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

“Working on these problems, but I think. That's going to be a major obstacle in going from visiting where we can bring everything we need to survive in the short term to actually colonizing.”
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 we need to do a lot of work in learning how to use the resources that are on the planet already to do the things we need. So if you're talking about someone going there for a few months. So we'll back up a little bit. There are many things that make Mars not hospitable temperature. You can't breathe air. You need a pressure suit. Even if you're on the surface, the radiation environment is, you know, even in all of those things, the radiation environment is too harsh for the human body. All of those things seem like they could eventually have technological solutions. The challenge, the real significant challenge to me seems to be the creation of a self-sustaining civilization there. You can bring pressure suits, you can bring oxygen to breathe, but those are all unlimited supply. And if we're going to colonize it, we need to find ways to make use of the resources that are there to do things like produce food, produce the air the humans need to keep breathing just in order to make it self-sustaining. There's a tremendous amount of work that has to be done. And people are...”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think that if our species survives long enough and we don't wipe ourselves out or get wiped out by some other means, that we will eventually be able to colonize other planets. I do not expect that to happen in my lifetime. I mean, tourists may go to Mars, tourists, people who commit years of their life to going to Mars as a tourist may go to Mars. I don't think that we will colonize it.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Well, that connection that you just made, the contents of the atmosphere to the life. Is a tricky one. And yeah, I know that claim received a lot of criticism for the lines of logic that went from detection to claim of life. Even the detection itself, though, doesn't meet the sort of historical scientific standards of a detection. It was a very tenuous detection and only one line of the species was detected and a lot of really complicated data analysis methods had to be applied to even make that weak detection.”
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 detection that was reported was the detection of the molecule phosphine. And they said. They tried every other mechanism they could think of to produce phosphine and no mechanism worked and then they said well we know that life produces phosphine and so that was sort of the train of logic and I don't personally believe that phosphine was detected in the first place.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, Venus is a fascinating object. So I like the objects that lie at the extremes. I think that if we can make a sort of theory or like I've been saying, framework for understanding planets and moons that can incorporate even the most extreme ones, then those are the things that really test your theory and test your understanding. And so they've always really fascinated me, not so much the nice habitable places like Earth, but these extreme places like Venus that have... Sulfuric acid clouds and just incredibly hot and dense surfaces. And Venus, of course, I love volcanism for some reason. And Venus has. Probably has volcanic activity, definitely has in the recent past, maybe has ongoing today.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accurate, but the planets are fascinating. I think Know, I find the planets in the solar system really fascinating. What I like about the moons is that there's so much less that is known. There's still a lot more discovery space than the questions that we can ask are still the bigger questions. Which you know, and maybe I'm being unfair to the planets because we're still trying to understand things like was there ever life on Mars? And that is a huge question and one that we've sent numerous robots to Mars to try to answer. So maybe I'm being unfair to the planets. But there is certainly quite a bit more information that we have about the planets than the moons.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, basically everything I've already said is just such an amazing and unique object. On, I guess, a personal note, it's probably the object that made me become a planetary scientist. It's the first thing in the solar system that really deeply captured my interest. When I started my PhD, I wanted to be an astrophysicist working on things like galaxy evolution and sort of slowly, I had done some projects in the solar system, but IO was the thing that like really caught me into doing solar system science.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope that's true. Because I feel like we're very ignorant as a species. And I hope that our current level of knowledge only represents the 0.001% of what we will someday achieve. That actually feels optimistic to me.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And be just a bunch of unknowns. It's like putting our ignorance together in one equation. But I've actually, now I understand this equation, you know, it's not something we'll ever necessarily have the answer to. It just gives us a framework for having the exact conversation we're having right now. And I think that's how it was intended in the first place when it was put into writing was to give people a language to communicate about the factors that go into the potential for aliens to Out there and for us to find them. I would put money on there being aliens. I would not put money on Us having definitive evidence of them in my lifetime.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're right. That big equation is being better understood, but you're really only talking about the first three parameters in the equation or something, you know, how many stars are there, how many planets per star. And then we're just barely scratching the surface of what fraction of those planets might be habitable. The rest of the terms in the equation are like how likely is life to evolve? Given habitable conditions, how likely is it to survive? All these things. There are all these huge unknowns. Actually, I remember when I first saw that equation, I think it was my first year of college and I thought this is ridiculous. This is a common sense that didn't need to give a name, you know?”
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 a great question, and it's one that just scientifically we don't have an answer to. We don't even know how many times life evolved on Earth if it was only once or if it happened independently a thousand times in different places. We don't know whether it's happened anywhere else in the universe, although it feels absurd to believe that we are the only life that evolved in the entire universe, but it's conceivable. We just have Just no real information. We don't understand really how life came about in the first place on Earth.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and Enceladus has the advantage, like I said, of spewing material out of its south pole so you could collect it, but it has the disadvantage of the fact that we don't actually really understand how Ocean could stay frozen, or sorry, could stay globally liquid over the age of the solar system. And so there are some models that say that it's going through this cyclical evolution where the ocean freezes completely and thaws completely and the orbit sort of oscillates in and out of these eccentricities. And in that case, the potential for life ever occurring there in the first place is a lot lower because if you only have an ocean for 100 million years, is that enough time?”
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 the potential for life in each of those two places is very different. So Titan is the one place in the solar system where you might imagine, again, all of this is so speculative, but you might imagine life evolving in the atmosphere. A biology perspective Titan is interesting because it forms complex organic molecules in its atmosphere. It has a dense atmosphere. It's actually denser than Earth's. It's the only moon that has... Atmosphere denser than Earth's. That's cool. It's got tons of methane in it. What happens is that methane gets irradiated, it breaks up, and it reforms with other things in the atmosphere. It makes these complex organic molecules, and it's effectively doing prebiotic chemistry in the atmosphere.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on your perspective. It's very exciting from an astrobiology perspective. I think Enceladus and Titan are the two most unique and interesting moons of Saturn that definitely both get the most attention also from the life perspective.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Enceladus gives you a slightly better chance of that because Enceladus is a moon of Saturn and it's broadly similar to Europa in some ways. It's an icy satellite. It has a subsurface ocean that's probably in touch with the rocky interior, but it has these massive geysers at its south pole where it's spewing out material that appears to be originating all the way from the ocean. And so, in that case, you could potentially fly through that plume and scoop up that material and hope. But let's say that you have some ingenuity and can come up with a way to do that, it potentially gives you a more direct opportunity at least to try to measure those bacteria directly.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think realistically, you need to do the drilling. There's So, Europa also has these long tectonic features on its surface where it's thought that there's potential for water from the ocean to be somehow making its way up onto the surface. And you could imagine some out there scenario where there's bacteria in the ocean. It's somehow working its way up through the ice shell. It's spilling out on the surface. It's being killed by the radiation. But your instrument could detect some spectroscopic signature of that dead bacterium. But that's, you know, that's many ifs and assumptions.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think anything's possible It doesn't have to be water that's sort of, you can tell as you identified, I phrased that really carefully. It's canonically accepted that. Because we recognize that scientists recognize that we have no idea what broad range of life could be out there. And all we really have is our biases of life as we know it. But for life as we know it, it's very helpful to have or even necessary to have some kind of liquid and preferably a polar solvent that can actually dissolve molecules, something like water. So the case of liquid methane on Titan is less ideal from that perspective. But, you know, liquid magma If it stays liquid long enough for life to evolve, you have a heat source, you have a liquid, you have nutrients in theory that checks your three classic astrobiology boxes.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that means that you can basically dissolve a lot of material out of the rock. You potentially have this hydrothermal activity that's injecting energy and nutrients for life to survive. And so this rock water interface is considered really important. The potential habitability.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Canonically accepted that liquids are required for life. And so the subsurface oceans, in addition to maybe Titan's atmosphere, the subsurface oceans of the icy satellites are one of the most plausible places in the solar system for life to evolve. Europa and Enceladus are interesting because for many of the big satellites, so Ganymede and Callisto also satellites of Jupiter also are thought to have subsurface oceans, but they have these ice shells and then there's an ocean underneath the ice shell. But on those moons or on Ganymede, we think that there's another ice shell underneath, and then there's rock. And the reason that that is a problem for life is that your ocean is probably just pure water because it's trapped between two big shells of ice. So Europa doesn't have this ice shell at the bottom of the ocean, we think. And so the water and rock are in direct interaction.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Yeah, Europa is from many perspectives one of the really interesting places in the solar system among the solar system moons. So there are a few. There's a lot of interest in looking for or understanding the potential for life to evolve in the subsurface oceans. I think it's fairly widely accepted that the chances of life evolving on the surfaces of really anything in the solar system is very low. Radiation environment is too harsh, and there's just not liquids on the surface of most of these things. And”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. Yeah, Yellowstone is a classic example. I don't know what the chances are of that happening. My intuition would be that the chances of that are lower than the chances of us getting wiped out by some other means, that in the time that maybe it'll happen eventually, that there'll be one of these massive volcanoes on Earth, but we'll probably be gone by then by some other means. To sound bleak, but.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Io, as I've said, it has these really low viscosity magmas. The lava spreads really quickly across its surface. It can put out massive volumes of magma in relatively short periods of time. And that sort of volcanism is not happening anywhere else in the solar system today, but literally every terrestrial planet and the moon had this what we call very effusive volcanism early in their history.”
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 we try to port the tools that we use to study Earth volcanism to Io and it works to some extent, but it is challenging because the situations are so different and the compositions are really different when you talk about Outgast, primarily water and carbon dioxide, and then sulfur dioxide is the third most abundant gas. And on IO, the water and carbon dioxide are not there. Either it didn't form with them or it lost them, we don't know. And so the chemistry of how the magma outgases is completely different. But the kind of one to me most interesting analogy to Earth is that”
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 very cold. The atmosphere is composed of sulfur dioxide, so you could breathe it. There's no pressure. I mean, it's kind of all the same things you talk about. One talks about Mars only. Worse, the atmosphere is still a thousand times less dense than Mars'. And the radiation environment is terrible because you're embedded deep within Jupiter's magnetic field. And Jupiter's magnetic field is full of charged particles that have all come out of Io's volcanoes, actually. So Jupiter's magnetic field strips all this material out of Io's atmosphere. And that populates its entire magnetosphere and then that material comes back around and hits Io and spreads throughout the system, actually. It's like Io is the massive polluter of the Jupiter system”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to go to IO. I mean, I don't want to go there personally, but I want to send a spacecraft mission there. Absolutely. Wow.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends a little bit on what you want to do. Ideally every night, but you could take a frame every second and see how things are changing. The problem with that is that for things to change on a one second time scale, to actually see something change that fast, you have to have super high resolution. The spatial resolution we have is a couple hundred kilometers. Things are not changing on those scales over one second unless you have something really crazy happening.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Black. It's black and red, I guess. Like, think of the type of magma that you see in Hawaii. So different types of magma flow in different ways, for example. So in somewhere like Io, the magma is really hot, and so it will flow out in sheets because it has really low viscosity. And I think the lava flows that we've been having in Hawaii over the past couple years are probably a decent analogy, although IOs magmas, lavas are even more fluid and faster moving.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's interesting because there's very little atmosphere, the surface is actually really cold, very far below freezing on the surface when you're away from a volcano, but the volcanoes themselves are over a thousand degrees, or the magma when it comes out is over a thousand degrees.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up the ocean a little bit, and specifically in these hydrothermal vans, where we see really interesting life evolve in the bottom of Earth's oceans.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. It's just a little bit farther away from Jupiter. And then Ganymede is also in the orbital resonance. So it's a three-object orbital resonance in the Jupiter system. But we have these sorts of orbital resonances all over the solar system and also in exoplanets. So for Europa, basically because it's farther from Jupiter, the effect is not as extreme, but you do still have heat generated in its interior in this way. And that may be driving could be driving hydrothermal activity at the base of its ocean, which obviously would be a really valuable thing for life.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So eccentric orbit or elliptical orbit, it just means non circular. So a deviation from a circular orbit. And that means that, you know, for Io or Europa, at some points in their orbit, they're closer to Jupiter. And in some points in their orbit, they're farther away. And so when they're closer, they're stretched out. A sense, but literally just not very stretched out, like a couple hundred meters, something like that. And then when they're farthest away, they're less stretched out. And so you actually have the shape of the object deforming over the course of the orbit. And these orbits are like just a couple of days. And so that, in the case of Io, that is literally sufficient friction in its mantle to melt the rock of its mantle. And that's what generates the magma.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And potentially making those subsurface oceans in places like Europa and Enceladus habitable. And so the way that that works is if you have multiple moons and their orbital periods are integer multiples of one another, that means that they're always encountering each other at the same point in the orbit. So if they were on just random orbits, they'd be encountering each other at random places and the gravitational effect between the two moons would be canceling out over time. But because they're always meeting each other at the same point in the orbit, those gravitational interactions add up coherently. And so that tweaks them into eccentric orbits.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So tidal heating is. You want to understand and contextualize planets and moons, you have to understand their heat sources. So for Earth, we have radioactive decay in our interior as well as residual heat of formation. But for satellites, tidal heating plays a really significant role.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah The heat source plays a big role. So many of the moons in the outer solar system are heated from gravitationally by tidal heating. And I'm happy to describe what that is.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Framework for how planets work in general. Our current framework, it started out very Earth-centric. We start to understand how Earth volcanoes work. But then when you try to transport that to somewhere like Io that doesn't have an atmosphere, which has a very tenuous atmosphere, which makes a big difference for how the magma degases for something that's really small, for something that has a different heat source, for something that's embedded in another object's magnetic field, the kind of intuition we have from Earth doesn't apply. And so broadly, planetary science is trying to broaden that framework so that you have a kind of narrative that all you can understand how each planet became different from every other planet. And I'm already making mistake. When I say planet, I mean planets and moons. Like I said, I see the moons as planets.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many reasons, but IO is it is the most volcanically active object in the solar system. It has hundreds of active volcanoes on it. It has volcanic plumes that go hundreds of kilometers up above its surface. It puts out more volume of magma per volcano than volcanoes on Earth today. Think to me, the reason that it's most interesting is as a laboratory for understanding planetary processes. So one of the broad goals of planetary science is to put together a sort of more general and coherent”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Orbital period is 29, 30 years. And so if you want to look at how its atmospheric seasons work, you have to observe it over that long of a time period. And you're not going to do that with a spacecraft. But you can do it with telescopes.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in terms of resolution, so on a given night, if I go and take a picture of Io and its volcanoes, you can sometimes see. Least a dozen different volcanoes. You can see the infrared emission coming off of them and resolve them, separate them from one another on the surface, and actually watch how the heat coming off of them changes with time. I think at this time variability aspect is one of the big advantages we get from telescopes. So you send a spacecraft mission there and you get an incredible amount of information over a very short time period. But for some science questions, you need to observe something for 30 years, 40 years. Like let's say you want to look at the moon Titan, which has one of the most interesting atmospheres 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
“When I was a kid, it was looking at the stars and playing with telescopes that really fascinated me, and that's how I got into this. But telescopes, it's amazing how much detail and how much information you can get from telescopes today. You can resolve individual cloud features and watch them kind of sheer out in the atmosphere of Titan. You can literally watch volcanoes on IO change from day to day as the lava flows expand. And then with spectroscopy, you get compositional information on all these things. When I started doing solar system astronomy, I was surprised by how much detail and how much information you can get even from Earth, and then as well as from orbit, like the Hubble Space Telescope or the James Webb.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Its surface. The types of tools that I use are primarily telescopes, and so my background is in astrophysics. And so I actually got into solar system science from astronomy, not from a childhood fascination with spacecraft missions, which is actually what a lot of planetary scientists became planetary scientists because of childhood fascination with spacecraft missions, which is kind of interesting for me to talk to people and see that trajectory. I kind of came at it from the fascination with telescope's angle.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My goodness, that is such a big question. So among the field of astronomy, so planetary science, broadly speaking, well, it falls kind of at the border of astronomy, geology, climate science, chemistry, and even biology. So it's kind of on the border of many things. But part of it falls under the heading of astronomy. And among the things that you can study with telescopes, like solar system moons and planets, The solar system is really unique in that we can actually send spacecraft missions to the objects and study them in detail. And so I think that's the kind of type of tool that people are most aware of, that's most popularized, these amazing NASA missions that either you fly by the object, you orbit the object, you land on the object, potentially you can talk about digging into it, drilling, trying to detect tectonic tremors.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can learn quite a lot from just a flyby, and that's all we're currently capable of doing in the outer solar system. The New Horizons mission is a recent example which flew by Pluto, and then they had searched for another object that was out there in the Kuiper belt, any object that was basically somewhere that they could deflect their trajectory to actually fly by. And so they did fly by another object out there in the Kuiper belt. And they take pictures and they do what they can do. And if you've seen the images from that mission of Pluto, you can see just how much detail we have compared to just the sort of reddish dot that we knew of before. So you do get an amazing amount of information actually from just essentially a high-speed flyby.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there are so many fascinating objects out there. And I think what you hit on is exactly right, that we just don't have the tools to study them in detail. But we can look out there and we can see there are different species of ice on their surface that tells us about the chemical composition of the disk that formed our solar system. Some of these objects are way brighter than they should be, meaning they have some kind of geological activity. People have hypothesized that some of these objects have subsurface oceans. You could even stretch your imagination and say some of those oceans could be habitable. But we can't get very detailed information about them because they're so far away. And so I think if any of those objects were in the inner solar system, it would be studied intently and would be very interesting.”
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 absolutely a lot to be found. So the material that's out there is remnant material from the formation of our solar system. We don't think it comes from outside the solar system, at least not most of it.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I actually do. I really satellites are the moons are my favorite things in the solar system. And I think part of what you're saying, I agree from maybe a slightly different perspective, which is from the perspective of exploration. We've spent a lot of time sending spacecraft missions to planets. We had a mission to Jupiter. We had a mission to Saturn. We have plenty of missions to Mars and missions to Venus. I think that exploration of the moons in the outer solar system is the next frontier of solar system exploration.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is important just for having a general framework for. Understanding and talking about things to have a precise definition.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this actually is not the first time that it's happened. So, Ceres, when it was discovered, Ceres is the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt. And it was originally considered a planet when it was first discovered. And it went through exactly the same story, history, where people actually realized that it was just one of many asteroids in the asteroid belt region. And then it got declassified to an asteroid. And now it's back to a dwarf planet. So there is a lot of reclassification. So to me, as somebody who studies solar system objects, I just personally don't care my level of interest in something has nothing to do with what it's classified as. So my favorite objects in the solar system are all moons. And frequently when I talk about them, I refer to them as planets because to me they are planets. They have volcanoes. They have geology. They have atmospheres. They're planet-like worlds. And so the distinction is not super meaningful to me, but I...”
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 parameters are that it has to orbit the Sun, which was essentially to rule out satellites. Of course, this was a not very forward-thinking definition because it technically means that all extrasolar planets, according to that definition, are not planets. So it has to orbit the Sun. It has to be large enough that its gravity has caused it to become spherical in shape, which also applies to satellites and also applies to Pluto. The third part of the definition is the thing that really rules out everything else, which is that it has to have cleared out its orbital path. And because Pluto orbits in a belt of material, it doesn't satisfy that stipulation.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Objects that were discovered in that belt, or at least all the ones, let's say above a certain size, became planets instead of Pluto being declassified. But we were now aware of many objects out there in the outer solar system and what's called the Kuiper belt that are of the same size or in some cases even larger than Pluto. So the declassification was really just a realization that it was not. The same category as the other planets in the solar system, and we basically needed to refine our definition in such a way that took into account that there's this belt of debris out there in the outer solar system of things with a range of sizes.”
2021-05-17 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #184 – Katherine de Kleer: Planets, Moons, and Asteroids in Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source