Through the Looking Glass

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0:41I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And I want to start the show on a mountaintop in Chile, 8 ,000 feet above sea level at Las Campanas Observatory. Yes, Las Campanas is in the northern part of Chile, in what we call the norte chico, the small north. This is Oscar Duhalde. He's an instrument and operations specialist. And before that, he was a telescope operator there.

1:15On February 24th, 1987, Oscar was working his usual shift, guiding the telescope by hand, which he says is exhausting.

1:32And by 2 a.m., I say, it's enough. I deserve to have a coffee at this time. So he gets his coffee and heads outside for a break. And all the sky, especially in the southern, you see a lot of stars, especially here in Chile. The sky was beautiful, like summer sky in Las Campanas. And high above, Oscar sees our neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. He had spent the previous few years taking detailed images of this galaxy. For that reason, I recognized very well that part of the sky. And around the LMC, the Large Magellanic Cloud, there is only one bright star. And I use that star always for focus the telescope.

2:19But when Oscar looks up this time, something is different. Immediately, I recognized a new star there that I was sure wasn't there before. A new star. So Oscar tells Barry Medore, one of the astronomers, about it, and then realizes it actually may be a supernova, an exploding star. Barry looked at me and said, Oscar, a supernova at the LMC? I said, well, it's difficult, but not impossible. So you actually spotted a supernova just by looking up into the sky. No telescope. Well, at that time, I didn't realize how powerful my eyes was. It's not easy to recognize a new star in any place of the sky.

3:15And in that moment, the excitement started. I say, well, we did. Oscar became the only living person on the planet to discover a supernova with the naked eye, our oldest tool for peering into the universe. For millennia, people have been studying the stars with the naked eye. And it's really astonishing to look at what people were able to discover and what people were able to learn just through stargazing. This is Emily Levesque. She's an astrophysicist, and she writes about the history of astronomy. Ironically, the first instances of sort of using telescopes for astronomy began just a few years after the last naked-eye supernova.

4:02There was a naked-eye supernova in 1604. And just a few years after that, we started using telescopes to study the universe. And then it was 300-odd years later in 1987 when Oscar Duhalde saw another naked-eye supernova. And now we had these beautiful modern telescopes at our disposal to try and study it. So you can see why that would have been such an exciting discovery when it happened. Our senses can only take us so far in understanding the world around us. But with the right tools, we can look further, see deeper, and push past those limits. We can venture into uncharted territory. Are we alone in the universe?

4:42And ask questions we didn't even know we had. Where did we come from? Where is the universe going? What is our place in it? Because sometimes big discoveries only happen if we're willing to fall down the rabbit hole. I just about fainted, I feel like. Give us something to reach for. I think we could talk about the human mind, the unconscious, as the final frontier. And something to dream of. So today on the show, we're traveling through the looking glass to explore strange new worlds using telescopes, microscopes, and even our unconscious minds. But first, back to Emily Levesque. She says that long before Oscar Duhalde spotted the supernova with his naked eye, astronomers were using something almost as primitive to make sense of the sky.

5:31Small plates of glass. Astronomers were using these very delicate glass plates to capture images from telescopes. The plates were chemically treated so they would respond to light. And then when you loaded one of these plates into a telescope's camera and opened the shutter, you would get this exquisite little black and white image of whatever the telescope was pointed at. Needless to say, these fragile pieces of glass were pretty hard to work with. Astronomers would mess with the chemical treatment that dictated how the plates responded to light. They would slice them down to size to fit into the cameras.

6:07They would do all this work in the dark because once you expose a plate to light, it starts to darken. But scientists made huge discoveries with these glass plates, including one in 1923 by someone you may have heard of before, Edwin Hubble. Most people know the name Hubble because of our wonderful space telescope that we have right now. But Edwin Hubble was an astronomer in the first half of the 20th century. And one of his biggest discoveries was that there are other galaxies beyond our own. Early in his career, sort of early in Hubble's time, we thought that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was possibly the whole universe.

6:48And Hubble got observations of one of our neighboring galaxies, the Andromeda galaxy, with glass plates. At the time, Andromeda was referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula, and people weren't quite sure what it was. And Hubble's observations with glass plates meant that he was able to estimate the distance to Andromeda and demonstrate that it must be incredibly far away. It had to be another galaxy. So Hubble made this discovery almost 100 years ago. But the images that we have of Andromeda today, they are so different. They are so detailed compared to when we had to use those glass plates, right?

7:30Yeah. So if you Google it, you can actually probably find a picture of the glass plate that Hubble used to make his discovery. And if you look at that plate, you can see these sort of wisps of spiral arms and this hint of what we know today looks like a galaxy. But if you just look up a big modern photograph of Andromeda, you'll probably see observations with the Hubble Space Telescope. So a very different type of Hubble observation. And nowadays, we can pinpoint and study individual stars in Andromeda down to really exquisite detail. We can study very dim stars in the galaxy. We can watch how the stars move.

8:11It's really just amazing how much detail we can now achieve with the observing tools that we have available to us today. Here's Emily Levesque on the TED stage, showing a photo of the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile. This telescope will photograph the entire southern sky every few days, over and over, following a preset pattern for 10 years. Computers and algorithms affiliated with the observatory will then compare every pair of images taken of the same patch of sky, looking for anything that's gotten brighter or dimmer, like a variable star, or looking for anything that's appeared, like a supernova.

8:53Right now, we discover about 1 ,000 supernovae every year. The Rubin Observatory will be capable of discovering 1 ,000 supernovae every night. It's going to dramatically change the face of astronomy and of how we study things that change in the sky. And it will do all of this largely without much human intervention at all. It will follow that preset pattern and computationally find anything that's changed or appeared. So it sounds like telescopes today almost remove all of the human aspects of stargazing. But Oscar Duhalde used the most basic tool available, his eyes. Is there still room for spontaneous observation in astronomy?

9:38Yeah. So we think of the story of Oscar discovering a supernova with the naked eye as this very unusual one-off. And it was. He was the only living person on the planet to discover a supernova with the naked eye in hundreds of years. But naked eye astronomy can still sometimes be kind of cool. And the best recent example of this is actually something that happened about a year and a half ago to the star Betelgeuse. So a lot of people know Betelgeuse. It's the bright red star in one of the shoulders of the constellation Orion. And in the fall of 2019, Betelgeuse started to get dramatically dimmer to the point where you could notice it with your naked eye.

10:21And amateur astronomers and small telescope users were the ones who started spotting this. So my colleagues and I were able to really on short notice snatch these brief moments of time on telescopes to try and point to Betelgeuse while it was this dim to try and figure out what was going on. I have a lot of people ask me, you know, how do I get into stargazing? How do I get into astronomy? And there's sometimes an assumption that you have to run out and buy an expensive telescope. But you can enjoy astronomy with just your eyes and just enjoy how beautiful the sky looks and try to look for patterns and look for unusual things.

11:00If you have a pair of binoculars, you can get just amazing views of things like the moon. So it's a really wonderful pursuit, even if all you're just doing is looking up and enjoying how beautiful it is. So I have to ask Emily, I mean, and this is full confession here, I get kind of freaked out when I spend any time doing astronomy. I think the existential nature of trying to peer into the universe, like it kind of messes with my head, to be honest. How do you deal with that? It's funny because I've heard several people talk about space and the universe as being scary and the scale of it as just being stunning.

11:44And I think it's something that a lot of astronomers never really forget, but that we get used to or that we put aside. And I talked about Betelgeuse and the fact that it had suddenly dimmed. And something that we tucked to the back of our minds was that Betelgeuse is 645 light years away. The light that we were studying from Betelgeuse had left that star 645 years earlier. And whenever you observe an object in the night sky, you're kind of looking back in time, it's like jumping into a tiny time machine. But once in a while, someone would ask me, you know, do you think Betelgeuse has already died as a supernova?

12:26Do you think the star is already gone and the light from that supernova just isn't going to get here for another 100 or 200 or 600 years? And I always think, you know, maybe it did, but we won't know for a few hundred years. So let's work at what we have. And that's just an astonishing scale to be working on and dealing with as part of your day-to-day job. That's Emily Levesque. She's an astrophysicist, and her book is called The Last Stargazers. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, through the looking glass. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

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14:29This message comes from TED Talks Daily, the podcast that brings you a new idea every day. Learn what's transforming humanity, from balancing AI and your critical thinking to surpassing discoveries about the adolescent brain. Find TED Talks Daily wherever you listen. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, we are venturing through the looking glass, extending our perception and exploring strange new worlds, including here on Earth. So when you land on the packed snow runway in McMurdo, yeah, you don't see anything. It's just snow. So there's no trees, there's no bushes, there's no grass, there's none of that.

15:16Most people think of Antarctica as really desolate. You know, it's covered with over a mile of ice in many locations. It's the coldest continent. It's also extremely dry. It's a polar desert. But the thing that I feel like a lot of people don't know about Antarctica is that it's really brimming with life in a lot of different locations. It's just that most of it is invisible to us. You would need to have a microscope in order to see them. This is Ariel Waldman. She's a wildlife filmmaker at the microbial scale. And I'm an advisor to NASA, and I'm also an Antarctic explorer. Ariel first became interested in Antarctic microbes back in 2013.

16:02She was working with NASA, and she met astrobiologists who study Antarctica's extreme conditions and the life forms that actually thrive there. I had learned that a lot of biologists go to Antarctica, but they very rarely ever take any photos or videos of the creatures that they study there. And so I kind of saw an opportunity to really help both scientists and help people around the world actually get to see all this amazing stuff. So that realization, that is what inspired you to basically become the first filmmaker to document these hidden ecosystems. But how did you go from that inspiration to making it happen?

16:47It could not have been easy. Going to Antarctica just required a lot of preparation. I prepared for months, and this was after it took me five years of applying to go to Antarctica and working towards becoming a wildlife filmmaker at the microbial scale. And so I was self-taught in microscopy, and then I ended up joining the San Francisco Microscopical Society, which I am now the president of. Super geeky. Whoa. So you had to become an expert microscopist. Am I saying that right? Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so do you remember, like, do you remember what it was like when you first got to put a sample under the microscope in Antarctica and peer into this tiny alien world for the first time?

17:35I just about fainted, I feel like. The very first sample I got to look at was from divers who had gone under the sea ice. and I had an idea of like a few of the different critters that I was going to see. But when I put the first sample under the microscope, I saw these beautiful diatoms, which are, you know, microalgae with glass shells, which are just beautiful. They're geometric gems of the sea and of different areas of water around the earth. But I found diatoms that had triangular shapes, and they just looked like they had been manufactured by humans. They're so gorgeous. And, yeah, I don't know.

18:19It's hard to put it into words just how excited I was. Okay, so talk us through it. Like, what was the plan for you and your trusty microscopes? So the plan in Antarctica was to take my microscopes around to different locations and really be able to find life that was under the ice. So I was looking for life underneath the sea ice. I was looking for life embedded inside glacier ice, life that was near frozen lakes. And I would go around and I would take samples from different locations. And some of the areas where I sampled that were more hardcore to get to, I would join up with another team. And one of those hardcore places was beneath the ice, like into the water.

19:05This was absolutely freezing water, right? Yeah, absolutely freezing water. I believe the water is negative 2 Celsius. So because it's salt water, it can go a little bit beyond the normal freezing point of water. And there are divers in Antarctica that regularly go down under 9 feet thick of sea ice and explore the ocean down there. It's really amazing.

19:34I was watching these divers going like, why would anyone want to do that? That is freezing cold. Like, there's nothing that can be that worth it. But thankfully, there's this metal tube that McMurdo Station puts into the ice. And you can crawl down this tube. And at the bottom of this tube, you're embedded between the sea ice and the seafloor. So you're kind of floating there, so to speak, with windows where you're able to see all of the life on the seafloor. And you can hear all of these amazing Weddell seals, which sound like synthesizers all around you. It's really magical. And it really changed my perspective on why anyone would ever want to be a diver in Antarctica.

20:32So I could help direct divers to take collections from the sea ice ceiling and from the seafloor. And then I would take the samples back to the main laboratory at McMurdo Station and filter them and look at them under the microscope as freshly as I could so that I could see them interacting in the way that they would interact in their home environment. So tell us about the microbes that you found and the footage that you took of them. We're actually going to look at them and describe some of them here. And the first one is a tardigrade. Ariel, what is a tardigrade? So a tardigrade is also known as a water bear or sometimes even a moss piglet.

21:13And they are tiny microscopic animals. They are actually animals. They have eight legs. They're incredibly cute. They look like little gummy bears with claws, I always like to say. They've got two little eye spots. Tardigrade means slow walker, so they are not the quickest microbes that you'll see under the microscope. But they're just adorable, and they're famous for being hardcore, for being able to survive extreme cold or extreme dryness, radiation, and lots of other things. so it looks like to me and okay yes a gummy bear you say gummy bear I think it also looks like a manatee with eight arms but then see-through and microscopic and it's just kind of moving around with its little arms what is it doing yeah so the little claws on tardigrades are really good at going through moss so their most common environment that you'll find these tardigrades in is moss and those claws allow them to be really nimble but when you put one on a glass slide it has trouble.

22:17It's kind of like an ice skating rink for it. So what you're seeing is a tardigrade which is able to navigate through moss fairly easily, but once it tries walking over the glass it slips and slides and has trouble getting traction. Wow, so much going on for the little tardigrade. Okay, so let's take a look at the next one. I'm just going to describe it. It's kind of oblong, translucent with what looks like these little green, I don't know, beach balls kind of moving around inside of it. Oh, and it's moving a bit. It's got a little shimmy. What is happening here, Ariel? Who is this? Yeah, so this is a ciliate.

22:54It's a type of protist. And protists, they're not animals, they're not plants, and they're not fungi. They are their own thing. And you saw it just here poop out like a little piece of stuff from its stomach. It pooped. What? This is what I love about ciliates. They're called ciliates because they have cilia on their outside, which just means little fringy bits that are like little hairs that they use to get around and feel for food and other things like that. But the thing I love about ciliates is that you can see their entire digestive system. Pretty much it's just a circle of digestion that you're looking at.

23:32Yeah. You know, earlier in the show, we spoke to Emily Levesque. She's an astronomer. And it strikes me that you both have been transported into places that it's kind of hard to believe they exist. Like without seeing them, you may not believe them. Is that what happened to you with this project? I feel like it did. I feel that, you know, it's the same as a telescope. It really shows you another world. But I think microscopes even more so because this is the world that you already live in. So instead of showing you this faraway distant planet and imagining what that is like, you already know what Earth is like.

24:12It's just that you don't know that you're walking by entire zoos of tiny animals every day. You know, tardigrades, while they're famous for surviving these extreme environments, they live in moss everywhere across the planet. So every single sidewalk crack that you walk by that has a little piece of moss embedded inside it, there is most likely a lot of tardigrades in there. And this is what I love about microscopes is really it gives you much more insight into your experience as a human on Earth, which is a pretty amazing planet when you study space. And so has that outlook and this experience changed you in some way and where you're headed?

24:52For me, my own journey in microscopes, I think, is really growing. I'm wanting to do more field microscopy in different locations. So whether it be going into prairies or the rainforests of Madagascar, it's very clear that being able to go into the field and look at the microscopic critters that are around and being able to showcase that to the world is something that's really useful because there's just so much that, you know, we enjoy from BBC documentaries of wildlife. And we should have that same experience for the microscopic world around us. And that's really where I'm hoping to take everything.

25:34That's Ariel Waldman. She's a wildlife filmmaker at the microbial scale. You can see all her microbes at lifeundertheice.org. And you can watch her talk at TED.com. On the show today, through the looking glass. And so far, we've taken the looking glass quite literally. Scientists peering into space or magnifying the tiny universes that exist in a drop of water. But how about we turn that looking glass inward and into our own minds? I think we could talk about the human mind, the unconscious, as the final frontier. This is therapist Rick Doblin. And what we need to do is to engage in a deep understanding and exploration of the unconscious.

26:21And Rick researches the final frontier of the unconscious with psychedelics. Preparing for this talk has been scarier for me than preparing for LSD therapy. Here he is on the TED stage. Psychedelics are to the study of the mind what the microscope is to biology and the telescope is to astronomy. Dr. Stanislav Grof spoke those words. Right now, there are clinical trials using psychedelic drugs in conjunction with therapy to treat PTSD, depression, social anxiety, substance abuse, alcoholism, and suicide. And so far, the results are promising. Psychedelic psychotherapy is an attempt to go after the root causes of the problems with just relatively few administrations, as contrasted to most of the psychiatric drugs used today that are mostly just reducing symptoms and are meant to be taken on a daily basis.

27:19But changing people's minds over the safety and efficacy of psychedelic drugs has taken decades. In the 1950s and 60s, psychedelic research flourished and showed great promise for the fields of psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy. but psychedelics leaked out of the research settings and began to be used by the counterculture and by the anti-Vietnam War movement. And so there was a backlash. America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. So there's this huge backlash. There's lots of fear. There's cautionary tales around psychedelics. But despite that, you decided to try it anyway.

28:01What was your experience like? Well, I felt like this experience opened me up to emotions. It started making me more balanced and was really starting to make me think of existential questions. And who am I and where am I and where did I come from? When you shift from your ego orientation, where you don't see things from your individual perspective so much, you're more a sense of the group and of how we're all interconnected. And this is only a few years after we had the first images of the Earth from space. And so my kind of awakening to psychedelics was, you could say, humanity's awakening to our place in the universe.