YouSaid · the spoken record

Sara Seager

lines on the record: 135
first: 2020-08-16
most recent: 2020-08-16
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

“And although my dad wanted me to do something more practical, where he could be guaranteed I could support myself was another option. But initially I wasn't that good at physics. It was a slog to just get through school and grad schools a very, very long time. But ultimately, when faced with a choice and I had the luxury of choosing, knowing that I was good at something and also loved it, it really carried me through.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that was the one sentence version. In my case, it was a long slog, and there were a lot of things I wasn't good at initially. But so initially, you know, I was good at high school math. I was good at high school science. I loved astronomy. And I realized those could all fit together. Like the day I realized you could be an astronomer for a job, it has to be one of my top days of my life. I didn't know that you could be that for a job I was good at all those things”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do have some advice just to succeed. It's tough advice in a way, but it is to find something that you love doing that you're also very good at. In some ways, the stars have to align because you've got to find that thing you're good at or the range of things, and it actually has to overlap with something that actually you love doing every day. So it's not a tedious job. That's the best way to succeed.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or just use from a topo map from a topographical map. The library. Were scary elements about it, but part of the excitement or the joy or the desire was to be scared.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I just thought to myself, wow, like that you could just take the summer off and explore by canoe and go and see what's out there. And it led to me just doing that, that very thing. Of course, it's different now, but going out to where the road ends and putting the canoe in the water and just, well, we had to have a plan. We didn't just explore, but go down this rivers with rapids and travel over lakes and portages and just really live.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About a trip he took in the late 1930s. And I was just shocked that even at that time, although that was a long time ago, there were large parts of Canada that were untouched by white people. And he went up there and interacted like with the natives. He called the book, with the Had a subtitle that was called something like Journey in the Barren Lands. And when you go up north in Canada, you pass the tree line, just like on a mountain, if you hike up a mountain, you get so far north there aren't any trees. And he wrote eloquently about the land and about being out there. There weren't even any maps of the region in that time?”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's hard to kind of convey that. And you can just say, oh, yeah, I want to be more diverse. I want to be more open, but it's nearly impossible problem to solve. And the movie really helps open people's eyes to it. This book I put third because unlike the giver, people may not want to read it. It's not as relevant. But when I was in my early 20s, I went to this big, this like 800 people large conference call run by the wilderness canoe association in my hometown of Toronto. And there was a family friend there who I met. And he said, read this book, it'll change your life. And it actually changed my life. And it was a book called Sleeping Island by an author PG Downs, who just coincidentally lived in this area, lived in the Boston area. And he was a teacher, I think at a private school. And every summer he would go to Canada with a canoe, often by himself. And he wrote this book maybe in the 40s or 50s.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True, yeah. Well, I do have two other books or two other things. One is something I came across just a few days ago, actually. It's actually a film called Picture a Scientist. And when you picture a scientist, you probably don't picture the women and women of color in this film. And it is a way to get outside your box. I really think everyone interested in science, even just peripherally, should watch this because it is. Shocking and sobering at the same time. And it talks about how, well, I think one of the messages across is, you know, we really are like, I don't know if we're hardwired to just like people like ourselves, but we're excluding a lot of people and therefore a lot of great ideas by not being able to think outside of how we're all stereotyping each other.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a generational thing, though, because the book came out, I think, in the 90s. So if you're older than me, that book didn't exist when we were in middle school. I just do think a lot of people won't have heard of it.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By Lois Lowry, I think is how you pronounce it. I really do hope everyone created it. And it is a young adult book, but it's incredibly, I'm really glad. I only read it because my kids got it for school. I just thought, okay, well, why don't I just see what this is about? And I just, wow”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I felt like from the book, you have to take it. I frowned from the book. I never thought, like now that you're saying it, I see what you're saying. The burden is huge, but I always felt like the answer is yes, you absolutely want to know what's outside. But you can't do that if you're very, it's hard to be objective about your own reality.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do I think outside the box in the confines of my society? It surely carries negative things with it that we don't realize today.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's part of that question Are we going to evolve as I mean? This isn't what's there, but it made me wonder are we evolving to a better place? Is there a day when we can eliminate poverty and hunger and crime and sickness? In this book, they pretty much have in a society that the boy's in. And sort of follows him. And he becomes the chosen one to be like a receiver, the giver's the old wise man who retains some of the harshness of the outside world so that he can advise the people. It's a sort of boy comes of age and is chosen for the special role. He finds the world isn't what he expects. And I don't know about you, but it was so profound for me because it jolts you out of reality. It's like, oh my God, what am I doing here? I'm just going with the flow, with my society.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Follows this boy in this very utopic society that's like perfect, it's been all clean cut and made perfect actually and as he kind of comes of age, he starts realizing something's wrong with his world.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one book I wish everyone could read. I'm not sure if you've read it. It's actually a children's book, like a young adult book. It's called The Giver.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is this other kind of field that everyone is involved in because Starshade is hard. Earths are hard. But there's another category of planet star type that's easier. And these are planets orbiting small red dwarf stars. They're not Earth-like at all. Think like Earth cousin instead of Earth Twin. But there's a chance that we might establish that some of those have water and signs of life on them. That's nearer term than starshaden.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will bring me joy finding another earth, an earth-like planet around a sun-like star, knowing that there's at least one or more out there, being able to see water, that it has signs of water and being able to see some gases that don't belong. So I know that the search will continue after I'm gone, enough to fuel the next generation.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I will after talking to you But no, it's not really something I think about. I mean, I do think about the search for nother Earth and will I get there? Will I be able to conclude? My search, and is there one? Like, as time goes by, you know, that window to solve that problem gets smaller.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They came in many ways, and the way like to think about it is like grief is an ocean. With tiny islands of the little lights, and eventually that ocean gets smaller and smaller and the islands become continents with lakes. So, initially be like the children laughing one day. Or my colleagues at work who rallied around me. And would take me away from my darkness to work on a project. Later on, it turned out to be a group of women my age, all widows, all with children in my town. And it would be even though it was a bit morose getting together still very joyful at the same time.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I learned to love the things I have more. I learned to love the people that I have more and to not let the little things Bother me”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing ends And it's hard to not, you wouldn't want to limit. Like my dog, who I love so much, will start to cry. Like, I can't think about the end. I know he'll age much faster than I will, and someday it will end, right? But it's too sad to think of. But should I not have got a dog? Have not brought this sort of joy into my life because I know it won't be forever.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know why. I mean, I think it's how we're hardwired. Like one of my friends some time ago, actually when my dad died, He never heard someone say this before, but he's like, Sarah, you know. Why do we evolve to take death so harshly? Like, what kind of society would we be if we just didn't care people died? Would be a very different type of world. How would we as a species have got to where we are? So, I think that is tied hand in hand with why do we seek connection? It's just that what we were talking about before, that subconsciousness that we don't understand.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the major concept of him after he died? I didn't know I was just lost because when something that profound happens, all the things I was doing, most of the things I was doing were just meaningless. It was so tough to. To find an answer for that. And that's when I settled on I'm going to devote the rest of my life to trying to find another earth and to find out, to find that we're not alone.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got sick pretty quickly. So, if you do only have a year to live, it's ironic because you can't do the things you want it to do because you get too sick too fast.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not so much of time, but I'd come back later and be like, okay, well, why don't you do that if that's what you would do if you were going to die a year from now? Why don't you make it real? Simple things, spend more time with family. Like, why don't you do that? And no one had an answer. It turns out unless you have, you really do have a pressing end of life. People don't do their bucket lists or try to change their career. And some people can't. So we can't, like for a lot of people, they can't do anything about it. And that's fine. But the ones who can take action for some reason never do. And that was one of the ways that Mike's death or at the time his You know, for these sick people, what I learned he had a bucket list and he was able to do some of the bucket lists. It was awesome.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What will you do differently about your life now You have one year to live. What would you do? I mean, it's hard. I don't know if you want to answer that”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long journey. It's a long journey, and you don't know where the diagnosis is going. So anyone who's suffered from a major illness, there's like always branches on the road. So, you know, he had this intestinal blockage. I can't imagine someone in their 40s having that and that be normal. But the doctor is like, it could be nothing. Could just cut it out. You don't need most of your intestine. It's a repeating pattern. Just cut that out. It could be fine. But it ended up not being fine in Hughes' diagnosis being terminal. Well, it really changed my life in a huge way, first of all. I remember immediately one summer, the summer when this happened, I started asking everyone I knew. I would ask you, I don't know, it's not my job to put you on the spot. I'd say, You have one year to live or two or three.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, initially, he just had a random stomach ache. I hate to say that out loud because I know a lot of people will have a random stomach ache. So he just had a bad stomach ache. And then, hmm, this is weird. A few days later, another bad stomach ache kind of gets worse. Might go away for a few weeks. Might come back. And at the time, all I knew was my dad had had that same thing. Not the same identical system, but he had these really weird pains. And he ended up having the worst diagnosis, one of the worst diagnoses you can get from a random stomach ache is pancreatic cancer. Because the time, the pancreas, like you can't feel anything. So by the time you feel pain, it's too late. It's spread already. So I was just like beside myself. I'm like, this is like, wow, this guy, he's a random stomach ache. All I know is another man I loved had a random stomach ache and it didn't end well.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I felt like a child. Like the doctors were trying to. Water down the real diagnosis or treat us like we couldn't know the truth, or they didn't know. You know, I felt mixed, like it's not a good situation if you think the doctor either has no idea what he or she is doing or if the doctor is purposely, let's just say lying to you to sugarcoat it. Like I didn't know which one of it was, but I knew it was one of those.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was incredibly frustrating. Like lots of us have had some kind of problem that the doctors completely ignore. That they kept blowing him off. It's nothing. Are they paid to just say it's something? I mean, it's just insane. I was just so angry. And we finally got to a point where he was really sick. He was in bed, not able to move, basically. And it turned out all the things they ignored and not done any tests. He had like a 100% blockage in his intestine, like 100%. Like nothing could get out, nothing could get in. And it was pretty, pretty shocking to even hear then that it could be nothing.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The title has a double meaning. On the face of it, it's the search for other earths. Earths are so dim compared to the big bright massive star beside them. Searching for the Earths is like searching for the smallest lights in the universe. Has this other meaning too? I really hope that you or the other people listening never get to the place where you're just fallen off the cliff into this horrible place of huge despair. And once in a while, you get a glimmer of a better life, of some kind of hope. And those are also the smallest lights in the universe.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't know totally. I mean, there's some rogue planets that are just born on their own. I know that sounds really weird to be how can you be born an orphan? But they just are. Because most planets are born out of a disk of gas and dust around a star. But some of these small planets are like totally failed stars. They're so failed. They're just small planets on their own. But we think that there's probably honestly, there's another path to a rogue planet. That's one that's been kicked out of its star system by other planets, like a game of billiard balls. Somebody just gets kicked out. We actually think there's probably as many rogue planets as stars.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's because we all want to be a part of something, a part of a family, or a part of a community or a part of something. And so our solar system, and by the way, I only, it's sort of like a... When you treat yourself to eating an entire tub of ice cream, I sometimes treat myself to imagine things like this and not just be so cut and dried. But when you imagine that, this planet's not, because I don't want to give emotions to a planet per se, but the planet's not part of anything. It's somehow, it's just all on its own, just kind of out there without that warm energy from its sun. It's just all alone out there.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The money given won't make it happen, but what it's done is it's planted the seed and it's shifted that line from what is crazy to what is a real project. It's shifted it just ever so slightly enough, I think, to plant the seed that we have to find a way to somehow find a way to get there.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These thousands or whatever, however many make it, they'll go by the nearest star system and snap some images and radio the information back to Earth because they're traveling so fast they can't slow down, but they'll zoom by, take some photos, send it back. But see, just what I want you to pause on for a second is that just by making that a real concept.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like any good engineering project, it has to be broken down into the crazy parts. Breakthrough initiative, like to their huge credit, is sponsoring. Getting over these, actually, they've listed initially, they listed 19 challenges. Broken down to concrete things. Like one of them is well, you have to buy the land and make sure the airspace is okay with you sending up that much power overhead Another one is you have to have material on the sale where the lasers won't just vaporize it. So there's a lot of issues. But anyway, these sales would be accelerated to 20th speed of light and their journey to the nearest star would no longer be tens of thousands of years, but could be 20 years So it's not as bad as tens of thousands.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'd have a bank of telescopes with lasers. That'd be like a gigawatt power. And these lasers would momentarily shine upwards and accelerate. They'd hit these sails. They'd be like a power source for the sale and would accelerate the sales to travel at about a 20th the speed of light.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second one, it's called Starshot. You know Starshot means like big dreams. And it's an initiative by the Breakthrough Foundation. And Starshot is a concept to send thousands of little tiny spacecraft, which they now call Star Chip. So instead of Starship, it's Star Chip. And there's a little chip. And the starship. So thousands of little turtles being born, they're not all going to make it. He used to send lots of them. And each of these star chips, once they're launched into, I guess, low Earth orbit, they will deploy a solar sail that's a few meters in diameter. And the idea is that on Earth, we would have a bank This one is still a bit on the other side of the line, but”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crazy, right? And it's crazy for a lot of other reasons because, again, you have to line up the sun and your target. You don't have one telescope per target because every star is behind the sun in a different way. So it's a lot of complicated things”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in this case, you would ask me, let's say if this thing could get built, it would take something like they like to say 25 years to get from here to there. 25 years, and then it could send some information back to us. And then you'd say, so, Sarah, how many pixels? And I wouldn't say one or less than one. I'd say, you know, it could be like 10 by 10 pixels. Could be 100 pixels, which would be awesome.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have a way to use that for magnification. That's right. There are galaxies that are lens, so-called gravitational lens, by intervening galaxy clusters, actually. There are microlensing events where stars get magnified as an unseen gravitational lens star passes in between us and that very distant star. It's actually a real tool in astronomy. Yeah, using gravitational lensing to magnify because it bends more rays towards you than normally would you normally see.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean In astronomy, and Einstein thought about this initially. We can use massive objects bend space. And so light that should be traveling straight. It actually travels around the warped space.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's really exciting. Really cool. So, there's two other topics that aren't mine, but I still love them. One of them, let's just talk about it briefly because it's not a pro. And this is way farther than the Voyager spacecrafts are right now. And to use our sun as a gravitational lens, use our sun to magnify something that's behind it. It's got to sink in for a minute”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And people would just laugh like that's dead. Like, you can never formation fly, or they'd say, Why are you working on that? That's just so not, it's not possible.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Severe engineering project. So I actually can tell you about two other projects that are not mine. I like to call Starshade mine because it was my project that I helped make it mainstream where that line is constantly shifting. When I started, when I got this leadership role on Starshade, I remember telling people about it. And it was definitely not on the mainstream OK line. It was on the giggle factor side of the line.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost finished solving all those problems, and then it's just a matter of building one and testing it in a full scale size facility. Then building the telescope is just a matter of time to build everything and get it up for lunch.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would actually ruin it because we're trying to see this tiny, tiny signal. So then the question is how do you make a razor thin edge? Like those petal edges would be like have to be like a razor. What materials can you? So there's a series of problems like that.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, wow, that is insane. And the team broke that down actually into a sensing problem because the starshade, how do you see the starshade precisely enough to control it? Because if you're shining a flashlight, you know the beam spreads out. So the starshade has a beacon, an LED, or a laser, it's going to spread out so much by the time it gets to the telescope. The problem wasn't how do you tell the star shade how to move around fast enough to stay in a straight line. The problem was how are you able to sense it well enough. So problems like that were broken down and money that came from NASA to solve problems is put towards solving it. So we've got through most of the hard problems right now. Another one was that Starshade, even though it's looking at a star, light from our own sun could hit the edges of the starshade and bounce off into the telescope, believe it or not.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We call it technology tall pole. It's the phrase where you have to figure out what are your hardest problems and then break those down to solve. So the starshade, one of the really hard problems was how do formation fly at tens of thousands of kilometers.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, working with unlimited money. We have some more engineering problems to solve, but not too many more. We've been burning down our so-called tall pole list.”
2020-08-16 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #116 – Sara Seager: Search for Planets and Life Outside Our Solar System · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source