too far away you can't see it and it has an atmosphere that atmosphere is far too small you definitely can't see it but the sunlight will go through that atmosphere and if that atmosphere is methane then on the other side that shade of blue i can't remember if i said blue green but that color will be missing because methane took it and so with phosphene it's the same thing it has specific colors 16.8 billion colors that it absorbs it and nothing else does and so if you can find them and notice them missing from the light of a star that went through a planet's atmosphere then you'll know that atmosphere contains the molecule how cool is that that's incredible so you can have this fingerprint within the space of colors and there's a lot of molecules and i mean i would i wonder that's a question of like how much overlap there is how how close can you get to the actual fingerprint like can phosphine unlock the iphone with its lights on he says 16.8 billion so presumably this rainbow is discretized into little segments somehow exactly how many total are there how how how a lot is 16.8 billion it's a lot you we don't have the instruments to break these break any light into this many tiny segments and so with the instruments we do have there's huge amounts of overlap methane as an example a lot of the ways it's detectable is because the carbon and the hydrogens they vibrate with one another they move they interact but every other hydrocarbon acetylene isoprene has carbon and hydrogens also vibrating and rotating and so it's actually very hard to tell them apart at low resolutions and our instruments can't really cope with distinguishing between molecules particularly well but in an ideal world if we had infinite resolution then yes every molecule spectral features will be unique yeah like almost too uni like it would be too trivial at the quantum level at our level uh there's huge overlap yeah but then you can start to then what try to disambiguate like what the mis the fact that certain colors are missing what does that mean and hopefully they're missing a certain kind of pattern where you can say with some kind of probability that's this gas not this gas or you're solving that gaseous puzzle i got it okay we can go back to venus actually and and show that so with this i mentioned those two molecules that could be responsible for that signal at the resolution that we have it was phosphine and so2 um sulfur dioxide and at that resolution could really be one of the other but in that same bandwidth so in the kind of the same observations there was another region where phosphine does not absorb we know that but so2 does so we just went unchecked and there was no signal so we thought oh then it must be phosphene and then we submit to the paper the rest is history i got it uh well yeah that's beautifully told is there so the telescopes we're talking about are sitting on earth what can it help solving this fingerprint molecular fingerprint problem if we do a flyby does it help if we get closer and closer or are telescopes pretty damn good for this kind of uh puzzle solving subscripts are pretty good but the earth's atmosphere is a pain i mean i'm very thankful for it but it does interrupt a lot of measurements and a lot of regions where phosphine would be active they are not available the earth is not transparent in those wavelengths so being above the atmosphere would make a huge difference then proximity matters a lot less but just escaping the earth's atmosphere would be wonderful but then it's really hard to stay very stable and if there is phosphate on venus there's very little of it in the clouds and so the signal is very weak and the telescopes we can use on earth are much bigger and much more stable so it's a bit of a trade-off so is it are you um with this kind of remote observation is it at all helpful to uh strive for going over to venus and like grabbing a scoop of the atmosphere or is remote observation really a a powerful tool for this kind of job like the scoop is not necessary well a lot of people want to scoop i get it i get it inclination yeah i don't want to scoop specifically because if it is life i want to know everything i can remotely before i interfere um so that's my i've got ethical reasons against the scoop more than engineering reasons against the scoop but i have some engineering reasons against the scoop scoop is not a technical term but i feel like now it's too late thank you for going along with this it's too late to take it back i appreciate it we don't understand the clouds well enough to plan the scoop very well because it's not that uh saturated like there's not that much of it present no and the place is nasty you know it's not it's not going to be easy to build something that can do the task reliably and can be trusted the measurements can be trusted and then passed that message on so actually i'm for an orbiter i think we should have orbiters around every solar system body whose job is just to learn about these places i'm disappointed we haven't already got an orbiter around every single one of them a small it can be a small satellite schlotting data figuring out you know how do the clouds move what's in them how often is there lightning and volcanic activity where's the topography is it changing is there a biosphere actively doing things we should be monitoring this from afar and so i'm for uh over the atmosphere hopefully around venus that would be that would be my choice okay so now recently venus is all exciting about phosphine and everything is there is there other stuff maybe before we were looking at venus or now looking out into other solar systems is there other promising exoplanets or other planets within the solar system that might have phosphine or might have other strong biosignatures that we should be looking for like phosphine there's a few but outside the solar system all are kind of promising candidates we know so little about them for most of them we barely know their density um most of them we don't even know if they have an atmosphere never mind what that atmosphere might contain so we're still very much the stage where we have detected promising planets but they're promising in that they're about the right size about the right density they could have an atmosphere and they're about the right distance from their host star but that's really all we know near future telescopes will tell us much more but for now we're just guessing so you said near future so there's hope that there will be telescopes that can see that far enough to to determine if there's an atmosphere and perhaps even the contents of the atmosphere absolutely jwst launching later this year will be able to get a very rough sense of the main atmospheric constituents of planets that could potentially be habitable and that's this here you know what's the name of jwst the james webb space telescope okay and that's going to be out in space past the atmosphere yes is there something interesting to be said about the engineering aspect of the telescope i mean it's an incredible beast but it's a beast of many burdens so it's going to do it's good see you are a poet yeah i love it this is very eloquent i love you're speaking to the audience which i appreciate uh so so yes it's a giant engineering project and uh is it orbiting something do you know so it's going to be above the atmosphere um and it will be doing lots of different astrophysics and so some of its time will be dedicated to exoplanets but there's an entire astronomy field fighting for time before the cryogenic lifetime of the um instrument and so when i was looking for the possibility of finding phosphine on distant exoplanets i used jwst as a way of checking with this instrument that we will launch later this year could we detect phosphine on an oxygen poor planet and there i put very much a hard stop where some of my simulations said yes you can totally do it but it will take a little under the cryogenic lifetime of this machine so then i had to go well that that's not going to no one's going to dedicate all of jwst to look for my molecule that no one cared about so we're very much at that edge but there'll be many other telescopes in the coming decades that will be able to tell us quite a lot about the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets so you mentioned simulation this is super interesting to me and and this perhaps could be a super dumb question but no i just think i'm gonna prove you wrong in that one you simulate molecules to understand how they look from a distance is what i understand like what does that simulation look like so it's uh it's talking about the the which colors of the rainbow will be missing is that the goal of the simulation that's the goal but it's really just a very very nasty schrodinger's equation so it's a quantum simulation it's simulating at the quantum level yes so i'm a quantum astrochemist hi i'm clara i'm a quantum astrochemist how we should have started this conversation can you describe the three components of that quantum astro and chemist and how they interplay together so i study the quantum behavior of molecules hence the quantum and the chemist specifically so i can detect them in space and see astro so what i what i do is i figure out the probability of a molecule being in a particular state there's no deterministic nature to the work i do it so it's every transition is just a likelihood but if you get a population of that molecule it will always happen and so this is all at the quantum level it's a stronger equation on i think 27 dimensions i don't remember it by hard and what this means is i'm solving these giant quantum matrices and that's why you need a lot of computer power giant computers to diagonalize these enormous matrices each of whom describes a single vibrational behavior of a molecule so i think phosphine has 17.5 million possible states it can exist in and transitions can occur between pairs of these states and there's a certain likelihood that they'll happen this is the quantum world nothing is deterministic there's just a likelihood that it will jump from one state to another and these jumps they're transitions and there's 16.8 billion of them when energy is absorbed that corresponds to this transition we see it in the spectrum this is more quantum chemistry than you had asked for i'm sorry no no i'm sorry brain is broken so when the when the transitions happen between the different states uh somehow the energy maps the spectrum exactly energy corresponds to a frequency and a frequency corresponds to a wavelength which corresponds to a color so there's some probability assigned to each color then exactly and that probability determines how intense that transition will be how strong and so you run this kind of simulation for a particular so that's 17.5 squared or something like that exactly 17.5 million energies each one of whom involves diagonalizing a giant matrix with a supercomputer which i wonder what the most efficient algorithm for the diagonalization is but there there's something there's many depends on kind of the shape of the matrix so they're not random matrixes so some are more diagonal than others and so some need more treatment than others most of the work ends up going in describing the system this quantum system in different ways until you have a matrix that is close to being diagonal and then it's much easier to clean it up so how how many uh how hard is this puzzle so you're solving this puzzle for phosphine right um is this are we supposed to solve this puzzle for every single molecule oh boy yes i calculated if i if i did the work i did for phosphine again for all the molecules for which we don't have spectra for which we don't have a fingerprint it would take me 62 000 years a little over 62 000 years what time flies when you're having fun okay but you uh you write that there are about 16 000 molecules we care about when looking for a new earth or when we try to detect alien biosignatures if we want to detect any molecules from here we need to know their spectra and we currently don't solving this particular problem that's my job what was that that i mean that's absolutely correct yeah i could have could have not said it better myself did you take that from my website yeah i think i stole it and your website is excellent so it's worthy place to steal stuff from how do you solve this problem uh of for the 16 000 molecules we care about of which phosphine is one yes and so um so taking a step a little bit out of fossil is there uh but we were having so much fun it was having so much fun no we're not saying no no no it's sticking around i'm just saying we're joining more friends coming to the party how do you choose other friends to come to the party that are interesting to study as we solve one puzzle at a time through the space of 16 000. so we've already started out of those 16 000 we understand water quite well methane quite well ammonia quite well carbon dioxide i could keep going and then we understand molecules like acetylene hydrogen cyanide more or less and that takes us to about four percent of those sixteen thousand we understand about four percent of them more or less phosphine is one of them but the other 96 we just really have barely any idea at all of where in the spectrum of light they would leave a a mark i can't spend the next 62 000 years doing this work um and i don't want to even if you know somehow i was able that that's not that that wouldn't feel good so one of the things that i try to do now is move away from how i did phosphene so i did phosphine really the best that i could the best that could be done with the computer power that we have you know trying to get each one of those 16.8 billion transitions mapped accurately calculated and then i thought what if i do a worse job what if i just do a much worse job um can i just make it much faster and then it's still worth it like how bad can i get before it's worthless and then could i do this for all the other molecules so i created exactly this terrible terrible it's a system how about it so how what's the answer to that question that fundamental question asks myself all the time in other domains how crappy can i be before i'm useless before somebody notices turns out pretty crappy because no one has any idea what these molecules look like anything is better than nothing and so i thought how long will it take me to create better than nothing spectra for all of these molecules and so i created rascal rapid approximate spectral calculations for all um and what i do is i use organic chemistry and quantum chemistry and kind of cheat at them both i just try to figure out what is the fastest way i could run this and i simulate rough spectra for all of those 16 000 so i've managed to get it to work it's really shocking how well it works considering how bad it is is there any insights you could give to like the the tricks involved in making it fast like what are the um maybe some insightful shortcuts taken that still result in some useful information about the spectra the insights came from organic chemistry from decades ago when organic chemists wanted to know what a compound might be they would look at a spectrum and see a feature and they would go i've seen that feature before that's usually what happens when you have a carbon triple bonded to another carbon and they were mostly right almost every molecule that has a carbon triple bonded to another one looks like that has other features different that distinguish them from one another but they have that that feature in common we call these functional groups and so most of that work ended up being abandoned because now we have mass spectrometry we've got nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy so people don't really need to do that anymore but these ancient textbooks still exist and i've collected them all as many as i could and there are hundreds of these descriptions where people have said oh whenever you have a iodine atom connected to this one there's always a feature here and it's usually quite sharp and it's quite strong and some people go oh yeah that's a really broad feature every time that combination of atoms and bonds so i've collected them all and i've created this giant dictionary of all these kind of puzzle pieces these lego parts of molecules and i've written a code that then puts them all together in some kind of like frankenstein's monster of molecules so you ask me for any molecule and i go well it has these bonds and this atom dangling off this atom and this cluster here and i tell you what it should look like and it kind of works so this creates a whole uh portfolio of just kind of uh signatures that we can look for very rough pictures but still useful enough to analyze the atmospheres the the telescope generated images of other planets close right now it is so complete so it has all of these molecules that it can tell you say you look at an alien atmosphere and there's a feature there it can tell you oh that feature that's familiar it could be one of these 816 molecules best of luck yes so i think the next step which is what i'm working on is telling you something more useful than it could be one of those 816 molecules that's still true i wouldn't say it's useful so i can tell you but only 12 percent of them also have a feature in this region so go look there and if there's nothing there it can't be those and so on it can also tell you things like you will need this much accuracy to distinguish between those 816 so that's what i'm working on but it's a lot of work so this is really interesting the like the role of computing in this whole picture you mentioned code so like you as a quantum astro chemist there is some role of for programming in your life in your past life in your current life oh yeah almost entirely i'm a computational quantum astrochemist but that doesn't roll off the tongue very easily so this is fundamentally computational like if you want to be successful in the 21st century and doing quantum master chemistry you want to be computational absolutely all quantum chemistry is computational at this point okay does machine learning play a role at all is there some extra shortcuts that could be discovered through uh like you see all that success with protein folding right a problem that thought to be extremely difficult to apply machine learning to because it's um i mean mostly because there's not a lot of already solved puzzles to train on i suppose the same exact thing is true with this particular problem but is there hope for machine learning to help out absolutely currently you've laid out exactly the problem the training set is awful and because there's so a lot of this data that i'm basing it on is literally many decades old the people who worked on it and data that i get often they're dead and the files that i've used they some of them were hand drawn by someone tired in the 70s yes so i could of course have yeah have a program training on these but i'll just be perpetuating these mistakes without hope of actually verifying them so my next step is to improve this training set um by hand and then try to see if i can apply machine learning on the full code of the full 16 000 molecules and improve them all but really i need to be able to test the outcomes with experimental data which means convincing someone in a lab to spend a lot of money putting very dangerous gases in chambers and measuring them at outrageous temperatures so it's a work in progress and so collecting huge amounts of data about the actual gases uh so you see you so you you are up for doing that kind of thing too so actually like doing the full end to end thing which is like having a gas collecting data about it and and then doing the kind of analysis that creates the fingerprint and then also analyzing using that library the data that comes from other planets so you do the full fall from birth to death interesting um yes i worked in an industrial chemistry laboratory when i was much younger in slovenia and there i worked in the lab actually collecting spectrum and and predicting spectrum what's it like to work with a bunch of gases that are like not so human friendly it's terrifying it's horrific it's so scary and i love my job i'm willing to clearly sacrifice a lot for it you know job stability money yes sanity but i only worked there for a few months it it was really terrifying there's just so many ways to die you know usually you only have a handful of ways to die every day you know but if you work in a lab there's so many more orders of magnitude more and i i was very bad at it i'm not a good hands-on scientist i want a laptop connected to a remote supercomputer or a laptop connected to a telescope yes i don't i don't need to be there to believe it and i am not good in the lab yeah when there's a bunch of things that can poison you a bunch of things that could explode and they're gaseous and they're often maybe they might not even have a smell or they might not be visible it's like so many of them give you cancer it's just so cruel and some people love this work but i've i've never enjoyed experimental work it's so ungrateful it's so lonely well most i mean so much work is lonely if you find the joy in it but you you enjoy the results of it yes i'm very thankful for all the experimentalists in my life but i i'll do the theory they do the experiment and then we talk to one another and make sure it matches uh okay beautiful what are uh spectroscopic networks those look super cool are they related to what we were talking about the picture look pretty oh and yes slightly so remember when i mentioned the 17.5 million energy levels yes there are rules for each molecule on which energy levels they can jump from and to and how likely it is to make that jump and so if you plot all the roots it can take you get this energy network for which is like a ball so these are the constraints of the the transitions that could be taken exactly for each molecule interesting and no they're not so it's not a fully connected it's like it's it's sparse somehow yes you get island sometimes you get a molecule can only jump from one set of states to another and it's trapped now in this network it can never go to another network that could have been available to other siblings is there some insights to be drawn from these networks like something cool that you can understand about a particular molecule because of it yes some molecules have what we call forbidden transitions and which aren't really forbidden because it's quantum there are no rules no there are rules it's just the rules are very often broken in the quantum world and so forbidden transitions doesn't actually mean they're forbidden low probability exactly they just become deeply unlikely yeah cool and so you could do all the same like i'm coming from a computer science world you know i love graph theory so you can do all the same like craft theoretic kind of analysis of like clusters or something like that or all those kinds of things and draw insights from me they're unique for each molecule so these the networks that you mentioned that's actually not too difficult a layer of quantum physics by then all the energies are mapped so we've had high school children work on those networks and the trick is to not tell them they're doing quantum physics until like three months in when it's too late for them to back out and then you're like you're a quantum physicist now and it's really nice yeah okay but like the promise of this even though 16 000 even just a subset of them that's really exciting because then you can do as the telescope data get better and better especially for exoplanets but also for venus you can then start like getting your full like you know how you get like blood work done or like you get your genetic testing to see what your ancestors are you can get the same kind of like high resolution information about interesting things going on on a particular planet based in the atmosphere right exactly how cool would that be if we could you know scan an alien planet and go oh this is what the clouds are made of this is what's in the surface these are the molecules that are mixing here are probably oceans because you can see these types of molecules above it and here are the hadley cells here are how the biosphere works we could map this whole thing wouldn't it be cool if the aliens like are aware of these techniques and like would spoof like the wrong gases just like pretend that's how they can be it's like an invisibility cloak they can generate gases that would throw you off or like or do the opposite they pretend they will artificially generate phosphate and so they like the dumb the dumb apes on earth again like go out like flying in different places because it's just fun it's like some teenager alien somewhere just pranking yeah uh but i was asked that exact question this saturday by uh by a seventy-year-old boy in canada old seven seven years yes [Laughter] but it was the first time i'd been asked that question this is the second in a week um we're kindred spirits him and i we can um they can prank us to some extent but the this work of interpreting an alien atmosphere means you're reading the atmosphere as a message and it's very hard to hide signs of life in an atmosphere because you can try to prank us but you're still going to fart and breathe and somehow metabolize the environment around you yeah and call that whatever you call that uh and release molecules and so that's really hard to hide you know you can go very quiet you can throw out some weird molecule to confuse us further but we can still see all your other metabolites it's hard to fake uh is there so you kind of mentioned like water what um what other gases are there that we know about that are like high likelihood as bio signatures in terms of life i mean what are your other favorites inter so so we got phosphine but like what uh what else is a damn good signal to be uh that you think about that we should be looking for if we look at another atmosphere is there gases that come to mind or are there all sort of possible bio signatures that we should love equally there's many so there's water we know that's important for life as we know it there's molecular oxygen on earth that's probably the most robust sign of life particularly combined with small amounts of methane and it's true that the majority of the oxygen in our atmosphere is a product of life and so if i was an alien astronomer and i saw earth's atmosphere i'm i would get a nobel i think on you know what would you notice i mean this is really i would be very excited about this about the oxygen about fighting 20 21 of oxygen atmosphere that's very unusual so would that be the most exciting thing to you from an alien perspective about earth in terms of detect like analyzing the atmosphere like what are the biosignatures of life on earth would you say in terms of the contents of the atmosphere is oxygen high amount of oxygen pretty damn good sign i mean it's not as good as the tv signals we've been sending out those those are slightly more robust than oxygen oxygen on its own has false positives for life so there's still ways of making it but it's it's a pretty robust sign of life in the context or atmosphere with the radiation that the sun produces our position in relation to the sun the other components of our atmosphere the volcanic activity we have all of that together makes the 20 of oxygen extremely um robust sign of life but outside that context you could still produce oxygen without life but phosphine although better in the sense of it is much harder to make it has lower false positives still has some so i'm actually against looking for specific molecules unless we're looking for like cfcs if we find cfcs that's definitely aliens i feel confident chlorofluorocarbons and so you know if aliens had been watching us they would be going oh no cfcs i mean yeah they're not gonna last long let's you know everyone's writing their thesis on the end of the end of the earth and then we got together we stopped using them i like to think they're really proud of us um you know they literally saw our ozone hole shrinking they've been watching it and they saw it happen i think they'll be honest they're more paying attention to the whole nuclear thing that's just i think they care it's not gonna bother them oh i mean worried about us oh yes oh no worried about us they i mean this is why the aliens have been showing up recently uh it's like if you if you look at i mean there is i mean it's probably there's a correlation with a lot of things but what the ufologists quote unquote often talk about is that there seems to be a much higher level of ufo sighting since like in the nuclear age so like if aliens were indeed worried about us like if you were aliens you would start showing up when the the living organisms have first discovered a way to destroy the entire the uh the entire colony can um the uh increase in sightings not have to do with the fact that people now have more cameras it's an interesting thing about science like with ufo sightings it's it's like either 99 of percent of them are false or 100 of them are false the interesting thing to me is in that point zero one percent there's a lot of things in science that are like these weird outliers they're difficult to replicate you have like there's even physical phenomena ball lightning there's difficult things to artificially create in large amounts or observe in nature in large amounts in such a way that you can do to apply the scientific method that could be just things that like what happened like a few times like or once and you're like what the hell is that and that that's very difficult for science to know what to do it i'm a huge proponent of just being open-minded because when you're open-minded about aliens for example is it allows you to think outside the box in other domains as well and somehow that will result like if you open mind about aliens and you don't comp you know don't laugh it off immediately what happens is somehow that that's going to lead to a solution to p equals np or p not equals np like in ways that you can't predict the open mindedness has tertiary effects that will result in progress i believe which is why i'm a huge fan of aliens because it's like because too many scientists roll their eyes at the idea of aliens alien life and to me it's one of the most exciting possibilities uh in the biggest most exciting questions before all of human civilization so to roll your eyes is not the right answer to roll your eyes presumes that you know anything about this world as opposed to just knowing point zero zero zero one percent of this world and so being humble in the face of that uh being open to the possibility of is uh visiting earth is a good idea not everything though i'm not so open-minded to the flat earth uh hypothesis is there's a growing number of people uh believing in but even then or the inner earth i've got shouted out in a public talk about it so like the earth is hollow yeah my understanding is that there's an this conspiracy theory that as far as i can tell has no grounding in reality is that there's a slightly smaller earth inside this one which is just too cute as a concept um and you can access it i think from antarctica and that's where we keep and i quote the mammoths and the nazis yeah i mean that one is ridiculous but like i do like hey i thought you were keeping an open mind i am this is this is i genuinely think that's more likely than aliens visiting the earth and i say this as someone who has dedicated her life to finding like alien life and and so that's how improbable i think the visitations are because interstellar distances are so huge that it's just not really worth it see i i have a different view on this whole thing i think the aliens that look like little green men are like extremely low probability event like mammoths and nazis yeah that's similar but but other kind of ideas like the the sad thing to me and i think in my view if there's other alien civilizations out there and they visited earth neither them or perhaps just us would be even able to detect them like we we wouldn't be open-minded enough to see it like if if because our understanding of what is life and i just talked to sarah walker who's uh you know sarah yeah we talked for three hours about the question what is life there's a good person to talk to about what is life but like the whole point is we don't really we have a very narrow-minded view of what is life and when it shows up and it might be already here um trees and dolphins and so on and or or mountains or i don't know or the or the molecules in the atmosphere or um or like i people make fun of me but i do think that ideas are kind of aliens themselves or consciousness could be the aliens or it could be the method by which they communicate we don't know about the way our human mind works and the fact that this thing is a quantum process please don't i i understand this it's not woo i'm not i could but it very well could be there could be something at the at the physics level right it could be at the chemical or the biological level things that are happening that we're just close too close-minded because our conception of life is at the level of like us like at the jungle level of mammals and on the time scale that's the human time scale we may not be able to perceive what alien life is actually like what on the scale at which their intelligence realizes itself we may not be able to perceive and the other thing that's really important about alien visitations whether it happened or not is especially after covet in 2020 i'm losing a little bit of faith of our government being able to handle that that well not our government but us as a society as a collective being able to deal with new things in an effective way that's inspiring that's efficient that uh like whether it's if it's a dangerous thing to deal with it to alleviate the danger whether it's the possibility of new discoveries and something inspiring to ride that wave and make it inspiring all those kinds of things i honestly think if aliens showed up they would look around everybody would ignore them and the government might like hide it try to like see to keep it from the chinese and the russians if it's the united states call it a military secret in a very close-minded way and then the bureaucracy would drawn it away to where uh through paperwork the poor aliens would just like waste away in a cell somewhere like there's a certain that would never happen part of the reason that i feel so confident that aliens have not visited because they would have had to visit just to have a look remotely you know from neptune or something which makes no sense because interstellar travel is so difficult that it would be quite a ridiculous proposition but that's the bit that i think is technically possible if they did come here and they were visible by anyone detectable by anyone the thought that any government no matter or any military could just contain them these beings are capable of traveling interstellar distances when we can barely go to the moon like barely go to the moon these things be way way way way and the fact that we think our puny military if any even if all the military in the world got together and the fact that they could somehow contain this it's that it's trying to contain a human that visited them exactly but and scientists you would have to bring scientists on board you've met a lot of scientists how good are they keeping secrets because in my experience they're absolutely appalling at keeping secrets yeah that's terrible even the phospho-non-venus thing which was a pretty well-kept secret this is true you had a bunch of people that were i told my dad yeah you know my dad knew and hopefully didn't tell anyone but if it had been an alien visiting he probably would have told them mate you know and so these secrets could not be kept by any scientist that i know and certainly not collaborative scientists which would be needed you need all sorts of um scientific teams so between the pathetic power of any world's military compared to any civilization uh capable of traveling and our absolute inability to keep secrets uh uh absolutely not i will bet everything that we have not been visited because we are too pathetic to hold that well let me hold that truth if we're making it like a 10 bet there's a possibility here that the main say there exists one alien other intelligent alien civilization in the galaxy the pa to me the if they visit earth was going to visit earth is like the crappy like the really crappy short straw yeah yeah like like this this like really dumb thing that's uh i don't know like the early game boys or something and there's a cartoon about this there's an alien that gets sent to earth a commander spiff or something and it's kind of a punishment or something uh but that's not possible that's the thing because interstellar distances are so hard to to cross you have to do it on purpose you have to do on purpose it has to be a big big deal and we know this because yes you're right we don't know enough about galactic biology we don't know what the universal rules of biology or biochemistry are because we only have the earth but we do know that the laws of physics are universal we can predict behavior in the universe and then see it happen based on these autophysics we know the laws of chemistry are universal we know the periodic table is all they have to choose from so yes there may be some sort of unimaginable intelligence but they still have to use the same periodic table that we have access to they still have a finite number of molecules they can do things with so they still have to use the resources around them the stars around them the universe around them and we know how much energy is in these places and so yes they may be very capable capable beyond our wildest dreams but they're still in the same universe and we know a lot of those rules we're not completely blind but there's a colleague here at harvard uh uh cameron vaffa he's a theoretical physicist i don't know if you know him i've only joined harvard about six months ago okay it's time to meet all the theoretical physicists uh so he's a string theorist but uh his idea is that uh aliens that are sophisticated enough to travel into cells like those kinds of distances will figure out actually ways to hack the the fabric of the universe enough to have fun in other ways like this universe is too boring like you would figure out ways to create other universes or like you you go outside the physics as we know it so the reason we don't see aliens visiting us all over the place is they're having fun elsewhere this is like way too boring we humans think this is fun but it's actually mostly empty space that not no fun is happening like there's no fun in visiting earth for a super advanced civilization so he thinks like if alien civilizations are out there they found outside of our current standard models of physics ways of having fun that don't involve us but that's probably true but even the notion of visiting that's so literally pedestrian you know of course we want to go there because going there is the only thing we know we see a thing we want we want to go there and get it but that is probably something they've no longer got need for i specifically don't particularly want to go to space it sounds awful you know none of the things i like are going to be there and i my whole work is my whole career is finding life and understanding the universe so i care a lot but i care about knowing about it and i feel no need to go there to learn about it and i think as we develop better tools hopefully people will feel less and less a need to go everywhere that we know about and i would expect any alien civilization worth their salt have developed observation tools and and tools that allow them to understand the universe around them and beyond without having to go there this this going is so wasteful yeah so more focused on the knowledge and learning versus the colonization like the the conquering and all those kinds of things that's you know beneath them that's benito that i mean that said do you think there's um any hopeful search for life through phosphate and other gases do you um do you think there's other alien civilizations out there first do you think there's other life out there first do you think there's life in the solar system second do you think there's life in the galaxy and uh third do you think there's intelligent life in the solar system or the galaxy outside of earth so intelligent life i have no idea it seems deeply unlikely uh possible but i'm not even sure if it's plausible so that's the special thing to you about earth is somehow intelligent life came yes and it's only you know very briefly probably extremely briefly uh oh you mean like it's always going to be like we're going to destroy ourselves exactly oh boy and life will continue on earth happily uh probably more happily um so trees and the dolphins will be here i'm telling you and the cockroaches and the incredible fungi you know they'll be fine uh so life on earth will be fine it was fine before us and will be fined after us so i'm not that worried about intelligent life but i think it is unlikely even on earth is unlikely out of what is it five billion species across the history of the earth yes there's been one an intelligent one and for a blink of an eye possibly not much longer than that so i i wouldn't bet on that at all though i would love it of course you know i i wanted to find aliens since i was a little girl and so of course i initially wanted to find ones that i could be friends with and i've had to let go of that dream because it's so deeply implausible but see the nice and sorry to interrupt but the nice thing about intelligent alien civilizations they may have more biosignatures than non-intelligent ones so they might be easier to detect that would be the hope on earth that's not the case but it could be the case elsewhere oh it's not the case on earth most of the biosignatures we have on earth are created by quite simple life if you don't count pollution pollution is all well so you don't see uh polluting gases as a as a possible like i look for polluting gases i would love to find polluting gases well you know i'd be worried for them of course the same way i i think about my alien colleagues all the time looking at us and i'm sure they worry about our pollutions but it would be a really good robust unambiguous sign of life if we found complex pollutants so i look for those too i just don't have any hope of finding them i think intelligent life in the galaxy at the same time that we're looking is deeply implausible but life i think is inevitable and if it is inevitable it is common so i think there will be life everywhere in the galaxy now how common that life is i think will depend a lot on whether there's life in the solar system beyond earth so i'll adjust my expectations very much based on there being life in the solar system if there's life in the venusian clouds if there's life in the if there are by singers coming out of the plumes of enceladus if there's life on titan oh yeah that's right and yeah yeah plumes of enceladus that's the um that's the saturn one it's the moon that has the geysers that come out and so you can't see the under the subterranean oceans but it's supposed to it's so it would be in the atmosphere i was gonna ask you about that one uh have you looked at that uh have you is is that a hope for you to use the tools you're using with rascal uh and other ways for detecting the 16 000 molecules that might be biosignatures to look at enceladus yes that's absolutely the plan is that what's that what's the limiting factor in currently is it the the quality of the telescopes is what's the what the the the quality of the data yeah the quality of the data the observational data and also the quality of rascal and other associated things so we're missing a lot of fundamental data to interpret the data that we get and we don't have good enough data but hopefully we will in the coming decades we'll get some information on titan we have dragonfly going over uh we'll get the plumes of enceladus we will look at the clouds of venus and there's other places and so if we find any life or any sign of life ever like on mars then i'll adjust my calculations and i'll say life is not just inevitable and common but extremely common because all of these places we've mentioned the subterranean oceans on enceladus the methane oceans of titan the clouds of venus the acidic clouds of venus these are places that are very different from the places where we find life on earth even the most extreme places and so if life can originate in all of these completely different habitats then life is even more resourceful than we thought yeah that's really everywhere that's really exciting if it's everywhere if if there's life on just one one of the moons if it's on mars anywhere anywhere in the solar system and i will bet everything i own that every solar system every planetary system has a potential for habitability you know because even if they don't have a habitable planet they'll have moons around other giant planets and there'll be so much life so for me that's the only thing to figure out now whether life is inevitable and quite common throughout the galaxy or everywhere but it's somewhere between those two intelligent life i make no bets and if i had to bet i would be against yeah to me like two discoveries in the 21st century would change everything one is and maybe i'm biased but one is a discovery of life in the solar system i feel like that would change our whole conception of how unique we are in the universe i i think i'm much more eager than you are to jump from basic life to intelligent life i feel like if there's life everywhere like the odds are there has like we cannot like you oh i see you're you're saying there could have been many intelligent civilizations out there that but they just keep dying out it's like i was detecting them you know ships in the night ships in the night now that's that's ultra sad just like is it sad a graveyard the earth is not better for having us is it we it doesn't owe us anything would you be sad to find alien giraffes would you be disappointed if you found alien giraffes because i would not no well giraffes first of all they look goofy with their necks and everything but no we do not  on giraffes okay giraffes our wondrous animals are deeply understudied we still know so little about them because no one does phds and giraffes i am there's a point i made phd and phosphine when people aren't doing pgs and giraffes we do not know enough about giraffes i think it was like ricky gervais that did a whole like a long thing about your face to talk about giraffes that is not its expertise yeah but it's a stupid necks it doesn't make any sense i mean giraffes are very resourceful animals who do incredible things and can kick a lion why don't you climb the tree why don't you climb the tree you don't need to grow through the the lengthy evolutionary process shooting on giraffes i do okay giraffe animals i would very appreciate that i take it back i apologize i i trust i trust your expertise on this uh the the the thing that makes humans really fascinating and i think the earth but i'm a human is where we create yeah we create things that are yes there's all the ugliness in the world there's all the on the on the biological and the chemical level there's the pollution but we create beauty if you if you even from a physics perspective look at symmetry as somehow capturing beauty the breaking of symmetries stuff grounded in all the different definitions of symmetry we're good at like creating things so as fighters but not giraffes okay but yes this is a spider yes there are spiders that crystals bubbles of air so they can breathe underwater they can literally scuba dive there are spiders that can create parachutes so they can glide and talk about symmetry look what spiders can do and i just thought of spiders but if i was an alien species coming to earth there'll be plenty to wander and we would just be one one of the things yeah clunky yeah naked monkey yeah the ants might be even more fascinating the ants ants can figure out exactly through some emergent consciousness what the maximum distance between their trash their babies and their food is just from without any of them knowing how to do this and collectively they've learned how to do this if i was an alien species i'll be looking at that well so that was the other thing i was going to mention the second thing is i tend to believe we can engineer consciousness but at the at the basic level understand the source of consciousness because if consciousness is unique to humans and if we can engineer it that gives me hope that it could be present elsewhere in the universe that's the other thing that makes it's an open question that makes humans perhaps special is not maybe the presence of consciousness but some kind somehow a presence of like elevated consciousness it does again maybe human-centric but it feels like we're more conscious than giraffes for example in spiders yes i won't deny that i i there is something special about humans i you know they're my favorite species they are they are you know some of my best friends are humans and i i i think highly of humans it's it's great i just don't have great hope for our longevity and specifically i don't have great hope given that we're the only species that are five billion that did this cool consciousness trick i just i don't want to bet on finding um a kinship elsewhere that's quite interesting to think about i don't think i've even considered that possibility that the that there would be life in the solar system so that indicates that very possibly life is like literally everywhere yeah everywhere it can happen it does yeah you know and like especially what we're discovering with the exoplanets now uh they're how numerous they are or earth-like habitable quote-unquote planets there's like they're everywhere the most common type of planet is rocky it seems yeah so but i didn't consider the possibility that life is like literally everywhere and yet intelligent life is nowhere long enough to uh to communicate with each other to form little clusters of um civilizations that expand beyond the solar system and so on man maybe becoming a multi-planetary species is uh is a less likely pursuit than um than we imagined but one of the things that makes humans beautiful is we hope but i i hope for humanity and one of the things i hope for is that we become less obsessed with conquering and we become less obsessed with spreading ourselves i hope that we transcend that that we're happy with the universe without having to go and take it so you can hope for the species without hoping for a multi-planetary existence that is only i think the drive of our most primitive instincts to go and take to go and plant a flag somewhere we love planting a flag somewhere and maybe we could overcome that minor drive and once we do the ai systems we build will destroy us because we're too peaceful and they will go and conquer and plant the flags best of luck to them the cockroaches will be happy to keep their keep to the business they always have i tend to believe that robots can have the same uh elegance and consciousness and all the qualities of kindness and love and hope and fear that humans have in principle they could yes i don't really trust the people who make them this is about the giraffe comment isn't it okay i haven't forgiven you on giraffes what have they done to you you um just as a small tangent your master's thesis is also fascinating maybe we could talk about it for just a little bit it's uh titled influence of a star's evolution on this planetary system so this interplay between a star and a planet is there something interesting you could say about what you've learned about this this journey that star takes and the planets around it well when i was younger and i was told what would happen ultimately to the earth as the sun expands towards a red giant and you know mercury would just like fall in and then you know venus fall in and the sun doesn't care and it just seemed so i felt so small i felt like the earth and everything on it it's just the universe doesn't care even our son doesn't care and i think i felt like our son should feel some sort of responsibility for his parents you know yeah and it just felt like such a violent and neglectful parent it's like a parent eating its own children it's horrible it's just a horrible notion but it made me think what if this there's some sort of generation and so at the time when i was doing my masters there was a notion of the white dwarf cemetery which is this idea that when stars become white dwarfs that death is so horrible that planets potentially habitable planets that could have been habitable before they're now gone there's no there's no chance for life but then i thought what if life returns you know now it's a white dwarf it's calmed down it's not going to go anywhere white dwarfs are very stable across like universal time scales and so could you have planets around a white dwarf that could themselves get life again you know life doesn't care and so my work was basically killing dozens of planets thousands of times i just ran thousands and thousands of n-body simulations well you simulated this yeah so i simulated the star wow growing and just eating all these planets up and just absolute chaos and the orbits of the planets would change as the star loses mass so you would have like jupiter plant like planets just crashing into the other planets throwing them into the sun early it was terrifying to watch these simulations it was absolute carnage but if you run thousands of these simulations some systems find new balance ways of staying alive some systems post star death find stable orbits again for billions of years more than enough for life to originate again and so that was my idea during that time that thesis was trying to explore this notion of life coming back and this idea of the universe doesn't care if you're here or not and it will go about its business you know andromeda will crash into us and doesn't care no one cares if you're alive in the universe and so letting go of that preciousness of life i found very useful at that stage in my career and instead i just thought what if if life is inevitable it doesn't matter that it came by four billion years ago it can start again four billion years later and maybe that is nice maybe that's where hope lies the phoenix rising everywhere planets being destroyed and created and we're here now and others will be more or less here-ish billions of years later so accepting the cycle of death and life and uh yeah i'm not taking it personally i'm not taking her personally the son doesn't owe us anything he's not a bad parent it's not a parent at all yeah i was looking at the work of freeman dyson and seeing how it how this universe eventually will just be a bunch of supermassive black holes before they also evaporate tiny black holes too yeah absolutely quiet everyone all the black holes a little too far away from one another to even interact until it's just silence forever but until then many many cycles of death and destruction and rebirth and rebirth you kept bringing up sort of coding stuff up i just i wanted to ask uh two things first of all like what what programming uh language do you like and also what um because you're as a computational quantum astrochemist no yes no that's correct that's right uh you're kind of um you could say you're you're actually understanding some exceptionally complicated things with one of the things you're using is the tools of uh computation of programming is there a device you can give to people because i i know quite a few that have not practiced that tool and have fallen in love with a particular science or whatever it's biology and chemistry and physics and so on and if they were interested in learning to program and learning to use computation is a tool in there particular science is there advice you can give on programming and also just maybe a comment on your own journey and the use of programming in your own life well i'm a terrible programmer a lot of scientists their programming is bad because we never learned formal programming we learned science physics chemistry and then we were told oh you can you have to get these equations modeled and run through a simulation and you're like okay so i'm gonna learn how to code to do this and you learn just as much as you need to run these simulations and no more so they're rarely optimized and they're really clunky six months later you can't read your own code my variable names are extremely embarrassing i still have error error messages for different compilation errors i say things like at least your dad loves you clara you know it doesn't help me at all it's like humor yeah yeah just like you suck at coding but there's other things in your life so i'm a bad programmer and so you know if that will give hope to anyone else who's about programmer i can still do pretty impressive science yes but i learned i think i started learning matlab and java when i was in college it did me no good at all like it has not been particularly useful i learned some fortran that was very useful even though it's really not a fun language because so much of legacy code is in fortran and so if you want to use other people's code who have now retired fortran will be nice and then i used idl to visualize so that uh simulation and body simulation those all fortran and idl but thankfully since i've left college i've just learned python like a normal person and that has been much nicer so most of my code now is in python i should also make a few quick comments as well so one is uh you say you're sort of bad at programming i've worked with a lot of excellent scientists that are quote-unquote bad at programming they're not it gets the job done in fact there's a there's a downside to sort of especially getting a software engineering education if i were to give advice especially if you're doing a computer science degree and you're doing software engineering is not to get lost in the in the like optimization of the correct there's an obsession you can see it in like stack overflow of the correct way to do things and i think you can too easily get lost in uh constantly trying to optimize and do things the correct way when you actually never get done the same thing happens you have like communities of people obsessed with productivity and they keep researching productivity hacks and then they spend like 90 percent plus of their time figuring out how to do things productively and then never actually do anything so there's a certain sense if you focus on the task that needs to be done that's what programming is for so not over optimizing not not focus not thinking about variable names uh in this in the following sense sometimes you think okay i'm going to write code that's going to last for decades in reality your code if it's well written or poorly written will be very likely obsolete very quickly the point is to get the job done uh really well so there's a trade-off there that you you have to you have to make sure to strike i should also comment as a public service announcement or a request if there's any world-class 4chan or cobalt programmers out there i'm looking for them i want to talk to you because that will not be me i'm a terrible foreign programmer but it's fascinating because so much of the world in the past and still runs programming languages and there's like no experts on it so they're all retiring yeah i i disagree slightly in that i think because i can get the job done i'm a programmer but because no one else can look at my code and know how i got my job done i'm a bad programmer that's how i'm defining it including yourself including myself six months later i'm working with a new student right now and she sent me some messages on slack being like what is this um what is this file that you've got um with some um functions that run and i was like i i this was from 2018 it wasn't that long ago and i can no longer remember what that code does i'm going to spend now two days reading through my own code and trying to improve it and i i do think that's frustrating and so i think my advice to any young people who want to get into astronomy or astrobiology or quantum chemistry is that i certainly find it much easier to teach the science concepts to a programmer than the programming to a scientist and so i would much much faster hire someone who knows programming but barely knows where space is than teach programming to an astronomer oh that's fascinating yeah okay this is true i mean yeah there's some basics i'm uh i'm focusing too much on the silver lining because i've the people that write like matlab code yeah single variable single letter variable names so those kinds of things it is accessibility right it's i want my my code to be open source but and it is it's on github anyone can download it but is it really open source if it's written so cryptically so poorly that no one can really use it to his full functionality have i really published my work and that weighs on on me i feel guilty for my own inadequacies as a programmer you can only do so much it's i've already learned quantum chemistry and astrophysics so you know uh yeah i mean there is there's uh there's all kinds of ways to contribute to the world one of them is publication but publishing code is a fascinating way to contribute to the world even if it's very small very basic element great code i guess i was also kind of criticizing the software engineering process versus like which is a good thing to do is code that's readable almost like without documentation it's readable it's understandable the variable names the structure all those kinds of things and that's the dream that's the dream this is a dumb question what do you uh no tell me a dumb question i want to hear it okay uh i mean okay this is the question about beauty it's way too general it's very impossible it's like asking what's your favorite band uh what's your favorite music band oh i thought you meant wavelength band i was like i definitely have favorite my fans absolutely well it's hard to narrow down huh okay uh what uh what to use the most beautiful idea in science that's not a dumb question do you want to try the question again proudly okay i i have a really good question to ask you okay don't oversell it i've got an okay question to ask you ever yeah what uh what do you is the most beautiful idea in uh in science something you just find inspiring or just maybe the reason you got into science or the reason you think science is cool my favorite thing about science is kind of the connection between the scales so when i was little and i wanted to know about space i really felt that it would make me feel powerful to be able to predict the heavens something so much larger than myself that felt really powerful it was almost a selfish desire and that's what i wanted there was some control to being able to know exactly what the sky would do and then as i got older and i got more into astronomy and i didn't just want to know how the stars moved i wanted to know how the planets around them moved and and then as i got deeper into that field i really didn't care that much about the planets i want to know about the atmospheres around the planets and then the molecules within those atmospheres and what that might mean so i ended up shrinking my scale until it was literally the quantum scale and now all my work the majority of my work is on this insane quantum scale and yet i'm using these literal tiny tiny tools to try and answer the greatest questions that we've ever been able to ask and this crossing of scales from the quantum to the astronomical that's so cool isn't it yeah it spans the entirety the tiny and the huge that's that's the cool thing about i guess being a quantum astrochemist because you're using the tools of the tiny to look at the heavenly bodies the the giant stuff and the potential life out there that this is the thing that connects us that you can't escape the rules of the quantum world and how universal they themselves are despite being probabilistic and that makes me feel really pleased to be in science but in a really humbling way it's no longer this thirst for power and i i feel less special the more work i do less exceptional the more work i do i feel like humans and the earth and our place in the universe is less and less exceptional and yet i feel so much less lonely and so it's been a really good trade-off that i've lost power but i've gained company wow that's a beautiful answer i don't think there's a better way to actually end it you're right i asked a mediocre question and you came through uh you made the question good by a brilliant answer um you're the michael jordan and i'm the who's the uh dennis rod i'll be the dennis rodman hey this is i don't know enough about basketball i mean literally you've reached the peak of my basketball knowledge because i know those people are basketball but that's it pros i believe but only because i watch space jam i think are there books or movies in your life long ago or recently do you have any time for books or movies had an impact on you uh what ideas did you take away i absolutely have time for books and movies i try as best i can to not work very hard i mostly fail i should point out but i think i'm a better scientist when i don't work evenings and weekends i'm if i get four good hours in a day i often don't i often get eight crappy hours you know emails meetings bad code yes data processing but if i can get four high quality scientific hours i just stopped working for the day because i know it's diminishing returns after that so i have a lot of time i try to make as much time as i can can you kind of dig into the what it takes to be one productive two to be happy in as a researcher because i think it's too easy in that world to to basic because you have so many hats you have to wear so many jobs you have to be a mentor a teacher a head of a research group do research yourself you have to do service all the kinds of stuff you're doing now with education and um interviews yeah yeah so as a a public science like being a public communicator that's a job yeah the the whole thing very poorly i'll pay you in bitcoin okay i'll take uh so uh is that is there some advice you can give to to the process of being productive and happy as a researcher i think sadly it's very hard to feel happy as a scientist if you're not productive it's a bit of a trap um but it's i certainly find it very difficult to feel happy when i'm not being productive it's become slightly better if i know my students are being productive i can be happy but i think a lot of senior scientists once they get into that mindset they start thinking that their student science is theirs i think this happens a lot of senior scientists they have so many hats as you mentioned they have to do so much service and so much admin that they have very little time for their own science and so they end up feeling ownership over the junior people in their labs and their groups and that's really heartbreaking i see it all the time and and that i think i've escaped that trap i feel so happy even when i'm not productive when my students are productive i think that sensation i was describing earlier of they only need to be half as productive as me for me to feel like i've done my job for humanity so that has been the dynamic i've had to worry about but to be productive is not clear to me what you have to do you have to not be miserable otherwise i find it extremely hard when i'm having conflicts with um collaborators for example kind of very hard to enjoy the work we do even if the work is this you know fantastical phosphine or things that i know i love still very difficult so i think choosing your collaborators based on how well you get along with them is a really sound scientific choice having a miserable collaborator ruins your whole life it's horrible it makes you not want to do the science it probably makes you do clumsy science because you don't focus on it you don't go over it several times you just want it to be over and so i think in general just not being a douche bag can get so much good science done just find the good people in your community and collaborate with them even if they're not as good scientists as others you'll get better science out yeah don't be a douchebag yourself and surround yourself by other cool people exactly and then you'll get better science than if you would try to work with three geniuses who are just hell to be around yeah i mean there's parallel things like that i'm very fortunate now um i was very fortunate at mit to have friends and colleagues there that were incredible to work with but i'm i'm currently sort of i'm doing a lot of fun stuff on the side uh like this little podcast thing and i mentioned to you i think robotics related stuff um i was at just the boston dynamics yesterday checking out their robots um and i'm currently i guess hiring people to help me with a very fun little project around those robots i have more applications i can possibly deal with there's thousands so uh it's not it's the opposite it's like we need to put an ad out for someone to help you go through the application well that too is already there that over ten thousand people apply for that an infinite matriarchal dollar of uh application yeah exactly punishment but the point is it's not it's not exactly the point is like what i'm very distinctly aware of is life is short and productivity is not the right goal to optimize for at least for me the right goal to optimize for is how happy you are to wake up in the day and to work with the people that you do because the productivity will take care of itself great and so like it's so important to select the people well and i think one of the challenges with academia as opposed to sort of the thing i'm currently doing is like saying goodbye sometimes a little bit tougher because it's really tough your colleagues are there oh i mean they're goodbye hurts and then if you have to spend the rest you know for many years to come still surrounded by them in the community it's tougher it kind of adds puts extra pressure to stay in that relationship uh in that collaborative you know in that collaboration and in some sense that makes it much more difficult but it's still worth it it's still worth it to break uh ties if if you don't if you're not happy if there's not that magic that dance i talked to um this guy named daniel kahneman oh i know danny kahneman danny yeah boy did that guy make me realize like what a great collaborator is well he had tversky right yeah but so they had obviously they had a really deep collaboration there but like i collaborated with him on a conversation like just like talking about i don't know what we were talking about i think cars autonomous vehicles but the brainstorming session i'm like a nobody and the fact that he would with that childlike curiosity and that dance of thoughts and ideas and the push and pull and the like and the lack of ego but then enough ego to have a little bit of a stubbornness over an idea and a little bit of humor and all those things it's like holy that person also the ability to truly listen to another human it's like okay that's what it takes to be a good collaborator if that makes me realize that i haven't been i've been very fortunate to have cool people in my life but there's like levels even to the cool yeah i don't think you can compete with danny kahneman on cole he's just incredible but he was like okay i guess i what i'm trying to say is that collaboration is an art form but perhaps it's actually a skill it's allowing yourself uh to develop that skill because that's one of the fruitful skills and and praise it in students you know and i think it is something you can really improve on i've become a better collaborator as the years have gone on i don't have some innate collaborative skills i think their skills i've developed and i think in science there's this really destructive notion of the lone wolf the scientists who sees things where others don't you know then that's really appealing and people really like either fulfilling that or pretending to be fulfilling that and first of all is mostly a lie any modern scientist particularly in astronomy which is so interdisciplinary any modern sciences do scientist says doing it on their own is doing a crappy job most likely because you need an independent set of eyes to help you do things you need experts in the sub fields that you're working on to to check your work but most importantly it's just a bad idea it's not um it doesn't lead to good science and it leaves you miserable i was recently had some work that i was avoiding and i thought maybe i should pursue the scientific project because i don't care enough about the outcome and it's going to be a lot of hard work and i was trying to balance these two things to be really difficult and the outcome is that maybe 10 people will cite me in the next decade because it's not no one's asking for this question to be answered and then i found myself working with this collaborator jason dipman and i spent a whole afternoon hours with him working on this and time flew by and and i just felt taller and like i could breathe better i was happier i was a better person when it was done and that's because he's a great collaborator he's just a wonderful person that brings out joy out of science that you're doing with them and that's really the trick you find the people that make you feel that way about the science you're doing and and you stop worrying about being the lone wolf that's just a terrible dream that will leave you miserable and your signs will be and uh since i'm russian just murder anybody who who doesn't fall into that beautiful collaborative relationship we were talking about books books yes is there books why was i talking about my productivity oh you said i you maybe don't have time for books and movies and you said you must make time for books and movies make time to not work make time to not work whatever that looks like to you um but there's plenty i when i was younger i found a lot of kind of my scientific fulfillment in books and movies now as i got older i have plenty of that in my work and i try to read outside my field i read about danny kahneman's work instead but when i was little it was contact the book the carl sagan book i really thought i was just like ellie um and i was going to become ali i really resonated with me that character and the notions of life and space in the universe even the idea of then the the movie came out and i got to put you know jodie foster in that um which helped but you know even the notion of if it is just us what an awful waste of space i find extremely useful as a concept to think you know maybe we are special but that would suck is a really nice way of thinking of the search for life that it's much better to not be special and have company i got that from carl sagan so that's what i always recommend let me ask one other ridiculous question we talked about the death and life cycle that is ever present in the universe until it's not until it's super massive and little black holes too at the end of the universe what do you think is the why the meaning of it all what do you think is the meaning of life here on earth and the meaning of that life that you look for whether it's on venus or other exoplanets i think there's none i find enormous relief in the absence of meaning i think chasing for meaning is a human desire the universe doesn't give two shits about but you still enjoy i enjoy finding meaning in my life i enjoy finding where the morality lies i enjoy the complication of that desire and i feel that is deeply human but i don't feel that it's universal it's somehow absolute like we conjure it up we we bring it to life through our own minds but it's not any kind of fundamental way real no and the same way the sun is not to be blamed for destroying its own planets the universe doesn't care because it has no meaning it always is nothing and looking for meaning in the universe is demanding answers who are we we're nothing we don't get to demand anything and that includes meaning and i find it very reassuring because once there is no meaning i don't have to find it [Laughter] uh yeah once there's no meaning it's a kind of freedom in a way you sound a bit like um [Music] i'm happy about it this isn't a depressing outlook as far as i'm concerned it's happiness yeah yeah so i mean there's a i don't know if you know who sam harris is but he uh despite the pushbacks from the entirety of the world really argues hard that there's that free will is an illusion that um you know the the the deterministic universe and it's already been predetermined and and he's okay with it and he's happy with it that that he's distinctly aware of it and that's one of the moral will disagree with him on the deterministic nature of nature well he's uh it's not the he's not saying it's deterministic but he's saying that the randomness doesn't help either like randomness does not help in in the experience of feeling like you're the decider of your own actions that he kind of is okay with being a leaf flowing on the river like or being the river right as opposed to having or being like a fish or something that can decide it's swimming direction he's okay just embracing the flow of life i mean in that same way it kind of sounds like your conception of meaning i mean it just is it doesn't the universe doesn't care it just is what it is and we experience certain things and some feel good and some don't and uh that's life but i don't feel like that about life i think life does have meaning and there's and it's laudable to look for that meaning in life i just don't think you can apply that beyond life and certainly not be on earth that this notion of meaning is a human construct and so it only applies within us and the other life forms and planet types that suffer from our intrusions or rejoice from our interactions but it's this this meaning is ours to do as we please we created it we've created a need for it and so that's our problem to solve i don't apply it beyond us i think we as humans have a lot of responsibilities but they're moral responsibilities and a lot of the responsibilities are much more easily fulfilled if you find meaning in them so i think there's value to meaning whether it's real or not i just think we gain nothing from trying to anthropomorphize the entire universe and also that's the height of hubris that's not for us to do yeah it also could be just like duality and quantum mechanics it could uh it could be both that there is meaning and then there isn't and we're somehow depending on the observer depending on the the perspective you take on the thing i mean even on earth that's true but the whether things are meaning or not depends a lot on who's looking whether it's us humans the aliens or the giraffes clara this was a incredible conversation i i mean i i learned so much but i also am just inspired by the passion you have in um not finding meaning in the universe yeah right for someone i'm very passionate about not finding meaning in the universe you're the most inspiring nihilist i've ever met i'm just kidding uh this you're i mean you are truly an inspiring communicator of everything from phosphine to life to quantum astro chemistry i can't wait to see what other cool things you do in your career in your in your scientific life thank you so much for wasting your valuable time with me today i really appreciate it uh it was my pleasure i had already got my four hours of productivity before i got here so it's not a waste it's all downhill from there thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with clara souza silva and thank you to onnit grammarly blinkist and indeed check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from constantine silkowski the earth is the cradle of humanity but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you