YouSaid · the spoken record

David Kipping

lines on the record: 252
first: 2023-01-28
most recent: 2023-01-28
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

“Okay, well, I mean, to a certain degree, ChatGPT3 has a level of intelligence already. It's not general intelligence, but it displays properties of intelligence with no consciousness.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not necessarily they may do, but it may not be a necessarily I mean, I guess we're talking about the difference here between sort of an AGI artificial general intelligence or consciousness, which are distinct ideas, and you can certainly have one without the other. So I could imagine.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sometimes watch up with a simulation argument that you are able to observe perhaps your own origins and study how the transformation happens. And so, yeah, that has for me recently been throwing the foaming paradox a bit on its head and this idea of the zoo hypothesis that would maybe be monitored, which has for a long time been sort of seen as a fringe idea even amongst the SETI community. If we live in this truly transitional period, it adds a lot of impetus to that idea, I think.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something we're averse to as astronomers. We normally like this mediocrity principle. We're not special. We're a typical part of the universe. Sometimes the cosmological principle. But in a temporal sense, we may be in a unique location. And perhaps that is part of a solution to the Fermi paradox, in fact, that if it is true that planets tend to go through basically three phases, dumb life for the vast majority, a brief period of biological intelligence and then an extended period of artificial intelligence that they transition to, then we would be in a unique and special moment in galactic history that would be of particular interest for any anthropologists out there in the galaxy, right? This would be the time that you would want to study a civilization very carefully. You wouldn't want to interfere with it. You would just want to see how it plays out. Kind of similar to the ancestor simulation.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything will be AI essentially out there if this is a common behavior. And so that's intriguing because it sort of implies that we are special in terms of our moment in time as a civilization, which it normally is.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You go back for the last four and a half billion years, the planet was dumb, essentially. If you go back the last few thousand years, there was a civilization, but it wasn't really producing any technosignatures. And then over the last maybe 100 years, there's been something that might be detectable from afar. But we're approaching this cusp where we might imagine, I mean, we're thinking of like maybe years and decades with AI development, typically when we talk about this. But as an astronomer, I have to think about much longer time scales of centuries. millennia millions of years. And so if this wave continues over that timescale, which is still the blink of an eye on a cosmic time scale, that implies that”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's depressing to think about AI in the search for life. I mean, I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few weeks with playing around with ChatGPT3 like many of us and being astonished with its capabilities. And you see that our society is undergoing a change that seems significant in terms of the development of artificial intelligence. We've been promised this revolution, this singularity for a long time, but it really seems to be stepping up its pace of development at this point. And so that's interesting because as someone who looks failing life out there in the universe, it sort of implies that our current stage of development is highly transitional and that”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always the key is to work in my mind, is to work with nature. That's how I see astroengineering rather than against it. You're not trying to force it to do something. That's why I always think solar energy is so powerful because in the battle against nuclear fusion, nuclear fusion, you're really fighting a battle where you're trying to confine plasma into this extremely tight space. The sun does this for free. It has gravitation. And so that's the essence of what a solar panel does. It is a nuclear fusion reactor fueled energy system, but it's just using gravitation for the confinement and having a huge standoff distance for its energy collection. And so there are tricks like that, it's a very naive, simple trick in that. Where we can rather than having to reinvent the wheel, we can use the space infrastructure, if you like, the astrophysical infrastructure that's already”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“trick of again kind of hacking the laws of physics it's like another one of these exploits that the universe seems to allow us to do to potentially manifest these artificial systems that would otherwise be difficult to to produce”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Transferability, or you could even use it as a space weather monitoring system, which actually proposed in the paper. We know that major events like the Carrington event that happened, you know, can knock out all of our electromagnetic systems quite easily, a major solar flare could do that, a geomagnetic storm. But if we had the ability to detect those higher elevated activity cycles in advance, The problem is they travel obviously pretty fast and so it's hard to get ahead of them, but you could have a station which is basically sampling solar flares very close to the surface of the earth and as soon as it detects anything suspicious magnetically it could then send that information straight back at the speed of light to your earth and give you maybe half an hour warning or something that something you know something bad was coming you should shut off all your systems or get in your Faraday cage now and protect yourself and so these these Kazites are kind of a cool”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How much of the gravitational force are you balancing out? You effectively enter an orbit where you're making the mass of the star be less massive than it really is. So it's as if you were orbiting a 0.1 solar mass star or a 0.2 solar mass star, whatever you want. And so that means that Mercury orbits with a pretty fast gravitation, a pretty fast orbital speed around the Sun because it's closer to the Sun than we are, but we could put something in Mercury's orbit that would have a slower speed and so it would co-track with the Earth. And so we would always be aligned with them at all times. And so this could be useful if you wanted to have either a chain of colonies or something that were able to easily communicate and move between one another between these different bases, you'd probably use something like this to maintain that easy”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you're in orbit, and that's how you maintain distance. A statite doesn't need to do that. It could be basically completely static in inertial space, but it's just balancing the two forces of radiation pressure and inward gravitational pressure. A quasite is the in-between of those two states. So it has some significant outward pressure, but not enough to resist fully falling into the star. And so it compensates for that by having some translational motion. So it's in between an orbit and a statite. And so what that allows you to do is maintain artificial orbits. So normally, if you want to calculate your orbital speed of something at, say, half an AU, you would use Kepler's third law and go through that and you'd say, okay, if it's at half an AU, I can calculate the period by P squared as proportional to A cubed and go through that. But for a quasi, you can basically have any speed you want. It's just a matter of how.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Previous ideas, ideas build upon ideas. An extension idea called a statite. A statite was an idea proposed, I think, by Ron Forward in the 1970s. 1970s seemed to have all sorts of wacky ideas. I don't know what was going on then. I think the Stanford Taurus, the O'Neill cylinder, Statites, the gravitational lens, people were really having fun with dreaming about a space in the 70s. The statite is basically a solar sail, but it's such an efficient solar sail that the outward force of radiation pressure equals the inward force of gravity from the sun. And so it doesn't need to orbit. Normally you avoid, the sun is pulling us right now through force of gravity, but we are not getting closer towards the sun, even though we are falling towards the sun because we're in orbit, which means our translational speed is just enough to keep us at the same altitude, essentially, from the sun.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of fun ideas here. One of the classic ideas is O'Neill Cylinder or a Stanford Taurus. These are like two rotating structures that were devised in space. They're basically using the centrifugal force as artificial gravity. And so these are structures which tend to be many kilometers across that you're building in space but could potentially habitat millions of people in orbit of the earth. Of course, you could imagine pulling them if you the expanse does a pretty good job, I think, of exploring the idea of human explosion of the solar system and having many objects, many of the small near Earth objects and asteroids inhabited by mining colonies. One of the ideas we've played around with our group is this technology called a quasite. A quasite is an extension. Again, we always tend to extend”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Planet, at least in isolation, they will have to be harvesting energy from afar, they will have to be doing work on that energy outside of their planet because otherwise you're going to dramatically change the environment in which you live.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consequences. If you're generating the energy here on Earth and you're doing work on it on Earth, then that work is going to produce waste heat and that waste heat is going to increase the ambient temperature of the planet. And so even if this isn't really a greenhouse effect that you're increasing the temperature of the planet, this is just the amount of computers that are churning. You put your hand to a computer, you can feel the warmth coming off them. If you do that much work of literally the entire instant energy of the planet is doing that work, the planet's going to warm up significantly as a result of that. And so, you know, that clearly indicates that this is not a sustainable path, that civilizations as they approach Kalashv Type 1, are going to have to leave planet Earth, which is really the point of that video to show that it's a Kalashv type one civilization, even though it's defined as instant energy upon a planet, that is not a species that is going to still be living on their planet.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, this is a few ways of achieving this. I sort of talked about in the video how there were several renewable energy sources that were excited about, like geothermal, wind power waves. But pretty much all of those don't really scratch the surface or don't really scratch the itch of getting to a Kardash type one civilization. They're meaningful now. I would never tell anybody don't do wind power now because it's clearly useful at our current stage of civilization. But it's not It's going to be a pretty negligible fraction of our energy requirements if we got to that stage of development. And so there has to be a breakthrough in either our ability to harvest solar energy, which would require maybe something like a space array of solar panels of beaming the energy back down or some developments and innovations in nuclear fusion that would allow us to essentially reproduce the same process of what's producing the solar photons. But here on Earth. But even that comes with some”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, competition is a great example of, I mean, already I think something like 10% of US power electricity use is going towards these supercomputing centers. So there's a vast amount of our current engine needs which are already going towards computing will surely only increase over time. If we start ever doing anything like mind uploading or creating simulated realities, that cost will surely become almost a dominant source of our engine requirements at that point if civilization completely moves over to this kind of post-humanism stage. And so it's not unreasonable that our energy needs would continue to grow certainly historically they always have at about 2% per year. And so if that continues, there is going to be a certain point where you're running up against the amount of energy which you can harvest because you're using even if you cover the entire plant and solar panels, there's no more energy to be had.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're using a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of that right now. So if you became a Kurdish Fype 1 civilization, which is seen not necessarily as a goal into itself, I think people think, well, why are we aspiring to become this energy-hungry civilization? You know, surely our energy needs might improve our efficiency or something as time goes on. But ultimately, the more energy you have access to, the greater your capabilities will be. I mean, if you want to lift Mount Everest into space, there is just a calculable amount of potential energy change that that's going to take in order to accomplish that. And the more energy you have access to as a civilization, then clearly the easier that energy achievement is going to be. So depends on what your aspirations are as a civilization. It might not be something one will ever do, but...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is surprising. I think people tend to think that we're close to this scale. The Kardashv type 1 is defined as a civilization which is using as much energy as is essentially instant upon the planet from the star. So that's a water, I think, for the Earth of something like 10 to the 5 terabytes.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you could also use them to accelerate away across the universe. And you can even imagine using small artificial black holes as thermal generators, right? So the Hawking radiation from them kind of exponentially increases as they get smaller and smaller in size. And so a very small black hole, one you could almost imagine, like holding in your hand would be a fairly significant heat source. And so that raises all sorts of prospects about how you might use that in an engineering context to power your civilization as well.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, it may be that black holes are using all sorts of ways by advanced civilizations. I think, again, it's been a popular idea in science fiction or science fiction trope that Sagittarius A star, the supermassive black hole in the Sagified galaxy, could be the best place to look for intelligent life in the universe because it is a giant engine in a way, in a unique capability of a black hole is you can basically throw matter into it and you can get these jets that come out, the accretion disks and the jets that fly out. And so you can more or less use them to convert matter into energy V equals MC squared. And there's pretty much nothing else except for annihilation with its own antiparticle as a way of doing that. So they have some unique properties you could perhaps power civilization by just throwing garbage into a black hole, right? Just throwing asteroids in and power your civilization with as much energy as you really would ever plausibly need.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To 20 light years when you do the occurrence rate statistics of how close you might expect feasibly want to be, they're of course difficult to detect because they're black, so they're inherently hard to see. But statistically there should be plenty out there in the Milky Way. And so these objects would be natural waypoint stations. You could use them to both accelerate away and to break and slow down.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So instead of speeding up, the way they steal energy is they increase their frequency. So they become higher energy photon packets, essentially. They get blue shifted so that you send maybe a red laser beam that comes back blue. It's got more energy in it. And because photons carry momentum, which is somewhat unintuitive in everyday experience, but they do, that's how solar sails work. They carry momentum. They push things. You can even use them as laser tweezers and things to pick things up. Because they push it comes back with more momentum than it left. So you get an acceleration force from this. And again, you're just seeing energy from the black hole to do this. So you can get up to the same speed. It's basically the same idea as Freeman Dyson, but doing it from a safer distance. And there should be a order of a million or so or 10 million black holes in the Milky Way galaxy. Some of them would be even as close as sort of 10.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just suggested why not replace those out for black holes, which is certainly very common, and rather than flying your ship into that hellhole of a blender system, you just stand back and you fire a laser beam. Now, because black holes have such intense gravitational fields, they can bend light into complete 180s. They can actually become mirrors. So the sun bends light by maybe a fraction of a degree through gravitational lensing. you know a compact object like a black hole can do a full 180 in fact if you obviously if you if you went too close if you put the laser beam too close the black hole would just fall into it and never come back out so you just kind of push it out push it out push it out until you get to a point where it's just skirting the event horizon and then that laser beam skirts around and it comes back now the laser beam wants to do a gravity i mean it is doing a gravitational slingshot but laser i mean light photons can't speed up unlike in like the spaceship case”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your speed plus twice the speed of the neutron star in this case, and that would be your new speed after the slingshot. This seems great because it's just free energy, basically. You're not doing anything. You're not generating to have a nuclear power reactor or anything to generate this. You're just stealing it. And indeed, you could get to relativistic speeds this way. So I loved that paper, but I had a criticism. And the criticism was that this is like trying to fly your ship into a blender, right? This is two neutron stars, which have huge tidal forces. And they're whipping around each other once every second or even less than a second. And you're trying to fly your spaceship and do this maneuver that is pretty precarious. And so it just didn't seem practical to me to do this, but I loved it. And so I took that idea and this is how science is. It's iterative. You take a previous great man's idea and you just sort of maybe slightly tweak it and prove it. And that's how I see the Hillo Drive.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And neutron stars are sort of the lower mass version of binary black hole system, essentially. In this case, he suggested just doing gravitational slingshot. Just fly your spacecraft into this very compact and relativistic binary system. And you do need neutron stars because if there were two stars, they'd be physically touching each other. So the neutron stars are so small that 10 kilometers across, they can get really close to each other and have these very, very fast orbits with respect to each other. You shoot your spacecraft through, right through the middle, like flying through the eye of a needle, and you do a slingshot around one of them. And you do it around the one that's coming sort of towards you. So one of them becoming away, one of them becoming towards you any one point. And then you could basically steal some of the kinetic energy in the slingshot. In principle, you can sell up to twice the speed. You can take your speed and it becomes...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These things as they merge together, the pre-merger phase, their orbiting each other very, very fast, even close to the speed of light. And so Freeman Dyson, before he passed away, I think in the 70s, he had this provocative paper called Gravitational Machines. And he suggested that you could use neutron stars as an interstellar propulsion system.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Case of the Halo drive, you can use black holes. So, this is kind of a trick of physics. I often think of the universe as like a big computer game, and you're trying to find cheat codes, hacks, exploits that the universe didn't intend for you to use. But once you find them, you can address all sorts of interesting capabilities that you didn't previously have. And the Halo Drive does that with black holes. So if you have two black holes, which are very common situation, a binary black hole, and they're inspiring towards each other, LIGO has detected, I think, dozens of these.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do arrive and are able to send back an image or maybe even if you wanted to have a person there, we might have some way of doing like a telepresence or some kind of delayed telepresence or some kind of reconstruction of the planet which is sent back so you can digitally interact with that environment in a way which is not real time but representative of what that planet would be like to be on the surface so we might be more like digital visitors to these planets certainly far easier practically to do that than physically forcing this wet chunk of meat to fly light years across space to do that and so that's maybe something we can imagine down the road the halo drive as i said is is thinking even further ahead and if you did want to launch large masses large masses could even be planet sized things in the”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bombs going off behind the spacecraft and propelling it that way, or having some kind of successful nuclear fusion reaction, which obviously we haven't really demonstrated yet as a propulsion system, then you could achieve something like 10% the speed of light in those systems. But these are huge spacecrafts. And I think you need a huge spacecraft if you can take people along. The conversation recently has actually switched, and that idea kind of seems a little bit antiquated now. Most of us have kind of given up on the idea of people physically, biologically stepping on board the spacecraft and maybe we'll be sending something that's more like a micro probe that maybe just weighs a gram or two, and that's much easier to accelerate. You could push that with a laser system to very high speed, get it to maybe 20% the speed of light. It has to survive the journey. Probably a large fraction of them won't survive the journey, but they're cheap enough that you could maybe manufacture millions of them. And some of them...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That first step, because just to context that, the halo drive requires a black hole. So that's why you're not going to be able to do this on the Earth right now. But there are lots of black holes in the Milky Way, so that's the good news. So we'll come to that in a moment. But if you're trying to travel to Africa Centauri without a black hole, then there are some ideas out there. There was a project Didellus and Project Icarus that were two projects at the British Interplanetary Society conjured up on sort of a 20-30 year timescale and they asked themselves if we took existing and speculatively but realistic attempts at future technology that are emerging over the next few decades, how far could we push into that travel system? And they settled on fusion drives in that. So if we had the ability to essentially either detonate, you can always imagine that kind of nuclear fission or nuclear fusion.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so before I took in the Halo Drive, there was an idea, because I think the Halo drive is not going to solve this problem. I'll talk about the Halo Drive in a moment, but the Halo Drive is useful for a civilization, which is a bit more advanced than us that has spread across the stars. And it's looking for a cheap highway system to get across the galaxy.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A few different ways of doing it, I suppose. One is it depends on how fast your ship is. That's always going to be the determining factor. If we devised some indecided proportion system that could travel a fraction of the speed of light, then we could do it in our lifetimes, which is, I think, what people normally dream of when they think about installed propulsion and travel, that you could literally step onto the spacecraft maybe a few years later you step off an alpha centauri B. you walk around the surface and come back and visit your family. There would be, of course, a lot of relativistic time dilation as a result of that trip. You would have aged a lot less than people back on Earth by traveling close to the speed of light for some fraction of time.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you go straight up, you're looking at the thinnest portion of atmosphere possible. But as you go closer and closer towards the horizon, you're increasing what we call the air mass, the amount of air you have to travel through. So here, it's kind of the worst case because you're going through the entire atmosphere in and out again with a telescope. So you'd need a very impressive adaptive optic system to correct for that. Yeah, I would say it's probably simpler, at least with proof of principle, just to test it with having some satellite that was a much wider orbit.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. It would be very, it's a very challenging thing to do. And normally, when you do adaptive optics, as it's called, you're looking straight up. So very close to straight up. If you look at the horizon, we basically never do astronomical observations on the horizon because you're looking through more atmosphere.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the straight one down a little bit to make it an equivalent light path distance. So the mirror itself has all these little actuators. It's actually made up of like thousands of elements, almost like a liquid mirror because they can manipulate it in kind of real time. And so they scan the atmosphere with a laser beam to tell what the deformations are in the atmosphere and then make the corrections to the mirror to account for it.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Possible to reconstruct. I mean, to some degree, we do this as a technology That can correct for what's called wavefront errors that happen through the Earth's atmosphere. The Earth's atmosphere is turbulent. It is not a single plane of air of the same density. There's all kind of wiggles and currents in the air. And so each little layer is bending light in slightly different ways. And so the light actually kind of follows a wiggly path on its way down. What that means is that two light rays which are traveling at slightly different spatial separations from each other will arrive at the detector at different times because one maybe goes on more or less a straight path and the one wiggles down a bit more before it arrives and so you have an incoherent light source and when you're trying to do imagery construction you always want a coherent light source so the way they correct for this is that this if this path had to travel a little bit faster the straight one goes faster and the wiggly one takes longer the mirror is deformable and so you actually bend the mirror on this on the”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bends light less. And so that pushes the focal point out. So the most useful focal point is actually about three or four times the distance of the Earth-Moon separation. And so that's what we call one of the Lagrange points, essentially out there. And so there is a stable orbit, kind of the outermost stable orbit you could have around the Earth.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you get about half a degree bend from the Earth's atmosphere when you're looking at the Sun at the horizon, and you get that two times over if you're outside of the planet's atmosphere because it comes. The star is half a bend to you still on the horizon and half a degree back out the other way. So you get about a one degree bend. You take the rates of the Earth, which is about 7,000 kilometers and do your Arctan function. You'll end up with a distance that's about, it's actually the inner focal point is about two-thirds, the distance of the Earth-Moon system. The problem with that inner focal point is not useful because that light ray path had to basically scrape the surface of the Earth. So it passes through the clouds. It passes through all the thick atmosphere. It gets a lot of extinction along the way. If you go higher up in altitude, you get less extinction. In fact, you can even go above the clouds. And so that's even better because the clouds obviously are going to be a pain in the neck for doing anything optical. But the problem with that is that the atmosphere, because it gets thinner at higher altitude, it”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ambitious goals we have in astronomy, but it's a very difficult system to test because you essentially have to fly out to these focus points and these focus points lie beyond the moon. So you have to have someone who is willing to fly beyond the moon and hitchhike an experimental telescope onto it and do that cheaply. If it was something doing in low Earth orbit, it'd be easy. You could just attach a CubeSat to the next Falcon 9 rocket or something and test it out. It'd probably only cost you tens of thousands of dollars, maybe $100,000. But there's basically no one who flies out that far except for bespoke missions such as like a mission that's going to Mars or something that would pass through that kind of space. And they typically don't have a lot of leeway in excess payload that they're willing to strap on for radical experiments. So that's been the problem with it. In theory, it should work beautifully, but it's a very”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That high angled resolution, but doesn't really have much photon collecting power because each telescope individually is very small. The telescope is different because it is literally collecting light with a light bucket, which is essentially the size of the Earth. And so that gives you both benefits potentially, not only the high angular resolution that a large aperture promises you, but also actually physically collects all those photons so you can detect light from very, very far away the very outer edges of the universe. And so we propose this as a possible future technological way of achieving these extreme”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, yeah. Sometimes I get confused this because they've heard of an earth size telescope because they may have heard of the event horizon telescope, which took an image of the center of our black hole. And it's very impressive and previously did Messi 87, a nearby supermassive black hole. And so those images were interferometric. So they were small telescopes scattered across the Earth. And they combined the light paths together interferometrically to create effectively an earth-sized angular resolution. Telescopes always have two properties. There's the angular resolution, which is how small of a thing you can see on the surface, and then there's the magnification. How much brighter does that object get versus just your eye or some small object? What the event horizon telescope did, it traded off amplification or magnification for the angular resolution. That's what it wanted.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The light is bending through the atmosphere. It's actually already about half a degree down beneath. And what you're seeing is that curvature of the light path. And your brain interprets it, of course, to be following a straight line because your brain always thinks that. And so you can use that bending. Whenever you have bending, you have a telescope. And so we've proposed in my team that you could use this refraction to similarly create an earth-sized telescope.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A touch at the size of such series A star or something, you just simply cannot collect enough light to do that from many light years away. So there is certainly reasons why visiting will always have its place, depending what kind of information you want. We proposed in my team actually that the sun is the ultimate pinnacle of telescope design, but flying to 1000 AU is a real pain in the butt because it's just going to take so long. And so a more practical way of achieving this might be to use the earth. Now the earth doesn't have anywhere near enough gravity to create a substantial gravitational lens, but it has an atmosphere. And an atmosphere refracts light, it bends light. So whenever you see a sunset, just as the sun's setting below horizon, it's actually already beneath the horizon.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on what information you want. If you want to know the chemical composition and you want to know kilometers of scale maps of the planet, then you could do that from afar with some version of these kind of gravitational lenses. If you want to do better than that, if you want to image a newspaper sell on the porch of somebody's house, you're going to have to fly there. There's no way unless you had...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Television signals, they can map out our surfaces, they can tell we have cities, they can even do infrared mapping of the heat island effect and all this kind of stuff. They can tell the chemical composition of our planet. And so that might be enough. Maybe they don't need to come down to the surface and study, do anthropology and see what our civilization is like. But there's certainly a huge amount you can do which is significantly cheaper to some degree than flying there just by exploiting cleverly the physics of the universe itself.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spacecraft have ever gone. So you have to send a spacecraft to that distance, which would take 30, 40 years even optimistically improving our chemical propulsion system significantly. You'd have to bound it into that orbit. But then you could use the entire Sun as your telescope. And with that kind of capability, you could image planets to kilometer scale resolution from afar. And that really makes you wonder. I mean, if we can conceive, maybe we can't engineer it, but if we can conceive of such a device, what might other civilizations be currently observing about our own planet? And perhaps that is why nobody is visiting us, because there is so much you can do from afar that to them that's enough. Maybe they can get to the point where they can detect our radio leakage, they can detect our terrestrial.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What a telescope could do is govern by its size. And so the largest telescope you could probably ever build would be one that was the size of the sun. There's a clever trick for doing this without physically building a telescope. There's the size of the sun. And that's to use the sun as a gravitational lens. This was proposed, I think, by Vaneshlaman in like 1979, but it builds upon Einstein's theory of general relativity, of course, that there is a warping of light, a bending of light from the sun's gravitational field. And so a distant starlight, it's like a magnifying glass. Anything that bends light is basically can be used as a telescope. It's going to bend light to a point. Now it turns out the Sun's gravity is not strong enough to create a particularly great telescope here because the focus point is really out in the Kuiper belt. It's at 550 astronomical units away from the Earth. So 550 times further away from the Sun than we are. And that's beyond any.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Giving us a lot of encouragement to maybe send a small probe to the nearest stars and start actually taking high resolution images of these objects. There's only so much you can do from far away. If you want to have, and we can see it in the solar system, I mean, there's only so much you can learn about Europa by pointing Hubble Space Telescope at it, but if you really want to understand that moon, you're going to have to send something to orbit it to hopefully land on it and drill down to the surface. And so the idea of even taking a flyby and doing a snapshot photo that gets beamed back that could be, doesn't even have to be more than 100 pixels by 100 pixels, even that would be a completely game-changing capability to be able to truly image these objects. And maybe at home in our own solar system, we can certainly get to a point where we produce crude maps of exoplanets. One of the kind of the ultimate limit of”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source