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

“Canals. And that was experimentalist bias playing out. He was told for one that he had basically the greatest eyesight out of any of his peers and ophthalmologists had told him that in Boston, that his eyesight was absolutely spectacular. So he just was convinced everything he saw was real. And secondly, he was convinced there was life there. And so to him, it just added up. And then that kind of wasted, you know, decades of research, of treating the idea of Mars being inhabited by this canal, civilization. But on the other hand, it's maybe not a waste because it is a lesson in history of how we should be always on guard against our own preconceptions and biases about what whether life is out there and furthermore what types of things life might do if it is there.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Polar caps, even its atmosphere had seasons. It seemed obvious to them that that too would be a place where life not only was present but had emerged to a civilization which actually was fairly common technology to our own because it was building canal systems. Of course a canal system seems a bizarre technosignature to us, but it was a product of their time. To them, that was the cutting edge in technology. It should be a warning shot actually a little bit for us that if we think solar panels or building Starlinks or whatever, space mining is like an inevitable techno signature, that may be laughably antiquated compared to what other civilizations far more advanced than us may be doing. And so anyway, Percival Lowell, he, I think, was a product of his time that he thought life was there. Inevitably, he even wrote about extensively. And so when he saw these lines, these linnae on the surface of Mars, to him, it was just obvious they were.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite possibly. I mean, I tried to as fun as it is to get into the speculation about the definitions of life and what life does and this gross network of possibilities. Honestly, for me, the strongest argument for remaining agnostic is to avoid that bias in assessing data. And we've seen it, I mean, Lowell, I talked about my channel maybe last year or two years ago. He's a very famous astronomer who in the 19th century was claiming the evidence of canals on Mars. And for him, from his perspective, and even at the time, culturally, it was widely accepted that Mars would, of course, have life. I mean, I think it seems silly to us, but it was kind of similar arguments to what we're using now about exoplanets that, well, of course, there must be life in the universe. How could it just be here? And so it seemed obvious to people that when you looked at Mars with its”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Doing what it's doing and doing everything in infinite diversity and infinite combinations is essentially what it's doing. And so we are taking this one slice and saying, no, this has to be treated separately. And I'm open to the idea that it could be a truly separate phenomenon, but it may just be like a snowflake. Every snowflake's different. It may just be that this one particular iteration is another variant of the vast continuum.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would also say I'm open to the idea of it being part of a continuation, but the continuation maybe is more broader and it's a continuation of chemical systems and chemical networks. And we call this one particular type of chemistry and this behavior of chemistry life. But it is just one manifestation of all the trillions of possible permutations in which chemical reactions can occur. And we assert specialness to it because that's what we are. And so it's also true of intelligence. You could extend the same thing and say, you know, we're looking for intelligent life in the universe. And you sort of where do you define intelligence? Where's that continuum of something that's really like us? Are we alone? There may be a continuum of chemical systems, a continuum of intelligences out there. And we have to be careful of our own arrogance, of assuming specialness about what we are, that we are some distinct category of phenomena, whereas the universe doesn't really care about what category we are.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, you run the risk of experimenters bias. If you think you know what the answer is, if you look at an Earth-like planet and a new, a preconditioned to think there's a 90% chance of life on this planet, it's going to at some level affect your interpretation of that data. Whereas if I, however critical you might be of the agnosticism that I impose upon myself, remain open to both possibilities, then I trust in myself to make a fair assessment as to the reality of that evidence for life.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think I would say I just twist that question around. So you're saying why is it a different process? And I would say why shouldn't it be a different process, which isn't really a good defense, except to say that we have knowledge of how natural evolution, natural selection evolution works. I think we understand that process. We have almost no information about the earliest stages of how life immersion our planet. It may be that you're right and it is a part of a continuum. It may be that it is also a distinct, improbable set of circumstances that led to the emergence of life. As a scientist, I'm just trying to be open-minded to both possibilities. If I assert that life must be everywhere,”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but I would say you're describing a different process. I mean, maybe I'm at fault for separating these two processes, but to me you're describing basically natural selection evolution at that point. Whereas I'm really describing abiogenesis, which is to me a separate distinct process.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moon are correct. I admit that. It could be any of those numbers. And the challenges we just have no. Rigorous reason to expect why 90% is any, because we're talking about a probability of a probability. Is 90% more a priori likely than 10 to the power minus 20?”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Capable of Darwinian natural selection that maybe we could define as life. The probability of that is maybe 1%, 1% of the time that happens, in which case you're right, the universe will be absolutely teeming with life. But it could also be 10 to the power minus 10, in which case it's one per galaxy or 10 to the power of minus 100, in which case the vast majority of universes even do not have life within it”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably not useful at all. It's probably just doesn't really affect its survival negatively, but it neither does it provide any significant benefit. But sometimes on rare occasions, of course, it will be of benefit. And so if I have a certain level of complexity, it's hard to go back in complexity, but it's fairly easy to go forward with enough bytes at the cherry. You will eventually build up in complexity. And that's tends to be why we see complexity grow in certainly in an evolutionary sense, but also perhaps it's operating in chemical networks that led to the emergence of life. I guess the real problem I have with the numbers game, just to come back to that, is that we are talking about a certain probability of that occurring. It may be to go from the primordial soup, however you want to call it, the ingredients that the earth started with, the organic molecules. The problem of going from that initial condition to something that was”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, suddenly, I mean, it's kind of weird that complexity develops at all, right? Because it seems like the opposite to our physical intuition, if you're training in physics, of entropy that things should, you know, complexity is hard to spontaneously, or shouldn't say spontaneously, but hard to emerge in general. And so that's an interesting problem. I think there's been, certainly from an evolutionary perspective, you do see growing complexity. And there's a nice argument, I think it's by Gould, who shows that if you have a certain amount of complexity, it can either become less complex or more complex through random mutation. And the less complex things are stripping away something, something that was necessary potentially to their survival. And so in general, that's going to be not particularly useful in its survival. And so it's going to be detrimental to strip away a significant amount of its useful traits. Whereas if you add something, the most typical thing that you add is...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, maybe we won't use spontaneous, but Not being, say, seeded by some other civilization or something like this. It naturally emerges.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'd say there's certainly, you can certainly make a very good argument, and I think you've already made one, just the vastness of the universe is the default argument people often turn to, that surely there should be others out there, it's hard to imagine. There are of order of 10 to the 22 stars in our observable universe. And so really the question comes down to, was a probability of one of those 10 to the 22 planets, let's say Earth-like planets, if they all have Earth-like planets, going on to form life spontaneously. That's the process of abienesis, the spontaneous emergence of life.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say you don't have to believe that we are alone, but you have to admit it's a possibility of our ignorance of the universe so far. Can have a belief about something in absence of evidence. Car Sagan famously described that as the definition of faith. If you believe something when there's no evidence, you have faith that there's life in the universe. But you can't demonstrate, you can't prove it mathematically, you can't show me evidence of that.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to guard against this all the way through from however we're looking for life, however we're looking for whatever this big question is. There is a part of us, I think I would love there to be life in the universe. I hope there is life in the universe, but I'm somewhat been on record several times as being fairly firm about trying to remain consciously agnostic about that question. I don't want to make up my mind about what the answer is before I've collected evidence to inform that decision. That's how science should work. If I already know what the answer is, then what am I doing? And that's not a scientific experiment anymore. You've already decided. So what are you trying to learn? What's the point of doing the experiment if you already know what the answer is? There's no point.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think... I think that's true. That whenever there's something you want to be true, it's the ultimate seduction intellectually. And I worry about this a lot with UFOs and with it's true already with things like Venus, Vosphen, and searching for astrological signals.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was one of the things that pulled me against it's like it's too good to be true and it's very convenient that this could be so. And I have no evidence directly in terms of scientific sense to support this hypothesis. And it just became really difficult to reconcile my growth as a scientist. And I know some people find that reconciliation I have not. Maybe I will one day, but as a general guiding principle, which I think I obtained from that experience, was that I have to be extremely guarded about what I want to do. Because it's going to sway me to say things which are not true if I'm not careful. And that's not what we're trying to do as scientists.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think generally the more I want something to be true More, I inherently doubt it. And I think that just comes from I grew up with a religious family and was just sort of indoctrinated to some degree like many children are that, okay, this is just normal that there's a God and this is the way the world is. God created the earth. And then as I became more well read and illiterate of what was happening in the world scientifically, I started to doubt. And it really just struck me that the hardest thing to let go of when you do decide not to be religious anymore. And it's not really like a light bulb moment, but it just kind of happens over my over sort of 11 to 13, I think, for me. It was happening. But it's that sadness of letting go of this beautiful dream, which you had in your mind of eternal life for behaving yourself on earth. You would have this beautiful heaven that you could go to and live forever. And that's very attractive. And for me personally,”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That can happen, but I guess the distinction here is evidence. So, in this case The evidence was so overwhelming, it wasn't really a matter of interpretation. You'd observe this star with the same star, but with maybe 10, even 100 times greater precision for prolonged, much longer periods of time. And there was just no doubt at this point this planet was a mirage. And so that's why you have to be very careful. I always say don't ever name my wife, my daughter's like, name this planet after me that you discover. And I can't I can't ever name a planet after you because I won't be objective anymore how could I ever turn around to you and say that planet wasn't real that I named after you?”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turned out that this planet was not there. Subsequent analyses by both dynamicists and theorists and those looking at the instrumental data established fairly unanimously that there was no way this planet was really there. But Peter van der Kamp insisted it was there despite overwhelming evidence that was accruing against him. And even to the day he died, which was I think in the early 90s, he was still insisting this planet was there even when we were starting to make the first genuine exoplanet discoveries. And even at that point, I think Hubble had even looked at that star and had totally ruled out any possibility of what he was talking about. And so that's a problem. How do you get to a point as a scientist where you just can't accept anything that comes otherwise because it starts out with the dream of fame and then it ends in a stubborn...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But on the other hand, the closer you get towards when you start flirting with that Nobel Prize in your eyes or you think you're on the verge of seeing something, you can lose objectivity. A very famous example of this is Barnard Starr. There was a planet claimed there by Peter van der Kamp, I think it was in 1968, 69. And at the time, it would have been the first ever claimed. felt assured that this planet was there. He was actually using the wobbling star method, but using the positions of the stars to see them to claim this exoplanet.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fame and fortune and being remembered in the history books. And we all grew up in our training learning about Newton and Einstein, these giants of the field Feynman, Maxwell. And you get the idea of these individual contributions which get immortalized for all time. And that's seductive. It's why many of us with a skill set to go into maybe banking instead decided actually there's something about the idea of being immortalized and contributing.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure there's some envy and jealousy involved on behalf of those who are not part of the original discovery. But there's also, in any case, just the particular people involved in Venus alone, in any case of making it a claim of that magnitude. Especially life, because life is pretty much one of the biggest discoveries of all time, you can imagine scientifically, you can see, and I'm so conscious in myself when I get close to, as I said, even the much smaller goal of setting an exomoon, the ego creep in. And so as a scientist, we have to be so guarded against our own egos. You see the lights in your eyes of a Nobel Prize or...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That okay, we either believe or don't believe that bite signatures are there. So there was inevitably going to be a lot of controversy and debate and argument about it. We just have to anticipate that. And so I think you have to basically have a thick skin to some degree academically to dive into that world. And you're seeing that with phosphine. It's been uncomfortable to watch from the outside the kind of dialogue that some of the scientists have been having with each other about that because”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of us are anticipating. I mean, we're already seeing it to some degree with Venus and the phosphine incident. But we've seen it before with Bill Clinton and the White House lawn announcing life from Mars. And there are inevitably going to be spurious claims, or at least claims which are ambiguous to some degree. There will be for sure a high-profile journal like Nature of Science that will one day publish a paper saying by a signature discovered or something like that on Trappis One or some other planet. And then there will be years of back and forth in the literature. And that might seem frustrating, but that's how science works. That's the mechanism of science at play, of people scrutinizing the results to intense skepticism. And it's like a crucible. You know, you burn away all irrelevances until whatever is left is the truth. And so you're left with this product, which is...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you knew now that in five years, ten years, the first life would be discovered elsewhere, you knew that in advance. It would shortly affect the way you approach your entire career, especially someone junior in astronomy, you would surely be like, well, this is clearly going to be the direction I have to dedicate my classes and my training and my education towards that direction.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that brings a different perspective to those who have maybe transitioned from a different career path. And so I suspect with Exomoons and probably technosignatures, astrobiology, many of the topics which are seen at the fringes of what's possible They will all open up into becoming mainstream one day. But there's a lot of people who are just waiting for that assuredness that there is a secure career net ahead of them before they commit.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do it except for those that were either emboldened to try or had maybe the career, maybe like tenure or something so they didn't have to necessarily worry about the implications of failure. And so once that happened, once they made the first discoveries, overnight and their dog was gunning into exoplanets and all of a sudden the whole astronomy community shifted and huge numbers of people that were once upon a time studying eclipsing binaries changed to becoming exoplant scientists. And so that was the first wave of exoplanet scientists. We're now in a kind of a second wave or even the third wave where people like me to some degree kind of grew up with the idea of exoplanets as being normal. You know, I was 11 years old, I guess, when the first exoplanet was discovered. And so to me, it was a fairly normal idea to grow up with. And so we've been trained in the exoplanets from the very beginning.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just say to exomoons. So the transit method is by far the most popular method for looking for exoplanets. But yeah, as I've alluded to, Exomoons is kind of a niche topic within the discipline of exoplanets. And that's largely because there are people I think are waiting for those slime dunks. And it was like the, if you go back to the first exoplanet discovery that was made in 1995 by Misha Mayor and Didier Kellos, I think it's true at the time that they were seen as mavericks, that the idea of looking for planets around stars was considered fringe science. And I'm sure many colleagues told them, why don't you do something more safe, like study eclipsing stars, two binary star systems? We know those exist. So why are you wasting your time looking for planets? You're going to get this alien moniker or something and you'll be seen as a fringe maverick scientist. And so I think it was quite difficult for those early planet hunters to get the legitimacy and be taken seriously. And so very few people risk their careers.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really is there, then we could predict its masses, predict its motion, and expect it to be maybe over here next time or something. With microlensing, it's a one snapshot event. And so for me, it's intriguing as a way of revealing something about the examining population. But I always come back to transits because it's the only method we really have that's absolutely repeatable, that we'll be able to come back and prove everyone that, look, on the 17th of October, the moon will be over here and the moon will look like this and we can actually capture that image. And that's what we see with, of course, many exoplanets. So we want to get to that same point of full confidence, full confirmation, the slam dunk detection of these exomoons. But yeah, it's been a hell of a journey to try and push the field into that direction and is there.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another planetary system passing in front and then gravitationally lensing light around it to cause a brightening. And so this is a method of discovering an entire solar system, but only for a glimpse. You just get a short glimpse of it passing like a ship sailing through the night, just that one photo of it. Now the problem with that is that it's very difficult. The physics of gravitational lensing are not surprisingly quite complicated. And so there's many, many possible solutions. So you might have a solution, which is this could be a red dwarf star with a Jupiter-like planet around it. That's one solution. But another solution is that it's a free-floating planet, a rogue planet like Jupiter with an Earth-like moon around it. And those two solutions are almost indistinguishable. Now, ideally, we would be able to repeat the observation. We'd be able to go back and see, well, if the moon...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say this like three or four candidates at this point, of which we have published two of them. And to me, to a quite compelling and deserve follow-up observations. And so to get a confirmed detection, at least in our case, we would need to see it repeat for sure. One of the problems with some of the other methods that have been proposed is that you don't get that repeatability. So for instance, an example of a technique that would lack that would be gravitational microlensing. So it is possible with a new task coming up in the future called the Roman space telescope, which is basically a repurposed by satellite that's the size of the Hubble mirror going up into space. It will stare at millions of stars simultaneously and it will look to see instead of whether any of those stars get dimmer for a short amount of time, which will be a transit, it'll look for the opposite. It'll see if anything get brighter. And that brightness increase is caused by...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fun. These are like little solar systems that we can simulate on the computer and imagine their emotions. But we are pushing things to the very limits of what's possible. And that's double-edged sword. It's both incredibly exciting intellectually, but you're always risking to some degree the pushing too far.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“20% of the cases it was over here. But to me, that was a hard enough projection that we felt confident that we could refute the exit, which was what I really wanted. I wanted to refuteable as a basis of science, a falsifiable hypothesis. How can you make progress in science if you don't have a falsifiable testable hypothesis? And so that was the beauty of this particular case.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's a five sigma sigma, so that's the slightly uncomfortable edge. I mean, it's often said that for any detection of a first new phenomena, you really want like a 25 sigma detection. Then there's just no doubt that what you're seeing is real. This was at that edge. I mean, I guess it's comparable to the Higgs boson, but the Higgs boson was slightly different because there was so much theoretical impetus as to expect a signal that precise location. And Neptune-sized mean was not predicted by anyone. There was no papers you can find that expect Neptune-sized moons around Jupiter-sized planets. So I think we were inherently skeptical about its reality for that reason. But this is science in action. And when we fit the wobbles, we fit the dips and we have this 3G geometric model for the motion of the orbit. And projecting that forward, we found that about 80% of our projections led to the moon to be before. So it's not 100%.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so basically from the wobbles of the planet itself, that tells us the orbital motion of the moon. It's the reflex motion of the moon on the”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's been a little bit of tension about analyzing the reduction of the Hubble data. And so the only way my mind to resolve this is just to look again. We actually did proposed a Hubble straight after that. And we said, look, if our model is right, if the moon is there, it came in late last time. It transited after the planet because of the orbit, we can calculate that it should transit before the planet next time. If it's not there, if it doesn't transit before, and even if we see a dip afterwards, we know that's not our moon. It's obviously some instrumental effect with the data. We had a causal prediction as to where the moon should be. And so I was really excited about that, but we didn't get the telescope time. And unfortunately, if you go further into the future, we no longer have the predictive capability because it's like predicting the weather. You might be able to predict the weather next week to some level of accuracy, but predicting the weather next year.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I had to push back. And we said, no, we're not calling it that. Even despite everything we've done, we're not calling it a discovery. We're calling it evidence for an ex-moon. Because for me, I'd want to see this repeat two times, three times, four times before I really would bet my house that this is the real door. And I do worry, as I said, that perhaps that's my own skepticism, self-skepticism going too far. I think it was the right decision. And since that paper came out, there has been continuous interest in this object. Another team independently analyzed that star and actually pretty much exactly the same resources as us, the same dip, the same wobble of the planet. And a third team looked at it and they actually got something different. They saw the dip was diminished compared to what we saw. They saw a little hint of a dip, but not as pronounced as what we saw. And they saw the wobble as well.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We spent months and months trying to kill it. This is my strategy for anything interesting. We just try to throw the kitchen sink at it and say, we must be tricked by something. And so we tried looking at the centroid motion of the No matter what we did, we just couldn't get rid of it. And so we submitted to science. And I think at the time science, which is one of the top journals, said to us, would you mind calling your paper discovery of an exo moon?”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two really striking pieces of evidence in the data that suggested this moon was there. Another was a fairly clear second dip in light, pretty clearly resolved by Hubble. It was about a five sigma detection. And on top of that, we could see the planet didn't transit when it should have done. It actually transited earlier than we expected it to by about 20 minutes or so. And so that's a hallmark of a gravitational interaction between the planet and the moon. We actually expected that. You can also expect that if the moon transits after the planet, then the planet should come in earlier than expected because the bary center, the center of mass, lives between the two of them, kind of like on a balancing arm between them. And so we saw that as well. So the phase signature matched up. The mass of the moon was measured to be Neptune mass. And the size of the moon was measured to be Neptune radius. And so everything just really lined up.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You convince yourself it's never going to be not for me. This just isn't going to happen. And so I saw that and I didn't really believe it because I didn't dare let myself believe it. But being a good scientist, we knew we had an obligation to publish it, to talk about the result, and to follow it up and to try and resolve what was going on. So we asked for Hubble Space Telescope time, which was awarded in that case that we were one of those lucky 20 that got telescope time. And we stared at it for about 40 hours continuously. And to provide some context, the dip that we saw in the Kappa data corresponded to a Neptune size moon around a Jupiter-sized planet, which was another reason why I was skeptical. We don't have that in the solar system. That seems so strange. And then when we got the Hubble data, it seemed to confirm exactly that. There was...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saw something extra just on the edges, we saw some extra dips around the outside. It was right at the hairy edge of detectability. We didn't believe it because I think one of the challenges of looking for something for 10 years is that you become your own greater skeptic. And no matter what you're shown, you're always thinking I've been, it's like falling in love so many times and it not working out.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of its mass and its semi-major access. So anything beyond about half an AU, so half the distance of the Earth and the Sun, and something of order of a tenth of a Jupiter mass, so that's the mass of Saturn, up to, say, 10 Jupiter masses, which is basically where you start to get to brown dwarfs. Those types of objects appear to be somewhat unusual. solar systems do not have Jupiters, which is really interesting because Jupiter again, like the moon, seems to have been a pivotal character in the story of the development of our solar system, perhaps especially having a large influence with the development of the late heavy bombardment and the rate of asteroid impacts that we receive and things like this. Anyway, to come back to 1625, this Jupiter-like planet had a hint of something in the data. But what I mean by that is when we looked at the transit, we got the familiar decrease in light that we always see when a planet traps in front of the star.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite rare in the universe. Certainly, mini Neptunes and Neptunes are extremely common, but Jupiter's only about 10% of sunlight stars have Jupiters around them, as far as we can tell.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was like, yeah, but HotJeopters is just, they're not interesting to me. I want to do something that I feel intellectually pushes me to the edge and is maybe a contribution that not no one else could do, but maybe is not certainly the thing that anybody could do. I don't want to just be the first to something for the sake of being first. I want to do something that feels like a meaningful intellectual contribution to our society. And so this ex-amoene problem has been haunting me for years to try and solve this. Now, as I said, we looked for years and years using Kepler. And the closest we ever got was just a hint for this one star, Kepler 1625, has a Jupiter-like planet in orbit of it. And that Jupiter-like planet is on a 287 day period, so it's almost the same distance as the Earth around the Sun. But for a Jupiter. So that was already unusual. I don't think people realize that Jupiter-like planets are...”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I've been searching for exams for most of my professional career. And I think a lot of my colleagues think I'm kind of crazy to still be doing it. After five years of not finding anything, I think most people would probably try doing something else. I even had people say that to me, they said professors, and I remember at a cocktail party took me to the side, an MIT professor, and he said, you know, you should just look for hot Jupiters. They're everywhere. You can write papists. They're so easy to find.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, plenty of Milestones that we need to cross, and we can argue about the severity of each of them, but. There is no doubt that we live in a world that has serious challenges, that are pushing our intellects and our will to the limit of We're really ready to progress to the next stage of our development.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the same with climate change, perhaps. I mean, climate change is the next major problem facing our civilization, but we know it is technically surmountable. Know it's, it does seem sometimes like there has been a series of challenges laid out. To progressist towards a mature civilization that can one day perhaps expand to the stars.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For intelligent life a sustained, fossil fuel industry just happens to be in the ground, we have plenty of fossil fuels to get our industrial revolution going. But also the chemical energy contained within those fossil fuels and hydrogen and other fuels is sufficient that we have the ability to escape our planetary atmosphere and planetary gravity to have a space program. And we also happen to have a celestial body which is just within reach the moon, which doesn't also necessarily have to be true. Were the moon not there, what effect would that have had on our aspirations of a space program in the 1960s? Would there have ever been a space race to Mars or to Venus? It's a much harder, certainly for a human program, that seems almost impossible with 1960s technology to imagine ever come to fruition.”
2023-01-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #355 – David Kipping: Alien Civilizations and Habitable Worlds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source