YouSaid · the spoken record
Clara Sousa-Silva
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- 118
- first
- 2021-06-28
- most recent
- 2021-06-28
- sittings or episodes
- 1
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- podcast
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“Not. I just think we gain nothing from trying to anthropomorphize the entire universe. And also, that's the height of hubris. That's not for us to do.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't feel like that about life. I think life does have meaning, and there's, and it's laudable to look for that meaning in life. I just don't think you can apply that beyond life and certainly not beyond earth, that this notion of meaning is a human construct. And so it only applies within us. other life forms and planet types that suffer from our intrusions or rejoice from our interactions. But this meaning is ours to do as we please. We've created it. We've created a need for it. And so that's our problem to solve. I don't apply it beyond us. I think we as humans have a lot of responsibilities, but they're moral responsibilities. And a lot of the responsibilities are much more easily fulfilled if you find meaning in them. So I think there's value to meaning, whether it's real or”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The same way the sun is not to be blamed for destroying its own planets. The universe becomes Doesn't care because it has no meaning. It owes us nothing, and looking for meaning in the universe is demanding answers Who are we or nothing? We don't get to demand anything, and that includes meaning. And I find it very reassuring, because once there is no meaning, I don't have to find it.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I enjoy finding meaning in my life. I enjoy finding Where the morality lies. I enjoy the complication of that desire. And I feel that is deeply human, but I don't feel that it's universal.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's none. I find enormous relief in the absence of meaning. I think chasing for meaning is. Human desire that the universe doesn't give two shits about.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, even the notion of if it is just us, what an awful waste of space I find extremely useful as a concept to think. You know, maybe we are special, but that would suck is a really nice way of thinking of the search for life, that it's much better to not be special and have company. I got that from Carl Sagan. So that's where I always recommend.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make time to not work, make time to not work, whatever that looks like to you. Plenty. When I was younger, I found a lot of kind of my scientific fulfillment in books and movies. Now as I got older, I have plenty of that in my work. And I try to read outside my field. I read about Danny Kanneman's work instead. When I was little, it was contact the book, the Carl Sagan book. I really thought I was just like Ellie. And I was going to become Ellie. I really resonated with me, the character and the notions of life and space and the universe, even the idea of... The movie came out, and I got to put Jody Foster in that, which helped.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I just felt taller, and like I could breathe better. I was happier. I was a better person when it was done. And that's because he's a great collaborator. He's just a wonderful person that brings out joy out of science that you're doing with him. That's really the trick. You find the people that make you feel that way about the science you're doing. And you stop worrying about being the lone wolf. That's just a terrible dream that will leave you miserable and your science will be shit.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But most importantly, it's just a bad idea. It's not It doesn't lead to good science and it leaves you miserable. I was recently had some work that I was avoiding and I thought maybe I shouldn't pursue a scientific project because I don't care enough about the outcome and it's going to be a lot of hard work. And I was trying to balance these two things. It's going to be really difficult. And the outcome is that maybe 10 people will cite me in the next decade because it's not. No one's asking for this question to be answered. And then I found myself working with this collaborator Jason Ditman, and I spent a whole afternoon hours with him working on this. And time flew by.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And praise it in students, you know. And I think it is something you can really improve on. I've become a better collaborator as the years have gone on. I don't have some innate collaborative skills. I think there are skills I've developed. And I think in science, there's this. Really destructive notion of the lone wolf, the scientist who sees things where others don't, you know, then that's really appealing and people really like either fulfilling that or pretending to be fulfilling that. And first of all, it's mostly a lie. Any modern scientists, particularly in astronomy, which is so interdisciplinary, any modern scientist as doing it on their own is doing a crappy job most likely because you need an independent set of eyes to help you do things. You need experts in the subfields that you're working on to check your work.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still very difficult. So I think choosing your collaborators based on how well you get along with them is a really sound scientific choice. Having a miserable collaborator ruins your whole life. It's horrible. It makes you not want to do the science. It probably makes you do clumsy science because you don't focus on it. You don't go over it several times. You just want it to be over. And so I think. In general, just not being a douchebag can get so much good science done. Just find the good people in your community and collaborate with them, even if they're not as good scientists as others. You'll get better science out.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I think I've escaped that trap. I feel so happy even when I'm not productive, when my students are productive. I think that sensation I was describing earlier. They only need to be half as productive as me for me to feel like I've done my job for humanity. So that has been the dynamic I've had to worry about. But to be productive is not clear to me what you have to do. You have to not be miserable otherwise. I find it extremely hard when I'm having conflicts with collaborators, for example. I find it very hard to enjoy the work we do, even if the work is this fantastical phosphine or things that I know I love.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think sadly it's very hard to feel happy as a scientist if you're not productive. It's a bit of a trap. But I certainly find it very difficult to feel happy when I'm not being productive. It's become slightly better if I know my students are being productive. I can be happy. But I think a lot of senior scientists. Once they get into that mindset, they start thinking that their student science is theirs. And I think this happens a lot of senior scientists. They have so many hats. As you mentioned, they have to do so much service and so much admin that they have very little time for their own science. And so they end up feeling ownership over the junior people in their labs and their groups. And that's really heartbreaking. I see it all the time. And”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, have time for books and movies. I try as best I can to not work very hard. I mostly fail, I should point out. But I think I'm a better scientist when I don't work evenings and weekends. If I get four good hours in a day, I often don't. I often get eight crappy hours, you know, emails, meetings, bad code. Data processing. But if I can get four high quality scientific hours, I just stop working for the day because I know it's diminishing returns after that. So I have a lot of time. I try to make as much time as I can.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know enough about basketball. I mean, literally, you've reached the peak of my basketball knowledge because I know, though, those people are basketball.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The potential life out there that this is the thing that connects us, that you can't escape the rules of the quantum world and how universal they themselves are despite being probabilistic. And that makes me feel really pleased to be in science, but in a really humbling way. It's no longer this thirst for power. I feel less special the more work I do, less exceptional the more work I do. I feel like humans and the earth and our place in the universe is less and less exceptional. And yet I feel so much less lonely. And so it's been a really good trade-off that I've lost power, but I've gained company.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shrinking my scale until it was literally the quantum scale. And now all my work, the majority of my work, is on this insane quantum scale. And yet I'm using these literal tiny, tiny tools to try and answer the greatest questions that we've ever been able to ask. And this crossing of scales from the quantum to the astronomical. That's so cool, isn't it?”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite thing about science is kind of the connection between the scales. So when I was little and I wanted to know about space, I really felt that it would make me feel powerful to be able to predict the heavens, something so much larger than myself that felt really powerful. It was almost a selfish desire. And that's what I wanted. There was some control to being able to know exactly what the sky would do. And then as I got older and I got more into astronomy and I didn't just want to know how the stars moved, I wanted to know how the planets around them moved. And then as I got deeper into that field, I really didn't care that much about the planets. I want to know about the atmospheres around the planets and then the molecules within those atmospheres and what that might mean. So I ended up”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is accessibility, right? It's I want my code to be open source, and it is. It's on GitHub anyone can download it. But is it really open source if it's written so cryptically, so poorly that no one can really use it to its full functionality? Have I really published my work and that weighs on me? I feel guilty for my own inadequacies as a programmer. Can only do so much. I've already learned quantum chemistry and astrophysics, so you know.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Including myself six months later. I'm working with a new student right now, and she sent me some messages on Slack being like, what is this file that you've got with some functions I run? And I was like This was from 2018. It wasn't that long ago. And I can no longer remember what that code does. I'm going to spend now two days reading through my own code. And trying to improve it. And I do think that's frustrating. And so I think my advice to any young people who want to get into astronomy or astrobiology or quantum chemistry is that I certainly find it much easier to teach the science concepts to a programmer than the programming to a scientist. And so I would much, much faster hire someone who knows programming but barely knows. Where space is. Than teach programming to an astronomer”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I disagree slightly in that I think because I can get the job done, I'm a programmer, but because no one else can look at my code and know how I got my job done, I'm a bad programmer. That's how I'm defining it.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like you suck at coating, buddy. There's other things in your life. So I'm a bad programmer. And so, you know, if that will give hope to anyone else who's a bad programmer, I can still do pretty impressive science. I learned, I think I started learning MATLAB and Java when I was in college. It did me no good at all. It has not been particularly useful. I learned some Fortran. That was very useful, even though it's really not a fun language because so much of legacy code is. Fortran. And so if you want to use other people's code who I've now retired, Fortran will be nice. And then I use IDL to visualize. So that simulation and body simulation, those all Fortran and IDL. But thankfully, since I've left college, I've just learned Python like a normal person and that has been much nicer. So most of my code now is in Python.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'm a terrible programmer. A lot of scientists that programming is bad because we never learned formal programming. We learned science, physics, chemistry. And then we were told, oh, you have to get these equations modeled and run through a simulation. And you're like, oh, okay, so I'm going to learn how to code to do this. And you learn just as much as you need to run these simulations and no more. So they're rarely optimized. They're really clunky. Six months later, you can't read your own code. My variable names are extremely embarrassing. I still have error messages for different compilation errors. I say things like... At least your dad loves you, Clara, you know.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A bunch of tiny black holes too. Absolute quiet, everyone, all the black holes a little too far away from one another to even interact. Is just silence forever. But until then many, many cycles of death and destruction and rebirth.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doesn't care. No one cares if you're alive in the universe. And so letting go of that preciousness of life I found very useful at that stage of my career. And instead, I just thought if life is inevitable, it doesn't matter that it came by four billion years ago. It can start again four billion years later. And maybe that is nice. Maybe that's where hope lies. planets being destroyed and created and we're here now and others will be more or less here-ish billions of years later”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growing and just eating all these planets up and just absolute chaos, the orbits of the planets would change as the star loses mass, so you would have like Jupiter-like planets just crashing into the other planets, throwing them into the sun early. It was... Terrifying to watch these simulations. It was absolute carnage. But if you run thousands of these simulations, some systems find new balance ways of staying alive, some systems post star death find stable orbits again for billions of years more than enough for life to originate again. And so that was my idea during that time that thesis was trying to explore This notion of life coming back and this idea of the universe doesn't care if you're here or not and it will go about its business. You know, Andromeda will crash into us”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's horrible. It's just a horrible notion. But it made me think, what if there's some sort of generation? And so at the time when I was doing my master's, there was a notion of the white dwarf cemetery, which is this idea that when stars become white dwarfs, that death is so horrible that planets potentially habitable planets that could have been habitable before, they're now gone. There's no chance for life. But then I thought, what if life returns? You know, now it's a white dwarf, it's calmed down, it's not going to go anywhere. White dwarfs are very stable. Across universal timescales. And so, could you have planets around a white dwarf that could themselves get life again? Life doesn't care. And so my work was basically killing. Dozens of planets, thousands of times. I just ran Thousands and thousands of N body simulations.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was younger, and I was told what would happen ultimately to the earth as the sun expands towards a red giant and Mercury would just like fall in. And then, you know, Venus fallen and the sun doesn't care. And it just seemed... So I felt so small. I felt like the earth and everything on it. It's just, the universe doesn't care. Even our sun doesn't care. And I think I felt like our sun should feel some sort of responsibility for its planets, you know. And it just felt like such a violent and neglectful parent”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope for humanity. And one of the things I hope for is that we become less obsessed with conquering and we become less obsessed with spreading ourselves. I hope that we transcend that, that we're happy with the universe without having to go and take it. So, you can hope for the species without hoping for a multiplanetary existence. Is only, I think, the drive of our most primitive instincts to go and take to go and plant a flag somewhere. We love planting a flag somewhere. And maybe we could overcome that minor drive.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I won't deny that. There is something special about humans. They're my favorite species. They are. Are Some of my best friends are humans I think Kylie of humans. It's great. I just don't have great hope for our longevity and specifically I don't have great hope given that we're the only species, our five billion that did this cool consciousness trick. I just don't want to bet on finding akin ship elsewhere.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ants. Ants can figure out exactly through some emergent consciousness what the maximum distance between their trash, their babies and their food is just from without any of them knowing how to do this. And collectively they've learned how to do this. If I was an alien species, I'd be looking at that.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are spiders that create little bubbles of air so they can breathe underwater. They can literally scuba dive. There are spiders that can create parachutes so they can glide. And talk about symmetry. Look at what spiders can do. And I just thought of spiders, but if I was an alien species coming to Earth, there'll be plenty to wander. And we would just be one.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do not shit on giraffes. Are wondrous animals, are deeply understudied. We still know so little about them because no one does PhDs and giraffes. I am to this point I made a PhD in phosphine when people aren't doing PhDs and giraffes. We do not know enough about giraffes.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The earth is not better for having us It doesn't owe us anything. Wouldn't you be sad to find alien giraffes? Would you be disappointed if you found alien giraffes? Because I would not.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anywhere, anywhere in the solar system, and I will bet everything I own, that every solar system, every planetary system has potential for habitability, you know, because even if they don't have a habitable planet, they'll have moons around other giant planets. Will be so much life. So for me, that's the only thing to figure out now, whether life is inevitable and quite common throughout the galaxy or everywhere. It's somewhere between those two. Intelligent life, I make no bets. And if I had to bet, I would be against.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We will look at the clouds of Venus, and there's other places. And so if we find any life or any sign of life ever, like on Mars, then I'll adjust my calculations and I'll say, life is not just inevitable and common, but extremely common. Because all of these places we've mentioned, the subterranean oceans on Enceladus, the methane oceans of Titan, the clouds of Venus, the acidic clouds of Venus, these are places that are very different from the places where we find life on Earth. Even the most extreme places. And so life can originate in all of these completely different habitats, then life is even more resourceful than we thought.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The quality of the data, the observational data, and also the quality of rascal and other associated things. So we're missing a lot of fundamental data to interpret the data that we get. And we don't have good enough data. But hopefully we will in the coming decades will get some information on Titan. We have Dragonfly going over We'll get the plumes of Enceladus.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But life, I think, is inevitable. And if it is inevitable, it is common. So I think there will be life everywhere in the galaxy. Now, how common that life is, I think will depend a lot on whether there's life in the solar system beyond Earth. So I'll adjust my expectations very much based on there being life in the solar system. If there's life in the Venusian clouds, if there's life in the If there are biosigners coming out of the plumes of Enceladus, if there's life on Titan,”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look for polluting gases. I would love to find polluting gases. Well, you know, I'd be worried for them, of course, the same way I think about my alien colleagues all the time, looking at us and I'm sure they worry about our pollutions. But it would be a really good, robust, unambiguous sign of life if we found complex pollutants. So I look for those too. I just don't have any hope of finding them. I think intelligent life in the galaxy at the same time that we're looking is deeply implausible”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the cockroaches and the incredible fungi. You know, they'll be fine. So life on Earth will be fine, was fine before us and we'll be fine after us. So I'm not that worried about intelligent life, but I think it is unlikely even on Earth is unlikely out of what is it, five billion species across the history of the Earth. Been one, an intelligent one and for a blink of an eye, possibly not much longer than that. So I wouldn't bet on that at all, though I would love it, of course. Wanted to find aliens since I was a little girl. And so, of course, I initially wanted to find ones that I could be friends with. And I've had to let go of that dream because it's so deeply implausible.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's probably true, but even the notion of visiting, that's so literally pedestrian. You know, of course, we want to go there because going there is the only thing we know. We see a thing we want. We want to go there and get it. But that is probably something they've no longer got need for. I specifically don't particularly want to go to space. Sounds awful. You know, none of the things I like are going to be there. My whole work is my whole career is finding life and understanding the universe. So I care a lot. But I care about knowing about it. And I feel no need to go there to learn about it. And I think as we develop better tools, hopefully people will feel less and less in need to go everywhere that we know about. And I would expect any alien civilization worth assault have developed observation tools and tools that allow them to understand the universe.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beyond our wireless dreams, but they're still in the same universe, and we know a lot of those rules. We're not completely blind”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to do on purpose has to be a big, big deal. And we know this because, yes, you're right. We don't know enough about galactic biology. We don't know what the universal rules of biology or biochemistry are because we only have the earth. But we do know that the laws of physics are universal. We can predict behavior in the universe and then see it happen based on these laws of physics. We know that the laws of chemistry are universal. We know the periodic table is all they have to choose from. So yes, there may be some sort of unimaginable intelligence, but they still have to use the same periodic table that we have access to. They still have a finite number of molecules they can do things with. So they still have to use the resources around them, the stars around them, the universe around them. And we know how much energy is in these places. And so, yes, they may be very capable.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a cartoon about this. There's an alien that gets sent to Earth, a commander spiff or something, and it's kind of a punishment or something. But that's not possible. That's the thing because interstellar distances are so hard to cross.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I told my dad. You know, my dad knew and hopefully didn't tell anyone, but if it had been an alien visiting, he probably would have told the mate, you know. And so these secrets could not be kept by any scientist that I know and certainly not collaborative scientists, which would be needed. You need all sorts of scientific teams. So between the pathetic power of any world's military compared to any civilization capable of traveling and our absolute inability to keep secrets. Absolutely not. I will bet everything that we have not been visited because we are too pathetic to hold that. Well, let me tell that”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the fact that we think our puny military, if any, even if all the military in the world got together And the fact that they could somehow contain this, that's ant's trying Human that visited them exactly And scientists, you would have to bring scientists on board. You've met a lot of scientists. How good are they keeping secrets? Because, in my experience, they're absolutely appalling at keeping secrets.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would never happen. Part of the reason that I feel so confident that aliens have not visited because they would have had to visit just to have a look remotely, you know, from Neptune or something, which makes no sense because interstellar travel is so difficult that it would be quite a ridiculous proposition. But that's the bit that I think is technically possible. If they did come here and they were visible by anyone, detectable by anyone, the thought that any government, no matter or any military, could just contain them. These beings are capable of traveling interstellar distances when we can barely go to the moon, like barely go to the moon.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I genuinely think that's more likely than aliens visiting the Earth. And I say this as someone who is dedicated her life to finding alien life. And so that's how improbable, I think, the visitations are.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, my understanding is that there's this conspiracy theory that, as far as I can tell, has no grounding in reality is that there's a slightly smaller earth inside this one, which is just too cute as a concept. And you can access it, I think, from Antarctica. And that's where we keep, and I quote, the mammoths and the Nazis.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But phosphine, although better in the sense of it is much harder to make, it has lower false positives, still has some. So I'm actually against looking for specific molecules, unless we're looking for like CFCs. If we find CFCs, that's definitely aliens. I feel confident chlorofluorocarbons. And so if aliens had been watching us, they would have been going, oh no, CFCs, I mean... They're not going to last long. Let's, you know, everyone's writing their thesis on the end of the earth. And then we got together. We stopped using them. I like to think they're really proud of us. You know, they literally saw our ozone hole shrinking. They've been watching it and they saw it happen. I think, to be honest.”
2021-06-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #195 – Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source