Remote Daily #78: What Is Life? An Hour w/ NASA's Michelle Thaller

this is remo daily your daily dose of inspiration this is remote daily [Music] and always of innovation for your mind just so your heart [Music] connects and [Music] [Music] this is rimo [Music] but i'm just looking at the chat and wow everybody has so many amazing questions i mean each one of these is worth like i said i i think i was saying before you know it's it's worth a bottle of wine and a whole evening every single one of these i just i just would love to talk to you about all of this and of course i'm not going to have time so maybe i can just starting with some of the ideas here um you know in some respects i actually find this kind of comforting and i think some people also find it sort of disturbing um the word life is something i've never really been very comfortable with because we talked last time about how we're made of the very same chemicals and the very same elements that the stars make and somebody asked the question you know why do we think life elsewhere would be based on carbon and use oxygen and of course scientists are not that limited of course we don't think that's necessarily the case but there there's a reason and there's a good reason why we're based on carbon um and um carbon is something that dead stars make very easily the the um the clouds between the stars are full of carbon in fact i actually i i brought i brought you something that's actually older than the sun this is a a meteorite a slice of a meteorite and um this particular one if you succeed it has it has some tiny tiny little silver nodules in it i'm kind of pointing with one at the top of my finger there and um these are these are something called um uh chondrites and and contracts were the very first matter in our universe to solidify we we started from a i should say in our universe our solar system um we started out of this cloud and the cloud was rich in all the elements that come from dead stars because the cloud was formed by the debris of dead stars and there was static electricity as this cloud moved around and clouds rubbed against each other much like lightning is created today and when you had a lightning discharge in this cloud even before the sun formed it melted little droplets of the material and they became a little denser than everything else and gravity began to sort of bring things in together around these little little globules here and this is actually one from a meteorite and this meteorite we know is older than the sun because of the chemistry that the sun's gravity drew most of the heavy elements into the middle of the solar system so most of the heavy stuff like gold and iron and silver and everything ended up inside the sun because that's where the gravity was pulling all the denser material and this this little guy here doesn't have any of that it's heavy and light stuff are all jumbled up so um the other thing that this has is it has more organic molecules more different sorts more nuclear bases things that make up dna than my body uses meteorites are filthy rich in carbon more chemicals than our bodies use our bodies use only a tiny little subset of these and it turns out that carbon has all these electrons that love to stick together and i've actually posted i think felix will share with you a funny little video from the european union about if chemical elements were at a party you know there are some that really want to react and some that really want to fight and and separate from each other and they have this all as actors it's really kind of fun at the end of the party some are fighting some are having sex on the table i mean it's just really hilarious and you know the the thing is is that all you need is is the the thing the reason why water is so important and it may not i'll talk today about where we where life might not be based on water is water will dissolve all of these organic compounds and allow them to move around and form bigger and bigger bonds and bigger and bigger molecules and i'm not kidding when i said that there's there's dna nucleobases in here one of the things we do at nasa is trying to figure out what life on another planet would be like it might not use the same chemistry the same organic molecules even if it's based on carbon so what would dna be like based on things in here as opposed to the things on our body and and life you know the chemistry can move around a lot i have another thing for you today i have a little piece of the planet mars um this this tiny little rock that you see kind of against my skin there that's uh that's a little martian meteorite something hit mars so long ago that the uh little rock was launched into space and uh and it actually fell back down on the earth as a meteorite and in the martian meteorites we find amazing organic chemistry and possibly even signs of life i mean that that meteorite you heard about decades ago they had little worm structures in it we still don't really know what those are so to me when i go to yosemite and i sit on the rocks you know these gorgeous huge unimaginably beautiful powerful things um i feel like i might with there with my older sisters you know there's no magic differentiation between life and non-life we're it's just a matter of complexity and there are things that we find in nature that we're not even sure are alive or not these are things that are sort of at the very boundary of life um one thing is something called a prion which is a protein that can make copies of itself that's one of the things that life started you know molecules that could begin to make bigger and bigger copies of themselves and for those of you that know anything about the sort of the medical stuff prions can be very bad diseases because specifically can take over things like brains uh mad cow disease is an example of a prionic disease and another thing is viruses interestingly enough viruses are so small most viruses are only about a thousand atoms across and they are of course unable to reproduce on their own they just inject their own molecules into a cell and get the cell to make copies of it so you know they're they're so tiny it's kind of unbelievable here i'll i'll share i'll share a picture just of some of these things what we'll talk a bit about sort of the boundaries of life hold on a second let me share my screen with you i just wanted to jump in as well and say thanks michelle for sure for winging this when we we don't know whether we have felix i'm not or don't have felix but i can um once we've seen some of these i can then facilitate the um the conversation in terms of some of the questions that are coming through so thank you oh absolutely so you know i i showed this is a little electron microscope of some viruses and um there's a tiny little bar at the bottom that says 100 nanometers i mean like i said you could fit about a thousand atoms across these things they're really really tiny and there's a little uh thing over here that shows uh the biggest thing that you see the the bottom one is a dust grain compared to a red blood cell and then a bacterium and a virus is smaller still i mean whether a virus is really alive or not is something that's hard to say and the origin of life interestingly enough never stopped people thought there was a moment when life came into being and and that was a mystery it's not so much let me show you some pictures um the moment of the genesis of life happens every day around the world life is created from chemistry it's just that now there's something else to eat it and there didn't used to be the first time that it happened now this is a picture of a uh something called a black smoker a hydrothermal vent a vent of hot water heated up by the lava and the heat of the earth at the bottom of the ocean and the warm water is rushing out into the cold water at the bottom of the ocean and there's a tremendous chemical reaction and as you can see the water is rich with minerals you know silicates and and organics carbon that was actually in the rock and there are some of these deep sea vents i think this is a picture of one here um very very deep in the ocean that are actually making hydrocarbons they're actually making useful life molecules from scratch today and you know there was a time when the oceans were empty of this there was sort of a time when it just began but now what we find is that every single one of these supports an incredible unique ecosystem because you know you actually have food hydrocarbons the building blocks of life forming just from minerals so the process that forms life didn't stop it's happening all around us every day and you know the amazing thing to me is we just became complex and we're able to replicate ourselves and able to modify i mean once you've got hydrocarbons they can start bonding together and then ones that don't like water are on the outside and form sort of a shell you know and then the inside you can start to get all kinds of interesting chemical reactions going it's not really a mystery to science why life began um it and like i said it's it's happening today in the deep sea event that moment of the beginning of life is still going on so you know people were asking questions about um you know where else do we find this i just i wanted to show you i've got too many pictures i would love to show you all of this but there's a moon of saturn and uh these are these are actual images from the cassini spacecraft this is an image taken by our spacecraft that spent 15 years out at saturn and you can see the the rings of saturn in a very different way the spacecraft was flying down along the ring plane and you can see that they're incredibly there's an incredibly thin line going across the middle there and you can see there's even a little a little moon a little tiny moon there um against the planet saturn the rings of saturn are a quarter million miles across but they're less than 30 feet thick and uh you can see the beautiful shadows being cast by the rings on the planet in fact saturn has very interesting seasons because not only does it sort of have a a tilt to its axis like we do but the shadows make whatever uh hemispheres in winter much much colder than it would otherwise so it has very pronounced seasons because of the shadows of the rings there's another real picture of saturn orbiting up around the pole i just have to show you these because i just think they're they're so lovely you just have to realize what we have seen and what is what is real out there and this was just for my little you know just by gratification if you notice that on the pull of saturn there's a beautiful storm that's shaped like a hexagon and again this is actually not so much of a mystery um a jet stream at very cold temperatures where there's no friction will do this and in the middle there's sort of this eye like the eye of a hurricane and i think one of my favorite pictures from from nasa is we flew our spacecraft very close down over that eye of the hurricane and took this picture and uh you know this is a a real picture of a uh of a hurricane structure in there that's um you know so the whole the whole storm is about the size of the earth so you know this thing is is many many hundreds of miles across and you're looking at walls of cloud catching the sunlight and the walls are probably 100 miles high but anyway um this is a picture of saturn's moon enceladus and enceladus again this was these are actual pictures we went out to enceladus and if you notice there's all this wonderful ice and the ice is cracked and uh uh we um we thought that was really interesting there are there are many moons in the outer solar system that have more liquid water than the earth does as far as we know the earth is in fourth place there there are three moons in the outer solar system that have more warm liquid water than we do but that liquid water is under the ice under a shell of ice and when you when you look at enceladus you can see that the ice is actually um venting water that the cracks are venting water this is water flying out into space and uh this is what we flew about 30 miles over these vents and we sampled them and we found pretty much everything you find in one of these uh hydrothermal vents i'll go here so this this is a picture of a hydrothermal vent from the earth but we found the same sort of minerals the same sort of dissolved minerals we found organic molecules we found warm water with about the same temperature and as acid levels the atlantic ocean and um i mean so we know that there's organics and warm water and a very nice environment out there for life so i mean that's one of the places that we think that we may be looking so you know what one of the things about me and you know i don't really know you know it's it's kind of here i'll i'll go i'll go back to uh i've got plenty more pictures by the way but let me go back to uh uh just see if i can go back to the viewer i'm not actually sharing here we go uh stop sharing yeah there we go um we we're made of the same stuff that that stars pump out when they die you know with the same stuff as the rocks and um chemically that little piece of meteorite that i showed you is more complex than i am but you know we have the structures that you know that that replicate and and sort of you know make this chemistry of life and and as you know that that chemistry of life is very fragile right when we're talking about my husband who's just declined since i talked to you last he can't really move anymore and for those of you who are who've ever done hospice care for a loved one you know i i salute you it's it it's not um it's not all terrible there are moments where i still hold him and it's lovely you know but he can't really communicate with me much anymore but you know what happened is andre's dna just went wrong i mean he that's what cancer is you know some of the cells just started reproducing in a way that wasn't good for his body and you know we try to fight that but we sort of we're sort of these bags of water and organic molecules almost barely hold together and you know i i think in instead of making me step away from love and emotion you know we we had the hospice care people who are wonderful you know asked if i wanted a chaplain to come and i i actually actually had a buddhist chaplain available and they did not here here in uh in annapolis maryland and but the very nice christian chaplain sort of asked why and i said that you know the i i can't really think of anything outside this life and we can talk about parallel dimensions and other parts of time if you want to but i mean just taking this experience and this life um even as painful it is and how fragile we are what it the feelings that elicits in me is a huge amount of compassion we are all in this together we are all these tiny brief little pearls of consciousness that then just dissolve and other pearls form from that and you know it's there's something about me that wants to you know put on robes and go into the woods and ring a bell or something to just sort of talk about how beautiful this is you know even as it's heart-wrenchingly painful you know i mean last night i had a bad night i well it's bad as a judgment last night i had a difficult night i mean i i wanted to sit so still that i thought maybe if i sat so still and didn't move time wouldn't move either and i wouldn't have to keep going through these days that are the last days of his life you know and there are times when i feel kind of panicked i can't even really want it i don't want to go up and sleep next to a dying person again and there are times i just want to hold him all day and so we are all in this situation together and i apologize for on behalf of life for for how brief it is and how fragile it is um but the beauty is amazing i mean you know that's the reason i want spacecraft out by saturn these are the real beautiful questions and you know we may we're sending we're getting ready to send out more sophisticated uh spacecraft to go look for life on enceladus and other moons as well there's a there's another moon of saturn called titan that has a thick atmosphere and we um that's one place if you'd like we can talk about it um where we might actually have some possible signs of life a very simple chemical life there you know i think that there's several places in the solar system that do have life just today we announced the discovery of a hundred new planets we had um citizen scientists untrained people anybody who can do this helping us look for that planet nine you know planet x the planet out there and the outer solar system that might be there well they didn't find it but they found a hundred other giant cold worlds around our sun um it's not planet x these are farther away but but they're still in our neighborhood and 100 planets just today um we um we used assault we used an eclipse of the moon a couple weeks ago with the hubble space telescope to just to practice how we're going to find life on these planets and uh here i'll maybe i'll share again and and show you how we did that because that's that's kind of lovely because we'll be doing this a lot so yeah so with the moon [Music] minimize my zoom window here so many things so i mean just just in the last week i just wanted to well here i'll i just have to do this okay so here's here's that giant moon of saturn i'll just kind of go through these uh again a real picture uh titan is about the size of the planet mars and uh you see there it has a very uh sort of cloudy look because it has a thick atmosphere and uh the the clouds are so thick you can't see through them normally but we have a heat-sensitive camera and we look through the clouds and don't mind the sort of square shapes of the image that's just the detector taking different images but what you're looking at there that's the sun glinting off an ocean an ocean of liquid methane so for those of you that wanted to know whether like life could be based on something other than water we know of a world where um natural gas falls from the sky it rains your waist deep in organic slush when you're on the surface of titan that that particular sea you see there is about the size of lake ontario and um we are sending a helicopter there uh in about three years time we're building it now uh a drone actually it's an octocopter it's about the size of a car and uh it's going to be exploring this world looking for life but that's just a map of the lake so you can see a 150 kilometers on the bottom there is the bar it's a big big lake and um we we actually did send uh in the uh early 2000s we sent a probe down this is the cassini spacecraft that they're working on uh that that silver actually gold foil covered thing was a probe that we uh we sent down this is this is an artist's conception unfortunately no one was there we have parachuted it down onto the surface of titan and there we are coming down over titan we saw lakes and rivers and stream beds and it was raining and uh we we landed the probe didn't last for long lands less than a couple of hours because the surface is about 300 degrees below zero but at that temperature uh the oceans are made of methane and ethane and it's full of organics so why not why not have life that uh can live that way and in fact we found out that there's bacteria on earth that this little creature is an earth creature but it lives on bacteria that use methane and in the very deepest parts of the ocean we uh found bacteria that don't use water so much as they use methane to live and the amazing thing sorry i just had a funny question oh yeah yeah it's uh it's from sarah i have to ask does it smell like farts there well so those of you may you may not know this this is an interesting thing i know a lot about farts because of nasa um methane has no scent at all the reason natural gas smells bad is they actually add a little sulfur dioxide and that way when you smell something bad you can you know there's a gas leak that's actually not the methane it's actually an added gas so methane you can't smell and we think that the methane would be clear it wouldn't look like uh black or you know like oil it would actually be clear like water and uh because the other thing that i learned because on on mars we actually find methane natural gas as well and we think it may actually be bacteria i wish i had time to talk to you about all of this uh but i learned uh that you people would say oh is that like cow farts i actually learned that that belches have more methane than farts farts are mostly hydrogen now you know so the main gas of farts is right from the big bang hydrogen gas anyway um just this last week this is a picture of the largest asteroid series between mars and jupiter it's about 600 miles across and if you notice there are these odd sort of glowing areas on it and uh well we wanted to know what that was for sure so we we got in closer and we found out that there is a an ocean of salt water pushing up and forming ice uh underneath these craters so even on the asteroids underneath the ground we have warm salt water it turns out even on on pluto the farthest world that we've explored from the sun uh you know that that wonderful heart shape there is a giant glacier the glacier is made of nitrogen ice but we now know that under that is a big reservoir of warm warm water so even on pluto pluto is actually covered with organics from meteorites from just natural organics formed in space they form like they form so easily and now we have warm water this is one of my favorite pictures that this is this is real this is us flying over pluto the uh the mountains you see glinting in the sun are made of pure water ice and they're ten thousand feet high over a nitrogen glacier just beautiful incredible yeah so if you're interested you can go this was i took a screen grab today of our website where we track how many exoplanets planets outside the sun we've we've found we uh we've confirmed over 4 200 of them we've got we're working on another 5 400 making you following up and um we used the hubble space telescope to practice finding life on exoplanets and this is how we did it um during a lunar eclipse if you look at the top diagram the reason the moon looks red during a lunar eclipse is that sunlight shines through our atmosphere and it's basically like all of the sunsets and sunrises all around the world that's the light that gets up to the moon the the sun is behind the earth and the earth is blocking out the sun but a little bit of that sunlight gets around the edge of the earth and that that's why the moon looks red during eclipse it's because of every sunrise and sunset there's light in a little ring around the earth getting through and we use the hubble space telescope to to figure out what the chemistry of our atmosphere was based on the light reflecting off the moon and we found everything we were expecting we found water and oxygen and ozone and methane and carbon dioxide and we're going to do the same thing with planets around other stars this is an artist conception of one of these worlds we now know like i said over 4 000 of them when one of these planets basically does a tiny little eclipse and passes in front of its star you can see there's sort of a ring of light lit up by its atmosphere and the atmospheres you know this the starlight will actually filter through the atmosphere and we'll be able to tell if there's oxygen and water vapor and carbon dioxide and methane and all of those things and so um we are we're getting ready now in the very near future to explore these planets and figure out whether there's life there so i'll stop with the science there we can talk a bit more about some of the the more deeper questions but you know some people would say to you that that this is a very unromantic and unspiritual view that you know what what i think we are is atoms formed in dead stars carbon happens to be very good at molecular bonding put it in water for a while and off you go and but you and i are really here and we really have experiences and you know this is the only time the universe gets to know itself through who you are you know and and i've said this right that you know so your fears your insecurities your pride your fun your love your your grief um you know that's this little tiny bit of and when i say conscious i don't think we're as conscious as as is possible we have tiny little brains you know what would what would something you know that had a billion years evolution on us what we know what what what what the experience of the universe but you know the the tiny little whether you're an insect or whether you're a cat or whether you're a human the tiny little bit of awareness we have i don't know why it's something that i want to share and it's something that i want to celebrate so that's that's sort of my take on what life is um a lot of you asked about the questions of time in parallel universes and and these are things that we have a bit less proof of but you know one of the things that somebody asked can you travel to a parallel universe something that kind of freaks me out is we probably do it all the time and um my my husband was one of the best quantum optical experts at nasa when he was working and he would make instruments and if you want this could be another visit um telescopes honestly i'm not making this up we did a podcast for npr and i can link to it um these telescopes really only work if if multiple realities sort of dovetail together you need to have a single particle of light from a star the same photon the same one go through several different telescopes at once and that shouldn't be possible but it is if you do it very very carefully and if you do some quantum mechanical tricks and certainly at very small scales the nature of reality and whether we're in a parallel universe or not may be very fuzzy and may switch back and forth um this is more conjectural but i think this is interesting um you may want to research something called the mandela effect because it turns out that we're beginning to realize that there are populations of people on the planet that remember different pasts and one of the things about quantum mechanics says that not only are there multiple futures that you may find yourselves in or multiple presents but in fact the reality you're in now this moment of now multiple paths may have led to so people might not remember the exact same past and there's there's a substantial group of people who really seriously remember nelson mandela dying in prison and the one that kind of freaks me out is a children's book series that i remember being called the bernstein bears this is well documented the bernstein bears was a children's book series i remember reading them it never existed the title was always the berenstain bears and if you write if you look that up you'll find that that's true that a substantial number of people remember it differently so um we may be transitioning in and out of parallel universes all the time it may be sort of almost kind of frothy to the nature of reality i again i i really admire some of the the buddhist ideas and i don't necessarily think the buddhists have you know some sort of special line to ultimate truth or anything but the idea that the universe you know could just come to existence now and it could it could be over again in 30 seconds and and and why do we weep you know for things we're attached to when everything is in flux everything is in flux you know the reality that i'm facing now many pasts came to and many futures that are different from now come off of you know the the idea of loving something so much and trying to be detached this part of me just this is my personality i i love very hard i i fight against detachment but even in my grief i'd sort of like to just go out and celebrate the wonderful wheel and the wonderful cycle of everything that i see here so what do you guys think should i i mean i can always answer more questions or i'm happy to make a conversation i think felix is back on his phone so i'm just going to welcome him back into the fold mr think about it thank you grace i'm back in the space uh i'm not sure uh how screen and sound are but i am here only to ask community questions on behalf of you all so uh what i would love to um continues with you personally um michelle because last time you talked about getting a tattoo for the first time in your life i did how's that going oh well did i show it to you so so it it goes all the way around my body um i think i think it starts here so so it's um it's elvish uh it's tolkien elvish and and yeah i i had never gotten a tattoo before but when when when my husband and i were courting he wrote me a love letter in elvish which probably tells you something about how nerdy we are and um and he uh he actually did the calligraphy again just a couple months ago when he could still write and and then i had just just like old-fashioned carbon paper i had his calligraphy transferred onto my skin like this nice little sort of purple paper that ripped off and then they they they tattooed it on so it's it goes it goes all the way around my my back and then then all my other arm yeah and it's yeah it's a um it's an elton john song so you know i i really i really hope that somebody at some sci-fi convention starts looking at my hand and goes is that an elton john's song i mean it's um for those so it's it's it's cinderellan right that that's that's the dialect of elvish and it's the fair faiorian script i mean he knew all the details i don't speak elvish but he does he's from oxford so wow see i got the tattoos it wasn't it wasn't that bad i mean it certainly hurt but it was also really fun i mean i came out of there smiling took about two and a half hours where did it hurt the most ask sabine and chad i think it hurt the most over my spine i think that's that's that's sort of classic that there's a lot of nerve endings there so um i i i i didn't it wasn't over my spine for very long though so it had no at no point was it ever horrible well i can't thank you enough and i want i would like to um continue with the community questions here um one question that jenny asked in the very beginning in the chat um is do we matter well i think that's up to us right i mean you know i mean in a universal sense right you know we are these little chemicals interacting and dispersing um do we matter to each other absolutely you know this is our experience of the universe these are our lives these are the only ones we get um i i don't think that there is you know i i remember i told you guys last time you know i i was one night i was observing at mount palomar and we were looking for exploding stars supernova explosions the end of a star's life and we saw 20 of them in one night you know 20 solar systems blowing up in one night and that happens every night and every day all around us there's no universal importance except that we are part of this amazing thing right but to each other and the difference we make to each other and the compassion that we're capable of and the exploration and the joy and you know i'm beginning to appreciate and i don't mean to be tried about this because it hurts like hell i'm beginning to appreciate the beauty of grief as well you know this is this is something that i'm going to let change me in whatever way it wants to change me and uh um don't mind myself i should turn it off i'm sorry so of course we matter to each other i mean i guess my idea of our importance as a species or as individuals we don't matter to a very large universe accepting a beautiful part of it and um well there's a lot of conversation in the chat about which elton song uh which album john's song it is it's it's this is the first verse of the elton john song the one so it's it's not one of his best known ones but it's really really pretty so uh it it has it has um um it has the the phrase when stars collide like you and i no shadows block the sun they're all i ever needed baby you're the one so lots of love for you in the chat here thank you michelle for sharing this and kyoko also asked the big question in the chat in the beginning is death and life the same well you know another person asked the question are we a simulation and i think that's a reference to what people are talking about is the holographic universe there's a lot of drawing evidence now that our perception of time is really really not the way time actually is in a basic sense and there's this idea that that every moment in time really does exist and perhaps every version of you know multiple versions of it exists all at once so i don't know if this is true but according to the the basic way physics is going right now um i've already been dead for billions of years you know all the stars have gone out now that that's happening now and i haven't been born yet in every moment of my life that was joyful or scary i think about that a lot you know as i lose my husband that you know all of those wonderful times this isn't just the end of his life it's just a shape you know he's he's some sort of shape through space time and this is just part of it but the part of him we're having a wonderful time in paris or the part of him where we're meeting um that's still there and that's still now and you know um i know i said this phrase before but you know we we as physicists think it's literally true that whatever the universe is this sort of large-scale hologram and by the way hologram does not imply that someone made it it's just it's the way the universe stores information is very much like a hologram and we may all be information constructs in that but you know i say that i said to my husband you know when the universe began i was holding your hand and when the universe ends i'll be holding your hand and in some real way you know you are eternal in that sense we believe that that this life and many many versions of your life perhaps really do all exist in this structure we call the universe so are we important we're a tiny part of this beautiful thing but we may be a part of it for whatever time means and there may be things outside of time as well but you know it could be that when the universe ends in countless countless quadrillions of years from now or when dark energy rips us all apart the moment where i'm holding his hand is still absolutely there and absolutely as real as any other moment there may be no now or everything is now the one of the reasons it's hard to get around this is you know we talked about light that light light does not experience space or time to a particle of light the universe never expanded and time never existed and michelle uh jenny asked us on on the slack if that kind of like your knowledge or your perspective about the universe how that impacts you in like the mundaneness of daily life for example you know when you're in line at the grocery store or in a traffic jam do you think you experience this differently to us i don't know i don't know what it's like to be other people's head i really don't um i i can't say that you know being a physicist i i do think change is everything um you know i mean i can still get annoyed and i can still get uh you know sad i mean i i mean i'm definitely just a person i mean i'm no no paragon by any by any means but i think everything does change a bit i mean you know i remember you know my mom driving me in a car as a kid when i was thinking about vectors and thinking about sort of how could i keep my hands still as the car turned so i would move my hands that it would be still as the car was turning around it and you sort of you sort of find yourself thinking about the physical world and how it works is put together all the time so you know nothing's really entirely mundane there's always a little something special going on yeah it's beautiful how do you how do you cope with the fact that so many people seem to lose belief in scientific facts it's a hard one um you know i i guess this is probably sounding a little bit you know overly marxist of me but you know i mean i don't think that was a i don't think that was i think that's deliberate i think it was it was politically deliberate to separate us you know to to take people and get them fighting each other and and then you know let very rich people cream off the top of everything you know i mean it just it just seems very politically advantageous that this was set up you know to to to actually get people arguing and hating each other that much people who have far more in common with each other than they have differences you know this idea of just you know that you know we're satanists right i mean it's this q anon stuff right you know anybody who's not you know a huge trump supporter is some kind of satanist pedophile and that's really what they're saying it's crazy stuff um i've certainly dealt a lot recently with flat earthers you know and i there's one there's one incredible death threat that nasa had to investigate against me um i get lots and lots of trolls lots and lots of threats um this is something being done for a political agenda i i wish people could see you know what the beauty is and how much we know even as simple as those pictures of saturn i wish they could you know these are things we just took a picture of and the things we know i mean we talked to you before about you know making elements out of the stars that's not a theory when we look when we look so far away in the universe that the light took billions of years to get to us we see different chemicals they just didn't exist you know before these uh these stars existed so i mean it makes me very sad but i also have to say i have a respect for the diversity of humans we're never going to agree we do have very different lives but i yeah that's we got you got me as to why that's so attractive after the next question um i would like to turn the virtual table here to the community for on-screen questions so um to make this a true community q a you can hit the participant symbol on your zoom app or desktop app and you will see the raise the hand symbol that will indicate that you have a question for michelle to ask here on screen and while you think about that while you um come up with your first uh questions for michelle here that you would like to ask her live in person um michelle this is kind of like a virtual dinner if you if you have uh the choice of anyone in the world for to meet for a real dinner uh who would you want as a dinner guest in the world today as alive like like right now um oh god all right i'll be totally honest with this i've got a huge crush on martin clunes he's a british actor um he uh he he right now he's in he's in doc martin which i i don't that's not how he is i particularly like that character but i think if you ask me right now especially because i've been kind of lonely you know i haven't had haven't had much physical intimacy for a year i think i'd probably say i i wanna i wanna have uh my my my my man crush uh martin clunes as far as other people but what i love to meet um see i've actually had the the benefit of meeting some of my heroes i mean i i've definitely had dinners with neil degrasse tyson with brian green um some of the best scientists in the world you know i've just really really loved seeing them i think i need an artist i think i need to uh um oh and and and probably that this is a wonderful thing because i obviously asking somebody of japanese said who's that wonderful artist that does all of those mirror rooms with all of the uh um uh with all the sculptures it looks like you're gazing off into infinity of color and shape and all that yeah like i think i need an artist so once i get over my you know my my hormones and have my dinner with martin thank you um we have the first raised hand here on zoom um again you can click on your uh participant uh button and then click the raise the hand symbol on the right to your desktop app you can see that little symbol of raising your hand and kyoko was the first one uh who hid it so um let's unmute kyoko kyoko this is uh your question to michelle great to see you you can probably see how much you like japanese culture i've got a whole house full i'm only half japanese so but thank you very much this is it's fascinating to to hear you and um my question is so we know that we're part of the universe and we're made of universe stuff and that the universe is expanding and pardon me for oversimplifying i'm just a a lay person but where where is the universe located where does it sit is it part of something like what's beyond expanding where you know like where is it expanding to yeah and of course you know like most of the absolute best questions we don't have the answer to that yet we absolutely we have absolutely no idea how big the universe is um the uh the the universe a lot of times when we say the word universe we're talking about what we mean as the observable universe and um that that is limited to the amount of space we can see where light has had time to reach us so um this is actually again something real this is not a theory as you look farther and farther out the light has taken millions or billions of years to get to you and eventually you look so far out in any direction on the sky that you look back to a time when the universe was so hot it was actually opaque it was like the surface of the sun so so so we know that the universe was once very hot and very dense that's not a theory pick any direction on the sky you'll see galaxies that are millions of light years away so the light took millions of years to get to the billions of light years away and the farthest we can see is about 400 000 years after the big bang where the universe is so hot it's actually the whole thing is is like the surface of the sun we can't see any further the universe is absolutely bigger than that because the universe is not a sphere centered on us that this is just a time effect any direction you look you look back to the time where it becomes opaque we don't know whether the universe has an end or whether it is truly infinite but in my case whenever i hear the word infinity i get distrustful you know we used to think that the earth was infinite or the ocean was infinite or the sky was infinite or space is infinite um i think we we just don't know yet what the shape really is if there are others how they're nested together um in this very distant fireball all around us um there may be the signals of us interacting with other universes it could be that when the universe was very small and again when i say the universe was small we don't know how big the universe is but everything we can see the observable universe we're pretty sure was once much much smaller than the size of an atom we have evidence of that but the universe itself could have been infinite even then that was just a tiny little bit that we can see now so the universe could have been in another state very dense very hot but we don't know what size it was so um it's it's not so hard to imagine that the question what is the universe expanding into is an excellent question and it can be answered a couple different ways i mean i mean sometimes i use the analogy it takes a little bit of explaining you you were you know the big bang had no center to it there's no center that all the galaxies are moving away from instead everything in space is getting a little farther away from everything else unless it's held together by something stronger than this expansion like the the the the the forces between my atoms the chemistry the bonds the gravity that holds me to er earth all of that is stronger than this expansion of space but it just seems like it's a property of space itself right now that space itself is getting bigger that may be why we experience time it could be that time is our perception of this change in the state of space so it's not that we're necessarily moving into anything it's just that space itself has this property of getting bigger in every direction so there doesn't really have to be an outside to the universe for it to get bigger for space itself to expand um that said maybe it is expanding into something it's just not not in our three dimensions i mean so when you think about a balloon expanding remember the big bang has no center this is not you're not the center of the balloon but if you think of just the surface just the latex of the balloon as the balloon expands every part that latex gets farther away from every other point there's no center to the latex we're not talking about the middle just the surface of the balloon so it could be that there actually are other dimensions and in this analogy the latex of the balloon the surface is where all of our universe exists all of space all of time there's no up this is that we that we're aware of as as three-dimensional creatures that that's another direction we're not you know we're not aware of so it's possible that we're expanding into a direction we as three-dimensional creatures don't know about and modern physics thinks that there may be many dimensions i mean there may be as much as 11 or the holographic universe says everything is two-dimensional so i mean we don't know yet but yeah you don't need to have anything to expand into there's no empty center nothing is moving through space that's an interesting point the galaxies moving away from each other are not the galaxies moving through space flying through space it's the space itself getting bigger in every direction at once thank you yeah the universe is full of galaxies there's no empty center thank you very much thank you kyoko for your amazing question we have ann uh joel and john stewart lined up as the next uh interviewers so and here you go uh welcome to the room and uh please ask your question to our guest michelle well michelle thank you so much just sharing this beauty of the universe and your perception of time and space and and i i i don't know if it's a controversial question i really don't think there's a right or wrong answer um i grew up in the catholic school and now i've been taught while science and religion don't really aren't really compatible i i don't see it that way um but as you're going through all this different process and you know thinking about life you can't help but think about you know how or your views on religion is how compatible is that to your view of this universe and fine well i mean the the the asking the big questions about what the universe is you know uh about the forces that are bigger than ourselves i mean the this is the same this is this the same longing in us right i mean this is this it's the same longing that goes back to probably before we were even human of trying to ask you know where do we come from and where are we going and what is the significance of life and death and i mean i think of religion is an absolutely beautiful cultural expression at its best i mean i have prayed in mosques in in the middle east you know i i have been to synagogues i have been to many catholic churches i've given many talks especially the jesuits the jesuits love me i'm friends with the uh the observatory of the va i'm friends with the uh the director of the vatican observatory um you know i've i've i've been all over the himalayas i've prayed with with buddhists i've you know i've had a chance to to to to experience the the beauty of religion and the power and the the community of prayer and a spirituality um in in some ways science to me you know while it answers a lot of the same you know they are separate um science has to be something that you can show by evidence and if the evidence changes you must change your belief with it so you know there were so many astronomers including einstein who did not believe the universe could be expanding but then when the universe was was found to be expanding um you know everybody has to once once the evidence is there you have to change and you know with with religion you know instead you have you know the beautiful cultural beliefs that don't change just because something else happens they're not really linked to that you know it's um science is limited in that you you have to be able to do an experiment eventually that anybody in the world could replicate you know as weird as we say quantum mechanics is the reason we think it's it's real is that any lab in the college university could replicate some of the experiments of quantum mechanics where spirituality is a personal thing it happens inside your one mind you know or you're one spirit and we and i talked about the universe being you are unique you are the one chance the universe gets to live through your spirit through your mind and your experience of praise of of religion of god of you know i mean that's your part that you get to teach the universe so you know i i think you know in a way in a perfect world right i mean we could really respect this of each other um i find myself with human psychology i live inside a human brain warm and mushy and irrational um i love to pray i love to worship i love to dance um i i personally interpret that as this is me this is my mind this is how my mind experiences the world and i think that that is informed by science and to me the science obviously i took very much into me the lessons of science i took very much into my ideas about life and death and and good and evil or any of those things but you know religion can be an absolutely amazing personal experience and then shared in the community of prayer and you know i think we all need to celebrate each other's experiences thank you so much ann for your question uh to michelle and next up is joe joe weldon welcome and here's your question for michelle michelle i could spend the whole time thanking you on so many different levels so i'll just say a big warm thank you for being here and sharing um so i'm gonna try to combine this into one question so i've had two competing thoughts so you're right science does challenge our beliefs and we see we challenge our assumptions and we have the data we change our beliefs and we have to two questions what one big assumption has been busted recently that we were like oh my god we assumed something but because of the scientific evidence it's changed our belief and then the second part of that question which i'm struggling with is very pragmatic one how the hell do we learn all this stuff how i mean because is is the learning modalities enough are schools learning more about this how are we educating people about all this stuff i mean i read the science section of the times every tuesday that's my extent of science you know but is it is the is the learning path enough that people are becoming educated about what we're learning because it's we're learning exponentially i would assume wow is that a great question um so i mean i mean certainly i mean there's so many things right now where i mean we you talk about kind of the copernican revolution where it turns out oh the earth's not in the center uh well maybe the solar system's in the center no it's not maybe the galaxies that no no no i mean of course the big one that we're really grappling with is that um you know as far as we can tell you know all of the all of the trillions of galaxies that we can see in the observable universe each one with hundreds of billions or a trillion stars you know 100 billion planets at least in our milky way you know all of that matter really really only making up about one percent of the matter of the universe so you know we think that regular matter made up of atoms is right now about four percent and and about three percent of that is just cold hydrogen gas between the galaxies it's very difficult to observe but that's where most of the regular matter is but the other 96 is in a state we haven't discovered yet i mean i mean let me talk but we're not made of what the universe is made of you know but whatever you and i are we're some little dusting of something that is kind of along for the ride on the rest of the universe and um that's a big deal because i mean all this just we only i mean so we've had inklings of dark matter since the 1940s uh when we were studying sort of how galaxies orbit around each other you know and then vera rubin uh famously and one of the with the first uh another woman astronomer who really should have gotten the nobel prize for discovery of dark matter he founded our own milky way galaxy and then you know now we're you know i mean that that's that's incredible um the other thing that i mean going from the very large scale to the small scale there's a a really great podcast called veritasium by derek muller i really recommend this and there's one called what is empty space uh there's another one called your your mass is not from the higgs boson there's another one about that that that image of the black hole the one that the giant black hole that they took an image of he does so many great podcasts but it turns out that um the particles elementary particles are not little balls they're actually fluctuating fields quantum fields there's really only one electron in the whole universe because there's an electron field and where it locally is vibrating you sense an electron you measure an electron but the wavelength of matter extends forever you know the wavelength of the matter and the particles that make you up never go to zero they extend through the universe and so this this i mean his what is empty space is amazing because now we find that just you know energy all the way back to einstein energy is the same as mass times the speed of light square it's a lot of energy that goes into a little mass but you know the universe is constantly just vibrating matter in and out of existence and what a what a proton really is i mean that will show you a picture of this is just this this weird conflagration of interacting fields that are jumping into existence and jumping back out and and this vibration of energy is what we think of as a particle so i mean there's no such thing as matter or mass at a tiny scale it comes in and out of existence so fast you know yeah i mean i mean think about that so ah you know i mean our sense of reality doesn't hold up anymore and this comes from measurements this comes from real data and so you know what one of the things that we've had to let go of in the last hundred years i mean the thing about every point in time being real that goes back to einstein and iraq that's 100 years old um we had to let go of that idea and now we're having to let go of the idea that anything we really comprehend is is solid there's another great book called um trespassing on einstein's lawn by a woman called amanda gefter and amanda gefter is actually a scientific american writer she's not a physicist but she tries to see how far she can go down this rabbit hole about what is really real is anything in the universe really real and the answer is no [Laughter] there's nothing we can say it's 100 people so um you know it this idea that our perception i mean not just ourselves as a matter of scale being very big or very small but you know our perception i mean quantum mechanics threw it away a hundred years ago general relativity threw it away now we're finding out just how how real that was so you know there's there's all kinds of stuff that's a great podcast veritasium with derek muller and for those of you who want to do a little more weird reading uh trespassing on einstein's lawn thank you so much michelle um was that joe was that answering your question about education as well oh education yeah so i boy why are we not all about this in school so so i mean at least the thing about where our atoms come from right how about learning that in middle school when you learn about chemistry when you learn about what an atom is and the reason a carbon atom is different from a hydrogen atom different from an oxygen atom just different numbers of protons how did this all start it's the stars it's the only thing in the universe that makes a carbon atom the only thing and you know i mean i would love to have that in curriculum i mean i didn't have astronomy as a part of my high school science um you know people are always they're always ready to make fun of people who don't know what causes the seasons and things like that but you only take a class in astronomy in college if you ask for it if you take it as an elective you know the vast majority of people have never had an astronomy class they don't they've never seen those pictures of saturn we try so hard but um i mean i i would love this to be a central part of education to know these questions about what is our solar system like where do our chemistry come from you know yeah we we need to know about our neighborhood of course i mean we can teach kids about geography too that's that's kind of gone down the tubes as well thank you thank you thank you and uh um we pass it on to the next amazing community member here for his question jon stewart john welcome and here's your question for michelle yes i saw you before with the t-shirt excellent you are here yeah thank you so much michelle's fascinating and the way you present it is always uh makes it even more that way um so i studied astrophysics in college and i really wish i had kept up and it was my favorite course and um there was a theory that captured my imagination about the balloon of the universe getting to a point where maybe gravity or something would pull it back in in time as we know it would go in reverse and and then we'd go back to the big bang and start all over again and and i don't know i just i don't know if that's still a possibility or how you feel about that it was it was one of the the it was one of the main ideas until about 10 years ago and um so there was this idea that you know okay the universe all of these galaxies have a lot of gravity between them eventually you know the the expansion should start to slow down and especially when we discovered that we've missed 96 of the mass the universe had that much more mass all this dark matter so um uh two people who were friends of mine brian schmidt who i was actually working with at the time in australia not not with him personally we were working at the same observatory and another one was adam reese so i knew ever since i was a graduate student um they were both students of a professor of mine at harvard called bob kirschner and um bob kirschner was trying to find a way to measure how much the universe was slowing down over time and um that's kind of hard because in order to figure out how much we we see around us that all the galaxies are receding it's called the hubble constant you're probably familiar that they're receding at a rate of uh 75 uh kilometers per hour for for every 3 million light years you go so so it's not a fast expansion locally we can measure we can measure how much the galaxies are moving away but if the rate was different earlier that'd be hard to measure because we sort of measured the local rate so long story short they found a way to measure the rate of expansion very far back in time back back many billions of years about about about nine billion years i believe and um nobody expected this uh everybody's jaws just dropped when they discovered the universe wasn't slowing down it was accelerating and this is the detection of this dark energy um nobody expected it they were all trying to measure how much the universe was slowing down over time thinking that eventually it might all recollapse again um that put a monkey wrench in that idea um so so that was one of the main ideas probably 10 years ago when you were taking astrophysics experimentally now the universe seems to be flying farther and farther apart and faster all the time and interestingly enough there was a an inflection point something changed five billion years ago and this is what we're designing a mission at nasa to explore that five billion years ago the universe was actually slowing down it was still expanding but the rate was slowing down and then we reached some kind of critical density and at that density we sped up again and it was almost like there always had been this hidden force but the universe was holding together it was dense enough we didn't notice it and then we got to this this density it just took over and and now a question is can matter itself hold together over this in the long run you know like i said the expansion of the universe is a very gentle force it's not making my body larger it's not ripping the sun away from the earth um if it keeps expanding this fast that may happen really i mean so we don't know this we just discovered this ten years ago and my two friends got the nobel prize and now i feel like a real schlub because of course you know when friends from grad school get the nobel prize you're like what have i been doing but um so we did not expect that result right now it looks like the universe is going to expand forever but like we know what the universe is going to do right i mean we only popped our heads out of caves a couple tens of thousands of years ago right now our measurements suggest that the universe will span forever there's an interesting idea called the false vacuum which you may want to look into that says that as we get to lower and lower densities we may actually drop space and time itself into a new state and that could set off another big bang that's one of the ideas that you may still be able to have kind of more big bangs if the universe expands so much you actually drop all of space and time into a lower energy state very conjectural we don't know that that's true so people are trying to figure out because it's kind of a dumb idea the universe begins and expands and then poof goes to nothing then we start asking you know why are we in this wonderful privileged time where space and time and matter exist or if you believe in many universes some people have said isn't it amazing that our universe is so perfect that matter can exist and life can exist maybe we're not the most perfect universe because it looks like this one may blow itself apart maybe a universe with slightly different rules of nature wouldn't have had that and life could exist for longer all those ideas come out of that just another just another small question to take away from this conversation here of course and um i would like to point to our banal uh human time which i've always find uh does go away like a second when we speak to you michelle thank you so much we have nine minutes left we have more music for you uh and we will instead of the breakouts um we will give our two community members who have raised their hand um the five more minutes here with michelle first up is uh tommy d tommy uh thanks for being here thanks for being a community member and here's your question for michelle got it thank you i only spent 13 hours on zoom all day i thought i would have figured it out by now uh michelle first of all your authenticity and your candor is it admirable and i think i speak on a lot of us to just say thank you for that we appreciate it um two quick questions please don't ruin the fantasy for me when i ask this question have they been here before are they coming back um and follow up to that and i think you know what i mean the extraterrestrials and also as a follow-up where do you land on universal consciousness and i think they're sort of related so i love the area yeah i you know and again i wish i had a wonderful answer for you i mean certainly in my idea of what's possible um very advanced extraterrestrial life is definitely possible um the the whole thing about you know visitations and alien abductions i think once we figure out quantum entanglement we won't need spaceships i think that you know when you think about um i kind of like the idea of that movie interstellar with matthew mcconaughey where there were creatures that had learned how to weave themselves into gravity itself um i i think that a lot of times we're just not thinking about what a very advanced civilization might be like um you know at nasa of course we're all about looking for a physical evidence of something i think that i i think can speak for pretty much everybody at nasa that says we think that that advanced extraterrestrial life very well may be possible the question is the evidence and if we can all agree on that yeah there was about about three years ago we found a star did you uh did you hear about something called tabby's star um i i think i think this kind of shows you that we're very willing to be open-minded we found a star that seemed to have these giant geometric structures in front of it um something that would resemble almost what people could talk to as a dyson sphere you know giant solar collectors that were moving in front of the star and um we followed up on that like nothing i mean we we did podcasts on it you can see a wonderful podcast by tabitha um boyanjian the reason we called it tabby stars because the the the stronger they called it was tabitha tabitha boyangian um unfortunately what it turned out to be at least in the end we did so many follow-ups that whatever this was is made out of dust and so we think that maybe two planets hit and there were these giant sort of triangles of dust coming off but it was a chance where for a second or two when i i did podcasts on this before we knew what it was we wondered if we were looking at uh evidence of a super advanced civilization that we could see in the sky and i talked on npr about you know this is a star you could see with the telescope you could go out in your backyard you could look set up this telescope and you could look at somewhere you knew that there was an advanced civilization in this case the evidence turned out that it wasn't um wow would i have loved it to be true i would love to have the evidence you know the joy for me and i i think for me it would be joy and not fear because if they wanted to meddle with us they already could um i think people don't have enough imagination and i think that the idea that very very advanced beings may know more about these different dimensions you know they could be here all the time and we'd never even know i mean it's not as simple as flying saucers you know so i think that's my take on it um universal consciousness well if i'm not overly impressed with human consciousness i don't think that we're as awake as some people as other things may be we don't perceive even space and time the way it is but what i would say to that is that if all points in space and time are the same and we're all these little pearls of consciousness that exist for a little bit of time do you really need more than one or can it be the same one looking at everybody's eyes at once wow tommy d thank you for asking michelle thank you for responding we have time for one more question and we have one more hand raised here in the room amanda amanda thank you for being here uh you have the last question of today here you go are you here with us amanda who is amanda anyway um amanda that's all right if uh if we uh can't get you i have um hiccups here as well i don't know what to do says amanda well that's what we all share with each other um no worries at all i guess we will we have to understand could you write your question in the chat just put it in the chat for us amanda and uh while amanda is asking this her last question um i want to thank you all for your time today um and want to just give a quick shout out to next tuesday where we host the in our very first inheritance workshop with our own facilitator co-star here on remote daily rit fam uh taking a facilitator helm we'll be guiding you through your own inheritance so prepare to find out new things about yourself and i'm not sure if amanda has had the chance to share her question yet amanda don't worry if if it doesn't work for you today um and uh we will continue the conversation with uh and for each other uh in on the slack channel i um would like to invite you for a final dance of today this is something new uh we have never done it before and uh before we dance with eleno and dario i would like to give michelle one last you know final piece of advice is there one thing michelle for today that you would like to share with us one thing that you would like to take us away from this conversation with you today other than that we will invite you back because that's already said um is there maybe one last final piece of advice for your own point in time uh one final thought one final saying well i guess you know i was reading sort of the chat you know people were saying you know you mean you know everything's already happened it doesn't matter what we do and all of that remember that um it still seems like space and time to us and we can still make each other's lives better and it matters to us what we do even if there's no external morality or any of that the other thing i would say is um people often make the wrong assumption that i'm not interested in actually being friends because it's like i'm on tv and they'll see me doing things and they're like well i couldn't possibly talk to her invite her out or you know invite her over for dinner um i could really use some more friends and i need to figure out how to have a new social life soon so invite me over i can get to new york and get to wherever you are i get to germany my mom's my mom's german you are welcome anytime and you know what um we will invite you to our slack um and uh continue the question and um continue the conversation with you there because having you as part of our community is one of the biggest privileges and joys and gifts um that we could all um ever had in our life and you already have a few invitations to berlin here in the chat i'm gonna type i'm gonna type my email address in and and please use this sparingly this is my email address right now as as you know uh and taking care of my husband is intense uh he can't move i'm doing complete bedridden care and because of covet i'm doing it all by myself so if i don't respond right away please no rejection i'm just kind of overwhelmed but but this is my my email address maybe we can start some conversations wonderful and i also want to give you um just all the love and all the respect and everything that i can have in my heart right now for what you're doing um in your everyday life right now that you share with your dear partner that you have shared your professional life with your personal life with uh you're such an example for being an amazing human being in this time um michelle it's it's been a huge honor to have you on back on remote daily and i would just want you all to give to stomp your feet clap your hands and give a big big round of applause for our guest today live from maryland and of course from nasa michelle tyler thank you so very much and michelle this is an invitation from many of you to many cities but now i have an invitation for you to dance it off uh what we're doing today for the very first time is a final dance off for the end of the hour to vent off to shake it all loose of course with our artist in residence elendon daniel if you dance we might shine a quick spotlight on you um don't treat that take it as a competition just shake it and um thank you all for joining today this is illinois and dadio live for you and if you dance um you'll feel it here you go [Music] do you remember the 21st night of september chasing the minds of pretenders while chasing the clouds away our hearts were ringing in a key that our souls were singing as we're dancing in the night remember how the star stole the night away hey hey a day my thoughts are with you holding hands with your heart to see you [Music] [Music] found the love we shared in september only blue talking love remember true love we share today [Music] do you remember oh dancing in september golden dreams are shining golden dreams were shiny [Music] do you remember oh remember never a cloudy day yeah yeah [Music] never was [Music]

Channel: Work Awesome

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Length: 75min 21sec (4521 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020