YouSaid · the spoken record

Nathalie Cabrol

lines on the record: 150
first: 2022-12-19
most recent: 2022-12-19
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

“Hopefully, we'll do all the learning before it's too late because our response to what's going on in the environment, our response to pandemics is deeply connected to this disconnect we have with nature. Anyways, we all agree that we are in growing pains and hopefully we can move forward because there is a fantastic universe, something absolutely magical around us. And I'm talking as a scientist. I mean, there is magic, not in sense of, you know, trickery, but in sense of wonder around us. And there are so many signs where we are getting so close to revolutions in cosmology, in astrobiology, in astronomy, which I think to me, this is where the hope lies and also an awakening of understanding that we”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the good thing about technology. This is also something I wrote. It's not the tools we create that are bad. It's the way we use them.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true for the people who are building the tools and know how to use it. Take those tools now, put them in the general public with no filter which is happening with social media, which is happening with a lot of things. And you see the disaster this is creating.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Planet is sending you now this information coming from different ways. You have no way of knowing if information is correct or not.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I wrote it first in English And I translated into French. So the English version is already pretty much ready to go if we find a publisher in the US. But anyways, the point being here that I looked at this as a relationship with technology, as a complete change. To me, this is the singularity, more than anything else, which is the coevolution of human with technology, not anymore with their environment. While we are messing up the environment right now, why we don't respond to pandemic the way we should because we are disconnected to the environment, we are taking our information from and we were adapting from. Right now exactly, as you said, we take the information from the web, from the phones, et cetera. We have no filter over that information before you were out in the environment. The information you get is the one.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you know, there I would completely agree with you. In fact, I wrote about this again in this new book that's coming out.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I would push back on my turn because I still think that human gave themselves the ability. To do that by building that tool. So the idea that the tool, you know, we are getting into the Cardish scale and the dark forest and all these things, we can see the world this way. At this point in time, for me, Still see Great tool Now ah, whether the science scenario is going to happen, etc. I still think that we are far away from this. But if that tool is capable of giving me a new perspective, it's just that we are starting to jump into a deeper cognition of what the universe is, whether it's through our brain or through a different way of gathering information. Remember, this is what we do.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At this point in time, remember who was behind AI? You know, I'm not buying in the singularity thing yet. AI is not aware. AI is being built by humans. So AI is a tool, an extremely smart tool. As long as we build it and as long as we use it as a tool, it remains a tool. And I think there is a lot of Bruha and of course the science fiction and movies, they don't help.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be our greatest achievement is that if we can find that process of life, because at that point, in my mind, the universal all of a sudden is going to illuminate itself with actually its living force. What I can only call a living force. To me, this is what we are looking at, a universe that becomes more and more complex with time, more and more able to gather information. And interestingly enough, why to understand itself. So Sagan was right when he was saying, we are the universe trying to understand itself. And the more we go, the more the universe becomes alive. Be intelligent and maybe also conscious.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, it's nothing until I can prove it. But in my mind, the universe is connected everywhere. In all different places. So this life connection is something that, as you said, permits the universe. And the way to find life might be very different than to look for the origins of life. I think it's a good thing to go out there and look for the origin of life somewhere else because it's the manifestation of the nature of life that all of a sudden becomes apparent evident to our eye but What I think”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That we need to take the world literally, which is an assemblage or additional capacity to gather, collect, store information. Maybe this is something like that, or actually use that information to do something with it. But I do completely agree with you when you talk about flavor of ice cream. I think this is exactly it. I have a basic education about what physics is doing right now. And I look at quantum physics. And what it says about the universe and about the connection, about an atom here and an atom here, a photon here and a photom there. And I am starting to put maybe wrongfully two and two together. But in my mind,”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't know. I think that we have to be honest. And as a scientist, I'm going to step back and talk about intelligence. For me, bacteria that has survived, like cyanodobact Has survived just like us four billion years in one incarnation or another, and actually they are very similar to the one that they wear 3.5 billion years ago. It has some intelligence about its environment. So for complexity, it might be”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have another problem. We don't know what life is. We don't know what intelligence is, and we don't know what consciousness is, but we are trying to tackle the big question.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That case, it really applies where the Earth is representative of an abundance of other words. Now, of course, there can be other biochemistry. We have some examples in our own solar system. Titan might be a representative of that. We are not very clear the kind of biochemistry that can come out of a world where you have hydrocarbon lakes and rains and things like that, but we are going there. So we will learn something about this. So the bias is right there. The nature of life is different. If really life is the best way the universe has to fight entropy, there is no bias there because physics is the same all across the universe. At least the universe, we know there might be other universes. One window works with the same physics.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think that it's a little different than that. We are biased when it comes to the origin of life. Because well, we are the only model we know. And as I said, it makes sense because it seems that a lot of stars like the sun appear 10 billion years ago. And there are lots of words that really resemble the Earth and lots of water out there and lots of condition that could be a repeat of what we know. And we know that this biochemistry works. Again, as I mentioned, what is going to change is really the evolution of a planet, extinction, geology, et cetera. But our model is probably very abundant. I'm not saying that the endgame is going to resemble us because of all this extinction, et cetera. But this is a good bias. It's one that has the number for it. You know, the principle of mediocrity, I think that in”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For some reason, there were big jumps in evolution right after each of those episodes. And today there are other things like why all of a sudden you have mutation that seems to be responsible for a big jump in evolution. We are not clear yet. So all of those things, when you're thinking about life elsewhere, are going to come into play. And I cannot tell you that a planet that remains habitable for much longer than the Earth will have an evolutionary path that's the same or different. Depends on extinction, depends on climate, depends on whatnot.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Planet has a role to play. And it seems that It's a theory. It still has to be backed up by more observation, but there is a good correlation between not only the passage of the solar system towards the center of the galaxy, there is one place where we get hit by asteroid because of the interaction I was telling you about. But the other one is the climate with the Milankovich cycles, big jumps in life's evolution seem to be associated with snowball earth episodes. We don't know why yet. Snowball episode, intuitively you would think that they are connected to a decrease in life because the whole earth is covered in ice.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We actually are in the evitable zone of our galaxy. And if you are too close to the center, then it's a lot denser. And remember, we have the Oort cloud around our solar system. And if you are in the region of the galaxy that's too populated, then you are going to run interaction, gravitational interaction with all these stars. And since it's more dense, you will have more of the comets that are leaving in the Oort cloud being ejected from the Oort cloud and coming towards the inner solar system and collide with planets. So you will have more of these impacts if you are too close to the center of the galaxy. Not to mention the radiation. There is a place in our galaxy where it's a really bad neighborhood. You don't want to be there. You wouldn't be able to have life. But what really matters is Extinctions, but also the climate history.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That Cambrian Revolution is really what took us towards what we are. And in the meantime, they were the dinosaurs, etc. The dinosaur were wiped out. So the evolution could have taken a completely different turn. It's always, I would say, mass extinction that are going to drive what's the end game. But yeah, you take two planets and you change those asteroid impacts or those big geological events that wipe out like 90% of life at any time. The thing that seemed to be interesting, there are two things. The first one is where you are located on our galaxy matters a lot.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you can imagine all sorts of things and you can imagine what type of life would be around those stars. The biochemistry might be quite similar, in fact, and especially for the simple life because simple life starts really quickly on Earth. So my take on this is that the universe is full of cyanobacteria. But as far as intelligent life, it takes more time. So that can take different aspect.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is why we have elements like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc. Now, and that's the life we are built on. So I think it's not stupid to be looking for something that looks like us because right now in the universe, this is the stuff that's the most abundant. And we see with the exoplanet, with Kepler, with Tess, and now with Jamswave, we see that there are many, many different type of planets that may be habitable in the habitable zone of their stars. There are countless stars like the Sun. But more interestingly enough, there are other type of stars where you do have habitable zone as well and where the duration of the stars are sometimes a thousand times more than our sun.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nature of absolutely I am more interested in that because the day we understand the nature of life, then we have a universal biosignature and it doesn't matter whether this life responds to the same kind of biochemical processes as we do, although it makes sense. I told you about the generational aspect of the bricks of life, the stuff we are made of. The sun is part of the youngest generation of stars. And the first two generations of stars didn't produce the kind of elements we are made of. They were stars that were either without metal, just made of alien and hydrogen, or poor in metals. So the stars died off and stars like the sun were born from those.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that as much as I do believe to sending probes to explore the universe, I say we should also look inward to find the answer to some of the profound questions of who we are, what's life, what's the nature of life, because we are expressing life.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“your atom. Then we put them together to create syllables, right? Those syllables get together to create words. Words tell you something, but they are nothing without a verb that gives the direction. That's RNA and DNA. And then you can put all the complements you want. Our languages are built exactly as life is built. We are repeating patterns. I call this the Mandelbrot universe and the fractal universe because this is exactly what it is.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the best way to beat entropy, to fight entropy. But when you look at what we are doing, if you want to know what the nature of life is, look at our languages. And they can be very different languages, but they all have the same purpose, right? Exchange information, understand, store information, and also whether it is with somebody at the outside. Thought in yourself. That's the same thing the cell was doing. But now when you're looking at life and at the structure of our languages, life started with an anathem, so it's an atom. They got together to create inorganic molecules. Then you have complex inorganic molecules. Then you get to organic molecules, complex in organic molecules, and then you have RNA, DNA, etc. Look at the structure of our language. We created alphabets, letters”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An exchange and preserve the most information possible. And so what you're saying is kind of preserving the kind of information we have. So in the things that we are doing. As life happened. And I say happen because we don't know what life is. We have 123 definitions of life. And some people are saying we don't have any definition. We only have descriptions of life. And that's true. And that's true. So think about it for two minutes. We are looking for something we don't know it is. But we have a few clues about the nature of life. There are some really good theories. The first one was Schrodinger, right? In the 40s. Right now there is a guy named Jeremy England. It's another biophysical theory of life. It says life is the inevitable result of thermophysics.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biological process. So you can think about a number of things. Personally, I believe that what you talk about preserving our information is kind of what life does. We need to look at ourselves as not different of what the little cell that started off was. And this is what tells you not about the origin of life, but in fact the nature of life, which is a lot more interesting to me. The nature of life is really what is going to give you some universal signature to look for it all over the place and not only around ponds of water for life, as we know it. But the nature of life is telling you that life wants to get the most information possible around its surroundings. And complexity is in fact the ability to”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Or at least the length of time a civilization remains detectable. It can disappear from the radar screen literally for a number of reasons. The first one is destroy itself or being destroyed by external events, or it can become so in tune with the universe and so advanced that it disappears because he melts really in the background and it's not visible anymore. There are some wild theories out there saying that civilization might be so advanced that you cannot distinguish them from physical processes. That was an example. It doesn't say that this is the case, but some people say imagine that in fact all the dark matter that we see or we theorized about is in fact some sort of”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we don't have enough brain to understand yet the consequences of what we are doing. And right now we are paying for this. So the question is whether we are going to be able to move forward and learn from the mistakes we are making to become a mature civilization. You probably heard of the Drake equation that would be the L at the very end. The duration”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many efforts to do the type of thing you are talking about, which is to put our DNA on whatever kind of substrate and preserve it in vaults, either in different place on Earth or on the moon. Some people are already thinking about putting DNA on the moon. As far as brain is concerned, it's drawing towards transhumanism, which is the enhancement of who we are through AI and machine learning. Of course, having backups is a good thing. For me, I would say that taking care of our planets and going back to a place where we are in equilibrium with our environment would be also maybe the best backup possible and let evolution do its sayings. Right now we are like teenagers with enough brain to create cool tools.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the bricks of life, the carbon hydrogen, et cetera, they were produced by the death of previous stars. So this is how they were produced. And stars like arson started to form 10 billion years ago. That doesn't mean that the sun is the only kind of star that produce life or enables life, but actually was produced 10 billion years ago. Now, what you're talking about is a little different. Right now there are many”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you know, that's the thing Penspermia is a vector, potential vector, which means that he actually distributes the stuff of life left and right, but it doesn't explain the origin of life. It's not the environment itself. It just promotes maybe. And we still have to prove this. But what we know is that the stuff we are made of is very abundant all over the place, including in interstellar medium. So it's all over. It's all over. The idea is that maybe just wait to have the proper environment. And we know what it needs here on Earth. It needs water. It needs energy, shelter, and nutrient.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Commits an asteroid, have the building blocks of life embedded in them, and that given favorable condition, they might be able to seed planets. This is a theory.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually both. Interestingly enough, the building blocks of life, the bricks, the stuff we are made of, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen and phosphorus, they were included on our planet. They were built in just because our planet is made of these kind of rocks, asteroids and comets coming together by what we call accretion. So they were built in. When an asteroid comes, there is a lot of destruction going on. But at the same time, those rocks, they bring with them those bricks of life and they create lots of energy. And if the environment around is favorable, you might possibly have some seating going on. That's one of the aspects of what we call panspermia. Which is the fact that”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which normally is used by life on earth, but it can be produced by other things. So it's not that it's a real biosignature in itself, but it's intriguing. We have now the C12 and we have methane. But going back, it's a time on Mars 3.5 billion years ago where you have lots of destructions, where you have lots of impact cratering, et cetera. But we still have very old rocks that survive from that time. So these are good places. That's why we're sending the rovers in those places, ancient lakes and impact craters and places where you have very old rocks.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Life also appeared on Earth very fast, so the condition being quite similar at that time between the Earth and Mars. Let's assume for a moment that life appeared on Mars. It would have been simple life when conditions started to degrade, which was less than a billion year after the planet had formed. So everything at the surface would have disappeared except maybe for morphological traces of the interaction between life and its environment. So on Earth, the best example are what we call stromatolites. These are rock formation that are built by microbes. So we know that we know how to recognize them. You could have chemical traces as well. There is some interesting question marks right now about carbon isotopes at Gale Crater because we found an abundance of C.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very good question. The thing is that if you draw the parallel with Earth, it took 82% of Earth's history, geological history, to go from very simple life, microbial life to complexity. And when I'm saying complexity, I'm not even talking about us. I'm talking about animals. Mars is smaller, lost its magnetic field very fast and lost its atmosphere is very fast.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About looking for life on Mars, we have to understand the environment because life and environment co-evolve. So as cause or effect, a planet is going to give you the physical chemical environment for life to happen. These are the boundaries. But once life is here, it's going to change everything. biggest impact of life was to inject oxygen And that changed everything, including our signature in space. So there is this coevolution. So if you want to understand one, you have to remove the other from the equation. It's kind of a to a known equation.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There be life. And of course, behind this, at the time there were people like Klein and Sagan, Carl Sagan, just, you know, thinking about how can we test the idea of biology of life on Mars. So this is what Viking did. But of course, at the time when the two lenders arrived on Mars, we didn't have the context of the geology of the environment. We didn't have much data at all. So the data that Viking sent back was very confusing. Some people still think today that we discovered life on Mars at the time because some of the experiment turned out to show a strange signal. But most of the community think that it can be explained by chemical reaction that we see today. So it was so confusing that NASA decided, say, okay, if we want to be serious.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“imagination of the scientists started to pick up because right away we were seeing something that was familiar that we could describe so right away viking what put on the fast track and the idea was so mars looks so much like earth could have been although it's arid and there is little atmosphere etc”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a huge disappointment. Then Mariner 9 came and that changed everything. There was a little bit of drama because Mars started one of the biggest dust storm he'd ever experienced. And so for three months, we had an orbiter circling around Mars and not seeing anything. But then when the dust cleared, all of a sudden we started discovering volcanoes, valleys, ancient channels, dune fields, polar caps, and see what I'm talking to you. I don't need to invent any words to describe Mars. And although the myth of extraterrestrial civilization on Mars was gone, all of a sudden,”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was really the exploration, like your first look at a planet. You have to remember that the first mission that successfully snapped some pictures of Mars was Mariner 4. And then everybody at that time was still under the spell of, you know, H. Wells and the idea that Mars looked with telescope so similar to the Earth. Polar caps. We could see them with a telescope and we knew it had season. The actual tilt is pretty much the same as the one for Earth. So when Mariner 4 left, everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people thought that we were silly crystal cities and domes and stuff. That another civilization might have evolved in parallel to us in the source system. And of course, when the first images came back and Mars looked with that kind of resolution he'd had like the moon.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we've gone a long way. Remember from the Viking where we had no resolution, well, we had a little bit more resolution than with Mariners.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still survives in those environments and what kind of instrument and what kind of resolution do I need to actually detect it. So this is how the whole thing started. And it started with a small grant literally 40K. It was a discretionary fund. And this is how I got started in my career.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have been always curious about life in the universe and about questions on how we got to be here and the bigger question now with 25 years more in that business. It's more about understanding the origin and nature of life rather than whether there is life or not on Mars. I mean, this was really for me a stepping stone to bigger questions, but they were definitely important because they helped me frame my way of thinking about those questions. And so looking at Mars, Alex, understanding what the conditions were, 3.5 billion years ago or close to 4 billion years ago, then I knew the type of environment I needed to explore here on Earth as analogous to be able to understand what type of life.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's the thing. That's why I was looking at those images and saw some legs. And then came time where we started talking about sending lenders and rovers on Mars and looking maybe at the possibility that Mars was habitable. And lakes are particularly good places to look for those questions. So this is how it all ties up.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was already in the 90s, but we didn't have yet the Mars Global Surveyor and whatnot. We still work for 20 years. We worked on that. I did my master and my PhD thesis on Viking missions.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Viking mission landed on Mars in 1976, and there were two landers and two orbiters. So they were really our first feet on the ground on Mars, but they were lenders. They were not moving. They were not going up.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of water. But then during my postdoc, I started to look where that water was ponding. Interestingly enough, everybody was about channels and water and weather catastrophic or whatnot or seepage. But when you are talking about pounding water like lakes or ocean, people started waving their arms a little bit. So it was a little bit of a battle. Interestingly enough, yeah. But that got us on track with my husband. We were working together and we started developing the idea, the concept of legs in impact craters. So why in impact craters? Just because the Viking mission at the time, which is what we were working with, the resolution and the topography were so poor that there was really no way of telling where you had a real low in the topography. Thing you knew was a hole in the ground was an impact crater. So when you saw valleys.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's funny because there was not really a job application. In fact, when you're a scientist, you have questions in your mind and you have hypotheses and you start to list the kind of thing you need to answer. And then when you see the kind of thing you have to answer, then you kind of know the places where you need to go to do that. As far as science is concerned, started with analyzing data from Mars missions. And I had written a PhD about water on Mars first looking at channels.”
2022-12-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #348 – Nathalie Cabrol: Search for Alien Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source