YouSaid · the spoken record

Caleb Scharf

lines on the record: 76
first: 2020-02-19
most recent: 2020-02-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So this is, you know, if you want to do really good astronomy, the best thing to do is to get off the Earth and away from our atmosphere. Our atmosphere is a pain. It makes things. It obscures things. It blurs objects. It also absorbs light at certain frequencies that you really want to study. So basically a space telescope is a telescope in space, but you can build it slightly differently because it's in that environment. It doesn't have to have the same support structures and so on. But it enables you to make images of very high resolution, very high fidelity. It enables you to be extraordinarily sensitive to very, very faint things out there in the universe. And that's critical for astronomy. Space astronomy is a big deal for us all. And so that's part of the reason why NASA helps fund astrobiology in the US. around the world. There's money for astrobiology coming.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Continues to be, yeah, and I think for NASA it's become very important because it's integrated with some of their upcoming science missions. So for example, they're launching a new space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, and a big piece of the science that that's going to be able to do is to do with exoplanets and to do with looking for scientific space.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not every university. There are a number certainly around the US. Obviously, Columbia has this, we're really a community of scientists around Colombia from different disciplines, places like Harvard, in Seattle, University of Washington, Arizona, a number of major research universities have an interest in this, and they see it as a way to bring some cohesion to different fields and to kind of take advantage of these extraordinary discoveries of planets around other stars, of solar system exploration, and things we're discovering about life here on Earth, life down in the deep ocean, in hydrothermal vent systems and so on. So there are a number of places that have an interest in astrobiology.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, absolutely. Internet's a great example. And it leaves an opening for very creative people to come along and kind of snatch up the best of that, refine it, make it more efficient, and so on.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Elon Musk is aiming at with SpaceX and already accomplishing is fantastic, simply for science, the ability to put stuff in space and blue origins as well. I think I've been impressed that all of the major commercial space ventures seem to get it, that there's a lot of useful stuff you can do in space that isn't just about making money, isn't just about tourism or kind of bravado and showing off, that there's real substance behind that. And the development of this technology is fantastic. I should say that I think that the ability for some An organization like SpaceX to make the jumps that they've made rests on really the last 50 to 70 years of work that's taken place by NASA, by the USSR and China and so on. But that's kind of the way these things go, right? The early experiments often”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think overall It's extremely positive that there's this interest in commercial spaceflight. Certainly as a scientist what we want is to be able to loft things into space. The ability to put mass up there. That's been stymied because of funding issues with places like NASA, what happened in the former Soviet Union and so on. It's been a real problem. And obviously the shutdown of the shuttle program kind of diminished our capacity to put anything useful in space. Humans are otherwise.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Earth gravity, right? And that sounds kind of better than zero G, but we actually don't know what that does to a human. We know the extremes. We know what it's like to be in 1G on the surface of the Earth. We know what it's like to be in microgravity in a space station or spacecraft orbiting the Earth. And we know that's pretty detrimental. Bone structure, cardiovascular system, all sorts of things, vision, you name it. But maybe a 3G kind of solves a lot of those problems, but maybe it doesn't. And we just don't know. We've not done that experiment yet.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dropping rovers down and then back in the 70s with things like the Viking missions. They were not sterilized to the same standards that we would today because we simply didn't understand the diversity of microbial life. So there are a lot of moving pieces to this. There's a lot of science that's still at the frontier. And I think that includes the question of human survivability in space. We don't really know long-term effects of certain things. Even something like gravity on Mars, it's a third...”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, yeah. No, I mean, humans have been diseases infecting each other inadvertently and deliberately for a very long time. And on Mars, it's more about confounding scientific data.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're kind of dirty, right? Humans are dirty, dirty, filthy things, and we don't know whether or not there's ever been indigenous life on Mars. And that would be a spectacular discovery. There's a bit of a risk that if you start plopping humans down, especially a million humans, that you confuse or confound the ability to see whether or not Mars once had indigenous life, even if it's just microbes. So there are sorts of...”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Of course, we already have this interesting symbiosis between ourselves and our machines and our data and so on. So all of these questions come down to or relate to the issue of... What should we do in terms of solar system exploration? What's the role of our species in there? Are we just little machines that we send out occasionally to do a bit of science? We send them to the moon, we pick up some rocks, we come back. Or is there something more that we can learn about the universe by sending humans elsewhere? I personally think that's true. A human is an incredible science machine. You place one human on Mars with a little bit of training. They're going to do more in a week than you can do with a rover in a year. But there are challenges to that, keeping that person alive. But then there's also this question of forward contamination. And that's, I didn't talk about this in my piece, but that's another challenge or another question that I think we haven't really had the full conversation about, which is you want to preserve humanity, you want to put some of us in a safety box.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it's a good question Is life elsewhere in the universe built exactly the same way? We simply don't know. The suspicion is that there's something, there is something special about carbon chemistry, allows a degree of complexity that we really don't see in any other kind of chemical system. But that doesn't mean you couldn't have life that's built out of software. Right, right. There are people thinking about that and we haven't got there yet.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then also the long-term evolution of planetary systems and the long-term potential for life in the universe. So I look at a lot of different things. Some really classical science and some kind of way out there.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you're missing all that biology that you're walking through. You walk down the street, you're in a swarm of viruses and bacteria. I'm sorry you have a cold, you know. I'd like to be on Mars right now. It's much more sterile. So that's kind of where I come at this from. So I spend a lot of time research thinking about what qualities enable a planet to sustain life in the bigger picture. So it's not just, oh, well, it's got to have oxygen and temperatures, but what really initiates any kind of life, including really extreme organisms, some of which we see here on Earth.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's playing out here on Earth? Has it played out somewhere else? Right, so you can see it at once. Right. And so I think we're still in early days with this. We don't know if there's life elsewhere. But that's kind of where I intersect with these questions of how do you sustain a civilization? And how does life really function? In the article I wrote, I talked a little bit very briefly about our microbiome. So we're totally reliant on this extraordinary community of microbes as humans, but also the environment around us. It's incredible mix of stuff that we don't usually perceive. You go to another planet like Mars, well, that's not there.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At going is kind of where I intersect with these questions of going to Mars, putting humans on Mars or other places in the solar system. And I'm really interested in both the challenge of looking for any signs of life.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Astrobiology is a modern effort to bring cohesion to the study of those questions, and it involves different fields. It involves astronomy, it involves biology, it involves chemistry, it involves geoscientists, planetary scientists, you name it. Part of what's driving it at the moment is our exploration of the solar system has been spectacularly successful in the last few decades. And, of course, we've now discovered planets around other stars. So a big focus is on understanding these so-called exoplanets and asking whether or not there are other systems out there that could have the conditions capable of not just initiating life, but keeping it going.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So astrobiology is kind of an umbrella term. The effort to understand whether or not we're alone in the universe. And by that I don't necessarily mean other intelligent life, just any life at all. Exist somewhere off the earth. Where do we come from in the first place? And kind of where we're going. So it's this sort of age-old.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come at this from perhaps an unusual So, my background is actually as a physicist, as a cosmologist. Is an astrobiologist.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, it's so funny. One of the things, popularizing the idea of traveling to Mars is interesting, and Elon's been doing it forever. And one of the jokes he said to me was I want to die on Mars just not on landing, which is, you know, he has a lot of things like that and the idea of living on Mars. So before we get to that, give me your background of your study in doing this. Because I do want to talk about the idea of where we are in space travel, because it's something that is being pushed by not just Elon, but Jeff Bezos and a number, you know, Richard Branson from Virgin Galactic, the idea of going up, he's wearing a spacesuit all the time now, goes everywhere in his spacesuit. And of course, there's all the discussion right now around climate change and the idea of this existential suicide that's going on on this planet. So talk a little bit about your background to begin with.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you put three meters of thickness of Martian regolith or soil on top of you, you're probably pretty protected. But you have to stay there. There's this perception that, yeah, you can shield, but that's only really works if you do Of what I wanted to bring up for the conversation was this notion of, okay, you get people to Mars. What are they going to do? Are they really going to sit in a Of their natural”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that Checks. It's not as exposed as Mars. It's kind of snug inside this thing we call the magnetosphere around the Earth. Mars is further out in the solar system. It gets less protection. cosmic radiation so there's two types of radiation has it's one come from the sun Come from the rest of the universe. It's these high energy particles, protons and atomic nuclei zipping around close to the speed of light. Impact stuff, they produce secondary particles. Part of what I wanted to bring up in the piece was this notion. Just put a spacesuit on, or I sit under a roof of something. Some of the kind of cosmic radiation that you're exposed to on Mars penetrates through You probably need to be underground”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Challenges for humans on Mars, but one of the ones that perhaps gets a little less attention because it sort of It feels almost familiar is the hazard of radiation. So here on Earth, we're kind of lucky. We live underneath 60 miles of atmosphere. That's like walking around with a meter of aluminum above. In terms of particle radiation An incredibly tenuous atmosphere, almost no atmosphere. It doesn't have a strong magnetic field, which also helps divert radiation. That the radiation environment on the surface of Mars is It's more brutal than pretty much anything you can do on Even airline pilots who get exposed to radiation do not get exposed to this level. We get is when people on the International Space Station for a period of time. That's long, and it's still a somewhat different environment than the surface of Mars.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Expert in Scientists, it's always important, I think, to have the full picture. That conversation because. for any life that's evolved on earth that evolves in one environment tends not to do well when it's”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am Kara Swisher, editor at large of Recode with a very bad cold. You may know me as someone who would love to go to Mars just so long as Elon Musk drives me there personally, but in my spare time I'm just a reporter and you're listening to Reco Deco, a podcast about power change and the people you need to know around tech and beyond. We're part of the Vox Media podcast network. Today in the red chair is Caleb Scharf, the director of astrobiology at Columbia University. He recently wrote a short piece for scientific American called Death on Mars, and it really fascinated me. In it, he explains why living on Mars might not be as easy as Elon Musk thinks. Shocking. Dr. Scharf, welcome to Rico Dco. Thanks very much for having me. So I want to get you to your background and everything else, but why don't you outlou why you decided to write this piece, which was terrific. It was a very pithy and just short page. Never going to die stupid and underground on Mars.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've all been there. Noisy uni flatmates. Music blar Phones going off in the library, But with long-lasting battery life on the lightweight and portable Dell XPS powered by Intel Core Ultra, you can get away from the distractions without needing to find a plug. So you can get back to, well. For those who get things done, the Dell XPS, built for you, Dell.co.uk forward slash learning.”
2020-02-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Caleb Scharf · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT