December 11, 2025 • 42 mins
Welcome to this special crossover episode from our other show, Going Off World.
In this episode, the hunt for alien life isn’t a sci-fi dream. It’s a patient, high-stakes investigation unfolding across labs, observatories, and space missions—and Sarah Seager is charting the course. We sit down with the MIT exoplanet pioneer to unpack how a field once defined by four puzzling worlds grew into a catalog of thousands, each challenging our assumptions about what planets can be and where life might take hold.
We trace Dr Sarah Seager’s path from early skepticism about hot Jupiters to leading-edge missions seeking signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres and even the acid clouds of Venus. The conversation blends technology, theory, and personal resilience to map the long road to finding another Earth.
If you care about exoplanets, biosignatures, Venus, and the future of discovery, this conversation is a guided tour of what it will take to spot another Earth and how that finding could reshape our place in the cosmos. If you enjoyed this episode, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves space, and leave a review to help more curious minds find us.
• how exoplanet science matured from four planets to thousands
• why hot Jupiters reshaped formation theories
• Kepler’s impact and TESS’s role in finding follow-up targets
• what biosignature gases are and why they matter
• starshade and direct imaging to see Earthlike worlds
• red dwarf habitability, tidal locking, and stellar flares
• Venus phosphine debate and sulfuric acid cloud chemistry
• realistic timelines, tech limits, and the long view
• career foundations, generalist leadership, and mentorship
Find her over at SarahSeager.com. She is also on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and a bunch of other social media platforms. You can just search for her name, Sarah Seager.
Thanks for listening to the Think Forward Podcast. You can find us on all the major podcast platforms and at www.thinkforwardshow.com as well as on YouTube under Think Forward Show.
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Thank you for joining me on this ongoing journey into the future. Until next time, stay curious, and always think forward.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_03 (00:00):
Of course they had to.
There was aliens involved.
But what we found in exoplanetsis that planets literally come
in all allowable masses, radii,and orbits.
SPEAKER_01 (00:11):
Yes.
SPEAKER_03 (00:11):
Honestly, we probably have planets of every
mass that can still be a planet.
So two mass, the star.
Yeah you know, not enoughmassive, it would be an asteroid
or something.
But literally anything thatcould, we literally fill it into
all the decimal places.
SPEAKER_02 (00:27):
Welcome, friends, and fellow big thinkers.
Today we're venturing beyond ourusual terrestrial futures to
explore humanity's greatestcosmic question.
Are we alone in the universe?
Well, our guest has dedicatedher life to answering this
question, not throughspeculation or philosophy, but
through rigorous science andingenious innovation.
She's an MIT professor and aMacArthur fellow.
(00:49):
She pioneered the study ofexoplanet atmospheres,
developing methods to detectchemical signatures of life
across vast distances of space.
In a special crossover with ourgoing off world show, we'll
explore how she's searching forbiosignature gases, the
atmospheric fingerprints thatonly life can leave behind.
We'll learn about her quest tofind an Earth twin orbiting a
(01:09):
distant star, her surprisingwork on Venus as a potential
harbor for aerial life, and herrole leading NASA's
groundbreaking test mission.
But this conversation goesbeyond telescopes and scanning.
It's about the future ofdiscovery itself, how we'll
recognize alien life when wefind it, and what it means for
humanity's place in the cosmos,and why this search for life
(01:32):
beyond Earth is fundamentally afuturist endeavor.
Her work represents anintersection of cutting-edge
technology, audacious vision,and patient persistence.
From developing the starshadeconcept to compiling exhaustive
lists of potential biosignaturegases, she's building the
roadmap for perhaps the mostsignificant discovery in human
history.
(01:53):
Expect to explore the questionsabout habitable zones, the
challenges of detecting life atcosmic distances, and what it
really means to find anotherEarth.
This future's thinking in itsmost profound.
Contemplating not just ourfuture, but the future of life
itself in our galaxy.
Welcome to a special ThinkForward episode: Hunting for
(02:13):
Another Earth with Dr.
Sarah Seeger.
So for those who don't know you,could you provide kind of your
journey?
SPEAKER_03 (02:24):
Hi, everyone.
I'm Professor Sarah Seeger atthe Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, MIT, where I've beena professor for nearly 20 years.
I work primarily on exoplanets,planets orbiting stars other
than the sun, where 25 years agoI started working on it and got
to literally lay down thefoundation for exoplanet
atmospheres, which today studiesare flourishing with the James
(02:46):
Webb Space Telescope.
In parallel to that, I worked onnumerous space missions.
Most recently, I'm proud to beleading a series of missions to
Venus.
SPEAKER_02 (03:09):
Did that kind of spark your path in the career,
kind of your passion for space?
SPEAKER_03 (03:15):
I mean it's like for training because you can always
look back and rewrite history.
But when I do look back at mychildhood, one of the threads is
certainly astronomy.
And there are these punctuatedmemories through time.
Do you have that as well?
SPEAKER_02 (03:29):
Yeah.
When I was about 11 or 12, Iwould lay on the ground outside
the house in the back.
We lived in a pretty ruralplace, but I remember distinctly
I had binoculars, pretty goodbasic telescope to see the moon
and the craters.
I think what really did it forme was even through binoculars,
seeing the four moons, whatGalileo saw, the four moons of
Jupiter, the patterns off whathe documented.
(03:51):
And I was passionately intoastrophotography.
So I had an old Nikon and Istarted to just I didn't have
anything fancy to track it, butI started to capture images and
things that you really couldn'tsee.
And it was just I I wanted tostudy astronomy and I just
became really into especiallythe my my passion probably would
(04:16):
have, if I would have continuedin engineering, would have been
around propulsion.
Because I was fascinated withthe way because the way we are
now and how we get off theplanet's very rudimentary listen
change.
But when it comes to things now,Kirby Drive or just even fusion.
And when I was at a conference,I met Freeman Dyson and talked
(04:37):
to him about the Orion.
He talked about the OrionProject, which was yeah,
fascinating project.
It never got off, it never Ithink of Wern of Vernon Braun
was a hero for me as a kid.
I mean, obviously, his past isobviously colored with a lot of
things, but his genius, and itwas interesting to learn about
the history of how he approachedand wanted to go to space.
(04:57):
Think about it if beauty read upon your career and I and our
conversation.
We talked about moving fromphysics into astronomy.
So, what was that during theuniversity years?
What was that shift?
Because you always had astronomyas that ground, which you
wanted.
SPEAKER_03 (05:12):
Right.
Well, I always loved astronomy,but you really need a background
in physics to explore astronomyas a professional.
When I went to undergrad, I wasjust trying to study general
science and narrow that down tophysics.
Astronomy and physics were a bitseparated while I was an
undergrad.
I what got a summer job at anobservatory.
But they came together later onwhen I got further into graduate
(05:35):
school.
SPEAKER_02 (05:37):
So what did graduate school do for you?
Was it a repositioning of howyou saw your career from?
SPEAKER_03 (05:42):
Yeah, more of an application of physics to
astronomy.
SPEAKER_02 (05:45):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (05:46):
What are some things you remember as a kid?
The star parties like thingslike Well, I grew up in the
city, so we didn't have too manystars.
But I remember the constellationOrion.
I remember seeing it in thefloor cold where I grew up in
Canada.
So I knew when Orion showed up,it was going to be winter.
SPEAKER_01 (06:01):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (06:02):
But I also remember as a child, I had literally one
experience to go away from thecity one summer.
My dad was a single dad, and wegot to live with him in
summertime.
And we had a babysitter everysummer to take care of us.
We had this babysitter, Tom.
He was a teenager, and he wasshocked we'd never been camping.
And how could a family neverhave tried that?
So he borrowed all his familystuff and got my dad to drive us
(06:25):
all away from the city oneweekend.
And it was just amazing.
I was so lucky that it was adark sky, no moon, clear.
And I wandered out of the tentin the middle of the night and I
looked up.
And for the first time in mylife, wow, I saw all the stars,
so many stars.
It was just mind-blowing.
And that always stayed with me.
(06:46):
It was just almost terrifying.
SPEAKER_02 (06:48):
Yeah, it is.
You feel very humbled how smallyou are.
SPEAKER_03 (06:51):
But I had no idea what it was.
No one had ever told me aboutit.
I'd seen the stars, I'd been tothe planetarium, but to see it
for real for the first timestayed with me.
SPEAKER_02 (07:01):
There's an adult experience from that my wife and
I went to the Amazon.
I went to Peru and we were in aneco village.
They everything would shut downat night, but we went out on a
canoe, guided to look for allkinds of stuff.
But everyone's looking forclimbing alligator, you know,
little crocodiles.
I'm looking at the sky becauseit's complete, it's actually the
(07:22):
first time seeing the Milky Way,seeing also it was another
hemisphere.
Because we went to Africa a fewyears later and to see the
Southern Cross, to see acompletely different sky.
SPEAKER_03 (07:33):
Amazing.
I can imagine going there.
It's just confusing, right?
You're not seeing what you usedto.
I heard Orion's upside down.
SPEAKER_02 (07:40):
Yeah, Orion wasn't in the sky at that time.
What was really wild, you talkabout Orion.
I can completely relate becauseit's here in the fall in in New
England.
It's that crisp fall air, andyou see Orion, you see the Big
Dipper, you see Pleities, yousee all the it's that comfort of
that sky, right?
SPEAKER_03 (07:57):
I find it comfort when it's in the springtime, and
I know that summer spring.
It's warm.
SPEAKER_02 (08:03):
Well, you and I are both, you and I, you're in I'm
in Metro West Boston.
So for those listening, we'reabout an hour away from each
other.
But yeah, it's definitely thecold is here.
You can definitely feel thecrisp skies.
Your early work, we want toshift to the career impact.
Your early work on hot Jupiteratmospheres, that was met with a
lot of skepticism.
How did you maintain theconviction, staying your ground
(08:26):
in the research for you?
SPEAKER_03 (08:28):
Well, when I started working on exoplanets, there
were only about four known.
Today there are thousands, likeseveral thousand known, several
thousand exoplanet candidateswaiting to be confirmed.
At the time, the reason whythere was such skepticism was we
were expecting to find solarsystem copies, like a Jupiter
many, but instead people foundwhat was easy to find based on
(08:50):
biases of the observingtechniques, which are big
planets really close to thestar.
And this just was ludicrous.
How could you have a Jupitermass planet many times closer to
its star than Mercury is to oursun?
It just makes no sense at all.
And when we see disks aroundnewborn stars, there's not
enough material that close tothe star to form a Jupiter mass
object.
(09:10):
So the very discovery of theseearly exoplanets meant that the
Jupiter had to form where thereis enough material and somehow
it migrate inwards and thenstop.
So people were generallyskeptical.
They wanted to explainexoplanets away by astrophysical
noise from the star, perhaps thestars pulsating in a certain way
to mimic the planet signal.
(09:32):
It wasn't that I wasdefinitively 100% sure the
planets were real.
It was more of like starting outon an adventure that seemed
exciting.
It's like climbing a mountain,you know, you might not get to
the top.
You always know that's apossibility, but you're still
going to go and try.
So I partly just thought it wasan amazing opportunity.
(09:52):
Partly some people around mewere convinced they were real
planets, namely my thesiscommittee.
So that was really great.
But partly I knew that if theexoplanets ended up not being
real, I was still gaining avaluable skill in graduate
school.
Thinking hard, learning how tocomputer program, studying
radiation.
And I knew I would get some kindof job.
SPEAKER_02 (10:11):
Okay.
SPEAKER_03 (10:12):
Finally, I wasn't committed to a career in
science.
What are we exploring?
I had no alternative either, butI think a lot of young people
are starting out, they get on apath, and you don't necessarily
know it's the right path to stayon.
SPEAKER_02 (10:25):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (10:26):
And so I think it's really common.
I really want to emphasize thatbecause I'm sure you also know a
lot of young people, and most ofthem, a good number of young
people, they've I don't say theyhave no idea what they're doing,
but you start out on somethingbecause your parents told you,
or it seemed like a natural nextstep.
But it evolves, right?
Count countless adults today,they started out doing one thing
and now they're doing somethingelse.
And so I always knew that was apossibility that getting trained
(10:49):
was why I was there.
And it didn't work out, or if Ididn't feel like doing it later,
I would do something else.
SPEAKER_02 (10:54):
Yeah, I wanted to be an astronaut, either science or
flight.
And I always wanted to fly as akid.
I took lessons as a kid, got mypilot's license, went to flight
school, and in a year I was,yeah, I don't want to do this.
It's just that your hobby is notyour job thing.
And my family, I come from afamily that does real estate and
(11:16):
builds, and it was somethingthat in engineering, my father's
an engineer, and he wanted me tobe a specific kind of civil
engineer, and I just didn't wantto do that.
And but when I finished mydegree, my degree is an
accounting of all things, right?
And I'm a designer and I studiedarchitecture, I studied product
design, and it's amazing howmuch that fundamental skill
(11:38):
helps run companies.
I knew it would devolve, Ineeded something foundational.
SPEAKER_03 (11:42):
Right, exactly.
Let's pause on that.
We need something foundational,and then it can take you on your
original path.
Me, I stuck to my original path,or you and many others, that
foundational thing.
You can leverage that, combineit with new skills you're gonna
learn, apply it in new areas.
So just like that, I wasn't, yousaid you went to pilot school,
eventually you realized it's notfor your career.
But sometimes you can't knowthat until you start on that
(12:04):
path.
So I just wanted to make that Ireally like that part of our
conversation.
But I always worked withastronomy.
That's what I had to guide me.
And even if I didn't necessarilylike what I was doing or didn't
know if it was going to goanywhere, I loved astronomy so
much.
And I'm just really soprivileged and thrilled that I
get to do it as my job.
SPEAKER_02 (12:22):
I'm jealous, a bit jealous of what you do.
I mean, you look at the last 30years.
You said when it was justthere's a couple out there that
we found with the telescopes,but I keep thinking about
science fiction.
There was a lot, you know, StarTrek, all the speculation that
these planetary systems existed.
You read Doom.
It was almost an expectationthat we would figure it out, but
many people just were thatthey're just stars.
(12:43):
We really don't know.
And now it's now on a search tofind the smaller how Yeah, I
like what you said.
SPEAKER_03 (12:48):
It used to be science fiction when we were
kids.
Right.
I don't know what Star Trek youwatched.
We had to watch the reruns.
SPEAKER_02 (12:54):
Yeah, I don't know.
I watched the reruns with mydad, but yeah, it's next
generation.
I watched them all.
SPEAKER_03 (12:59):
Yeah, you watch them all, and but yeah, we just
speculated there were planets,crazy planets with crazy life
form.
SPEAKER_02 (13:05):
Right.
Because we could get into oldscience fiction conversation,
but when you think about youryour work has really spanned
from the theoretical models tothis, obviously practical space
missions.
How do these approaches, how dothey complement each other when
understanding exoplanets?
Yeah.
So you go from the theoreticalto the practical, right?
(13:25):
How do the approaches, how dothey complement each other when
you're trying to understand?
SPEAKER_03 (13:30):
Yeah, that's a really good question.
Traditionally, people just focuson one thing.
You're either an engineerbuilding something, yeah, or
you're an observationalastronomer observing something
and working with data.
Yeah, sure.
Most people specialize in onething, like you would be the
engineer that builds thetelescope or spacecraft, or you
would be the person who createsan observing program and
(13:51):
analyzes data, or you would be atheorist who makes computer
models to understand thephysical planet and interpret
the data.
I try to do all three.
You know, the more you know, thebetter you can get your job
done.
So I don't pretend to be anexpert in everything, but
getting a deep conceptualknowledge or studying deeply two
out of the three while being anexpert at one.
(14:12):
But I'm sure you have your ownanalogy from business, the
business world.
Like it pays to know more thanone thing, even if you don't
know all of them super well.
So I bring them all togetherbecause if you want to envision
a mission or lead a team, yousure have to know.
You know, that's what I tellpeople to be the chef, the top
chef, you've got to have workedon every area, basically, where
you can't do the best job.
SPEAKER_02 (15:07):
There's a the approach I take, the
generalist's view where you haveto get a certain knowledge of
how things work in if you'rebuilding a software company.
You have to understand the rolesand the different things and
certain things you can do.
But there's the thing that youdo as a specialist, the thing
that you focus on the best ofthe things.
SPEAKER_03 (15:24):
Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_02 (15:25):
Knowing that, the other thing is you have to know
how to hire it and how to getthe right things out of people.
You don't have to be the expertin it, but you have to know
enough to be able to get thethings from the people to get
your work done, right?
SPEAKER_03 (15:37):
You have to know enough to hire the right people,
to know if what they're doing islegit, to steer them in the
right direction, if they've sortof fallen off the main path.
So that's partly why I've spentso much time studying and
learning and working in manydifferent areas, so that I can
be the leader that's going tofind signs of life beyond Earth.
SPEAKER_02 (15:56):
Yeah, you have a really great saying I found in
your research for exoplanets.
Anything is possible under thelaws of physics and chemistry.
unknown (16:04):
Right.
SPEAKER_02 (16:05):
For anyone, anything.
Yeah, go ahead.
SPEAKER_03 (16:07):
You're talking about that.
Even Star Trek, Star Wars, theyenvisioned a certain kind of
planet.
Of course, they had to.
There was aliens involved.
But what we found in exoplanetsis that planets literally come
in all allowable masses, radii,and orbits.
SPEAKER_01 (16:22):
Yes.
SPEAKER_03 (16:22):
Honestly, we probably have planets of every
mass that can still be a planet.
So two masses, the star, youknow, not enough massive, it
would be an asteroid orsomething.
But literally anything thatcould, we literally fill it into
all the decimal places.
So half an Earth mass through,you know, up to 12, 13 Jupiter
masses and every single thing inbetween.
(16:43):
Same with planet size, same withplanet orbits.
I mean, there's a planet thathas an almost cometary orbit.
There are planets in betweenEarth and Neptune size that are
very average.
We don't know what they're madeof.
Anything is possible.
Nature is more creative andclever than we are in many ways.
So anything's possible.
SPEAKER_02 (17:01):
How has our understanding evolved?
You've you had talked about whenit was four, and we now we have
so many, and there's thousandsnow.
How has our understandingevolved?
Of what's kind of has there beenmarkers, milestones, things of
which brought us here to wherewe are?
SPEAKER_03 (17:17):
Big milestones.
I mean, what's cool aboutastronomy is anytime you get a
new telescope, it opens up a newregime.
For the initial telescopes thatfound exoplanets, they could
almost only find one kind ofplanet.
And we're really lucky thatnature gave us that planet, the
massive planets, the Jupiter'sclose to the star.
So we found those right away, ornot right away, but those were
(17:37):
the first exoplanets around sunstars.
The big milestone was the KeplerSpace Telescope, NASA's
telescope that was designatedfor planets only.
And Kepler's job was to stare atone giant field of stars for
literally four whole years ofone spot.
And Kepler's goal was to lookfor transiting planets, planets
that go in front of the star, asseen from our viewpoint.
(17:59):
And these have to be speciallyaligned.
So they're very rare.
But if you look at enough stars,you're going to catch them.
And what Kepler did was becauseof its incredible sensitivity,
our detectors got better andmore sensitive.
Kepler did such a phenomenal jobin showing us all the kinds of
planetary sizes out there.
It was literally breathtaking.
And Kepler's observationalability is what really launched
(18:21):
us into what is our modern eraof exoplanets.
SPEAKER_02 (18:25):
Would you say that that's the technological
advancement that's most excitedyou?
SPEAKER_03 (18:29):
Well, the best, the more exciting things are always
in the future for us.
Okay because there's always thenext big thing.
But at the time, Kepler wasdefinitely probably in all of
exoplanets.
It gave us the most, the largestleap forward, I would say.
It found crazy things.
It found compact planetarysystems that are almost as flat
as a record player in theirorbits, with several planets
orbiting tightly, all in aplane, interior to what would be
(18:53):
Mercury or Venus's orbit.
It found the most common type ofplanet out there is this planet
between Earth and Neptune size.
We have no solar systemcounterpart, don't know what
they're made of.
Kepler definitely birthed thefield in a big way.
It took us to the next level andgenerated a ton of data, so much
data that lots of people couldenter the field and find
(19:13):
something to do.
SPEAKER_02 (19:14):
That's great.
SPEAKER_03 (19:15):
Well, also, I don't know how it works in every
industry, but do you know how inthe business world stuff's
proprietary?
You figure something out, youkeep it for yourself because you
got to sell.
Well, NASA's for the public,it's our taxpayers' dollars at
work.
So our data is all made public.
And not only is it made public,but it's archived nicely with
different levels of dataproducts.
So you could get raw data, butyou might not know what to do
(19:37):
with it.
Or you could get at the otherend calibrated light curves that
are kind of the end product.
That was also a big boost forthe community.
SPEAKER_02 (19:46):
Now you have that you described in the search,
there's this concept I readcalled Shade.
SPEAKER_03 (19:56):
Star Shade.
SPEAKER_02 (19:57):
So could you is that a bit different than what Kepler
did?
SPEAKER_03 (20:01):
Yeah, yeah.
Ways to find exoplanets.
So many ways, like six or sevenvery solid ways.
And each of these ways will havetheir time.
Like we started out with theradial velocity technique.
That was the only game in townfor quite a while.
Then we had Kepler doingtransits, and the transits are
still going strong.
SPEAKER_02 (20:18):
Cool.
Okay.
SPEAKER_03 (20:20):
So starshave will be a giant specially shaped screen
that will have a spacecraftattached and that will go to
space above the blurring effectsof Earth's atmosphere and block
out the starlight.
Because the other methods wehave to find planets aren't
quite working for Earth.
A true Earth twin, an Earthorbiting a sun-like star.
(20:42):
Now our Earth is incrediblyfaint.
It is ten billion times fainterthan our sun.
B billion.
So we have to block out thatstarlight incredibly precisely
so we can see the planetdirectly.
Now this star shade right hereis a very special shape.
Because if we were to put acircular screen in space and
(21:03):
block out a star, believe it ornot, we wouldn't be blocking it
out.
It sounds crazy, but starlightcan act like a wave.
And it would bend around theouter edges of a circular
screen, creating ripples.
So it would be like dropping apetal in a pond.
You'd get ripples.
Ripples of light.
SPEAKER_02 (21:23):
So for those listening on the audio version,
Sarah's got a large metal disc.
It almost looks like a paper sunpointing outward.
SPEAKER_03 (21:31):
And it well large petals.
SPEAKER_02 (21:33):
Large petals.
It looks like a flower.
Okay.
SPEAKER_03 (21:37):
And what it is, it's called starshade.
And the reason why it's sospecially shaped is if it was
just a circle and you block outa point source, you would get
ripples.
Like dropping a pebble in apond, you get waves.
These are like light waves.
So with starshade, it would belike the light goes around the
petals and interacts with itselfto cancel itself out.
(22:00):
What I showed you is a 1% scalemodel.
1%.
So starshade would be a hundredtimes bigger.
SPEAKER_02 (22:09):
Oh wow.
SPEAKER_03 (22:10):
What isn't?
Do you want to describe it forthe listeners?
That relates to the lensing Ijust showed you, that ginormous
black structure.
SPEAKER_02 (22:17):
Oh big.
Yeah, and that's one of thepetals.
SPEAKER_03 (22:21):
One of the petals.
SPEAKER_02 (22:22):
Yeah, there's a so it's like a long it is.
It's a yeah, it's it's enormous.
So you're building that now tolaunch.
SPEAKER_03 (22:32):
Starshade has been developed by NASA and it's
reached quite a level ofmaturity.
But right now, we don't have aplan for it, doesn't have a
funding plan to go forward rightnow, say.
SPEAKER_02 (22:45):
So let's talk about missions.
So you're deputy sciencedirector of TESS.
What is TESS and what are someof the discoveries it's made for
those who don't know it?
SPEAKER_03 (22:55):
Sure.
TESS is a transit mission.
It launched in April 2018.
TESS is basically four glorifiedtelephoto lenses, about 10
centimeters in aperture.
Each has a giant baffle.
They're very custom made up.
It's kind of a glorifiedtelephoto lens.
SPEAKER_02 (23:10):
Is there anything that's been a discovery that
really surprised you that itcame out with?
SPEAKER_03 (23:14):
Sure.
Let me just finish describingthe mission.
It has these four telephotolenses and they're bolted on a
platform, and the whole missionorbits Earth in a very highly
inclined, highly ellipticalorbit to have as much time in
the dark away from Earth aspossible.
And it looks at a giant strip ofthe sky and covers tens of
thousands of stars, a millionstars every month.
(23:35):
Tess has found, I mean, its goalwas to find a lot of planets
that could be followed up withthe James Webb Space Telescope,
transiting planets whoseatmospheres we could try to
observe.
So in that regard, Tess hasfound a few hundred prime
candidates for the James WebbSpace Telescope to follow up.
And it's definitely beensucceeding at that goal.
(23:56):
It's found a lot of things.
I mean, I can't point to onespecific thing that would be the
next thing's like.
But you know, it's found acombination of things.
It's found many planetstransiting small red dwarf stars
that are easily accessible.
Tess has found some planetstransiting very, very young
stars, stars as young as just afew million years old to help us
(24:19):
understand planet formation.
Because most mature systems arenot millions, but they're
billions of years old.
And studied a lot of thingsoutside of exoplanets.
SPEAKER_02 (24:32):
The system that's closest to us, the Proxima Apha
Centauri.
Do you think that they'll findplanets?
I mean, do you think there's athere's a chance that there'll
be something habitable for us?
SPEAKER_03 (24:44):
Absolutely.
In fact, our nearest star,Proxima Centauri, it's a red
dwarf star, smaller than our sunby about half or a bit smaller.
It has evidence for anEarth-mass planet in its
habitable zone.
SPEAKER_02 (24:57):
With a red dwarf, what would be different?
So people that obviously we livehere on Earth, if you were
living on a red dwarf or say wetried to, what would be the
light, the light spectrum wouldbe different?
But what would be different forsomebody living there?
SPEAKER_03 (25:11):
Well, one of the main things that's different is
the planet has to be closer tothe star because the stars give
off very little energy.
So for the planet to have thesame temperatures our Earth has,
it has to be much closer to thestar.
And the main result of proximityto the star is that the planet
ends up in a favorable energystate where the planet rotates
one time for every time itorbits.
(25:34):
So that's complicated, but oneday equals one year.
And just like our moon has thatwith the Earth, due to tides
over a long period of time, ourmoon slowed down until it shows
the same face to Earth at alltimes.
Because people don't think aboutit this way, but the moon is
rotating one time for every timeit orbits.
SPEAKER_02 (25:53):
All times.
SPEAKER_03 (25:54):
Yeah.
So these exoplanets, they wouldbe showing the same face to
their star at all times.
In other words, one side isalways in day and one side is
always in night.
SPEAKER_02 (26:04):
Oh the temperature differences would be staggering.
SPEAKER_03 (26:06):
So well, they might, but as long as the planet had an
atmosphere, the atmosphere willrecirculate all the energy.
Just like here in New England,what happens on a cold day if
you open your front door?
All the hot air rushes out, thecold air rushes in.
So if there's an atmosphere,we're not worried about that.
But I want you to imagine for amoment being on one of these
planets.
Wouldn't that be weird?
You either always have day oralways night.
(26:26):
The sun is always in the sameplace in the sky at all times.
SPEAKER_02 (26:29):
Well, I think of Antarctica, the Arctic, your
circadian rhythm.
So the ability to sleep would bereally tough on the system.
SPEAKER_03 (26:36):
I mean, imagine that on vacation, we astronomers
would go to the night side.
We just see stars all the time.
SPEAKER_02 (26:43):
Permanent study, yeah, to place to study.
SPEAKER_03 (26:45):
Yeah, but there's one more bigger, much bigger
problem.
It's really that these M dwarfstars, they give off flares.
Lots of flares, lots ofhigh-energy particles.
You know how here we get excitedabout the chance to see an
aurora because our sun mighthave given off a little burst.
Right.
Well, this is much moresignificant and dangerous.
In fact, here on Earth, we hadan event in the 1850s called the
Carrington event.
(27:06):
Have you heard of that?
SPEAKER_02 (27:07):
Very much so.
I've studied a lot about it.
Very familiar with theCarrington events, give it a
shot.
It essentially was a massivesolar flare that hit Earth.
And during that time, the onlytechnology that really was of
any sophisticated nature was thetelegraph system.
And it essentially friedanything electronic.
(27:31):
And telegraph lines exploded,telegraph system it showed that
with a massive solar flare, ifwe had something like that
today, the disruption would becatastrophic.
SPEAKER_03 (27:41):
Yeah, it's great.
I mean, it was a flare, and itwas a small part of our sun,
came off our sun, a coronal massejection.
SPEAKER_02 (27:48):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (27:48):
And it came hurtling towards Earth.
And what people don't realizewas that that part of our sun
had a magnetic field embedded.
And this goes back to physics,but when that magnetic field hit
Earth's magnetic field, itinduced a current.
So literally, that breaking downyour story, just to amplify it a
bit, our Earth becameelectrified, literally.
And yeah, people are reallyworried about that now because
(28:11):
if it happened today, as yousaid, we have much more
infrastructure that can bedamaged here on Earth.
It's called Aurora.
And it's a book about howthere's these disaster book
scenarios.
SPEAKER_02 (28:22):
Oh, yeah.
No, I've read a lot ofpost-apocalyptic shots.
Aurora.
Yeah, so the Aurora is the book,the book of Rorro.
SPEAKER_03 (28:29):
Yeah, it's a recent book by David Cope.
Oh, yeah.
I really like the book.
And it's the scenario that thishappens again because supposedly
it's supposed to happen every150 years.
SPEAKER_02 (28:40):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (28:40):
And this book, disaster scenario, that it
happens and what happens to oursociety.
And it follows a couple ofcharacters.
One's a prepper who's preparedfor disaster, and one is not at
all prepared for anything.
And it follows these twocharacters who have a somewhat
intertwined story through thealmost a pandemic without
illness, but it's a pandemic ofa different kind, basically.
But anyway, yeah.
SPEAKER_02 (29:01):
Go ahead.
SPEAKER_03 (29:01):
Just racing ahead.
Well, so here we are into this.
But imagine living on a planetwhere it's a normal occurrence.
Any one of these weekly ormonthly.
I imagine here in New England,in the old days, anyway, we had
snow days.
We get a dump of snow, everyonehas to stay off the roads, work
is canceled, school is canceled.
SPEAKER_01 (29:19):
Right.
SPEAKER_03 (29:20):
Same great day.
I imagine in one of theseworlds, you have a radiation day
where a big burst comes through,it hits your planet.
You've got to go into yourspecial basement and stay there
for a couple days till thatenergy disperses.
SPEAKER_02 (29:32):
How do you really live on a planet like that?
It makes me think about thesolar radiation, the winds,
things that we always talk aboutgoing to a place, but what about
living in a place?
Right.
SPEAKER_03 (29:44):
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_02 (29:45):
Yeah.
I think that's a reallyinteresting thing you bring up
about exoplanets earlier on whenI got to know you through your
work on Venus.
Can you dive deeper into yourfocus on the possibility of life
in Venus's clouds?
Like what could led you toexplore that direction?
SPEAKER_03 (30:04):
Definitely explain that.
I was working on exoplanets, oram, coming up with a list of
gases that might be a sign oflife.
Because in exoplanets, we'researching for life beyond Earth,
not directly, but indirectly.
Here on Earth, for example, wehave oxygen that fills our
atmosphere to 20% by volume.
But without life, plants andphotosynthetic bacteria, we
(30:24):
would literally have no oxygenin our atmosphere.
It's very reactive and needs tobe continuously produced, or we
would have none.
A great sign of life elsewherewould be finding a gas that
doesn't belong.
We can't explain it away anyother way in the context of
environment without life.
So I was part of a team thatmade a discovery, reported
(30:45):
discovery of a gas on Venus, onethat doesn't belong, that can't
be made in any significantquantity by lightning,
volcanoes, meteoric delivery, oranything.
And this gas is calledphosphine.
Now, phosphine, very few peoplehave heard of it because on
Earth, it's only made by ushumans as pesticides or found in
some oxygen-free environmentsassociated with life.
(31:07):
Phosphorus doesn't go withhydrogen to make phosphine, it
goes with oxygen to makephosphates.
So this report became incrediblycontroversial the moment we
released it.
And people, it's still verycontroversial as to whether
phosphine is present.
If it is present, what it allmeans.
And this was a problem,actually, a bit of a career
crisis for me personally, onlybecause that's my goal and
(31:29):
others share the goal to findsigns of life elsewhere.
But it's really hard to believe.
Anyhow, let's put phosphineaside for a moment, because
phosphine reinvigorated the ideathat there might be life in the
Venus clouds, an idea that wasstarted over half a century ago
by Carl Sagan himself.
And the concept is that thesurface of Venus is too hot for
(31:50):
life due to the massive carbondioxide greenhouse atmosphere.
But just like here on Earth, ifyou climb a mountain or go in an
airplane, it gets colder andcolder, right?
As you go up.
And so there's some bigdistance, 50 kilometers above
the Venus surface where it's theright temperature for life.
So that's how I got involved isthrough this phosphine discovery
because it connected exoplanetsto Venus.
(32:12):
And then I and others startedrealizing just how interesting
Venus is.
And what we also realized isthat although people have kept
the idea of life in the cloudsalive, no one did very much
about it.
And that's because the cloudsaren't made of water.
They're made of concentratedsulfuric acid, a very nasty
chemical.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (32:31):
Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (32:32):
Wow.
So nasty.
And life has to persist in theclouds where the temperature is
good.
And we started doing experimentsand we've showed, just to the
complete astonishment ofplanetary scientists, who've
assumed that concentratedsulfuric acid destroys anything
interesting.
But we found that, for example,our amino acids are stable in
concentrated sulfuric acid,chemically modified, but stable.
(32:55):
We have found a growing list ofother biomolecules that are
stable there.
And we're doing theseexperiments of molecules in
sulfuric acid to demonstrate,not that there is life on Venus,
but that it's worth exploring.
And so hand in hand with theselaboratory experiments, we have
designed a series of missionconcepts, missions to go to
(33:15):
Venus to search for signs oflife.
SPEAKER_02 (33:18):
If we found life in the atmosphere, like how do you
think it'll change the approachto searching for life elsewhere?
Because it's disrupting thestatus quo, which a lot of
people how would that change theapproach?
SPEAKER_03 (33:32):
I think it will help people open up their minds.
I mean, honestly, if we would dofind life on Venus, it would
just be so shocking.
And I hope it will open up morepeople to be bold and to take
risks and to just pursue thingsthat others think is ridiculous.
I mean, I think it reallyhopefully would motivate us to
(33:53):
uh find the fastest, cheapestway to get to other bodies in
our solar system.
Because there's a lot of placeswhere there could be life.
They're just very hard toexplore.
SPEAKER_02 (34:02):
Yeah, I feel like there's two paths in the search.
There's one, which is justsearch for life in general.
Right.
And then there's the search foran earth analog, like another
humanity, if you will.
I mean, we're trying that withother things that are close to
us, but can you really sustainhumanity for the long term?
Not known at this point.
(34:22):
But you've shared so many greatuh stories.
How close this is completespeculation.
I mean, with the advanced intechnology, with AI analyzing
all the data, do you think we'reclose to finding our unearth
analog?
SPEAKER_03 (34:39):
We're very far from even though we have thousands of
planets, yeah, an Earth aroundthe sun, an Earth around a
sun-like star is amongst thehardest to find.
And so despite the thousands ofplanets and the huge,
fascinating field of exoplanets,we're asking our instruments,
our detectors to go so far we'renot ready yet.
(35:01):
And it's not just that thetechnology is so difficult to
get ready.
It's that the methods we havehave hit a bit of a plateau
because our sun has spots andhas granulation from convection
and noise in the star itself,our stars themselves, is
preventing it.
So AI is going to help us, butit's not going to be the magic
(35:23):
bullet.
SPEAKER_02 (35:24):
It was just more about processing data, the speed
of which you can pull the thingsout to take a deeper look.
SPEAKER_03 (35:29):
Right.
I know.
There's two things.
I have this one for person Iknew before who said computers
make us dumb because you canthrow all the processing power
you want.
And yes, that will definitelyget you some gain.
But let's imagine you have afactor of 10 to go, and throwing
the computer at it gets you afactor of two, which is amazing.
I mean, that's huge.
You still have another factor offive.
So I think we are working onboth at once, using our brains
(35:51):
to sort through the informationcontent of all the data and
getting the computers to help usfor sure.
But there's still quite a longway to go, but we're working it.
SPEAKER_02 (36:00):
Well, my father refused to learn CAD for 30 some
years, and he still can use theslide rules.
He's in a traditional in thatsense, sticking with the tried
and true.
Advancements in technology, doyou think we still need to have
that say the next 50 years, 100years?
What do we need to really haveto detect life that on an
exoplanet?
Because it kinds of life.
SPEAKER_03 (36:21):
Well, there's several things.
We need to get our list of ourtargets, the sun-like stars that
have Earth mass or earth-sizedplanets.
That's one step.
The second step is we have to dobetter with what we have.
Then we have to go to spaceabove the blurring effects of
Earth's atmosphere to study theatmospheres of all these and to
see which ones have water vaporindicative of water oceans, to
(36:42):
see which have hopefully oxygenor ozone, a sign of life.
And we need to then hammer awayat those prime candidates to see
what else is going on.
But ultimately, the thaw sceneon Venus lesson is that no one
will ever fully believe just agas far away and noisy data.
No one will ever believe a gason a planet far away with noisy
(37:06):
data.
We're going to need more.
So we can see in our lifetimes,it would be a dream just to have
a list of candidates.
Hey, here's a planet with wateroceans and oxygen.
But we'll have to eventually thenext step.
So since you've given us 50years, we'll at the same time as
stretching our technology toeven find this list of
candidates, we'll have to startthinking of new paradigms in
(37:28):
outer space.
We have to find ways to, yeah,get a lot more data.
And there are definitely someideas out there that we need to
pursue.
SPEAKER_02 (37:37):
Yeah, because even solar sales or even the micro
devices, I can't remember thename of them, that were going
out, they're being starship.
Yeah.
Those they're going point one.
Speed that'll take a hundredyears.
That's and they even just sendback the day.
It's this round trip of data.
So it is, yeah.
(37:58):
It's it's it's the lens of thelong view and long view.
SPEAKER_03 (38:04):
We have to get used to the long view because we're
gonna have done the easy things,we'll have our lists of
candidates.
What can we invest in?
What can we be patient with toreally know for sure?
SPEAKER_02 (38:14):
Oh, I I your memoir, which I read parts of it, is the
smallest light in the universe.
SPEAKER_03 (38:22):
So what made you write such a personal well the
original thing that motivated mewas a major personal tragedy
that just was incrediblycrushing.
But thinking of this tragedyagainst the vastness of the
(38:42):
universe, all the stars outthere, the huge expanse, it was
definitely hard to reconcile.
So, on the whole, I wanted totell my story.
It started out that way becauseit's been an incredible journey.
But it was also to capture thisidea of hope and longing that
we're all looking for something.
Each one of us humans is on ajourney of some kind.
(39:04):
And although my journey is tofind another earth, we all have
something.
And this title, The SmallestLights in the Universe, has a
double meaning.
One is that we want to find theother earths to know that we're
not alone.
But at the same time, on ourpersonal journeys, it's
definitely an up and down.
And sometimes you will hit rockbottom.
(39:25):
You can't avoid it.
And there you've got to hold onto whatever your tiny lights
are, those little tiny beaconsof hope that are going to get
you out from the bottom of thatcanyon back to where you need to
be to complete your journey.
SPEAKER_02 (39:38):
That's wonderful advice.
It made me think about yourprofessor at MIT and you've
taught a lot of young minds.
Do you add that with other typesof guidance?
SPEAKER_03 (39:49):
I don't usually give advice because I try to stick to
the professional.
But once in a while there's acrisis, students commit suicide
pretty much annually.
And then I definitely get intoit.
And I definitely try to give thevibe or explain.
I definitely try to helpstudents.
I mean, it's a mix.
I try to stay professional, butwhere it's warranted, I
definitely try to communicate.
(40:11):
You know, you've got to focus onwhat matters.
And it's usually not your grade.
SPEAKER_02 (40:14):
To study in this field, what do you think are the
most important qualities to bein this type of field?
It's very exciting, but journey.
SPEAKER_03 (40:23):
Well, the main advice I would give is to find
something that you love doing,that you're also very good at,
and that additionally you canget a job in.
It's very hard to line all thatup, but if you can, that's
recipe to success.
SPEAKER_02 (40:37):
That's great.
I know we have to wrap up, butI'd love to have you on again.
I think we can talk for anotherhour about this.
How do people connect with yourwork?
How do people find you?
SPEAKER_03 (40:46):
Find me from my website, Sarah Seeger.com.space.
And I'm also on Facebook,Instagram, LinkedIn, and a bunch
of other social media platforms.
You can just search for my name,Sarah Seeger.
SPEAKER_02 (41:02):
Great.
Sarah, thanks for your time andjust uh great conversation.
And uh we'll have to bewonderful talking to you.
SPEAKER_03 (41:09):
I hope we can continue the conversation.
SPEAKER_02 (41:11):
This is great.
Thanks a lot.
Have a have a have a greatholiday.
Thanks a lot.
SPEAKER_00 (41:15):
Goodbye.
SPEAKER_02 (41:16):
Bye.
SPEAKER_00 (41:17):
Thanks for listening to the Think Forward Podcast.
You can find us on all the majorpodcast platforms and at
www.thinkforwardshow.com as wellas on YouTube under Think
Forward Show.
See you next time.
Of course they had to.
There was aliens involved.
But what we found in exoplanetsis that planets literally come
in all allowable masses, radii,and orbits.
SPEAKER_01 (00:11):
Yes.
SPEAKER_03 (00:11):
Honestly, we probably have planets of every
mass that can still be a planet.
So two mass, the star.
Yeah you know, not enoughmassive, it would be an asteroid
or something.
But literally anything thatcould, we literally fill it into
all the decimal places.
SPEAKER_02 (00:27):
Welcome, friends, and fellow big thinkers.
Today we're venturing beyond ourusual terrestrial futures to
explore humanity's greatestcosmic question.
Are we alone in the universe?
Well, our guest has dedicatedher life to answering this
question, not throughspeculation or philosophy, but
through rigorous science andingenious innovation.
She's an MIT professor and aMacArthur fellow.
(00:49):
She pioneered the study ofexoplanet atmospheres,
developing methods to detectchemical signatures of life
across vast distances of space.
In a special crossover with ourgoing off world show, we'll
explore how she's searching forbiosignature gases, the
atmospheric fingerprints thatonly life can leave behind.
We'll learn about her quest tofind an Earth twin orbiting a
(01:09):
distant star, her surprisingwork on Venus as a potential
harbor for aerial life, and herrole leading NASA's
groundbreaking test mission.
But this conversation goesbeyond telescopes and scanning.
It's about the future ofdiscovery itself, how we'll
recognize alien life when wefind it, and what it means for
humanity's place in the cosmos,and why this search for life
(01:32):
beyond Earth is fundamentally afuturist endeavor.
Her work represents anintersection of cutting-edge
technology, audacious vision,and patient persistence.
From developing the starshadeconcept to compiling exhaustive
lists of potential biosignaturegases, she's building the
roadmap for perhaps the mostsignificant discovery in human
history.
(01:53):
Expect to explore the questionsabout habitable zones, the
challenges of detecting life atcosmic distances, and what it
really means to find anotherEarth.
This future's thinking in itsmost profound.
Contemplating not just ourfuture, but the future of life
itself in our galaxy.
Welcome to a special ThinkForward episode: Hunting for
(02:13):
Another Earth with Dr.
Sarah Seeger.
So for those who don't know you,could you provide kind of your
journey?
SPEAKER_03 (02:24):
Hi, everyone.
I'm Professor Sarah Seeger atthe Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, MIT, where I've beena professor for nearly 20 years.
I work primarily on exoplanets,planets orbiting stars other
than the sun, where 25 years agoI started working on it and got
to literally lay down thefoundation for exoplanet
atmospheres, which today studiesare flourishing with the James
(02:46):
Webb Space Telescope.
In parallel to that, I worked onnumerous space missions.
Most recently, I'm proud to beleading a series of missions to
Venus.
SPEAKER_02 (03:09):
Did that kind of spark your path in the career,
kind of your passion for space?
SPEAKER_03 (03:15):
I mean it's like for training because you can always
look back and rewrite history.
But when I do look back at mychildhood, one of the threads is
certainly astronomy.
And there are these punctuatedmemories through time.
Do you have that as well?
SPEAKER_02 (03:29):
Yeah.
When I was about 11 or 12, Iwould lay on the ground outside
the house in the back.
We lived in a pretty ruralplace, but I remember distinctly
I had binoculars, pretty goodbasic telescope to see the moon
and the craters.
I think what really did it forme was even through binoculars,
seeing the four moons, whatGalileo saw, the four moons of
Jupiter, the patterns off whathe documented.
(03:51):
And I was passionately intoastrophotography.
So I had an old Nikon and Istarted to just I didn't have
anything fancy to track it, butI started to capture images and
things that you really couldn'tsee.
And it was just I I wanted tostudy astronomy and I just
became really into especiallythe my my passion probably would
(04:16):
have, if I would have continuedin engineering, would have been
around propulsion.
Because I was fascinated withthe way because the way we are
now and how we get off theplanet's very rudimentary listen
change.
But when it comes to things now,Kirby Drive or just even fusion.
And when I was at a conference,I met Freeman Dyson and talked
(04:37):
to him about the Orion.
He talked about the OrionProject, which was yeah,
fascinating project.
It never got off, it never Ithink of Wern of Vernon Braun
was a hero for me as a kid.
I mean, obviously, his past isobviously colored with a lot of
things, but his genius, and itwas interesting to learn about
the history of how he approachedand wanted to go to space.
(04:57):
Think about it if beauty read upon your career and I and our
conversation.
We talked about moving fromphysics into astronomy.
So, what was that during theuniversity years?
What was that shift?
Because you always had astronomyas that ground, which you
wanted.
SPEAKER_03 (05:12):
Right.
Well, I always loved astronomy,but you really need a background
in physics to explore astronomyas a professional.
When I went to undergrad, I wasjust trying to study general
science and narrow that down tophysics.
Astronomy and physics were a bitseparated while I was an
undergrad.
I what got a summer job at anobservatory.
But they came together later onwhen I got further into graduate
(05:35):
school.
SPEAKER_02 (05:37):
So what did graduate school do for you?
Was it a repositioning of howyou saw your career from?
SPEAKER_03 (05:42):
Yeah, more of an application of physics to
astronomy.
SPEAKER_02 (05:45):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (05:46):
What are some things you remember as a kid?
The star parties like thingslike Well, I grew up in the
city, so we didn't have too manystars.
But I remember the constellationOrion.
I remember seeing it in thefloor cold where I grew up in
Canada.
So I knew when Orion showed up,it was going to be winter.
SPEAKER_01 (06:01):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (06:02):
But I also remember as a child, I had literally one
experience to go away from thecity one summer.
My dad was a single dad, and wegot to live with him in
summertime.
And we had a babysitter everysummer to take care of us.
We had this babysitter, Tom.
He was a teenager, and he wasshocked we'd never been camping.
And how could a family neverhave tried that?
So he borrowed all his familystuff and got my dad to drive us
(06:25):
all away from the city oneweekend.
And it was just amazing.
I was so lucky that it was adark sky, no moon, clear.
And I wandered out of the tentin the middle of the night and I
looked up.
And for the first time in mylife, wow, I saw all the stars,
so many stars.
It was just mind-blowing.
And that always stayed with me.
(06:46):
It was just almost terrifying.
SPEAKER_02 (06:48):
Yeah, it is.
You feel very humbled how smallyou are.
SPEAKER_03 (06:51):
But I had no idea what it was.
No one had ever told me aboutit.
I'd seen the stars, I'd been tothe planetarium, but to see it
for real for the first timestayed with me.
SPEAKER_02 (07:01):
There's an adult experience from that my wife and
I went to the Amazon.
I went to Peru and we were in aneco village.
They everything would shut downat night, but we went out on a
canoe, guided to look for allkinds of stuff.
But everyone's looking forclimbing alligator, you know,
little crocodiles.
I'm looking at the sky becauseit's complete, it's actually the
(07:22):
first time seeing the Milky Way,seeing also it was another
hemisphere.
Because we went to Africa a fewyears later and to see the
Southern Cross, to see acompletely different sky.
SPEAKER_03 (07:33):
Amazing.
I can imagine going there.
It's just confusing, right?
You're not seeing what you usedto.
I heard Orion's upside down.
SPEAKER_02 (07:40):
Yeah, Orion wasn't in the sky at that time.
What was really wild, you talkabout Orion.
I can completely relate becauseit's here in the fall in in New
England.
It's that crisp fall air, andyou see Orion, you see the Big
Dipper, you see Pleities, yousee all the it's that comfort of
that sky, right?
SPEAKER_03 (07:57):
I find it comfort when it's in the springtime, and
I know that summer spring.
It's warm.
SPEAKER_02 (08:03):
Well, you and I are both, you and I, you're in I'm
in Metro West Boston.
So for those listening, we'reabout an hour away from each
other.
But yeah, it's definitely thecold is here.
You can definitely feel thecrisp skies.
Your early work, we want toshift to the career impact.
Your early work on hot Jupiteratmospheres, that was met with a
lot of skepticism.
How did you maintain theconviction, staying your ground
(08:26):
in the research for you?
SPEAKER_03 (08:28):
Well, when I started working on exoplanets, there
were only about four known.
Today there are thousands, likeseveral thousand known, several
thousand exoplanet candidateswaiting to be confirmed.
At the time, the reason whythere was such skepticism was we
were expecting to find solarsystem copies, like a Jupiter
many, but instead people foundwhat was easy to find based on
(08:50):
biases of the observingtechniques, which are big
planets really close to thestar.
And this just was ludicrous.
How could you have a Jupitermass planet many times closer to
its star than Mercury is to oursun?
It just makes no sense at all.
And when we see disks aroundnewborn stars, there's not
enough material that close tothe star to form a Jupiter mass
object.
(09:10):
So the very discovery of theseearly exoplanets meant that the
Jupiter had to form where thereis enough material and somehow
it migrate inwards and thenstop.
So people were generallyskeptical.
They wanted to explainexoplanets away by astrophysical
noise from the star, perhaps thestars pulsating in a certain way
to mimic the planet signal.
(09:32):
It wasn't that I wasdefinitively 100% sure the
planets were real.
It was more of like starting outon an adventure that seemed
exciting.
It's like climbing a mountain,you know, you might not get to
the top.
You always know that's apossibility, but you're still
going to go and try.
So I partly just thought it wasan amazing opportunity.
(09:52):
Partly some people around mewere convinced they were real
planets, namely my thesiscommittee.
So that was really great.
But partly I knew that if theexoplanets ended up not being
real, I was still gaining avaluable skill in graduate
school.
Thinking hard, learning how tocomputer program, studying
radiation.
And I knew I would get some kindof job.
SPEAKER_02 (10:11):
Okay.
SPEAKER_03 (10:12):
Finally, I wasn't committed to a career in
science.
What are we exploring?
I had no alternative either, butI think a lot of young people
are starting out, they get on apath, and you don't necessarily
know it's the right path to stayon.
SPEAKER_02 (10:25):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (10:26):
And so I think it's really common.
I really want to emphasize thatbecause I'm sure you also know a
lot of young people, and most ofthem, a good number of young
people, they've I don't say theyhave no idea what they're doing,
but you start out on somethingbecause your parents told you,
or it seemed like a natural nextstep.
But it evolves, right?
Count countless adults today,they started out doing one thing
and now they're doing somethingelse.
And so I always knew that was apossibility that getting trained
(10:49):
was why I was there.
And it didn't work out, or if Ididn't feel like doing it later,
I would do something else.
SPEAKER_02 (10:54):
Yeah, I wanted to be an astronaut, either science or
flight.
And I always wanted to fly as akid.
I took lessons as a kid, got mypilot's license, went to flight
school, and in a year I was,yeah, I don't want to do this.
It's just that your hobby is notyour job thing.
And my family, I come from afamily that does real estate and
(11:16):
builds, and it was somethingthat in engineering, my father's
an engineer, and he wanted me tobe a specific kind of civil
engineer, and I just didn't wantto do that.
And but when I finished mydegree, my degree is an
accounting of all things, right?
And I'm a designer and I studiedarchitecture, I studied product
design, and it's amazing howmuch that fundamental skill
(11:38):
helps run companies.
I knew it would devolve, Ineeded something foundational.
SPEAKER_03 (11:42):
Right, exactly.
Let's pause on that.
We need something foundational,and then it can take you on your
original path.
Me, I stuck to my original path,or you and many others, that
foundational thing.
You can leverage that, combineit with new skills you're gonna
learn, apply it in new areas.
So just like that, I wasn't, yousaid you went to pilot school,
eventually you realized it's notfor your career.
But sometimes you can't knowthat until you start on that
(12:04):
path.
So I just wanted to make that Ireally like that part of our
conversation.
But I always worked withastronomy.
That's what I had to guide me.
And even if I didn't necessarilylike what I was doing or didn't
know if it was going to goanywhere, I loved astronomy so
much.
And I'm just really soprivileged and thrilled that I
get to do it as my job.
SPEAKER_02 (12:22):
I'm jealous, a bit jealous of what you do.
I mean, you look at the last 30years.
You said when it was justthere's a couple out there that
we found with the telescopes,but I keep thinking about
science fiction.
There was a lot, you know, StarTrek, all the speculation that
these planetary systems existed.
You read Doom.
It was almost an expectationthat we would figure it out, but
many people just were thatthey're just stars.
(12:43):
We really don't know.
And now it's now on a search tofind the smaller how Yeah, I
like what you said.
SPEAKER_03 (12:48):
It used to be science fiction when we were
kids.
Right.
I don't know what Star Trek youwatched.
We had to watch the reruns.
SPEAKER_02 (12:54):
Yeah, I don't know.
I watched the reruns with mydad, but yeah, it's next
generation.
I watched them all.
SPEAKER_03 (12:59):
Yeah, you watch them all, and but yeah, we just
speculated there were planets,crazy planets with crazy life
form.
SPEAKER_02 (13:05):
Right.
Because we could get into oldscience fiction conversation,
but when you think about youryour work has really spanned
from the theoretical models tothis, obviously practical space
missions.
How do these approaches, how dothey complement each other when
understanding exoplanets?
Yeah.
So you go from the theoreticalto the practical, right?
(13:25):
How do the approaches, how dothey complement each other when
you're trying to understand?
SPEAKER_03 (13:30):
Yeah, that's a really good question.
Traditionally, people just focuson one thing.
You're either an engineerbuilding something, yeah, or
you're an observationalastronomer observing something
and working with data.
Yeah, sure.
Most people specialize in onething, like you would be the
engineer that builds thetelescope or spacecraft, or you
would be the person who createsan observing program and
(13:51):
analyzes data, or you would be atheorist who makes computer
models to understand thephysical planet and interpret
the data.
I try to do all three.
You know, the more you know, thebetter you can get your job
done.
So I don't pretend to be anexpert in everything, but
getting a deep conceptualknowledge or studying deeply two
out of the three while being anexpert at one.
(14:12):
But I'm sure you have your ownanalogy from business, the
business world.
Like it pays to know more thanone thing, even if you don't
know all of them super well.
So I bring them all togetherbecause if you want to envision
a mission or lead a team, yousure have to know.
You know, that's what I tellpeople to be the chef, the top
chef, you've got to have workedon every area, basically, where
you can't do the best job.
SPEAKER_02 (15:07):
There's a the approach I take, the
generalist's view where you haveto get a certain knowledge of
how things work in if you'rebuilding a software company.
You have to understand the rolesand the different things and
certain things you can do.
But there's the thing that youdo as a specialist, the thing
that you focus on the best ofthe things.
SPEAKER_03 (15:24):
Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_02 (15:25):
Knowing that, the other thing is you have to know
how to hire it and how to getthe right things out of people.
You don't have to be the expertin it, but you have to know
enough to be able to get thethings from the people to get
your work done, right?
SPEAKER_03 (15:37):
You have to know enough to hire the right people,
to know if what they're doing islegit, to steer them in the
right direction, if they've sortof fallen off the main path.
So that's partly why I've spentso much time studying and
learning and working in manydifferent areas, so that I can
be the leader that's going tofind signs of life beyond Earth.
SPEAKER_02 (15:56):
Yeah, you have a really great saying I found in
your research for exoplanets.
Anything is possible under thelaws of physics and chemistry.
unknown (16:04):
Right.
SPEAKER_02 (16:05):
For anyone, anything.
Yeah, go ahead.
SPEAKER_03 (16:07):
You're talking about that.
Even Star Trek, Star Wars, theyenvisioned a certain kind of
planet.
Of course, they had to.
There was aliens involved.
But what we found in exoplanetsis that planets literally come
in all allowable masses, radii,and orbits.
SPEAKER_01 (16:22):
Yes.
SPEAKER_03 (16:22):
Honestly, we probably have planets of every
mass that can still be a planet.
So two masses, the star, youknow, not enough massive, it
would be an asteroid orsomething.
But literally anything thatcould, we literally fill it into
all the decimal places.
So half an Earth mass through,you know, up to 12, 13 Jupiter
masses and every single thing inbetween.
(16:43):
Same with planet size, same withplanet orbits.
I mean, there's a planet thathas an almost cometary orbit.
There are planets in betweenEarth and Neptune size that are
very average.
We don't know what they're madeof.
Anything is possible.
Nature is more creative andclever than we are in many ways.
So anything's possible.
SPEAKER_02 (17:01):
How has our understanding evolved?
You've you had talked about whenit was four, and we now we have
so many, and there's thousandsnow.
How has our understandingevolved?
Of what's kind of has there beenmarkers, milestones, things of
which brought us here to wherewe are?
SPEAKER_03 (17:17):
Big milestones.
I mean, what's cool aboutastronomy is anytime you get a
new telescope, it opens up a newregime.
For the initial telescopes thatfound exoplanets, they could
almost only find one kind ofplanet.
And we're really lucky thatnature gave us that planet, the
massive planets, the Jupiter'sclose to the star.
So we found those right away, ornot right away, but those were
(17:37):
the first exoplanets around sunstars.
The big milestone was the KeplerSpace Telescope, NASA's
telescope that was designatedfor planets only.
And Kepler's job was to stare atone giant field of stars for
literally four whole years ofone spot.
And Kepler's goal was to lookfor transiting planets, planets
that go in front of the star, asseen from our viewpoint.
(17:59):
And these have to be speciallyaligned.
So they're very rare.
But if you look at enough stars,you're going to catch them.
And what Kepler did was becauseof its incredible sensitivity,
our detectors got better andmore sensitive.
Kepler did such a phenomenal jobin showing us all the kinds of
planetary sizes out there.
It was literally breathtaking.
And Kepler's observationalability is what really launched
(18:21):
us into what is our modern eraof exoplanets.
SPEAKER_02 (18:25):
Would you say that that's the technological
advancement that's most excitedyou?
SPEAKER_03 (18:29):
Well, the best, the more exciting things are always
in the future for us.
Okay because there's always thenext big thing.
But at the time, Kepler wasdefinitely probably in all of
exoplanets.
It gave us the most, the largestleap forward, I would say.
It found crazy things.
It found compact planetarysystems that are almost as flat
as a record player in theirorbits, with several planets
orbiting tightly, all in aplane, interior to what would be
(18:53):
Mercury or Venus's orbit.
It found the most common type ofplanet out there is this planet
between Earth and Neptune size.
We have no solar systemcounterpart, don't know what
they're made of.
Kepler definitely birthed thefield in a big way.
It took us to the next level andgenerated a ton of data, so much
data that lots of people couldenter the field and find
(19:13):
something to do.
SPEAKER_02 (19:14):
That's great.
SPEAKER_03 (19:15):
Well, also, I don't know how it works in every
industry, but do you know how inthe business world stuff's
proprietary?
You figure something out, youkeep it for yourself because you
got to sell.
Well, NASA's for the public,it's our taxpayers' dollars at
work.
So our data is all made public.
And not only is it made public,but it's archived nicely with
different levels of dataproducts.
So you could get raw data, butyou might not know what to do
(19:37):
with it.
Or you could get at the otherend calibrated light curves that
are kind of the end product.
That was also a big boost forthe community.
SPEAKER_02 (19:46):
Now you have that you described in the search,
there's this concept I readcalled Shade.
SPEAKER_03 (19:56):
Star Shade.
SPEAKER_02 (19:57):
So could you is that a bit different than what Kepler
did?
SPEAKER_03 (20:01):
Yeah, yeah.
Ways to find exoplanets.
So many ways, like six or sevenvery solid ways.
And each of these ways will havetheir time.
Like we started out with theradial velocity technique.
That was the only game in townfor quite a while.
Then we had Kepler doingtransits, and the transits are
still going strong.
SPEAKER_02 (20:18):
Cool.
Okay.
SPEAKER_03 (20:20):
So starshave will be a giant specially shaped screen
that will have a spacecraftattached and that will go to
space above the blurring effectsof Earth's atmosphere and block
out the starlight.
Because the other methods wehave to find planets aren't
quite working for Earth.
A true Earth twin, an Earthorbiting a sun-like star.
(20:42):
Now our Earth is incrediblyfaint.
It is ten billion times fainterthan our sun.
B billion.
So we have to block out thatstarlight incredibly precisely
so we can see the planetdirectly.
Now this star shade right hereis a very special shape.
Because if we were to put acircular screen in space and
(21:03):
block out a star, believe it ornot, we wouldn't be blocking it
out.
It sounds crazy, but starlightcan act like a wave.
And it would bend around theouter edges of a circular
screen, creating ripples.
So it would be like dropping apetal in a pond.
You'd get ripples.
Ripples of light.
SPEAKER_02 (21:23):
So for those listening on the audio version,
Sarah's got a large metal disc.
It almost looks like a paper sunpointing outward.
SPEAKER_03 (21:31):
And it well large petals.
SPEAKER_02 (21:33):
Large petals.
It looks like a flower.
Okay.
SPEAKER_03 (21:37):
And what it is, it's called starshade.
And the reason why it's sospecially shaped is if it was
just a circle and you block outa point source, you would get
ripples.
Like dropping a pebble in apond, you get waves.
These are like light waves.
So with starshade, it would belike the light goes around the
petals and interacts with itselfto cancel itself out.
(22:00):
What I showed you is a 1% scalemodel.
1%.
So starshade would be a hundredtimes bigger.
SPEAKER_02 (22:09):
Oh wow.
SPEAKER_03 (22:10):
What isn't?
Do you want to describe it forthe listeners?
That relates to the lensing Ijust showed you, that ginormous
black structure.
SPEAKER_02 (22:17):
Oh big.
Yeah, and that's one of thepetals.
SPEAKER_03 (22:21):
One of the petals.
SPEAKER_02 (22:22):
Yeah, there's a so it's like a long it is.
It's a yeah, it's it's enormous.
So you're building that now tolaunch.
SPEAKER_03 (22:32):
Starshade has been developed by NASA and it's
reached quite a level ofmaturity.
But right now, we don't have aplan for it, doesn't have a
funding plan to go forward rightnow, say.
SPEAKER_02 (22:45):
So let's talk about missions.
So you're deputy sciencedirector of TESS.
What is TESS and what are someof the discoveries it's made for
those who don't know it?
SPEAKER_03 (22:55):
Sure.
TESS is a transit mission.
It launched in April 2018.
TESS is basically four glorifiedtelephoto lenses, about 10
centimeters in aperture.
Each has a giant baffle.
They're very custom made up.
It's kind of a glorifiedtelephoto lens.
SPEAKER_02 (23:10):
Is there anything that's been a discovery that
really surprised you that itcame out with?
SPEAKER_03 (23:14):
Sure.
Let me just finish describingthe mission.
It has these four telephotolenses and they're bolted on a
platform, and the whole missionorbits Earth in a very highly
inclined, highly ellipticalorbit to have as much time in
the dark away from Earth aspossible.
And it looks at a giant strip ofthe sky and covers tens of
thousands of stars, a millionstars every month.
(23:35):
Tess has found, I mean, its goalwas to find a lot of planets
that could be followed up withthe James Webb Space Telescope,
transiting planets whoseatmospheres we could try to
observe.
So in that regard, Tess hasfound a few hundred prime
candidates for the James WebbSpace Telescope to follow up.
And it's definitely beensucceeding at that goal.
(23:56):
It's found a lot of things.
I mean, I can't point to onespecific thing that would be the
next thing's like.
But you know, it's found acombination of things.
It's found many planetstransiting small red dwarf stars
that are easily accessible.
Tess has found some planetstransiting very, very young
stars, stars as young as just afew million years old to help us
(24:19):
understand planet formation.
Because most mature systems arenot millions, but they're
billions of years old.
And studied a lot of thingsoutside of exoplanets.
SPEAKER_02 (24:32):
The system that's closest to us, the Proxima Apha
Centauri.
Do you think that they'll findplanets?
I mean, do you think there's athere's a chance that there'll
be something habitable for us?
SPEAKER_03 (24:44):
Absolutely.
In fact, our nearest star,Proxima Centauri, it's a red
dwarf star, smaller than our sunby about half or a bit smaller.
It has evidence for anEarth-mass planet in its
habitable zone.
SPEAKER_02 (24:57):
With a red dwarf, what would be different?
So people that obviously we livehere on Earth, if you were
living on a red dwarf or say wetried to, what would be the
light, the light spectrum wouldbe different?
But what would be different forsomebody living there?
SPEAKER_03 (25:11):
Well, one of the main things that's different is
the planet has to be closer tothe star because the stars give
off very little energy.
So for the planet to have thesame temperatures our Earth has,
it has to be much closer to thestar.
And the main result of proximityto the star is that the planet
ends up in a favorable energystate where the planet rotates
one time for every time itorbits.
(25:34):
So that's complicated, but oneday equals one year.
And just like our moon has thatwith the Earth, due to tides
over a long period of time, ourmoon slowed down until it shows
the same face to Earth at alltimes.
Because people don't think aboutit this way, but the moon is
rotating one time for every timeit orbits.
SPEAKER_02 (25:53):
All times.
SPEAKER_03 (25:54):
Yeah.
So these exoplanets, they wouldbe showing the same face to
their star at all times.
In other words, one side isalways in day and one side is
always in night.
SPEAKER_02 (26:04):
Oh the temperature differences would be staggering.
SPEAKER_03 (26:06):
So well, they might, but as long as the planet had an
atmosphere, the atmosphere willrecirculate all the energy.
Just like here in New England,what happens on a cold day if
you open your front door?
All the hot air rushes out, thecold air rushes in.
So if there's an atmosphere,we're not worried about that.
But I want you to imagine for amoment being on one of these
planets.
Wouldn't that be weird?
You either always have day oralways night.
(26:26):
The sun is always in the sameplace in the sky at all times.
SPEAKER_02 (26:29):
Well, I think of Antarctica, the Arctic, your
circadian rhythm.
So the ability to sleep would bereally tough on the system.
SPEAKER_03 (26:36):
I mean, imagine that on vacation, we astronomers
would go to the night side.
We just see stars all the time.
SPEAKER_02 (26:43):
Permanent study, yeah, to place to study.
SPEAKER_03 (26:45):
Yeah, but there's one more bigger, much bigger
problem.
It's really that these M dwarfstars, they give off flares.
Lots of flares, lots ofhigh-energy particles.
You know how here we get excitedabout the chance to see an
aurora because our sun mighthave given off a little burst.
Right.
Well, this is much moresignificant and dangerous.
In fact, here on Earth, we hadan event in the 1850s called the
Carrington event.
(27:06):
Have you heard of that?
SPEAKER_02 (27:07):
Very much so.
I've studied a lot about it.
Very familiar with theCarrington events, give it a
shot.
It essentially was a massivesolar flare that hit Earth.
And during that time, the onlytechnology that really was of
any sophisticated nature was thetelegraph system.
And it essentially friedanything electronic.
(27:31):
And telegraph lines exploded,telegraph system it showed that
with a massive solar flare, ifwe had something like that
today, the disruption would becatastrophic.
SPEAKER_03 (27:41):
Yeah, it's great.
I mean, it was a flare, and itwas a small part of our sun,
came off our sun, a coronal massejection.
SPEAKER_02 (27:48):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (27:48):
And it came hurtling towards Earth.
And what people don't realizewas that that part of our sun
had a magnetic field embedded.
And this goes back to physics,but when that magnetic field hit
Earth's magnetic field, itinduced a current.
So literally, that breaking downyour story, just to amplify it a
bit, our Earth becameelectrified, literally.
And yeah, people are reallyworried about that now because
(28:11):
if it happened today, as yousaid, we have much more
infrastructure that can bedamaged here on Earth.
It's called Aurora.
And it's a book about howthere's these disaster book
scenarios.
SPEAKER_02 (28:22):
Oh, yeah.
No, I've read a lot ofpost-apocalyptic shots.
Aurora.
Yeah, so the Aurora is the book,the book of Rorro.
SPEAKER_03 (28:29):
Yeah, it's a recent book by David Cope.
Oh, yeah.
I really like the book.
And it's the scenario that thishappens again because supposedly
it's supposed to happen every150 years.
SPEAKER_02 (28:40):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (28:40):
And this book, disaster scenario, that it
happens and what happens to oursociety.
And it follows a couple ofcharacters.
One's a prepper who's preparedfor disaster, and one is not at
all prepared for anything.
And it follows these twocharacters who have a somewhat
intertwined story through thealmost a pandemic without
illness, but it's a pandemic ofa different kind, basically.
But anyway, yeah.
SPEAKER_02 (29:01):
Go ahead.
SPEAKER_03 (29:01):
Just racing ahead.
Well, so here we are into this.
But imagine living on a planetwhere it's a normal occurrence.
Any one of these weekly ormonthly.
I imagine here in New England,in the old days, anyway, we had
snow days.
We get a dump of snow, everyonehas to stay off the roads, work
is canceled, school is canceled.
SPEAKER_01 (29:19):
Right.
SPEAKER_03 (29:20):
Same great day.
I imagine in one of theseworlds, you have a radiation day
where a big burst comes through,it hits your planet.
You've got to go into yourspecial basement and stay there
for a couple days till thatenergy disperses.
SPEAKER_02 (29:32):
How do you really live on a planet like that?
It makes me think about thesolar radiation, the winds,
things that we always talk aboutgoing to a place, but what about
living in a place?
Right.
SPEAKER_03 (29:44):
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_02 (29:45):
Yeah.
I think that's a reallyinteresting thing you bring up
about exoplanets earlier on whenI got to know you through your
work on Venus.
Can you dive deeper into yourfocus on the possibility of life
in Venus's clouds?
Like what could led you toexplore that direction?
SPEAKER_03 (30:04):
Definitely explain that.
I was working on exoplanets, oram, coming up with a list of
gases that might be a sign oflife.
Because in exoplanets, we'researching for life beyond Earth,
not directly, but indirectly.
Here on Earth, for example, wehave oxygen that fills our
atmosphere to 20% by volume.
But without life, plants andphotosynthetic bacteria, we
(30:24):
would literally have no oxygenin our atmosphere.
It's very reactive and needs tobe continuously produced, or we
would have none.
A great sign of life elsewherewould be finding a gas that
doesn't belong.
We can't explain it away anyother way in the context of
environment without life.
So I was part of a team thatmade a discovery, reported
(30:45):
discovery of a gas on Venus, onethat doesn't belong, that can't
be made in any significantquantity by lightning,
volcanoes, meteoric delivery, oranything.
And this gas is calledphosphine.
Now, phosphine, very few peoplehave heard of it because on
Earth, it's only made by ushumans as pesticides or found in
some oxygen-free environmentsassociated with life.
(31:07):
Phosphorus doesn't go withhydrogen to make phosphine, it
goes with oxygen to makephosphates.
So this report became incrediblycontroversial the moment we
released it.
And people, it's still verycontroversial as to whether
phosphine is present.
If it is present, what it allmeans.
And this was a problem,actually, a bit of a career
crisis for me personally, onlybecause that's my goal and
(31:29):
others share the goal to findsigns of life elsewhere.
But it's really hard to believe.
Anyhow, let's put phosphineaside for a moment, because
phosphine reinvigorated the ideathat there might be life in the
Venus clouds, an idea that wasstarted over half a century ago
by Carl Sagan himself.
And the concept is that thesurface of Venus is too hot for
(31:50):
life due to the massive carbondioxide greenhouse atmosphere.
But just like here on Earth, ifyou climb a mountain or go in an
airplane, it gets colder andcolder, right?
As you go up.
And so there's some bigdistance, 50 kilometers above
the Venus surface where it's theright temperature for life.
So that's how I got involved isthrough this phosphine discovery
because it connected exoplanetsto Venus.
(32:12):
And then I and others startedrealizing just how interesting
Venus is.
And what we also realized isthat although people have kept
the idea of life in the cloudsalive, no one did very much
about it.
And that's because the cloudsaren't made of water.
They're made of concentratedsulfuric acid, a very nasty
chemical.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (32:31):
Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_03 (32:32):
Wow.
So nasty.
And life has to persist in theclouds where the temperature is
good.
And we started doing experimentsand we've showed, just to the
complete astonishment ofplanetary scientists, who've
assumed that concentratedsulfuric acid destroys anything
interesting.
But we found that, for example,our amino acids are stable in
concentrated sulfuric acid,chemically modified, but stable.
(32:55):
We have found a growing list ofother biomolecules that are
stable there.
And we're doing theseexperiments of molecules in
sulfuric acid to demonstrate,not that there is life on Venus,
but that it's worth exploring.
And so hand in hand with theselaboratory experiments, we have
designed a series of missionconcepts, missions to go to
(33:15):
Venus to search for signs oflife.
SPEAKER_02 (33:18):
If we found life in the atmosphere, like how do you
think it'll change the approachto searching for life elsewhere?
Because it's disrupting thestatus quo, which a lot of
people how would that change theapproach?
SPEAKER_03 (33:32):
I think it will help people open up their minds.
I mean, honestly, if we would dofind life on Venus, it would
just be so shocking.
And I hope it will open up morepeople to be bold and to take
risks and to just pursue thingsthat others think is ridiculous.
I mean, I think it reallyhopefully would motivate us to
(33:53):
uh find the fastest, cheapestway to get to other bodies in
our solar system.
Because there's a lot of placeswhere there could be life.
They're just very hard toexplore.
SPEAKER_02 (34:02):
Yeah, I feel like there's two paths in the search.
There's one, which is justsearch for life in general.
Right.
And then there's the search foran earth analog, like another
humanity, if you will.
I mean, we're trying that withother things that are close to
us, but can you really sustainhumanity for the long term?
Not known at this point.
(34:22):
But you've shared so many greatuh stories.
How close this is completespeculation.
I mean, with the advanced intechnology, with AI analyzing
all the data, do you think we'reclose to finding our unearth
analog?
SPEAKER_03 (34:39):
We're very far from even though we have thousands of
planets, yeah, an Earth aroundthe sun, an Earth around a
sun-like star is amongst thehardest to find.
And so despite the thousands ofplanets and the huge,
fascinating field of exoplanets,we're asking our instruments,
our detectors to go so far we'renot ready yet.
(35:01):
And it's not just that thetechnology is so difficult to
get ready.
It's that the methods we havehave hit a bit of a plateau
because our sun has spots andhas granulation from convection
and noise in the star itself,our stars themselves, is
preventing it.
So AI is going to help us, butit's not going to be the magic
(35:23):
bullet.
SPEAKER_02 (35:24):
It was just more about processing data, the speed
of which you can pull the thingsout to take a deeper look.
SPEAKER_03 (35:29):
Right.
I know.
There's two things.
I have this one for person Iknew before who said computers
make us dumb because you canthrow all the processing power
you want.
And yes, that will definitelyget you some gain.
But let's imagine you have afactor of 10 to go, and throwing
the computer at it gets you afactor of two, which is amazing.
I mean, that's huge.
You still have another factor offive.
So I think we are working onboth at once, using our brains
(35:51):
to sort through the informationcontent of all the data and
getting the computers to help usfor sure.
But there's still quite a longway to go, but we're working it.
SPEAKER_02 (36:00):
Well, my father refused to learn CAD for 30 some
years, and he still can use theslide rules.
He's in a traditional in thatsense, sticking with the tried
and true.
Advancements in technology, doyou think we still need to have
that say the next 50 years, 100years?
What do we need to really haveto detect life that on an
exoplanet?
Because it kinds of life.
SPEAKER_03 (36:21):
Well, there's several things.
We need to get our list of ourtargets, the sun-like stars that
have Earth mass or earth-sizedplanets.
That's one step.
The second step is we have to dobetter with what we have.
Then we have to go to spaceabove the blurring effects of
Earth's atmosphere to study theatmospheres of all these and to
see which ones have water vaporindicative of water oceans, to
(36:42):
see which have hopefully oxygenor ozone, a sign of life.
And we need to then hammer awayat those prime candidates to see
what else is going on.
But ultimately, the thaw sceneon Venus lesson is that no one
will ever fully believe just agas far away and noisy data.
No one will ever believe a gason a planet far away with noisy
(37:06):
data.
We're going to need more.
So we can see in our lifetimes,it would be a dream just to have
a list of candidates.
Hey, here's a planet with wateroceans and oxygen.
But we'll have to eventually thenext step.
So since you've given us 50years, we'll at the same time as
stretching our technology toeven find this list of
candidates, we'll have to startthinking of new paradigms in
(37:28):
outer space.
We have to find ways to, yeah,get a lot more data.
And there are definitely someideas out there that we need to
pursue.
SPEAKER_02 (37:37):
Yeah, because even solar sales or even the micro
devices, I can't remember thename of them, that were going
out, they're being starship.
Yeah.
Those they're going point one.
Speed that'll take a hundredyears.
That's and they even just sendback the day.
It's this round trip of data.
So it is, yeah.
(37:58):
It's it's it's the lens of thelong view and long view.
SPEAKER_03 (38:04):
We have to get used to the long view because we're
gonna have done the easy things,we'll have our lists of
candidates.
What can we invest in?
What can we be patient with toreally know for sure?
SPEAKER_02 (38:14):
Oh, I I your memoir, which I read parts of it, is the
smallest light in the universe.
SPEAKER_03 (38:22):
So what made you write such a personal well the
original thing that motivated mewas a major personal tragedy
that just was incrediblycrushing.
But thinking of this tragedyagainst the vastness of the
(38:42):
universe, all the stars outthere, the huge expanse, it was
definitely hard to reconcile.
So, on the whole, I wanted totell my story.
It started out that way becauseit's been an incredible journey.
But it was also to capture thisidea of hope and longing that
we're all looking for something.
Each one of us humans is on ajourney of some kind.
(39:04):
And although my journey is tofind another earth, we all have
something.
And this title, The SmallestLights in the Universe, has a
double meaning.
One is that we want to find theother earths to know that we're
not alone.
But at the same time, on ourpersonal journeys, it's
definitely an up and down.
And sometimes you will hit rockbottom.
(39:25):
You can't avoid it.
And there you've got to hold onto whatever your tiny lights
are, those little tiny beaconsof hope that are going to get
you out from the bottom of thatcanyon back to where you need to
be to complete your journey.
SPEAKER_02 (39:38):
That's wonderful advice.
It made me think about yourprofessor at MIT and you've
taught a lot of young minds.
Do you add that with other typesof guidance?
SPEAKER_03 (39:49):
I don't usually give advice because I try to stick to
the professional.
But once in a while there's acrisis, students commit suicide
pretty much annually.
And then I definitely get intoit.
And I definitely try to give thevibe or explain.
I definitely try to helpstudents.
I mean, it's a mix.
I try to stay professional, butwhere it's warranted, I
definitely try to communicate.
(40:11):
You know, you've got to focus onwhat matters.
And it's usually not your grade.
SPEAKER_02 (40:14):
To study in this field, what do you think are the
most important qualities to bein this type of field?
It's very exciting, but journey.
SPEAKER_03 (40:23):
Well, the main advice I would give is to find
something that you love doing,that you're also very good at,
and that additionally you canget a job in.
It's very hard to line all thatup, but if you can, that's
recipe to success.
SPEAKER_02 (40:37):
That's great.
I know we have to wrap up, butI'd love to have you on again.
I think we can talk for anotherhour about this.
How do people connect with yourwork?
How do people find you?
SPEAKER_03 (40:46):
Find me from my website, Sarah Seeger.com.space.
And I'm also on Facebook,Instagram, LinkedIn, and a bunch
of other social media platforms.
You can just search for my name,Sarah Seeger.
SPEAKER_02 (41:02):
Great.
Sarah, thanks for your time andjust uh great conversation.
And uh we'll have to bewonderful talking to you.
SPEAKER_03 (41:09):
I hope we can continue the conversation.
SPEAKER_02 (41:11):
This is great.
Thanks a lot.
Have a have a have a greatholiday.
Thanks a lot.
SPEAKER_00 (41:15):
Goodbye.
SPEAKER_02 (41:16):
Bye.
SPEAKER_00 (41:17):
Thanks for listening to the Think Forward Podcast.
You can find us on all the majorpodcast platforms and at
www.thinkforwardshow.com as wellas on YouTube under Think
Forward Show.
See you next time.
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