1050: Lisa Kaltenegger | In Search of Alien Life and Livable Worlds

1050: Lisa Kaltenegger | In Search of Alien Life and Livable Worlds

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:03] Lisa Kaltenegger: Light needs time to travel. Let's say we go 2 billion light years away. We look 2 billion light years away. We look back in time, 2 billion years. I cannot look any further than these 13.7 billion light years away.

[00:00:23] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show, I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show. We decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional journalist, turn poker champion, extreme athlete, real life pirate or tech luminary.

And if you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show. I suggest our episode Starter Packs is a great place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime, and cults and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. There's quite a variety as you know. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/starts, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, Lisa Coger breaks down the odds of life on other planets. How many similar earth-like planets are there?

How far away are they? Will we ever be able to see them, maybe even travel to them? How would we even communicate if we were able to do that? When we got there, I was actually quite astounded at the rate we are discovering new planets. It's something like one every other day. I, it just absolutely mind blowing.

I also found the science and technology that we're using to evaluate the probability of life on other planets to be absolutely fascinating. Again, I think you will agree. Enjoy this fascinating conversation about space and life on other planets or possible life on other planets with Lisa Colton Egger.

Here we go.

This is the part that blew my mind initially and as a good hook for the book, by the way. So congrats on putting that in the beginning. I think that's a good idea. And by the way, if people buy the books, please use our links in the show notes and help support the show. There's a new world on average being discovered every other day since we built the equipment to find them.

So that's really wild, the fact that a few times a week they're just finding another planet and that could continue for a really long time. 'cause like you said, even if we're like, oh, we've kind of exhausted some of these closer ones, but we can't see the small ones. Well once they invent, I don't know, higher resolution whatevers or AI's able to help us, it's like, oh, between all the, we have to start over and come back close again.

Because now we can see these really small things we couldn't see before. So we could be discovering a new planet every single day at some point, which is just bonkers if you think about it. It's absolutely, you cannot overstate how amazing that is.

[00:02:44] Lisa Kaltenegger: And this is why I wanted to share, right? Because I think this is passing us by a little bit.

We live in this incredible time of exploration because you could say Monday, planet Tuesday,

[00:02:59] Jordan Harbinger: yeah.

[00:02:59] Lisa Kaltenegger: Wednesday, planet Thursday, you know, Friday planet. It was like, and there are three totally new worlds that we know about at the end of each week or four really? Right. So three half. But this is only getting better as you were saying, because with bigger telescopes, with more time looking, we can find smaller worlds.

We can find worlds that take more time to whi around their star because we can only see them currently, or most of the time the way we find them is when they go between us and they are star and block out part of the hot, stellar surface from our view. So we just have to stare at those stars without blinking to see when they become a little bit less bright, to know that they have a companion, that I have a planet.

You were saying in school, and it was the same for me when I was in school. We were like, oh, maybe they're planets, maybe they're not. It's such a long shot, but we have actually changed our whole understanding of the cosmos in this respect that there are so many other stars out there. And when I talked to my daughter, we usually say like, the sun is a star, as you said, we know that the one star that we all love is our own son, our star, but those other stars are also sons.

Sun is a name. So the other stars have different names and these are planetary systems, but it's basically the same. The star out there, these are other sons with their worlds. And for the first time ever, we are in a place where we can spot them. Where we can do some inventory, where we can do exploration, even so we don't have to ships to get there yet.

We can catch the light and read it.

[00:04:48] Jordan Harbinger: So there are billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, which for people who don't know, is the one that we happen to be in. And there are, is it what, billions of galaxies as well,

[00:04:57] Lisa Kaltenegger: I assume? Absolutely.

[00:04:58] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:04:58] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so if you go one out of five and you have 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone, you have billions and billions of possibilities that there could be a world like ours.

And I don't know if there's life in the universe, but the biggest surprise would be if we find nothing.

[00:05:19] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It seems unlikely. I mean, just by sheer probability, having no life in the universe would be like, and someone's done the math on this. I wish I had looked it up. I. That would be like rolling a pair of dice and getting double sixes every time, 10 million or billion times in a row.

That's like the likelihood that there's no life anywhere at all.

[00:05:39] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so now it comes down to the question, can we find it

[00:05:42] Jordan Harbinger: right? Can we find it?

[00:05:43] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so when you look at the earth, and so when I called the book Alien Earth, I was thinking about these worlds around other stars, but also our planet through time.

That kind of resembles an alien world. If you were a time traveler and you would step out of, let's say the Tardis from Dr. Who, right? And do bring an oxygen mask because the composition of the air on our planet changed so that there was no oxygen initially. So you wouldn't be able to breathe or survive if you open your time machine.

Ah, but it would be like an alien world. There would be no Himalayas that are made, you know, because the continents crash into each other and form this majestic hills and mountains and even the stars. Because they move individually. The star constellation that we are familiar with wouldn't be there at the beginning of our world.

So it would be a real alien world in a way if you didn't. Now it was ours because what would you use to say this is our own planet?

[00:06:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. If there's no Himalayas, I mean, what are you looking for Starbucks at that point? Yeah.

[00:06:47] Lisa Kaltenegger: Or the, you know, the end of the Statue of Liberty as we have in the plants of the apes.

You know, that's only a tiny timeframe that you can actually find those.

[00:06:55] Jordan Harbinger: Exactly. Yeah. It's like a fraction of a second. Essentially, in geological terms, you mentioned before that the planet has to be close enough to their sun or their star, that there's liquid flowing water. So not farther away, not so hot that it's all evaporated.

Why do we think all life needs liquid water? People, mammals and stuff do, but life on Earth does and does that water have to be on the surface?

[00:07:18] Lisa Kaltenegger: Great questions. So first we go, before we know, and if you look at the Earth's all life needs water. And then you can argue that other liquids could also work.

And we have some really cold moons in our solar system like Titan, where we are sending a quad copter. It's one of the moons of Saturn. And we are hoping we are gonna find some kind of organics that might indicate that life could be in another base because it's much colder there. So they are Ethan and Methane Lake.

But if we just go back and say, all life that we know so far requires liquid water, then that's our first goal of finding liquid water to provide these circumstances. But it could be subsurface, it could be under a huge ice layer, or it could be trapped in a kind of, I don't know, cave somewhere on the bottom.

And so what we get back to is, could we find it? Because if it's free floating on the surface of a planet, then it doesn't impede any gases to go into the atmosphere and change the atmosphere. So I, from very far away with my telescope, can spot those signs of light. If it's under huge ice layer or deep down under the surface, I probably won't see it.

And so our search for life is, is there life? And then which part of that can we actually spot with our telescope? Because we don't have a Starship Enterprise yet. Even so I'm hoping the engineers are hard at work at that.

[00:08:51] Jordan Harbinger: That's incredible. So we might see a planet where we go, oh my gosh, there could totally be life there.

Uh, you know what, it just looks like a big ice ball. Nothing to see here. And then until we find technology that can look into that ice remotely, we got nothing. But we might be able to look underneath and find that there's, it's just teaming with life. There's just a shell on the outside. That's crazy.

[00:09:11] Lisa Kaltenegger: Exactly. But this is why it's so good that we have such a big number right, of planets to spot. Right? Because we know for sounds, we'll miss it, but with the numbers that we found, they just seem to be in our favor. Right. This is where we were saying maybe, you know, the biggest surprise would be if we find nothing, but there's always this big, but in it, we need life that changes its whole planet like life did on earth to spot it.

Because if it, it didn't, if it's subsurface or if it's kind of hidden. Then we can say, Ooh, interesting pot ad. But for now, a question mark.

[00:09:49] Jordan Harbinger: It sounds like the signs that we can read or see are always hidden in light. Like you mentioned, it has to pass between their star and us so we can see them back lit essentially.

Or we look at the light that the planet, the way that things, actually, you're gonna have to explain this 'cause I can't even ask the question. It's like you look at the planet with equipment and you see that there's gases in there, and somehow we can see like, oh, there's a lot of carbon dioxide on this planet.

Maybe something is exhaling that, or there's oxygen on this planet, but is that also hidden in light, or am I stretching the definition of what light is?

[00:10:26] Lisa Kaltenegger: No, you're perfect. And the key thing is light and matter in track. And so Einstein already taught us that. But if you go out and you put your hand in the sun, it gets warm.

So you know, light carries energy. Then if you think back to different molecules when you had it in school, maybe it's like, for example, every molecule has a different structure. Like if you think about a water molecule, it's two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom that is stuck together. And usually in school you always show it a bit like a triangle, like you know, the two hydrogens hanging off the oxygen.

And so that's one shape. And then if you have an oxygen molecule, two oxygen atoms, they are connected these two. So they have a different shape. And so you have to hit that shape with the right energy to make it swing and rotate.

[00:11:16] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:11:17] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so what is happening? If I had a world, let me get one here. And so if it goes between us and let's assume the star is behind it and so the light gets filtered through the air of that world before it gets to my telescope, the light that not, that does not arrive at my telescope, that's what tells me.

What's in the air off that planet, and if anything is breathing. And so it's a little bit like a passport set. Did you just

[00:11:46] Jordan Harbinger: bring a planet with you? That's so weird. But also really, it was funny that you did that. You brought a lot of plate. She brought a lot of planets. I brought

[00:11:52] Lisa Kaltenegger: three different colors because one of the things that I'm trying to point out, I love that, is that when we have another planet, even if it's an alien earth, it doesn't have to look exactly like a carbon copy of ours.

And this is not really a cool exoplanet, but I found some Earth globes in different colors.

[00:12:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:12:11] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so you take what you got. But

[00:12:13] Jordan Harbinger: yeah,

[00:12:14] Lisa Kaltenegger: it basically shows that even an earth. Like point could be very different. And so yes, I brought some and they're light and I can even juggle with one of them, not three.

I'm working on it. I don't know if that's juggling but one. Yeah.

[00:12:26] Jordan Harbinger: Yes.

[00:12:27] Lisa Kaltenegger: It's not juggling yet. I'm working on it. So the good thing is this is mostly a podcast, so only people who go on YouTube will see the desperate attempt of trying to catch it again.

[00:12:36] Jordan Harbinger: If you are listening and not watching, you have missed nothing.

She threw one up and caught it barely. So yeah, don't, don't bother going to YouTube just to watch that particular act.

[00:12:45] Lisa Kaltenegger: Invite me back in about two or three years. Yeah, I might have

[00:12:48] Jordan Harbinger: managed it that. It's so funny that you brought three plastic planets. Tell us about the Fermi paradox, because this is kind of, I have so many questions about this, and I think a lot of people, this is the endless debate is their life.

What are the probabilities? Can we ever contact them, et cetera. I always find this endlessly fascinating.

[00:13:04] Lisa Kaltenegger: I agree. I find it endlessly fascinating too. But what's also interesting is to look at the question in a little bit more detail. Because the Femi paradox is basically saying, well, and the universe is deeming of life, then where is everyone?

And so we know that one out of five stars and we have 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone has a planet that could be like ours. So you're like, well, well, why is nobody here? Right? And then the idea that permeates history, really, people were discussing about this for a long time, even when we didn't know how many plants were out there.

And so the worry was that maybe there is no life at all out there. So if we wouldn't have had other planet that could be like ours, that would be a good solution. Or that if life becomes advanced so it could travel or talk to us, then it actually destroys itself. And

[00:13:56] Jordan Harbinger: yeah,

[00:13:57] Lisa Kaltenegger: Fermi's question came in this time when we invented nuclear weapons.

And so that worry was foremost on his mind when he asked this question. But what's kind of interesting is that if you go the opposite way. And if you say, let's just assume there's a lot of different planets out there with life, then why would anybody wanna come to us? And I do this in class a lot, and I love the earth.

My favorite planet don't wanna be anywhere else. But when I ask my students and I say, look, if I find two planets right, and I only have the resources to go or contact one out of the two. One is 5,000 years older than us and show sign of life and one 5,000 years younger, which one do you my students want me to go and contact?

Right? The one that's, yeah, 5,000 years ago or the one that's 5,000 in the future. And basically all them want the one that's in the future because it's more advanced. We might be able to talk to them, they might be traveling the stars. We can learn something. And then if you reverse that, are we really that interesting to another technological civilization if they're out there Because we have boots on the moon, but we don't even have boots on Mars yet.

Our next planet over. So in a way, maybe we're not on the adult table yet.

[00:15:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense. I, well, first of all, I would definitely go to the planet that's 5,000 years ahead. Me too. And maybe Earth is, like you said, undeveloped, uninteresting. 'cause they, this alien world could easily be a hundred thousand years ahead of us, a million years ahead of us.

I would wanna visit ancient Egypt, for example, but I would probably pass on visiting pre-humans in caves and whatnot.

[00:15:37] Lisa Kaltenegger: I agree with you. But you know, ancient Egypt. Absolutely. But what about the fifth element world or something that we see in science fiction? Right? It's like, yeah, even ancient Egypt for me is not as interesting if I can't just go once.

If I can't just do one trip. I have the resources for one trip. I wanna go to the future, to planet in the future if I could show you. Sure. And so that kind of makes this question and this family paradox, less scary. Because a lot of times it packs this real punch of saying, well, maybe advanced civilizations can survive, or, well, maybe we are alone.

And to me, looking up at the sky and finding these new worlds, it actually brings the cosmos closer. It connects me even more because I know there are other worlds that could be like ours, even so, I don't know if they are, but there's hope and there's wonder, and there's our human curiosity that gets us to investigate, to explore.

Even so we don't have the ships, we can read the information encoded in light.

[00:16:47] Jordan Harbinger: It is kind of a bummer to think that advanced civilizations all kill themselves before they develop the technology to travel or communicate over cosmic distances. And it makes you also go, oh, I, I hope we don't do that. And then you look at the fact that we have nuclear weapons, but we don't have like nuclear powered spaceships.

And you think, well. We are trending in one particular direction and maybe it's not the right one.

[00:17:10] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so I think this is where this fear came in, right? And it depends a little bit if you're an optimist or a pessimist, but I think even if, and I hope it's not because I think the advances in technology we are making can be used for good and for bad, right?

We have to choose. But you should have a distribution. If you have enough worlds, if you have enough civilizations, there's probably not one answer fits all. There's gonna be the in-betweens, the one that don't care if they're alone or not and don't wanna communicate because why? They're the ones who never look up at the sky and never actually figured out that they are one of many, many planets.

And then there's the subset of curious beings, I hope. And we are now in the realm of science fiction. And some of them are probably not gonna make it out of the cradle, their home world, because they don't figure out how to not be aggressive. And some of them will. And I think we have time because as you were saying, we don't have those spacecrafts yet, so maybe there's evolution that still needs to happen.

Yeah. Because you know, if you're on the spacecraft and you're like on a tiny space and with other, let's say six people, or 20 or 25, you'd better be a peaceful civilization because you probably don't have anybody left when you land on the other side if you're not.

[00:18:27] Jordan Harbinger: That's right. That's right. And I also wonder how would we communicate with aliens.

I think you mentioned this in the book, it might be like us trying to talk to a jellyfish. I mean, what about science and math? Are those universal languages? It seems like we're all bound by physics. Mostly the same physics, probably the same physics at least so far.

[00:18:45] Lisa Kaltenegger: Absolutely. Whenever we look through the universe, the laws of physics hold.

So math holds, physics holds, and then. Let me just say, in the center of a black hole, there's kind of a singularity. So we don't have all the information yet. We don't know how the laws change when gravity becomes so high, so that's just a caveat. But generally, everywhere else, the laws that we know of physics hold, and also the chemistry we see is the same.

This is also why. Why would life be based on water, right? Because carbon, water and oxygen is everywhere. So chances are that if you're at the right distance from the star, there is a liquid that's water. But for that, as we said before, it could be a different liquid, but the carbon scaffolding seems to be really, really versatile and important.

So this is why even though life on the earth is carbon and water, it might not be as narrow of you to look for life somewhere else. But I completely high checked your question because you asked something completely different and I went off rail

[00:19:48] Jordan Harbinger: with the, the things I, I appreciate that. I'm more like simplify this for me, like that movie contact with Jodi Foster.

Have you seen that?

[00:19:55] Lisa Kaltenegger: Oh yeah. How we could talk. Absolutely.

[00:19:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:19:57] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so basically this is, I brought this example of jellyfish and because absolutely the idea movie contact, amazing movie, right? Is this, we are gonna put mathematical frequencies out, like, or signals that have prime numbers, right? Numbers that do not occur in nature.

We have to find something that doesn't occur in nature and it tends to reckon that a civilization that could communicate and travel the stars needs to understand math and physics to be able to do that. We have a commonality, even if everything else could be different. And I mean like, you know, they could look different.

Even maybe the chemistry of the body is different. Maybe the solvent is different, but the commonality of the loss of physics and, and the language of mass should be there. So absolutely. But sometimes that makes it sound so easy, right? We send prime number frequencies out and then the, as a prime number frequency comes back, great contact established.

But how do you communicate? And so I love the show you've done about how to effectively listen and communicate one of the earliest shows in your series. And it's so hard for people on this planet, same species, maybe even same country, to actually not misunderstand.

[00:21:10] Jordan Harbinger: That's true.

[00:21:11] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so I brought this example of a jellyfish in just to show my students a jellyfish, a wolf on the earth, right?

You can see it, you could touch it, maybe don't, but I can't communicate with it. It's not to say that nobody can, and there are amazing scientists who try to communicate with dolphins and whales, right? And maybe they'll get to jellyfish, but it is not a simple problem. And if you've seen Arrival, if you've read the novel, that arrival is based on this movie where these big space shifts land.

And then it's basically the biggest problem we have is communicating, learning their language, not misunderstanding what they're trying to tell us, right? And so it's a really beautiful idea that A, hopefully you're gonna find signs of life soon. But the next step, the one you were talking about, the civilizations, the communication.

We have so much to learn. But what's great is this learning about how to communicate, it's probably gonna also feed back on how we all gonna communicate better, and also with the other species on our planet. And this search for life in the universe. Looking at these other planets and exploring them.

These other earth that teaches us about our own planet too. And so this is why I think this research is not just about are we alone in the universe, it's also about understanding our planet, getting a glimpse in our potential future when we look at all the earth and using all that knowledge to safeguard our pale budda.

[00:22:49] Jordan Harbinger: I always think about the end of, I think it was the end of that movie contact where the aliens appear to Jodi Foster as her dad, who was, who had passed away. And I was like, just completely confused by that. And then I realized, ah, okay, they, they're so advanced, they can scan her brain or whatever, figure out some memories, something that's gonna be calm for her because her puny human brain can't comprehend the actual form of this alien life.

Like they had sort of figured it out because they were so advanced that they were able to tell us how to build that machine or whatever. In the, in the movie. And it, you're right, we could be jellyfish. To that extraterrestrial life, or they could be jellyfish and we can't get to them because we're not there yet.

And it's just, it's so interesting to think about.

[00:23:30] Lisa Kaltenegger: Or there could be jellyfish language signals coming through our planet like since forever. Yeah. And we just haven't figured them out because we don't know how to speak jellyfish.

[00:23:39] Jordan Harbinger: Right.

[00:23:40] Lisa Kaltenegger: And of course, that's a funny interpretation, but there are so many things we don't know, but we are chipping away at it.

Science is chipping away on the different issues, but it's fun to think about it.

[00:23:51] Jordan Harbinger: I always think of those quantum particles. You know how you, they have to build those buildings, 30 stories underground because they're looking for, I don't know, some sort of like alpha particle and everything else gets blocked by the earth.

Except this one particle that's so small, it can just float through the whole earth. No problem. It just goes between the nucleus and the whatever, and the atoms and the proto, whatever, it doesn't bounce off anything and they can detect it with that. That would be a great way to communicate with some other planet, right?

Because you can shoot that thing through other planets, through asteroids, through everything, and nothing can touch it. 'cause it's so tiny. And I'm just imagining this jellyfish civilization light years away going, how are they not picking up our signals for God's sake? We've been blasting these things at them for hundred, for thousands of years.

They can finally pick it up and they built this building to receive it and they're going, aha. There's one of those things and it's like, we've been sending you trillions of those things and you got one and everybody celebrated. Look at these idiots down there. I mean, it's just a, I'm imagining that, you know, one day they're gonna, we're gonna think, oh, oh my gosh, they've been.

The whole time this thing has been on and we've never noticed.

[00:24:55] Lisa Kaltenegger: I think the other funny part in that example that you've just given is what about this one thing where we're like, oh, great, we found one. Right? And that's great. Mm-Hmm. And that's all good. It actually contained information and they're waiting for a phone call back.

Or it was like, right. So if you actually wanna talk to us, give us a call back. And we're like, duh, duh. And they were like, well, they're not interested, so we're gonna go and look at the next planet we And try that.

[00:25:17] Jordan Harbinger: That's right. Yeah. It's like we can, we can't see. All we can do is detect that particle exists.

It would be like looking at someone's blood and thinking this is the smallest thing we can see as a drop of blood. And now of course we can see DNA in the cells of the blood and we just don't have the resolution to view what is in that particle.

[00:25:35] Lisa Kaltenegger: And I think this is why, you know, if you wanna take out the component of, maybe we can't find the signal yet.

Maybe somebody is not messaging us. Right. If there's somebody out there, this is why this search in the light of other worlds. It's actually a passive search and it actually scans the whole time since life changed the earth significantly. So about 2 billion years ago, if you think about the Earth's history as a 24 hour o'clock, around lunchtime, life actually changed our atmosphere so strongly that we can pick it up with a telescope from far away.

So when we look at other planets and we look at all these different epochs, real life, you know, equivalent could have changed on that planet, then we get so much more information and we take out the component of did they want to talk to us? Do they want us to know if they're there? But it's also fun to think about it in reverse, right?

Because for 2 billion years, if anybody were looking. Just had our level of technology, they could have figured out that we are here. And then I wonder what they're thinking. Right? It's like, why are they not picking up? What are they doing to their climate? Oh, okay. A fixed deal zone hole. But oh my God, what are they doing now?

So it's kind of funny to think about it like a reality TV show in a sense.

[00:26:54] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:26:55] Lisa Kaltenegger: And just hope that we are good protagonist. That will make it,

[00:26:58] Jordan Harbinger: it's like keeping up with the Kardashians. Except we're all the Kardashians. I wanna go back to light because I'm curious about it. Light from the sun takes what minutes to reach us?

Eight minutes. Eight minutes

[00:27:08] Lisa Kaltenegger: from the sun to us. And one second. From the moon to us.

[00:27:11] Jordan Harbinger: One second. From the moon. Okay. Now how long light from the next closest stars? It ranges right? Years, decades, even centuries. Am I still correct here?

[00:27:20] Lisa Kaltenegger: Absolutely. The closest star to us, it's about four light years from us.

So we see that star like it was four years ago and they, if anybody were looking wow, would see us like we were four years ago. And so that is kind of fascinating because when you go and look up at the sky at night, everything you see has already happened because light needs time to travel and carries that information to us.

So we can write it down in our Copic notebook. But while this kind of frustrating at a certain point in that there's a limit to light speed, so we don't know what's going on right now everywhere in the cosmos. The flip side of that is that the further away we look, the further back in time we can look and so we can look at a time where there were no humans, not even the sun and our planet, because we can catch ever more light from further and further away places.

And so this is this hobble deep field or James, we deeps field, that's what we call them, that show us galaxies as there were billions and billions of years ago, or down to about 13 billion years ago. It's like a huge number. Wow. The universe is only 13.7 billion years old, roughly. But we can unravel the history of the universe to its beginning because light has a speed limit.

And so we can delve into deep time. And the way that I think about space around us or space time is that it's kind of like a fabric. And the further it goes away from us, the older it is or the younger universe, it shows us. And so that I find as a privileged position because we miss our star and our planet miss the first two third of the life of the universe or the history of the universe, but we get to figure it out.

We were curious enough to look up, catch the light from other galaxies and read it. And now we can do this with ever bigger telescope, forever smaller objects. And so from galaxies, we go to stars, we go to planets. We go to earth size planets, and that's where we are right now.

[00:29:39] Jordan Harbinger: You know what else is outta this world?

The great deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Rosetta Stone. Ever got the urge to learn a new language? I love learning languages. Just imagine yourself being able to chat with locals instead of just nodding, pointing, hoping for the best.

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[00:31:10] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by TaskRabbit. You know, every week you got that never ending to-do list, mount the tv, fix the curtain rod that's barely hanging on. Finally put together that IKEA dresser that's been sitting in the box for way too long.

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[00:32:13] Jordan Harbinger: If you're wondering how I manage to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network.

That's the circle of people that I know, like, and trust. I'm teaching you how to build the same thing for free. I know you're probably not booking for a podcast, but this stuff is important for your career. It's important for your social life. Yes, even if you're retired, the course is about improving your relationship, building skills, building systems around those things so it doesn't take forever.

And the course is very down to earth. Pardon the pun, non cringey, no awkward strategies or cheesy tactics, just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, and a better peer in a few minutes a day. And many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course.

So come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. Now back to Lisa Tigger. When I was a kid, I had the idea to go really far away from earth and then look at it with a really powerful telescope and see the dinosaurs. There are admittedly a few holes in that plan.

[00:33:07] Lisa Kaltenegger: You would need instant trouble, but other than that, yeah, brilliant plan

[00:33:11] Jordan Harbinger: other than, other than breaking the laws of physics entirely, the second half of the plan might have worked. So it's fascinating that I think there's a star whose light is just now reaching us that was sent, that light was generated or whatever sent on the day that we were all born.

And since there are so many stars, every single one of us has multiple stars whose light is reaching us on the day we were born. Is that, am I doing this math right? I'm not. I'm not usually that good at this kind of thinking.

[00:33:38] Lisa Kaltenegger: No, you are absolutely right. This is where I think we have another connection with the cosmos, right?

Because you can spark a star if you're more than four years old, right? The closest other star after the sun is four years. So it works for toddlers plus,

[00:33:53] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, there's a limited number of toddlers listening to this show, so we should be covered.

[00:33:56] Lisa Kaltenegger: Might be okay. But the interesting thing is that, yeah, you have several stars and you can pick one because there's the northern hemisphere where we are in New York, for example, and the south hemisphere, and so there's a northern and thousand sky.

You see different stars if you hear in the north or if you go down TAs. So what you wanna do is you wanna put it in a browser. And so like star your age. Let's say you're 21, 21 light years away. And then you actually figure out Northern Hemisphere, if you like us somewhere in the Northern hemisphere. And then it tells you which stars are about 21 light years away.

And so the light that gets to us today was sent out in the year you were born. And it's a great present and it doesn't cost you anything. And it's fast to make. And it's probably something most people don't have. And the star changes every year because you get a year older, right? So the star needs to be a year a light here further away.

And it's your start. You don't have to pay for it, don't name it, don't worry about that. Just go out and select that one. The light's coming. And if you think about, if that one had upon it and somebody were looking in the earth right now, they would see it like it was when you were born.

[00:35:12] Jordan Harbinger: Do we need the moon for life?

I know it affects tides and, and it affects life on earth, but is it a requirement for life to have a moon like ours?

[00:35:22] Lisa Kaltenegger: No, because life evolves for the condition it finds.

[00:35:26] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Okay.

[00:35:27] Lisa Kaltenegger: That's what we know. And even if it were hard, you know, if the season change a lot, because there is no moon or a very, very intense season, a life would be able to evolve forward when it gets out of the water.

We think it started in water or if it's on the bottom of the ocean, it wouldn't care how intense the seasons are on the surface. So for you, MA, for us, the moon's really important because it stabilized the seasons on the earth.

[00:35:55] Jordan Harbinger: I didn't know that. And

[00:35:56] Lisa Kaltenegger: this is what we evolved for.

[00:35:57] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:35:59] Lisa Kaltenegger: If we didn't have a moon, we would've evolved for something else.

[00:36:02] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no, I, I had no idea it'd stabilize the seasons on the earth.

[00:36:05] Lisa Kaltenegger: It stabilizes the axis

[00:36:07] Jordan Harbinger: I see.

[00:36:07] Lisa Kaltenegger: Of the earth. And so that's why the seasons, you know, if the axis of the earth, the seasons come because the earth is basically, if you think about it, if it's a leaning axis, the part that leans towards the earth, if you want, it's a sphere, right?

That one is summer and the other one is winter. And so if that axis changes a lot, so it goes from zero to 23 and Bach, then the season, the intensity of the seasons would change during that.

[00:36:33] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Okay.

[00:36:34] Lisa Kaltenegger: The moon stabilizes this tilt compared to our star, so we go around and the seasons are pretty much the same.

[00:36:43] Jordan Harbinger: Gotcha. Okay. So the last thing we want is the whole world is just Texas in July and Texas in December. Right. It's just. You don't want that. We don't want, even Texans don't want that. It would be extreme to extreme. You're getting my list of Neil deGrasse Tyson questions and I hope you don't mind. Why All good.

Why do we need Carbon for life? You know, I read the very scientific book by Michael Creon called The Andromeda Strain, um, which is clearly science fiction from the nineties, but I think, and it's been a while, it's been like 30 years. That was a silicon based life form and I think it was a virus or something like that.

But basically people would die and they would get sick and then their lungs were full of sand because it was replicating in their lungs. The whole premise was it was a silicon based life form, not a carbon based life form. So is that just nonsense or is it possible that we have something like that? Or is carbon kind of like up there with water where we think, okay, this probably is a requirement for life.

[00:37:40] Lisa Kaltenegger: So carbon can make very flexible and very complex structures, right. So great. And the good thing is you can break them easily. So recycling is easy, and that's where it actually has its superpowers. Because if you take silicate, what's in the periodic table is a similar element. So can do similar things, can make long structures.

It requires an incredible amount of energy to break.

[00:38:08] Jordan Harbinger: I see. So

[00:38:08] Lisa Kaltenegger: you would make something but you couldn't remake it. And the other thing that happens is that if carbon and oxygen are next to each other, they will react to carbon dioxide and gas. Right? You can dissolve it and water all good. You can get the carbon back.

If you have silicone and oxygen, it makes silicone oxide. So the sand you were talking about or rocks, granite. Right. And so the key point about this is then you need to go to a temperature of about 2000 degrees. To get the silicone back out because it will just be, it's a rock, right? It's sand in the lungs, in the science fiction story.

So you cannot reuse it. So you basically use it and then you would have to require so much energy to recycle it, to do something else. And everything we know about life is that it tries sinks and then, Ooh, this didn't work, so let's try something else. And so with silicon instead of carbon, you would start to get into this situation where nothing is left for you to try because you have no billing blocks anymore that you could use.

[00:39:14] Jordan Harbinger: I see. Unless somehow that is being, that element's just being manufactured over and over, but then you'd have the carcasses of all the other things just laying around everywhere. Right. Piling

[00:39:23] Lisa Kaltenegger: up, piling up, piling up. Yeah.

[00:39:24] Jordan Harbinger: Interesting. Tell me more about how we can see if there's life on other planets using light.

I mean, you mentioned the telescope. We, yeah. If there's giant things on there, we can see 'em walking around or something like that. But you have a really interesting, I'd never seen or heard of anything like this in the book you talk about. Growing life in a lab and then using, I guess the same or similar instruments that we use over distance and space to see if we can detect, I guess, gases that that life gives off in the test tube or whatever you're, you've used to grow the life in the first place.

That's really interesting, right? So you grow some sort of moss or whatever in a little dish that's enclosed and then you aim a tiny Hubble telescope at it and you say, oh, if I zap this laser towards it, it turns green. Let's aim that at a planet and see if it turns green. If so, there's a bunch of carbon dioxide or whatever on that planet.

Am I close?

[00:40:13] Lisa Kaltenegger: It's even easier than that. Really. You absolutely close, but it's easier than that because the way that I like to think about it is think about an algae bloom, right? You could have a world covered in, let's say red algae. All the oceans are tomato soup colored kind of. So that would look to my telescope like a red planet.

But I know that life has many different colors and pigments. So the bio pigments make those colors. And so what I need to do is I need to figure out which bio pigments life does, which colors life is. And so this is where we get back to my lab because I'm an astronomer, right? So I actually don't usually grow things and I don't grow them very successfully.

Mm. But what's really important is I don't wanna miss signs of life if they're out there. And so if they're just a little bit different than the green plants that I think about when I go outside in my garden, or like the flowers or trees, whatever you wanna think about, then I don't wanna miss it. And so if you, for example, walk through Yellowstone National Park, you see these gorgeous colors in this hot sulfur springs.

They're actually different kinds of life. They are maths of biota. That just uses, is happy to live and strive under different conditions than you and may. And so what we are doing in the lab is we basically try to make as extreme and as complete and as diverse a set of life, and then have an amazing colleague who's a microbiologist who grows this way better than me because I kill most things that I grow, that grows these organisms and then we put them in, I call it like a high tech device, our ec.

We put the flask in the EC and walk to the other department that we want sense in the department where we can, as you said, a small Hubble or a small whatever the next telescope's gonna be, like the habitable world observatory or the extremely large telescope. But we basically have a look at it and say, if this was the dominant life form on another planet, if we had a huge algae bloom on another water world, for example.

How would it look to my telescope? Would I be able to spot it? And so we make a comparison chart. If you want a database of what life can look like, inform from everything we know here on the earth, and then say, okay, and this is what it would look like to my telescope. And so it reverses that. When I have the information now from my telescope, I can actually look and see, Ooh, does it look like this?

And it works for gases right now. So for example, oxygen is produced by life on the earth. You wanna see water, you wanna see a gas that reacts with oxygen. So the golden fingerprint for life is oxygen with a reducing gas just means it's a gas. It reacts with like methane oxygen plus methane makes CO2 and water.

So if I find huge amounts of oxygen and methane in the atmosphere, in the air of another world, then I know something is making both of these gases right now because they react with each other and they would produce CO2 and water.

[00:43:31] Jordan Harbinger: Hmm.

[00:43:31] Lisa Kaltenegger: And this is how I then say, well, for this amount of oxygen, see it for methane can come out of volcanoes or from life, but for the amount of oxygen to be there while the methane is there as well that react with it.

I have no other explanation on life. So it gets a little bit complicated. But yeah, the context tells you which gases you need life to produce because you have no geological solution. You cannot just invent a volcano big enough that spews this out. And this is how we look at the light fingerprint of these worlds to see signatures that we cannot explain with anything else but life.

That's our first step in the discovery. And then if we get even bigger telescopes, we wanna look at these planets like a dot of light. So not just when they go in front of their star, but if you see them as a dot of light, you could see their color, you could see if they're red, if they're blue, if they're green, and figure out if there are some colors of life as you know it on another world as well.

And we use machine learning for that. We use loads of algorithms. We use a computer program where we build these worlds. So what I have in my lab, I take, and then I manufacture their worlds on my computer. I basically paint my computer and my computer code being my canvas. And sometimes I think it's a little bit, you know, Douglas, Adam, they had this workshop where they basically created other worlds and then he really funny says that the earth was actually created.

I create worlds on my computer too. I don't get one to hold. Right. This is why I'm bringing these normal ones. You bring

[00:45:18] Jordan Harbinger: your own From the gas station. Yeah,

[00:45:20] Lisa Kaltenegger: from the gas station, exactly. But it's incredible as you imagine what could be out there, because circumstances in characteristics of these planets are different from ours, and so the diversity, if there's life out there will be astonishing

[00:45:38] Jordan Harbinger: it seems like.

I know we're usually think of life as like animals and plants and stuff, but there's crazy, and I know you know this, but I was surprised to see this, there's something called extremophiles. They live in these like super hot vents in the puddles of sulfuric acid at the bottom of the ocean under crazy pressure in hundreds of degrees, heat.

It's just absolutely wild the conditions that life can exist on. So that really opens up the band of what, because we're not like looking for whales all the time, right. We're not looking for deer running around on the surface or buildings built by. Humanoid type of creatures, we, we can be looking for a bunch of, for lack of a better word, algae that lives in a volcanic kind of zone.

And, and that's good enough.

[00:46:20] Lisa Kaltenegger: Exactly. I think the diversity is just astonishing. And when I was in school, we didn't learn about extremophiles. We probably also didn't know much about Extremophiles at that point. We have learned so much more about the limits for life. So at one point it gets too hot and cells break down.

At one point it gets so cold that the reactions are so slow that we don't think you, you can actually start life because everything is just like so slowly moving and then there's radiation that can destroy cells. But within that realm, there's a huge realm inside of that where life happily strives and does so on the earth in different niches.

Like on the sulfur spring study you were talking about, where there's the cutest, well cutest, it depends, but this is cutest thing that's called a tardy grade or a water bear.

[00:47:09] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:47:09] Lisa Kaltenegger: It's not even an extreme profile because it's not extreme. Extreme, but you can cook it, you can boil it, you can freeze it, and they put it into space on the outside of a rocket.

And when it came back down, couple of days later, they put water on it and it was like, okay. I'm fine. You know, I'm good again,

[00:47:30] Jordan Harbinger: really.

[00:47:30] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so that is just amazing what live can survive. And this specific organism, the tardigrade, actually you, you need a microscope to see it, but it's basically everywhere in the world.

But it's really cute, so look it up. But the interesting thing about this is that it does this because it can go into something called a tuned state. It can travel up and lose most of its water and lose most of it, or pause. Most of its life functions. And it can do this for hundreds of years. It basically goes dormant, but in a really, really huge way.

And so it does that because it lives in areas where water can become sparse. And so instead of dying, it shrives up and waits for the next drain. But the shriveling up also allows it to withstand much more radiation than we do, or temperatures we couldn't withstand. And so now this research has also led to a lot of other research where people are like, Ooh, could we use some of this for, you know, extending human life times for space travel?

And so it's fascinating how diverse life here is and finding life on other planets. Oh my god, you know, that should be even more different. But one of the key questions that's just really interesting is we dunno if life can start under extreme conditions. We dunno that yet. So if it can start on the extreme condition, great.

We have a much, much wider range of planners to look for. If it can't, if it can't just adapt to extreme condition once it got started, then we have a smaller range where we can look.

[00:49:06] Jordan Harbinger: I gotta go back to this little water bear tar gray thing. This is crazy. So I looked them up, they're 600 million years old on earth.

They can survive in space. These are almost like. Tiny seeds that can travel through space, and then we just add water that brings up all kinds of questions. Could these things have la I mean, could they have landed on earth from another place? I mean, I don't know if humans could come from something like that, or plants or little animals, but it seems like if they can survive, for hun, you said hundreds of years in those conditions potentially and withstand radiation.

It seems like that could be something that comes from another planet or another solar system and have landed it. They land all over the galaxy or all over the universe, and if they land on mercury, they're shit outta luck. Right. They burn up and they die. But if they land on a place with a bunch of water, they go on and live happy lives and reproduce.

I mean that, there's a lot that you could think. This is really blowing my mind. I mean, this could be on every. They could land on every planet that's potentially hospitable for life and be alive there. That is absolutely bananas when you think about it.

[00:50:11] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so the great thing about this is, so I should actually clarify that radiation is their Achilles heel.

Oh, I thought you

[00:50:17] Jordan Harbinger: said they withstand radiation. Well,

[00:50:19] Lisa Kaltenegger: right. They do stand radiation better than you may.

[00:50:21] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:50:22] Lisa Kaltenegger: But at a certain point it's also bad. But sorry, I should have been more clear on that. But no, no better than you and me. So they can still go traveling. But what's really interesting is that this is, by the way, the science fiction plot, if you haven't seen it or read it off the three body problem, that as civilization, like tardy grades live somewhere else and they need to go.

And it's kind of a weird plot just in case you know that story.

[00:50:48] Jordan Harbinger: I don't, but I'm sure a lot of people do.

[00:50:49] Lisa Kaltenegger: The premises is that the planet and the star system isn't stable. And so that actually would not happen. So it would just be immediately unstable. Or stable in the long run. So basically, but it's a great book.

It's a fun series right now. But going back to tardy grades. So what is really important is that it's not just the water that you need to bring, it also needs the atmosphere that we have.

[00:51:14] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm.

[00:51:14] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so anything that you wanna travel from one world to another, and see there again, if you want, you have to bring enough of its environment with you to actually allow it to adapt to this new world.

So now you're not just talking about having to transport like tiny tardy grids. You are also talking about having to transport. You know, let's assume water is there. Right? But water can be very different if it's salty, if it's not salty, if there's other chemicals in it. And also it will require the atmosphere on top of it, right?

A right atmosphere, like if you put it into a sulfur atmosphere, is now gonna do fine. So. It is a little bit more complicated in terms of the environment you have to add to bring for space traveler. It's a little bit like a spacecraft, right? We need to bring our environment, our food, our water, if we wanted to go to Mars or to another planet.

But this is a Linearized signature for that, like our mine rice version of that because tardy grads are smaller. But if you think about where you have the highest chances to get life started, at least in our solar system for now, if you need a rocky surface and water that's so far what we think you need for life, at least two of the things you definitely need, then the earth gives you the highest chances to get that started.

So the interesting question would be more if we find something like tardy grates somewhere else. Yeah. Have we littered that planet? And that's the tardy greats made it there. And another fun part is like we actually shot some tardy grates onto the moon, apparently. It was not really sectioned. It was on a private Israeli lander.

And one of the people who was behind that project said, oh yeah, I actually put lots of tardy guards into this. And then the thing crash landed, so it didn't land like it should. And so the question is open, did those involuntary space travelers survive? And if you think about far future, completely hypothetical, they're like alien archeologists.

And I think it's just fun to think about these things. And they find the tardy graves on the moon. They're like, Ooh, this species managed to travel all the way to the moon. Right, right. And they'd be like, where's the spacecraft? What's happening? And they're like, Ooh, the spacecraft has crashed here. So it's gonna be really, really hard for future alien archeologists to figure out what we did.

[00:53:35] Jordan Harbinger: I'm gonna give them a little more credit and they're gonna go, I'm guessing this closed planet that was teaming with life before they destroyed themselves, screwed up this one too. Thankfully, they only had the technology to get to the moon and didn't end up going and colonizing anywhere else before they blew themselves up.

It's gotta be so hard to spot planets. You can tell I'm an optimist. It's gotta be so hard to spot planets far away, right? They're small planets don't emit light. Of course they reflect light. But don't they reflect less light than stars emit. So they're They're washed out, right? You wouldn't want

[00:54:05] Lisa Kaltenegger: Absolutely.

I mean, it's

[00:54:06] Jordan Harbinger: gonna be tough to develop that film, so to speak.

[00:54:08] Lisa Kaltenegger: And this is why it took so long for us to find those. Because if you take the earth and you put it a hundred times next to each other, that's roughly the diameter of the sun. So our sun is so much bigger, and it's bright and it's hot and it's close by, right?

The earth is here and then it's a huge, bright thing next to it. So the star outs shines the planet by at least a billion, right? So it just means lots of photons, lots of light from the planet versus tiny, tiny amount of reflected light from the tiny planet next to it. And so this is why, and I think that's also, I think it's intriguing that we have found more than 5,600 plants ording other stars, circling other stars.

But we haven't seen most of them because we look at the star and what I explained before is that you have the star, and if the star dims ever so slightly looks ever so slightly less bright for a little time, then you can figure out that something went between us and that star and blocked our view of the hot Stella surface.

And by how long it takes for this to go around, you can figure out how long a year on that planet it is, how many days or earth hours if you want. And then you can figure out by how much light it blocks, how big it is. But you haven't seen the planet, not really, you have seen its effect on the starlight.

And this is how you can do it, because you take the hotter, brighter, more massive object in this pair, right? Or in this family of things, of objects. So the big, hot, bright star. And you figure out if these small plants have any influence on its movement, on its brightness. And this is the trick of how to spot them.

And so the way that I explain this to my students is if you go to a park and you see somebody walking a dog and the dog is pulling in the direction, the owner doesn't want to go. You don't have to see the dog to see something is pulling if somebody is leaning back.

[00:56:16] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:56:17] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so the pull, the gravitational pull.

Off the planet on the star makes it wobble a little bit.

[00:56:24] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, okay. And

[00:56:25] Lisa Kaltenegger: that wobble we can see in the light or the brightness change. If by chance the planet goes between our line of sight to the star, that's what we can see. But it is so hard. I completely agree with you, and this is why it took such a long time to find earth's size planets.

And the first planets we found were these big massive Jupiter hot sinks that just whiz around the star in a couple of days because you find them fast and they're big, they leave a big wobble, they block a lot of the light from the star's surface.

[00:56:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:56:58] Lisa Kaltenegger: And the better our instruments are getting the smaller and the cooler the plants are getting, we can spot.

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[00:59:48] Jordan Harbinger: If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable over at Jordan harbinger.com/deals.

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Is there, I'm gonna show my ignorance here. Well, that's what this whole show is about, whatever. So is there something like a doppler effect with light? So for people who don't know, the Doppler effect is when like a car races by you and it goes and the sound changes because your closer, or it's moving closer to you or moving further away from you.

Is there something like that but with light? 'cause like then you could tell if the planet was reflecting light and it was, see this is where I lose myself. Am I making any sense? Am I close to something? That makes sense.

[01:00:49] Lisa Kaltenegger: You are very close. Okay. And thank you very much for making the soundscape.

[01:00:55] Jordan Harbinger: I can handle all the sound.

This I, then I, I got lost with the light part.

[01:00:58] Lisa Kaltenegger: That's all right. Because it's exactly like for the sound wave. So if something comes tower to you or it moves away from you, we hear the sound change. If it's an ambulance, for example, or a race car. But light does the same. So basically if a star moves away from you, you see the light redder than it should be.

And if it comes towards you, you see the the light bluer than it should be. And if the planet jiggles or if the star jiggles, we're just looking at the star right now, nothing about the planet. If the star jiggles, because the planet pulls on it. And so the star actually makes a counter movement. Basically you see the stars light going towards the red, then it's normal again, and then it going towards the blue, then it's normal again.

Then it's towards the red and normal again because it comes toward us. Blue shifted away from us, redshift and so on. And then you can say, okay, it's moving. It's moving around the center of mass. So it's kind of jiggling. And so that's because something pulls. And if that Chile is very small, you can say the thing that pulls is not very massive.

If you don't have much mass, then you don't have enough temperature and pressure in your core to start nuclear fusion and to start shine like a star. And so then you found a planet. And the light, the movement of an object is encoded in the light. Do this. Yes, Doppler ship, red and blue ship. And this is also why we know that our universe is expanding because these galaxies actually all look red than they should be.

So everything's in average moving away from us. And this is when you figure that out and we figure out what the speed is that they move away from us. You can figure out how long it took all of these galaxies from the start to now to move away from each other. And this is how we figured out what the age of our universe is.

[01:02:59] Jordan Harbinger: That's incredible. It's complicated and people are like, wait, should I rewind right now? Or just keep going? And that's up to you. But that kind of thing is really incredible. I was. I was almost thinking like, oh, can you tell if there's a moon by the Doppler effect of the planet wobbling the planet a little.

But you took it to absolutely universal scale, and I appreciate that.

[01:03:17] Lisa Kaltenegger: If you actually could then see the planet, like when we can see the planet next to the star, when we can block out the light from the star, that's gonna be the easiest way. It's like a mask that we can put on top. If you go in a bar, it's bright, you wanna see your friends, you basically block out the light from the lamp and then you can see them.

Right? Same for the star. If we could block out the light from the star, we could see the demo planet close to it, and then we could do the exact same thing that you were just mentioning with the double effect. So then if the planet actually wobbles, then you know that the moon goes around the planet. And so you can split Axo moons that way, but we are not there yet.

Yeah. 'cause even finding the planet is such a hard measurement that finding a moon around the planet. Whew. That's like so much harder,

[01:04:01] Jordan Harbinger: right? It's like finding a needle in a haystack and now you're like, find the rust spot on the needle in the haystack. Thanks Jordan.

[01:04:07] Lisa Kaltenegger: Exactly.

[01:04:08] Jordan Harbinger: I know you have promising candidates.

You mentioned in the book Kepler 62 and and Trappist, I think one E or something like that was what makes these planets exciting? What makes them promising?

[01:04:19] Lisa Kaltenegger: So we found about a couple of dozen planets right now already that are at this right distance, not too hot and not too cold. So I start, think about it like a bonfire.

If you get too close, it gets too hot. If you go further away, it gets too cold, right? There is like a nice region, this habitable cell. Now I talked about just at a certain distance from the star, and now I said, when you see this wobbling or this jiggling of the star, or when you see the brightness change of the star, you can basically see how long does it take to star to wobble back and forth, or how long does it take for the starter to become a little less bright?

Then come a little less bright again. So you know how long it takes the planet to go around The star and Kepler has already, it's a long time ago. Kepler, an astronomer, has actually figured out that how long it takes you to go around your star tells you how far away the planet is from the star. The further away, the longer it takes.

So we go around the star faster than Mars does. Mars is further out, so Mars is going slower or takes more time to go around the sun than we do the earth. And so that means we can tell you how far away planet is from the star with the search techniques. And then we can say, okay, so it's just at the right distance that there could be liquid water on top of that planet.

And the liquid water on top is what I need to spot it with my telescope, right? Because if it's locked under ice or if it's locked subsurface, then the gases or the life that could change the color of the surface is locked away and hidden. And so this is why we're so excited about this planet at the right distance.

And then the planets have to be small enough. So if you have like huge Jupiter Planet, huge gas ball, we are less excited because we learned, at least from everything we know that you need a surface and liquid water to get life started. That's some of our key ingredients. So in a gas ball, you don't have that maybe on a moon around the gas ball, but we just talked about that.

Finding moons is even harder. Yeah. So small enough planet at the right distance, incredibly hard to find. But from the ones that we found, and we are about 45 50 in right now, at least 5,600 planets. Wow. We know how hard it is to spot those. So by the ones we found, we can tell you how many must exist for us with our not so great technology.

Like it is great technology, but it's just not cutting it fully yet.

[01:06:54] Jordan Harbinger: Right? Sure. To

[01:06:55] Lisa Kaltenegger: have found that many. This is where the number one out of five comes from. So one out of five stars must have a rocky world in this right distance for us to have found what we found. And that's makes these planets so exciting at the right distance and rocks.

And then you say, okay, maybe that's what it takes. If there's water, it's a rock and it has the energy from its star. That's what it took on the earth. Maybe if that's what it takes, then life could get started there again too. And that's what we are looking for.

[01:07:31] Jordan Harbinger: Really incredible. So there's so many planets.

Some we can't even see because they're too small. But it just occurred to me they could also have moons where there's no life on the planet, but the moon has life. I hadn't even thought about that possibility. And you can't see the moons 'cause those are too small. So I mean, it is just like, people might say it's unlikely there's other life out there from reading the book, it seems like there's just a near certainty that there is because there's so many things in the Goldilocks zone on so many different stars.

The habitable zone. And this is a, a non-sequitur I suppose. But you mentioned that the universe is expanding. Do we have an edge of the observable universe? Can we see it? Or is it just theoretical or is there no edge and it's something you can't explain?

[01:08:12] Lisa Kaltenegger: Remember I said that when we look further away, we look back in time?

[01:08:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:08:16] Lisa Kaltenegger: So you have to, if you have that question, and it's a great question, you have to now mesh time and space because everything is embedded in space and time at the same time.

[01:08:29] Jordan Harbinger: And so

[01:08:29] Lisa Kaltenegger: basically,

[01:08:30] Jordan Harbinger: I won't pretend I understand that.

[01:08:31] Lisa Kaltenegger: Okay. It's not just space, right? Because on the earth you could say, okay, you get to the edge of the table and you fall off.

Right? There's an edge.

[01:08:38] Jordan Harbinger: That's what I'm thinking, right? The edge of the universe. There's some sort of like weird wall thing, force field can't get past it. The end.

[01:08:44] Lisa Kaltenegger: Yeah. No, we haven't found any of this. Okay. But the further away we look, so towards an edge that you'd wanna see. The further we look back in time, so we actually not hitting any edge of the universe.

We are hitting the beginning of time.

[01:08:59] Jordan Harbinger: I feel like I need to roll up a joint, but continue. This, this, this is, this has now become the Joe Rogan podcast.

[01:09:08] Lisa Kaltenegger: Oh my God. I'm happy to, you're gonna have to get

[01:09:09] Jordan Harbinger: this blunt.

[01:09:12] Lisa Kaltenegger: So when you look at the sky, light needs time to travel. Let's say we go 2 billion light years away.

We look 2 billion light years away. We look back in time, 2 billion years. Now the universe is only 30.7 billion years old. So because time and distance are combined or correlated, I cannot look any further. Then these 13.7 billion light years away.

[01:09:42] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Okay. God, it's so hard to wrap your mind around that.

[01:09:45] Lisa Kaltenegger: It's really great though, right? Because it is crazy.

[01:09:49] Jordan Harbinger: It's so interesting, but it's so hard for my puny human brain to comprehend this. This is really unbelievable.

[01:09:55] Lisa Kaltenegger: Okay, while we there, let me do one more. Sure. It's gonna be harder.

[01:09:58] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[01:09:59] Lisa Kaltenegger: But more fascinating. Okay. Blow your mind. So the big bang I cannot explain as well.

Okay. And nobody can explain it as well because it's kind of a very weird thing. It was an explosion of space time everywhere at the same point in time. So it's not an explosion like we think one point out. Okay. And so what that means is me here at this part of the universe, I have an observable horizon of the universe that's about 13.7 billion years old, right?

[01:10:31] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-Hmm. And

[01:10:32] Lisa Kaltenegger: then things move. So these things that we're there 13.7 billion years ago are now somewhere else. All of that. But let's just go with, I have my horizon, how far I can see because of the age of the universe. But if you go hugely far away outside of this horizon that I can see, and you put somebody there who would look too, they would have the same size horizon.

Oh, but their horizon and our horizon would never have to intersect. And so this tells you when you were talking about is there edge of the universe, if this can exist, if there can be billions of people or of places with different horizons that never intersect. It's infinite everywhere.

[01:11:18] Jordan Harbinger: So basically, 'cause I was gonna say, is there a center where we're like, the big bang happened and this was the point at where it happened and everything expands from that?

No, there's no center of the universe. Everywhere is the center of the universe at the same time somehow.

[01:11:32] Lisa Kaltenegger: Right. And so, wow. What's really interesting is it took us a while to figure this out. Sure. Because it looks as if everything's moving away from us, right? And so then you could say, Ooh, ooh, we were the center.

Right? That's clearly, but it's not, think about it a bit like a raisin bread, where when the yeast dough expands, I dunno if you know what a raisin bread is, but in Germany, Australia we do rai bread is now, now

[01:11:55] Jordan Harbinger: you're in my zone of genius. Alright.

[01:11:58] Lisa Kaltenegger: And so every, when this thing expands in the oven, right, every raisin moves away from every other raisin.

It's a little bit tricky because a raisin bread also has a center. But if you just jump on one of the raisins in this raisin bread. All the other raisins around it look like they move away from it. But if you jump on another raisin, all the raisins around it look like they move away from it. So it's your point of view that basically determines what your horizon, observable, horizon, cosmic horizon is.

And there is no reason to think that somewhere completely different outside of our horizon. Somebody else, if there's life out there, wouldn't have the same horizon, but that just doesn't intersect. And so that gets you into this realm where you were just saying, now we're starting to blow our mind. It's fascinating that human curiosity figure that out, right?

Yeah. Because you wouldn't think that, we look at the stars and we haven't done this for such a long time, like humankind, but what we figured out and what concepts we trying to wrap our mind around. I just think that gives me hope for our future because if we could figure that out that the universe is expanding, that there was a big bang, that we are changing our climate, right?

We can fix so many things, or we can solve so many things because we were curious and luck and we invited this wonder in and And you want me to blow your mind like to a certain extent, right? And that I think is what it takes to figure out how we fit in this beautiful cosmos.

[01:13:39] Jordan Harbinger: I am just grateful that you were able to explain this in terms of raisins, because you're doing a good job communicating with this jellyfish of a podcaster, I have to say.

I'm impressed. The raisin analogy really did do it for me. I think there's people out there that are like, okay, I don't wanna admit this, but the raisin thing works. I do understand this quite a bit more now. It's still hard for me to believe that everywhere is the center of the universe. At the same time, the observable universe

[01:14:04] Lisa Kaltenegger: everywhere is the center of the observable universe.

Right. Of the

[01:14:08] Jordan Harbinger: observable universe. I see. Okay. Yeah, that's a key, a crucial distinction. And the little bit of time we have left, it's occurred to me that earth is a certain size. Right? There could be really big earths, I suppose. Right? Smaller might be harder 'cause there's not, what you mentioned not enough core mass to create volcanic.

Activity, yada yada. No life. But there could be bigger earths, right? Or is that also hitting a wall at some point due to the gravity of that planet?

[01:14:34] Lisa Kaltenegger: Absolutely. So what we finding and what was one of the biggest first surprise, so you look for planets outside, right? And you kind of expect them to be like the ones in our solar system would make sense because that's the one system we know.

And what we found is that most of the planets we've found so far are actually in between. In between the size of the biggest rock we have. That's the earth. And the smallest gas we have, that's Neptune. So we call them mini Neptunes if they're smaller, Gass a Neptune. Super earth if they're bigger rocks than the Earth.

So your question, absolutely. There could be earths that are more massive, gravity would be stronger. So you would need more muscles to actually be able to walk around or you would wanna slither around. Right. And never actually stand up. Right. Or you have a different bone structure if you wanted life on those worlds.

But at a certain point, the gravity that this planet has will actually, when the planet forms, it forms in an environment, in a disc around the star that has rocks, ice, and gas. At a certain point it becomes so big that it will actually basically vacuum up all the gas and dust. Mm. And it will become very, very fast.

A big gas ball. And we think the edge is somewhere around 10 to 15 times the mass of our planet.

[01:16:00] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, wow.

[01:16:01] Lisa Kaltenegger: And about twice the size. So we call it super earth because astronomers are really good at naming things.

[01:16:07] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:16:08] Lisa Kaltenegger: But it doesn't mean that they're any better or any worse. So this is why this search is so fascinating because we have no idea, there's no reason to think there couldn't be light.

There's, you know, some reasons to think with more gravity, you know, you'd have a different structure, a different way of moving. And with a bit less gravity, you could actually go to about half the mass of the earth still have the atmosphere is probably not as thick. You could, with our muscles, we could jump much higher.

It would be much more fun, right? Like the moon, the astronauts like jumping around on the moon with my muscles strength. I could do feast of, uh, aerobics, right? Or of sports. But there is this range from about half the mass of the earth to about 10 to 15 times the mass of the earth where you get a rock.

That might have more water or less water. Many of these more massive planets seem to have less rock and more water, making them water worlds. Wow. Like when we talked about Kepper 62 E and F, that I got to actually help discover. And so what's so fascinating when you then think about this, so more water, what would that mean?

Could that be an ocean world? Could there be waves that never break because there is no shore, the whole planet is covered in oceans. And one other thing that's so fascinating about these worlds, because physics works, right? And so if you were on a water world and you would jump into that ocean, you would go down, down, down, it would be a deep ocean, much, much deeper than what we have here in the earth because there's more water there.

And so the bottom of the ocean, you would actually hit the ice. It's not the cold ice that we know of. It's water that has so much pressure on top of it that it solidifies. It's called high pressurized. Whoa. And so that planet would work so differently, and you shouldn't dive down because all the water inside of you would also solidify.

[01:18:13] Jordan Harbinger: It never occurred to me that you could have ice. That's not cold, right? You just, but the pressure pushes the water molecules together so much that it turns into just warm ice. It's just a rock of water that's, uh, really interesting. I never thought about that.

[01:18:27] Lisa Kaltenegger: And it wouldn't go up to swim, right? Because the density would be very, very strong, like very high.

So it would stay where it is. But it would be completely different because you wouldn't have water with a rock like interface like we have here on the earth. On the bottom of our ocean, there's a rocky surface. I see. And so these planets could be very, very different in how they work from us. And there are geological or sinks like, you know, like volcanoes or how does the magnetic field work?

Or how does the interior of that planet work that we don't understand yet because we don't have a way to actually make this in the lab. Right? Because the pressures and temperatures are hard to do. But we're starting to think about how different these worlds could be. And there I take the extreme of fast that we talked about.

Right. Extremists in the eye of the beholder because I always think like these extreme profile would like look at humans like, oh, poor guys, you know? Yeah. They don't have any acidity. They, they have like only this measly temperature range and so maybe other worlds that look very bizarre and weird to us.

If there's life there, that would be the norm there and they would be like, oh, that planet around this yellow sun, there can't be no life because they don't have enough

[01:19:42] Jordan Harbinger: pressure to do it. That's true. And every, yeah, they're looking at us and they're going, oh, all that water and that oxygen, there's no way.

Everything there just doesn't oxidize immediately.

[01:19:50] Lisa Kaltenegger: There's no

[01:19:51] Jordan Harbinger: way. No way. Okay. I know there is a such thing as a planet without a star, rogue planets, I'm guessing there's no life 'cause there's no star. So there's no sort of energy there. I mean, I guess remains to be seen, but still. So lemme throw you a curve ball.

What about planets with more than one star? Does that exist? I'm talking about like tattooing from Star Wars where Luke Skywalker is from. Can there be a two star. Solar system.

[01:20:14] Lisa Kaltenegger: Absolutely. Or planet.

[01:20:15] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[01:20:15] Lisa Kaltenegger: Actually 50%, like half of the stars out there have a stellar companion. So double sunrises and double sunsets are not as rare as you might think.

Huh? Because they're planets that actually orbit those two. And I got to dive into science fiction in the book too, where it was like planets maybe even better than the science fiction worlds. And I know I'm getting myself into all kind of troubles here, but it was pretty funny because tattoo was of course one of the ones with two stars.

And a friend of mine then actually accused me of ruining Star Wars for him forever. What I did not do on purpose, because my one question was like, where's the second shadow on tattoo? Mm.

[01:20:55] Jordan Harbinger: Whoops. Didn't think of that.

[01:20:57] Lisa Kaltenegger: But you know, we can fix that CGI Now everything works. Yeah. But they're actually systems where you have a planet that goes around two stars.

But there's another stellar pair that orbits in the same system. So quadruple star system. So you would have to double sunset and double stars at sunrise and double sunset, but you would still have two close by stars that belong to your system too. So it can get much more interesting and much read than the sci-fi worlds that we have imagined so far.

[01:21:30] Jordan Harbinger: Would having more than one star increase or decrease chances for life? I'm guessing decrease. 'cause now they ha it has to be in the goldilock zone of both stars. So that's just added complexity.

[01:21:40] Lisa Kaltenegger: There is added complexity. But if those two stars orbit very close to each other and then the planet just goes around both of them, then it's actually not as hard.

And so we find a lot of planets around double stars. So the jury is completely out. If there's any good or bad effects that would happen to that, except for beautiful sunrises and sunset.

[01:22:03] Jordan Harbinger: Man, I love your passion for this. It really comes through in the way that you speak about this stuff. And it's funny, I wanna note that when I called you, it was the day of the eclipse and it was really clear that this is like a hundred percent your thing and you were born for this.

And it was just, it's an honor to have you bring that passion to the show. And I thought it was especially funny that you brought, you travel across the country, you saw a rocket launch, you bring your kid to this rocket launch into the eclipse, and afterwards it's like you go to some hibachi place. The daughter remembers the onion volcano that the chef made.

That's what she took away from the rocket launch in the eclipse. I

[01:22:37] Lisa Kaltenegger: know. The thing is like, I was just like, I, for every parent out there who takes their kids to rocket launch, right when they're small, yeah. Do not go to the Japanese place after, because the cool Ona volcano will actually out outpace, you know, the amazing impression.

But I keep reminding her and I think it's just great that we get to take. The young people in the world to this adventure because it's their world coming up. It's refining these worlds. Somebody has to study them. Somebody has to figure this out. And science is so much fun. And I think this is what we sometimes don't get to convey.

You get to travel, you get to figure something out that nobody has ever figured out before, and you get to do that with a team of people from everywhere. So I love science for that. And now I get to talk about the passion and share. So I love that part too.

[01:23:30] Jordan Harbinger: Dan Hun,

[01:23:31] Lisa Kaltenegger: thank you so much for having me and for the great questions and for helping with communicating with the jellyfish.

[01:23:38] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, that's right. You, you, you got it. Here's a sample of my interview with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. I. We talk about why an interest in science serves every field of expertise from law to art, what our education should ideally train us for. Here's a quick look inside

[01:23:56] Neil deGrasse Tyson: Walt Whitman. When I heard the learned astronomer, when the proofs, the figures were ranged in columns before me when I was shown the charts and diagrams to add.

Divide and measure them. When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, how soon unaccountable, I became tired and sick till rising and gliding out. I wandered off by myself into the mystical, moist night air, and from time to time looked up in perfect silence at the stars.

It's the same curiosity you have as a kid, but I just have it as an adult. I've had it since childhood. You don't have to maintain it, you just have to make sure nothing interferes with it. So the counterpart to this would be, oh, sir, literate one. Why ruin what something looks like by describing it with words When I can see it fully with my eyes, your words just get in the way.

I'd rather my mind float freely as a gaze upon something of interest and have the writer step in between me and it and interpose. Is her own interpretation. You don't know the thoughts that you're not having. What keeps me awake is wondering what questions I don't yet know to ask, because they would only become available to me after we discover what dark matter and dark energy is.

Ah, man. Because think about it. The fact that we even know how to ask that question, that's almost half of the way there, but I wanna know the question that I can't know yet. What is the profound level of ignorance that will manifest after we answer the profound questions? We've been smart enough to pose thus far

[01:25:47] Jordan Harbinger: for more, including how science denial has gained a global foothold. What it'll take for the US to get to Mars before China and why it's dangerous for people to claim the Earth is flat. Check out episode 3 27 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Man, there was so much we couldn't include the Voyager missions.

Apparently there's a cosmic record player out there with Earth sounds, famous songs, sound effects, things like that. It's gonna be a hell of a collector's item for some alien civilization someday. I mean, it might never be found, probably won't be. Or maybe it's found millions of years from now. We might be long gone by then.

That might be all that's left of us. That's kind of weird to think about. We don't really know which conditions were needed to get life started here on Earth. It could be cold, it could be warm. We really don't know. Because apparently the ancient rocks on earth have been destroyed by tectonic plate movement over millions of years.

So we just really have no idea. If we find life on frozen or hot worlds, we might actually figure that out. So we might find out more about earth by exploring other planets. Could be hot, could be cold, could be both. We don't know. I also find it fascinating, she explains this a little bit in the book. If you break Earth's life span right into a day, humans have been alive for a few seconds, dinosaurs for about an hour.

That's why there's so many fossils. They were around a long, long, long, long time. I mean, humans have been around for, for quite some time. Dinosaurs were around for hundreds of times longer apparently. So that explains why. 'cause I was always wondering. I was like, how are there so many dang fossils? I mean, we find these things all the time and they're getting destroyed by tectonic plate movement as well, I would imagine.

But there's just so many of them in the ground. Unbelievable. And last but not least, I just thought it was mind blowing. Really hard to wrap my mind around, but like crazy, that light takes so long to travel. I. Two far reaches of the universe that observers on other planets looking at Earth might actually be looking at a planet full of dinosaurs or possibly a planet that has no life at all if they're really, really far away and they have the technology to observe the earth.

So that puts things in perspective, man. Uh, I don't know, drive like you know each other as my friend David Somali says. 'cause we're very insignificant in the scheme of things and the big problem you're having right now, well, on a universal scale, doesn't matter at all. All things Lisa Ger will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.

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