ReThinking: Searching for life on other planets with astrophysicist Sara Seager

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2:48I remember clearly getting to see the moon through a telescope for the first time. It's absolutely astonishing. The moon is literally a whole other world. And I just thought, wow, what is out there? It's so huge and vast and magnificent. You know, whatever's out there beyond Earth. Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

3:26Sarah Seeger is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist whose research focuses on exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, orbiting other stars. When we spoke, she was at MIT, sitting in front of her chalkboard, which was covered in equations. Sarah, is that the Goodwill hunting chalkboard behind you? Well, it is MIT. It's on brand. What are those equations? Well, these equations describe exoplanets that fortuitously are aligned in a way that they go in front of the star as seen from our viewpoint. And we call these transiting planets and it's the main way we discover exoplanets today. Sarah's main research goal is to find another Earth, meaning a planet outside our solar system that could sustain life.

4:08We talked about how to detect exoplanets, the likelihood of finding alien life forms out there, and how her unique childhood circumstances led to her groundbreaking work.

4:20I have so many questions for you about this, but before we get there, take me back to your origin story. How did you end up in this field? So my origin story, I always loved the night sky. And, you know, coupled to that, I had a very quirky childhood. I lived with my mother and stepfather, and my stepfather was literally like a mean monster who mentally tortured me. And at the same time, I lived with my dad on weekends, and even though he was an educated man, he believed in crazy things. Like, he adored me so much. He told me he believed in reincarnation and that we would come back to this earth together, like again and again as like business partners or brothers or something.

5:02And And so there I was, like at 11 years old, going to the library, taking out a stack of books to kind of sort through this on my own. So what I got out of my childhood was, because of my stepfather, like a distrust of authority. And because of my dad, openness to crazy ideas that I could think through on my own. And wow, what a winning combination for science. Because we have to be able to challenge authority and we have to entertain out their ideas and sort through what is possible. Wow. Wow. So how did that take you to searching for exoplanets? Well, it sounds so cliche, and I don't know how I came to this at such a young age in my early 20s, but life is short.

5:43And if you find something you're good at that you love doing, you should go for it. So I decided to go to graduate school in astronomy. And when I was in graduate school in the mid-1990s, that's when exoplanets were first discovered. And my PhD thesis advisor, by the way, was his first student. And he also, he only told me this a couple of decades later. He didn't realize that you shouldn't be giving a graduate student like an incredibly risky project. But I guess neither of us knew any better and we thought it was an amazing idea. So I jumped on the chance to work on these new exoplanets. So what is an exoplanet?

6:18An exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than the sun. Because in the night sky, all of those stars are suns. And if our sun has planets, like Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc., it makes sense that other stars have planets also, and they do. We didn't know this with much confidence, though, when you first got into the field, did we? Not at all. The evidence we had was that we can see stars being born, and around those stars we see disks of leftover stuff of gas and dust that we assumed formed planets. But when I first got into it, everyone had thought that exoplanets would be like our solar system.

6:57like small planets close to the star with massive planets like Jupiter quite far from the star. And that's not what people found initially, because our selection biases what's easier to find are big planets close to the star. So it's not only that not much was known about them, but what was known wasn't believed. And then, I mean, slowly the evidence grew, but not after a lot of like back and forth. And eventually the evidence just became incontrovertible that exoplanets are real, and they're incredibly different from our solar system. How do you detect one? There's so many ways to detect exoplanets.

7:34The most common one today is by watching star brightnesses as a function of time. So to oversimplify, it would be like taking your phone and pointing at a field in the night sky and just taking a picture over and over again, like for nights on end and years on end. And what we're looking for is a tiny drop in brightness because some planets, their orbits are aligned perfectly with our point of view. And so the planet goes in front of the star as seen from our viewpoint. And repeatedly, every time it orbits its star, it goes in front of the star. And there's a tiny, tiny drop in brightness. Like what you have to understand is we don't spatially resolve those stars.

8:14They're just points of light. Yet we can measure the drop in brightness precisely enough to find evidence of planets orbiting their star. But it's a rare occurrence to align just so. And that's why we have to stare at the night sky and look at hundreds of thousands, like to millions of stars at one time. I can imagine then that AI has started to radically transform this detection process. Like yes and no. You know how there's two uses for AI? I'd say two uses in science. One is just to do our job better. So we can train AI with supervised learning or unsupervised learning and just get it to do a more uniform job more quickly.

8:54But the part about AI that we really want it to do is find something we humans couldn't do. So not just doing what we can do better, but putting things together in a new way. For exoplanets, it's really done more of that first category, just done things that we can do better, faster or more thoroughly or just more efficiently or with a tiny bit more insight. It hasn't really found like a new path, a new way to do things. Do you have a sense of how many exoplanets might be out there? Trillions, trillions in our galaxy alone. We have just scratched the surface. It's like we can meet our neighbors, but we can't meet the people on the other side of the globe.

9:28So literally, every star appears to have a planetary system. And in our galaxy alone, there are hundreds of billions of stars. So, wow, I mean, if every star has multiple planets, that's more than hundreds of billions. I mean, that's just, that's a number at a scale that is almost impossible to grasp. It is. It is almost impossible. I mean, it's hard. I can't even picture a trillion of anything. I know. Just think about that vast night sky. At the very darkest sky, if we had good eyesight, we could see only thousands of stars. And yet there are hundreds of billions out there in our galaxy alone and hundreds of billions of galaxies.

10:06Incredible. So if that doesn't make you feel insignificant, like what does? Yeah. And I guess, you know, the other thing that makes really salient for me is it makes it seem so much more unlikely that there isn't intelligent life anywhere. I agree. Biologists don't like this, but yes, the numbers just seem to tell you there has to be intelligent life somewhere out there. Why don't biologists like that? Because we don't understand how life originated on Earth. And so we cannot assume that it originates elsewhere until we understand how it happens here. Okay, but the question of mechanisms seems like a really different one than the question of probabilities, doesn't it?

10:45Well, aren't they related? I mean, you have to know how something occurs in order to assess the probability of it occurring again. Fair. But, you know, I guess thinking about this as a social scientist, even not understanding the mechanisms, I think, what are the odds that, you know, we're talking one in a trillion times how many galaxies? Well, I'm with you. I'm with you. And just to be honest, one thing that a lot of us want is to find a sign of life. One more sign of life with an independent genesis. And then I do think we can, you know, we can all agree that if it formed twice independently, the chance then is just so believable that it's happening elsewhere.

11:30So it's hard for me to even imagine. How would it be the case that it's just here? That it's just Earth? Sure. Let's for now agree that there has to be intelligent life somewhere out there with trillions of possibilities in our galaxy alone. What we're more focused on in a practical fashion is the nearby stars. So it's not trillions of them, or rather hundreds of billions of stars. It's maybe like the nearest hundred stars or the nearest few thousand stars that we can legitimately search with our generation's capabilities. Yep. And then, okay, the probability starts to feel a little smaller at that point.

12:06It does, unfortunately. What do you think is the probability that we find intelligent life in our lifetime? Well, okay, I hate to break it to you. Just on my personal opinion alone, it's pretty low. I figured as much. I might even put it at zero for now. Wow. And why? Is it just too far? Well, a lot has to happen for intelligent life to evolve, right? I may be getting outside of my depth here, but I think back to like the dinosaurs, right? The dinosaurs dominated. I can't imagine us humans even coexisting with dinosaurs. They're just so big and vicious. If the dinosaurs had survived, there wouldn't be room for us humans or some other life form to be intelligent there.

12:46So it's not just that we have to have planets nearby that have the right conditions for life, but life has to be able to evolve and get to a place where there's room for intelligent life to also evolve and to be willing to communicate with us. There's just a lot that has to go right. So what would it mean if there is life on other planets? How do you think about our world changing if we do discover it? Well, I think that really depends. I think on a daily basis, it's not going to change our life, right? But I definitely think it changes our view of our place in the cosmos. You know, for a long time, for centuries, millennia, people thought that Earth was literally the center of the universe.

13:24We thought everything revolved around us. And later on in the Copernican Revolution, people recognized or acknowledged or found evidence that we're not the center. but Earth revolves around our sun and other planets revolve around our sun, and therefore our sun is the center. And later on, we realized our sun is just but one of countless stars orbiting the center of our galaxy. And now our galaxy is just one of, you know, so many galaxies. So it kind of carries us forward in this cosmic story of what is our place? How do we fit in? Okay, so timeline-wise, how long do you think it might take to discover life if it's out there?

13:59Well, let's just start with simple bacteria, like not even complex life, just the simplest life form we can think about. Maybe even simpler than our bacteria here on Earth. Let's start with that. That we hope to have evidence for. Maybe not robust, solid findings, but kind of suggestions. We really hope to accomplish that in our lifetime, starting with our solar system, the subsurface of Mars. One of my favorites is the clouds of Venus. Little primitive microbes just floating around. perhaps subsurface of one of Jupiter's or Saturn's icy moons, like Enceladus is one of the favorite targets. It's got plumes of water kind of bursting out.

14:38And a lot of these places we've seen organic molecules or have hints from models that organic molecules could be there. So I think that is a big, big deal to find signs of primitive life. In terms of exoplanets, we now can study their atmospheres. And we're looking there for signs of life, like a few steps removed from actually, you know, collecting samples and looking for bacteria, but gases that don't belong. Like here on earth, we have oxygen that fills our atmosphere to 20 % by volume. But without life, without plants and photosynthetic bacteria, we'd have no oxygen because it's so reactive.

15:12So we're looking for gases that don't belong. So I know I'm like really excited and maybe you and others are not as excited about just finding these tentative hints, But that's where we're at. No, I think it's tremendously exciting to find even the most basic signs of life anywhere outside of Earth. I mean, that to me would be an earth-shattering, no pun intended, discovery. And I think, you know, I guess then there are so many questions this raises for me. One is the way you do your job, it almost eliminates the Fermi paradox for me. In what way? As I understand it, and please correct my lay understanding, but when I first read about the paradox, it was the idea that, you know, on the one hand, it seems highly likely that there should be intelligent life out there.

16:03And on the other hand, if it were the case, we would already know about it and we don't. And therefore, what's going on? And from your point of view, it sounds like there are two simple explanations of this. One is that our tools are too primitive to detect it or to reach it. And the second is that it might just be way too far away. That is definitely one of my thoughts on it as well. But the other side of the Fermi paradox is if there is like a super intelligence out there, why aren't they coming here? You know, that's kind of what it is. that's kind of less about us and what we can do and more about what this other supposedly more advanced civilization or civilizations would have done.

16:39But they could also be too far, right? And they could be super intelligent, but still not be able to reach us, right? I think so. Or they may decide it's not worth the energy to reach us. I mean, it literally takes a lot of energy. Or my favorite theory actually is that they could maybe do all the above, but they just don't bother. It's like the ants. I mean, unless you live in like a concrete block apartment or house, the ants seem to come every year like in the spring you know they come they do reconnaissance you get a few ants and if they hit upon a piece of like cat food or something right then you get a whole stream of them and you know they have their own kind of intelligence you know they went back and told the team come this way but would you talk to those ants like would you say hey i'm adam i've got this podcast i mean i well i actually like to think we're the ants we are the ants to the super intelligent beings out there.

17:32And like, why would they come here and talk to us? Wow. You know, I think, okay, I wouldn't go and talk to them, but as we do whenever we discover a new animal species, I would want to study them. Are you suggesting we're not even interesting enough to be studied or are they studying us from a distance? How do you think about that? Maybe they're studying us. Just like if we study the ants, do they know we're studying them? All right. So it might be happening and we're just, we're in the dark about it. Maybe. Okay, as far as we're concerned, I've been so curious for a while about if aliens are out there, is it a good idea to search for them?

18:09Tell me if you read this article. There was a Times piece before the pandemic by Stephen Johnson called Greetings, ET, Please Don't Murder Us. And Stephen, you know, at least raised the question of should we be galactic introverts rather than galactic extroverts? And it really pushed me to rethink the whole idea of doing the outreach and making contact, because I think the best case scenario is really great, but the worst case scenario is existential risk. And when it comes to other forms of existential risk, we proceed extremely cautiously. And so I'm so curious as an expert on this, where do you come down?

18:47Should we be searching? Should we not be searching? If we find it, should we try to make contact? Well, I can say that in the astronomy community, people do vigorously debate sending a message. And once in a while, some people get together and they're like, hey, we're going to send the signal. And then other people damp them down and like, no, don't send the signal. So that debate is actually an active one. And where do you come down on it? I don't think it matters. I think whether or not we send a signal, I don't think there's anything we can do to get around the fact that others could find us if they're there and if they have the technology to do that.

19:22Even if they're like us, I mean, let me phrase that a little differently. I think if they're vastly more intelligent than we are, of course, they'll find us. But if they have similar levels of intelligence, they might have an equally difficult time finding us, right? And it could be millennia or longer before they detect us. Right. If they're like us now, they can't find us because we cannot find another Earth twin right now. So at this moment, they wouldn't be able to find us. But, you know, they could just be a few hundred years ahead of us, which is nothing in cosmic time. And yet they could find us.

19:55I mean, the first thing they'll do is they'll see oxygen. And they'll know it's a highly reactive gas and shouldn't be there. And so the first thing they'll do is suspect there's some kind of life here. Not necessarily intelligent life, but there's something re-engineering the atmosphere. Something that's constantly pumping out oxygen because it's so reactive it shouldn't last. So if we find them before they find us, do you think we should make first contact or no? I do, I do. But I honestly will go back to what I said over and over again, that if they have the ability to come to us, then they already know we're here.

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23:36Would you want to live to see humans make contact with aliens? Absolutely, yes. Why? I just think it's part of who we are as humans. We always want a narrative of where we came from and what it means to be human. And like me as the little girl or anyone who hopefully can go out and see the dark night sky, when you look up there, you realize just how much more there is to the world, to us, right? Than our daily drudgery. There's so much out there. And we just want to know what is out there, who might be out there. Did you read Project Hail Mary? I did. Yes, I did read it. So Andy Weir was on the show and we had such an interesting conversation about his creative process around, you know, imagining what would a different origin of life look like and what kind of planet would they come from?

24:22I'm sure you daydream a lot about these kinds of questions. If you imagine us finding life out there, where do you envision it? What does it look like? What are your images? Well, believe it or not, we don't do that very often, unless we're asked by science fiction people. So we do sometimes think about it, but not in that sense. So for example, we have thought about this. I mean, one kind of one is that if a planet has a higher surface gravity than Earth. We expect animals close to the ground with like big huge legs so they can defy gravity, right? It's like the opposite of when you're in the swimming pool and you know how you can lift something really heavy in the pool because the water buoyantly is like helping you hold it up?

25:03The opposite of that, a high gravity planet where you can barely drag yourself around. Or we've imagined planets with like, very unscientific, this is just like dreaming, but some of these planets have massive atmospheres and they're probably really dark at the surface, extremely dark and gloomy. Maybe there's birds with giant wings that fly high up where the wings are like plant leaves. They have photosynthesis ability to get energy from their sun while they're flying. We can easily put a bunch of things together, but it's never really in the context of actual scientific work right now. So I guess one thing this makes me wonder about is what do you make of the fact that so many people are opposed to the idea of doing the kind of work you do because we have too many problems here on earth?

25:55Right, right. I do get that question a lot. Do tell. I do. Well, you know, the best answer I can give you is to solve practical problems on earth. We need a lot of people trained in technological sciences, like in physics and engineering and math and other topics. And one of the big things we do in astronomy is we communicate to the public the wonders of science. So I want you to think about young kids and even my origin story where I talked about the night sky. Like small kids don't know about the large defense agencies or they don't know that, you know, someone had to invent insulin or GLP-1 or lasers, right?

26:35We don't hear about those. Like telling a little kid, wow, like lasers are part of our everyday world and you know they were just invented from pure physics. Or, hey, tell a teenager, you know how you're glued to your GPS because you've got to get somewhere? That just came from this kind of long, convoluted, just exploring rockets. Rockets and people wanted to get beyond Earth's gravity and orbit Earth. So one of the main things is just to attract more people to science. We need astronomy to, you know, show people how great it is. That's number one, like encouraging people to do go into STEM fields.

27:05The second one is that it's really hard to explain to people that pure science of any kind is needed. And may at the outset seem wasteful, but those things I've just mentioned, GPS and medicines and lasers and so many things, you have to do so much extra science, you know, just to get to a discovery. You can't pre-plan what it is you want to do. And I do have an analogy that is a bit of a sad analogy, but it's also a legit one. I got to go to the UK with when my kids were younger on a soccer tour. They call it football, of course. And honestly, there's so many players that go through the talent pipeline just for the very few that make it to the top teams.

27:44And so all of science is like that. You have a ton of stuff happening and you'll be like, why do I support astronomy? Why do I support this? Why do I support that? That's why. In astronomy, we take credit for some medical imaging because we had to translate our data to images. And so we need to get that message out of why we spend so much on science, because without doing that, we can't find the discoveries that were not conceivable before. Yeah, I think that that tracks with what I know about the psychology of creativity. One of the most successful models in the field is basically a model of blind variation and selective retention.

28:15This is Dean Simonson's work, probably most seminally, but basically what it says is, just like evolution, idea generation requires a tremendous amount of variety. There's going to be a lot of noise, and the challenge is to find the signal and then hone in on it. And I think, you know, maybe underscoring that, I've read some evidence that approximately half of all patents are either accidental or spontaneous discoveries, you know, not driven by a planned search of any kind. And so I think you're spot on. Great. Well, I'm glad that one resonated with you. But one more, we should ask ourselves, like, as a society, should we have exploration?

28:52Should we have great art and great music and parts of science are like that. Yeah, they're kind of like creative adventures just for the sake of them. That's right. This episode is sponsored by study.com. Life can be messy and complicated and it can be hard to work towards finishing your college degree when other responsibilities get in the way. Luckily, study.com is designed to help you earn college credit online and on your schedule. They offer over 220 online college courses that help students make progress towards completing a college degree in a flexible and more affordable way. Knock out your general courses like English, math, and history, and study on your phone or computer for just$95 a month.

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31:58Okay, I want to go to a lightning round. I've got a few rapid fire questions for you. One is, what is the worst career advice you've ever gotten? Don't go into astrophysics. You'll never make it. Glad you ignored that one. Best advice as somebody who's not been afraid to take scientific risks? I could give maybe more than one answer, but one idea is hone your inner voice. Like unpack your successes and then try to develop that inner voice. Like, you know, if you're walking in the back alley and there's like a shady character, you feel that you're worried and you go the other way. But we also have that same in a positive way for science and for everything we do, right?

32:37Like you may meet someone and be like, hey, wow, I need to get to know this person better. Or you may have the opposite vibe, but we have that in science also. So honing that, that's the best advice I haven't gotten, but that I can give. Yep. Okay, following that, do you have a hypothesis, a hunch, or an opinion that's controversial in your field? Yes. Right now, it's that there could be life, microbial life on Venus, in the clouds of Venus that are not made of friendly water, but are made of concentrated sulfuric acid that kills all of our life instantly. Wow. Oh, if you turn out to be right on that one, that will be a revolution.

33:18Okay, let's see. Do you have a favorite space film? I can't say I have a single space film, but I love all the films about meeting intelligent aliens. One is called Arrival, because it's really a film that doesn't assume these aliens are little green humanoids. Instead, they're like a weird kind of life that we can't really communicate with. We can't actually. And so I really like that depiction of it. I love the time travel movie. Actually, I love every movie that has to do with time travel. I know time travel is not possible, but I just love that idea of like getting put in the future or the past.

33:51Some of the other movies, I love Interstellar. What a great movie. Because as much info as we can get about exoplanets, now or in the future, we'll never know the little details. And in Interstellar, you know, they found planets. They may be places for us to go in the future. But until they actually go there, they don't know if we humans, we're so fragile, could survive on these other worlds. Great choices. If you got to host a dinner party for anyone in history, alive or dead, who would you invite? You know, I'm not the one who admires people or has heroes. It's just like who I am as a person.

34:24But I would definitely invite dead family members. I would definitely want to bring them all back and have a moment. That makes sense. I have to wonder, though, you wouldn't want to sit at dinner with Copernicus and Galileo? Honestly, probably not. Like, it might be fun. Really? I don't know. I mean, there's something about having people in the past or people who are no longer alive. There's something about just preserving your memory and what you know about them. Like, what if you invited Kepler or Copernicus and they were a total ASS? Like, how would you feel? Wouldn't that just, like, shatter your dream with these people?

34:58No. No? No, I have modest expectations of their personality and character. I just think it would be so interesting to bring somebody who was responsible for one revolution into a time where there have been many others and see how they react. And, you know, you take, I don't know, I would love to have a dinner with Einstein reacting to the gravitational waves discovery. I see. Okay. Now that that hypothesis is supported, what does he envision next? Right. Or maybe you'd like to bring someone from the future who would tell us our fate or if we're going to become those maybe cyborg or maybe not. Maybe we'll be all taken over by AI.

35:39Okay. I give you the mic now. I think it's time. Do you have a question for me? Well, I do have a question for you. I'd like to know what motivates you. What motivates me? I think there are a lot of things. And it's a weird question to answer. as somebody who studies motivation, I'm like, ah, I should probably have a well-thought-out answer to this. But what seems to motivate me most consistently is one, a desire to help other people, and two, a love of learning. I think those are kind of the twin joys of the work that I do. I remember, I don't know if I've ever felt as well-captured by a quote as when I stumbled across E.B.

36:23White saying, I wake up in the morning torn between a desire to enjoy the world and a desire to improve the world, and this makes it very difficult to plan today. And I feel that conflict a lot, but I think I've mostly been able to resolve it by trying to improve people's lives in a very small way through both discovering and communicating knowledge about what makes humans tick. I just find that endlessly fascinating. I like it. Thanks for sharing that. Wow, thank you for asking. I think what motivates me is understanding what motivates other people and then trying to help motivate them. That would have been a more succinct answer, wouldn't it?

37:00I like it. Yes. Okay, so before we wrap, I just want to ask you, you have said frequently that we shouldn't be so arrogant as to assume that we are alone in the universe. Why? Why is that arrogant? It's just self-centered, really, like thinking that we're the only thing that could be out there. And what would you like to replace that with? Humility. When you look at that night sky and just realize our Earth is just a speck. We're like less than a speck of dust. I like that view because it's tough to get through life. Like we have a lot of high highs, low lows. And in the midst of all that lowness, I don't know if this is good or bad, but confronting like our own tragedies against the vastness of the universe.

37:43It somehow brings comfort. Aha. Okay. So this is kind of a perspective-taking or self-distancing intervention for you, where when you realize how insignificant we are, it makes all the big problems seem smaller. It definitely does. That's why I like it. That's why I love the universe. I love it. Well, Sarah, thank you for taking the time to chat today. This is like being a kid in a candy store for me. So thank you. Thank you, Adam. It was great chatting with you. Thank you.

38:46You know, we could self-destruct. Us humans, we could turn into AI, or AI could eat us, but the cockroaches will still be here. When you think of the vastness of the universe and us self-destructing, those cockroaches are very hardy. Yeah. It's true. I would prefer to see nematodes survive. Nematodes, yeah.

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