YouSaid · the spoken record

Katherine de Kleer

lines on the record: 101
first: 2021-05-17
most recent: 2021-05-17
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

“The sort of. I've always been a fan of chaos and. The idea of things just. Slowly getting cold and stopping and dying is just so depressing to me, so much more depressing than things blowing up or, you know, burning and getting covered by a lava flow. Somehow the activity of it endows it with more meaning to me maybe.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you have to find, but if the techniques that you use are things that excite you, then your job is fun every day. So for me, I'm fascinated by the solar system and I love telescopes and I love doing data analysis, playing with data from telescopes, coming up with new ways to use telescopes. And so that's where I have found that mesh. But if I was interested in, you know, the dynamical evolution of the solar system, how the orbits of things evolve, then I would need to do a different type of work that I would just not find as appealing. And so it just wouldn't be a good fit. And so it's sort of, seems like an unromantic thing to have to think about the techniques being the thing you want to work on also, but it really makes a profound difference for, I think, your happiness. Scientific career”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think for somebody. I would not presume to speak to giving people advice on life and humanity overall, but for somebody thinking of Being a scientist. So there are a couple of things. One sort of practical thing, which is career-wise, I hadn't appreciated this going into science, but you need to... So the questions you're working on and the techniques you use are both. Of very high importance, maybe equal importance for being happy in your career. If there are questions you're interested in, but the techniques that you need to use to do them are tedious for you, then your job is going to be miserable even if the questions are inspiring.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of these are really heavy. I don't know. I just don't have anything lighter to recommend. Ishiguro's the light version of this.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, you know, I hadn't realized until this moment, but it's yet another one of these kind of slow reveal books. It's a contemporary Russian, I think Russian-American writer named Olga Grushen, G-R-U-S-H-I-N. And she wrote this just phenomenal book called The Dream Life of Sukhanov that I read this year. Maybe it was last year for the first time. And it's just a really beautiful. This one you could call a character study, I think, of a Russian father coming to terms with himself and his own past as he potentially slowly loses his mind.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's how I feel about Rilke's poetry. He turns the kind of desolation and loneliness of human existence into something joyful and almost meaningful.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right. All of these are difficult reads. I think I just Read for in part for an intellectual challenge, but Rilka, so he wrote one thing that might be characterizable as a novel, but he wrote a lot of poetry. He wrote this series of poems called The Duino Elegies that were very impactful for me personally, just emotionally. Which actually kind of ties in with. Astronomy, in that There's a sense, you know, in which we're all going through our lives alone, and there's just this sense of kind of profound loneliness in the existence of every... Individual human. And I think I was drawn to astronomy in part because the sort of vast spaces, the kind of loneliness and desolateness of space made the sort of internal loneliness feel okay in a sense. It like gave companionship and”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just fascinating character basically and how his mind works in this story. The idea of a novel also being a kind of intellectual puzzle and something that slowly reveals itself over the course of reading was really fascinating to me. And I have since found a lot more writers like that. Contemporary example that comes to mind is Kazwo Ishiguro, who's pretty much all of his books are like slow reveals over the course of the book and like nothing much happens in the books, but you keep reading them because you just want to know what the reality is that he's slowly revealing to you. Kind of discovery oriented reading, maybe.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, why they were so compelling to me. One of the first books that really captured my fascination was Nabakov's book Pale Fire Are you familiar with it? So I read it actually for a class. It's one of the few books I've ever read for a class that I actually really liked. And the book is, it's in some sense a puzzle. He's a brilliant writer, of course. But the book is like, it's formatted like a poem. So there's an introduction, a very long poem, and footnotes. You get part way through it before realizing that the whole thing is actually a novel unless you sort of read up on it going in. But the whole thing is a novel and there's a story that slowly reveals itself over the course of all of this. And kind of reveals this.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. So many that just don't know where to start with it. So I love reading. I read obsessively. I've been reading fiction and a little bit of nonfiction, but mostly fiction obsessively since I was a child and just never stopped. So I have some favorite books. None of them are easy reading, so I definitely, I mean, I recommend them for somebody who likes an intellectual challenge in the books that they read. So, maybe I should go chronologically. I have at least three. I'm not going to go through 50 here. Yeah, I'd love to also like.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll just add to that not on the topic of masks, but on the topic of curiosity. I mean, I think that's astronomy and planetary science is a field are unique because for better and for worse, they don't directly impact humanity. So, you know, we're not studying virology to prevent transmission of illness amongst humans. We're not characterizing volcanoes on Earth that could destroy cities. It really is a more curious and in my opinion playful scientific field than many. So, for better and worse, we can kind of afford to pursue some of this speculation more because human lives are not in danger if we speculate a little bit too freely and get something wrong”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think so. I completely agree. And I think that most scientists do speculate about these things. It's just at what point do you act on those things? So you're right that the scientific method has inherent skepticism and for the most part that's a good thing because it means that we're not just believing crazy things all the time. It's an interesting point that requiring that high level of rigor occasionally means that you will miss something that is truly interesting because you needed to verify it three times and it wasn't verifiable”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's so the benefit of looking for intelligent life is that we perhaps have a better chance of recognizing it. Couldn't necessarily recognize what an alien stop sign looked like. That's true. And maybe, you know, the theorists are the people who sort of model and try to understand. Solar system objects are pretty good at coming up with models for anything. I mean, it may be a Muamua was a stop sign, but we're clever enough that we could come up with some physical explanations for it and then we all want to go with the simplest possible, we all want to believe the sort of most skeptical possible explanation. And so we missed it because we're too good at coming up with alternate explanations for things.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, and whether you think it's aliens or not, it's a missed opportunity. But we weren't prepared and we will be prepared for the next ones. So there's been a movement in astronomy more towards what's called time domain astronomy, so kind of monitoring the whole sky all the time at all wavelengths, kind of the goal. And so we expect to detect many more of these in the future, even though these were the first two we saw. Our potential to detect them is only increasing with time. And so there will be more opportunities. And, you know, based on these two, we now can actually sit and think about what we'll do when the next one shows up.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Works pretty well here is for a bar of soap. Your bar of soap starts out sort of close to spherical, at least from a physicist's perspective. And as you use it over time, you eventually end up with this long, thin shard because it's been just by sort of weathering, as we would call it. And so, in the same way, if you just sublimate material off of one of these ice shards, it ends up long and thin and it ends up accelerating out of the solar system. And so given that these properties can be reasonably well explained that way. You know, we should be extremely skeptical about attributing things to. Aliens”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, our solar system formed out of a collapsing molecular cloud. Sometimes those molecular clouds are not massive enough, and they sort of collapse into bits, but they don't actually form a solar system. But you end up with these kind of chunks of hydrogen ice, apparently. And so one of those chunks of hydrogen ice could have got ejected and passed through our solar system. So both cases explain these properties in about the same way. So those ices will sublimate once they've passed the sun. And so as they're moving away from the sun, you have the hydrogen or nitrogen ice sublimating off the sunward part of it. And so that is responsible for the acceleration. The shape also, because you have all this ice sublimating off the surface, if you take something, the analogy that”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are explanations that fit well within our understanding of how things work. So there are a couple, there are two hypotheses for what it could be made of. They're both basically just ice shards. In one case, it's a nitrogen ice shard that came off of something like Pluto, in another solar system that Pluto got hit with something and broke up into pieces. And one of those pieces came through our solar system. In the other scenario, it's a bit of a failed solar system.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I cannot, as a scientist, honestly say that I can rule out. That it's alien space junk. However, I see the kind of alien explanation as following the Sagan's extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you are going to actually claim that something is aliens, you need to carefully evaluate one needs to carefully evaluate the other options and see whether it could just be something that we know exists that makes sense. In the case of a Muamua,”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For an object in our solar system, it's really unusual in two particular ways. One is the dimensions that we don't see natural things in our solar system that are kind of long and skinny. The things we see in our solar system don't deviate from spherical by that much. And then that it showed these strange properties of accelerating as it was leaving the solar system, which was not understood at first. Terms of the alien space junk, you know, as a scientist, I cannot rule out that possibility. I have no evidence to the contrary. However...”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like the way that's braised. So Amuamua is a fascinating object, just the fact that we have started discovering things that are coming in from outside our solar system is amazing and can start to study them. And now that we have seen some, Design now, kind of thinking in advance the next time we see one, we will be much more ready for it. We will know which telescopes we want to point at it. We will have explored whether we could even launch a fast turnaround mission to actually get to it before it leaves the solar system. In terms of Amuamua, yeah, it's.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. I do see exploration going that way. I think, um. Way that NASA is currently Historically, it has been doing missions is putting together these really large missions that do a lot of things and are extremely well tested and have a very low rate of failure. But now that these sort of CubeSat technologies are becoming easier to build, easier to launch, they're very cheap. And, you know, NASA is getting involved in this as well. There's a lot of interest in these missions that are relatively small, relatively cheap, and just do one thing so you can really optimize it to just do this one thing and maybe you could build 100 of them and send them to different asteroids and they would just collect this one piece of information from each asteroid. It's a kind of different, more distributed way of doing science, I guess. And there's a ton of potential there. I agree.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is potential for that if you catch it early enough in advance. I think in theory if you knew. Five years in advance. Depending on the object and how much you would need to deflect it, you could deflect it a little bit. I don't know that it would be sufficient in all cases. And this is definitely not my specific area of expertise, but my understanding is that there is something you could do. But it also how you would carry that out depends a lot on the properties of the asteroid. If it's a solid object versus a rubble pile, so let's say you planted some bomb in the middle of it and it blew up, but it was just kind of a pile of material anyway. And then that material comes back together and then you kind of just have the same thing. Presumably it's trajectory would be altered, but it's...”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are tracking a lot of them, and we are doing our best to track more of them, but there are a lot of them out there, and it would be potentially catastrophic if one of them impacted Earth. Have you, are you aware of this apophis object? So there's an asteroid near Earth object called Apophis that people thought had a decent probability of hitting Earth in 2029 and then potentially again in 2036. So they did a lot of studies. It's not actually going to hit Earth, but it is going to come very close. It's going to be visible in the sky in a relatively dark. I mean, not even that dark, probably not visible from Los Angeles, but... And it's going to come a tenth of the way between the Earth and the Moon. It's going to come closer, apparently, than some geosynchronous communication satellites.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is definitely possible. And it doesn't even have to necessarily collidis and change its trajectory. We're not tracking all of them. We can't track all of them yet. You know, there's still.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's some water in the outer part of the asteroid belt, but they're not quite like comets In the sense of having clouds around them, there are some crazy asteroids that do become active like comets. That's the whole other category of thing that we don't understand. But their surfaces, I mean, we have visited some. You can find pictures of spacecraft have taken of them. We've actually scooped up material off of the surface of some of these objects. We're bringing it back to analyze it in the lab. And there's a mission that's launching next year to land on one of these supposedly core fragment objects to try to figure out what the heck it is and what's going on with it. But the surfaces, you know, you can picture a solid surface with some little grains of sand or pebbles on it and occasional boulders, maybe some fine, dusty regions, dust kind of collecting in certain places.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, the asteroid belt, there's a ton of material there, but it's actually not that dense. It is mostly open space. So mentally, do picture mostly open space with some rocks. The problem is some of them are not thought to be solid. So some of these asteroids, especially these core mantle fragments, you can think of as sort of solid like a planet. But some of them are just kind of aggregates of material. We call them rubble piles. So there's not necessarily.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But these are the sort of, they're pretty basic questions. We're still trying to classify them based on fairly basic information in kind of combination with our general understanding of the material the solar system formed from. And so you're sort of, you come, you're coming in with prior knowledge, which is that you more or less know what the materials are, the solar system formed from. And then you're trying to classify them into these categories. a huge amount of room for understanding them better and for understanding how their surfaces are changing in the space environment.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I would say that we don't know a whole lot about their compositions. Most of them are small, and so you can't study them in such detail with telescopes as you could, you know, a planet or moon. And at the same time, because there are so many of them, you could send a spacecraft to a few, but you can't really get a statistical survey with spacecraft. And so a lot of what we a lot of what has been done comes down to sort of classification. You look at how bright they are, you look at whether they're red or blue. Simply, you know, whether their spectrum is sloped towards long wavelengths or short wavelengths, there are certain if you point a spectrograph at their surfaces, there are certain features you can see. So you can tell that some of them have silicates on them.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when it comes to the asteroids, there are so many of them, and the big pictures. The big questions are Some questions can be answered by zooming in in detail on individual objects, but mostly you're trying to do a statistical study. So you want to look at. Thousands of objects, even hundreds of thousands of objects, and figure out what their composition is and look at. Know how many big asteroids there are of this composition versus how many small asteroids of this other composition and put together these kind of statistical properties of the asteroid belt. And those properties can be directly compared with the results of simulations for the formation of the solar system”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting clues into the interiors of planets. We've never seen a planetary core or deep mantle directly some mantle material comes up on Earth's surface and then we can see it. But in sort of in bulk, we haven't seen these things directly in these asteroids potentially give us a chance to look at what our own core and mantle is like, or at least would be like if it had been also floating through space for a few billion years and getting irradiated and all that. But it's a cool potential window or like analogy into the interior of our own planet.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that there are cases where people have kind of looked at objects and by looking at their orbits, they say these objects should have originated together, but they have very different compositions. And so then you can hypothesize maybe they were different fragments of a differentiated object. But one of the really cool things about this is, you know, we've been talking about”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so some of them are these ancient objects, maybe, that have undergone collisions. And then there's this other category of object that is the one that I personally find really interesting, which is remnants of objects that could have been planets. So early on, a bunch of potential planets secreted that we call planetesimals and they formed, and they formed with a lot of energy and they had enough time to actually differentiate. So some of these objects differentiated into cores and mantles and crusts. And then they were subsequently... Strapped did in these massive collisions, and now we have these fragments. We think fragments floating around the asteroid belt that are like bits of mantle, bits of core, bits of pressed, basically.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gives us a window into understanding the composition of the material from which Earth and the other planets formed and how that material was kind of redistributed over the history of the solar system. So the asteroids, one could classify them in two different ways. Some of them are ancient objects. Accreted out of the sort of disc of material that the whole solar system formed out of and have kind of remained ever since more or less the same. They've probably collided with each other and we see all these collisional fragments. And you can actually look based on their orbits say, you know, like these 50 objects originated as the same object. You can see them kind of dynamically moving apart after some big collision.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the asteroids, let's talk about just the restricted to the main asteroid belt, which is the region it's Region of debris basically between Mars and Jupiter And These sort of belts of debris throughout the solar system, the outer solar system, you know, the Kuiper belt that we talked about, the asteroid belt, as well as certain other populations where they accumulate because they're gravitationally more favored. Our remnant objects from the origin of the solar system. And so one of the reasons that we are so interested in them, aside from potentially the fact that they could come hit Earth, but scientifically”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, people have tried to put together global circulation models. You know, we've done this for Earth. People have tried to do these for other planets as well. And it is a really hard problem. So Titan, for example, like I said, it's one of the best studied atmospheres in the solar system. And people have tried to make these global circulation models and actually predict what's going to happen moving into sort of the next season of Titan and those predictions have ended up being wrong. And so then, you know, I don't know. It's always exciting when a prediction is wrong because it means that there's something more to learn. Like your theory wasn't sufficient. And then you get to go back and learn something by how you have to modify the theory to make it fit.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that it doesn't tell you something about the atmosphere. So, atmospheres have a property that surfaces don't have, which is that they can redistribute heat a lot more effectively.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The climate of Uranus has always been fascinating to me because it orbits on its side and it has a 42 year orbital period. And so, you know, with Earth, our seasons are because our equator is tipped just a little bit to the plane that we orbit in. So sometimes the sun lights a little bit above the equator and sometimes it's a little bit below the equator. But on Uranus, it's like for 10 years the sunlight is directly on the North Pole, and then it's directly on the equator, and then it's directly on the South Pole. And it's actually kind of amazing that the atmosphere doesn't look crazier than it does. But understanding how taking again, like one of these extreme examples, if we can understand why that atmosphere behaves in the way it does, it's kind of a test of our understanding of how Atmos”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's condensed molecules from the atmosphere, so ammonia ice particles in the case of Jupiter, it's methane ice in the case of, let's say, Uranus and Neptune and other species. You can kind of construct a chemical model for which species can condense where. And so you see a cloud at a certain altitude within the atmosphere, and you can make a guess at what that cloud is made of and sometimes measure it directly and different species make different colors as well.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pictures and there's all these vortices and anti vortices, and you have these different bands that are moving in opposite directions that may be giving you information about the deep in the atmosphere physically deep properties of... Interior and circulation.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Composition and occurrence of storms and clouds in these objects is another one of these kind of windows into the interior that I was talking about with surfaces, one of these ways that we can get perspective and what the composition is of the interior and how the circulation is working. So circulation will bring some species up from deeper in the atmosphere of the planet to some altitude that's a little bit colder and that species will condense out and form a cloud at that altitude. And we can detect in some cases what those clouds are composed of. And looking at where those occur can tell you how the circulation cells are, whether the atmospheric circulation is, say, coming up at the equator and going down at the poles, or whether you have multiple cells in the atmosphere. And I mean, Jupiter's atmosphere is just insane. There's so much going on. You look at these.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so there's sort of. Every planet and moon has a kind of interesting and unique weather pattern. Those weather patterns are really, we don't have a good understanding of them. We don't even have a good understanding of the global circulation patterns of many of these atmospheres, why the storm systems occur”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think the aliens would come? I mean, the first thing they would see is, I suppose, our cities, assuming that they had some idea of what a natural world looked like, they would see cities and say, these don't belong, which of these many species created these?”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See that recycling of material because Much oxygen is an Earth's atmosphere, and between those two things, you would identify Earth as a reasonable candidate for a habitable environment, in addition to, of course, the pleasant temperature and liquid water. But the abundance of oxygen and the plate tectonics both play a role as well.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so coming back to habitability again, things like tectonics and plate tectonics are thought to play an important role in the surface being habitable, and that's because you have a way of recycling material. So if you have a stagnant surface, everything you use up all the free oxygen, everything reacts until you no longer have reactants that life can extract energy from. And so if nothing's changing on your surface, you kind of reach this stagnation point. But something like plate tectonics recycles material, you bring up new fresh material from the interior, you bring down material that's up on the surface, and that can kind of refresh your nutrient supply in a sense or the sort of raw materials that the surface has to work with. From a kind of astrobiologist perspective, looking at Earth, you would”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends what angle you're looking at it where the sun is, all the things like that. You know, the sunlight is much weaker, but it's still there.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because there's no atmosphere, all the plume molecules are just plume particles where they end up is just a function of the direction that they left the vent. So they're all following ballistic trajectories. And you end up with these umbrella plumes. You don't get these sort of complicated plumes that you have on Earth that are occurring because of how that material is interacting with the atmosphere that's there. You just have these huge umbrellas. And it's been hypothesized actually that the atmosphere is made of sulfur dioxide and That you could have these kind of ash particles from the volcano and the sulfur dioxide would condense onto these particles. And you'd have sulfur dioxide snow coming out of these volcanic plumes.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my gosh. The IC. Yes, I'm sure it would be beautiful, and the pictures we've seen of it are beautiful. You have, so the magma will come out of the lava, will come out of these fissures, and you have these curtains of lava that Maybe even a kilometer high. So if you looked at videos, I don't know how many volcano videos you've looked at on Earth, but you sometimes see a tiny, tiny version of this in Iceland. You see just these sheets of magma coming out of a fissure when you have this really low viscosity magma sort of water-like coming out at these sheets. And the plumes that come out.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around and there's cracks. Yeah. So Earth has plates of solid rock sitting on top of a partially molten layer. And those plates are kind of shifting around. On Io, Don't have that, and the vulcanism is what we call heat pipe vulcanism. It's the magma just punches a hole through the crest and comes out on the surface. I mean, that's a simplification, but that's effectively what's happening.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing that you would be able to tell from orbit given enough time is that Earth has tectonic plates. So you would see that volcanoes follow the edges. If you trace where all the volcanoes are on Earth, they follow these. Lines that trace the edges of the plates, and similarly you would see things like the Hawaiian string of volcanoes that you could infer just like we did as people actually living on Earth, that the plates are moving over some plume that's coming up through the mantle. And so you could use that to say if the aliens could look at where the volcanoes are happening on Earth and say something about the fact that Earth has plate tectonics, which makes it really unique in the solar system.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was going to say that's where I was going to go first. There are a few things to say about the atmosphere, but in terms of the volcano, so one of the Really interesting puzzles to me in planetary science is so we can look out there and we've been talking about surfaces and volcanoes and atmospheres and things like that. But that is just this tiny little veneer on the outside of the planet and most of the planet is completely sort of inaccessible to telescopes or to spacecraft missions. You can drill a meter into the surface, but that's still really the veneer. And one of the cool puzzles is looking at what's going on on the surface and trying to figure out what's happening underneath or just any kind of indirect means that you have to study the interior because you can't dig into it directly even on Earth. You can't dig deep into Earth. So from that perspective, looking at Earth,”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source