Chris Impey [00:00:00] My name is Chris and I'm a professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. I've worked here for about thirty five years. I was born in Scotland and grew up in the U.K. and America, 10 different schools bouncing around, got interested in physics as an undergraduate and did that and then got pulled into the outward looking astronomy game for a PhD. And so I'm in Arizona because we have incredible clear skies, large telescopes. It's about the best place to do astronomy. And if it's not the best place, then the places like Chile and so on where the skies are even better with telescopes there. So I go there to observe.
Huda [00:00:38] So Australia would by far be the worst place to do any form of astronomy then?
Chris Impey [00:00:43] Not terrible. When I was a graduate student in Edinburgh, I went to the Anglo Australian Observatory and Sighting Spring and I got data there and my thesis as a data. And it's not a terrible sight. It's pretty dark. It's not very high, though. So these days you want to be above all the weather in the atmosphere?
Huda [00:01:00] Yeah, that's that's usually what we have an issue with - weather.
Chris Impey [00:01:03] So Australia is famous for radio astronomy and they were pioneers on that back to the nineteen forties and fifties. So that's for radio astronomy where the climate doesn't matter.
Sahil [00:01:13] What's radio astronomy? Is it like the podcast of astronomy?
Chris Impey [00:01:16] Yeah, well it could be, but it's more the radio universe. What's going on at long wavelengths out there in space, which is the answer to quite a lot. So it's a big subject.
Sahil [00:01:26] So I just wanted to let you know that Huda and I both you know, we want to break things down for the audiences because I feel like astronomy is one of those branches that it needs to be more accessible to the common person. And we want to do that more and more so people can stop coming up with conspiracy theories or ideas that they might think are true, even though they're not. And I wanted to start with the first one, which was the report that came out out of the Pentagon. And I know you've commented on it and I personally read it. And it's a piece of shit. It's a massive bunch of bullshit that just I felt like I learned less after reading that.
Huda [00:02:04] But also, do you think it's because you had high hopes or -
Sahil [00:02:06] Of course I had high hopes.
Huda [00:02:08] And it just didn't meet them?
Sahil [00:02:09] Yeah, it definitely didn't meet them. What did you think about it, Chris? And be really honest.
Chris Impey [00:02:14] I wasn't as disappointed because I didn't have very high hopes.
Sahil [00:02:17] Like, is that part of being a scientist?
Chris Impey [00:02:19] No, it's part of knowing the history of the US military and UFOs. It goes back to Roswell in 1940s, and they've been secretive and not very forthcoming about everything. And they've not really shone much light on the phenomenon so that nothing really changed. Their report of nine pages that cost twenty two million dollars so American taxpayer should be pretty annoyed too.
Huda [00:02:41] Yeah.
Sahil [00:02:41] And they've never mentioned it. And is that statistic something that has been published?
Chris Impey [00:02:46] Oh yeah. Congress asked for the report and they got it and now they just have learned almost nothing. So they're military, we're told, to go back and come back again in a few months with more data, better information or say how are you going to do better? And that's that's pretty much it. I agree. Didn't learn much at all.
Sahil [00:03:04] So is it part of being a superpower that the US has always been so secretive about it? Why the secrecy? Like if we were to find that there is life outside, why is there so much fear around what might happen? Is it the unknown that people are so scared about or the government is so scared about?
Sahil [00:03:21] Well, the military is secretive by instinct and by... It's a reflex, of course, because they don't generally think public can handle certain things and they have genuine security concerns, too. So with this report, for example, one of the things they forget about aliens and ET, they also were very cagey about whether these were possibly technologies that were adverts and military adversary of the United States. And that is why the report came from the director of national intelligence, because that's that's their main concern. They didn't say much about that either. But that's an example of why they are secretive historically and then they're secretive just because they know the UFO phenomena has been cloaked in conspiracy theories and it's in the pop culture and a kind of unfortunate way with crop circles and alien abductions and so on. And they're probably pretty squeamish about that. In fact, the report also talked about how they had to get over the reticence that their pilots have and even reporting the sightings because they would be embarrassed. I think they would think it's unprofessional and even talk about this. So it's right the way through the military from the pilots themselves all the way up to the top. And there is probably at some level at which they don't trust the public with sensitive or awkward information.
Sahil [00:04:35] So why why come out with the report now? What was the need for the report?
Chris Impey [00:04:39] They were told to do it. They were ordered by Congress to do it. So going back decades, Harry Reid, who used to be the Democratic Senate leader, he'd been interested. His district, of course, includes Area 51 in Nevada. So he'd been interested personally and had rattled the cage of the military to say more about their secret programs. He's out of power now. And Marco Rubio was the senator from Florida who pretty much led the committee that asked for this report, so they were told to do it and they had to respond to Congress.
Chris Impey [00:05:07] So I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to this. And you mentioned crop circles. So how does that even work? Like I mean, what are they really for someone who doesn't know and how do they happen?
Sahil [00:05:18] And what were the first interpretations of crop circles that kind of came out? Like why did people perceive it as it could be a UAV or UFO?
Chris Impey [00:05:27] Right. Well, you can go back to the origin story, which I know and it's been lost in time back in the 1970s.
Sahil [00:05:33] Please tell us.
Chris Impey [00:05:34] What people have forgotten that story which is the crop circles, which started to appear in England and then are seen in Canada, Australia, various places with wheat being pressed down. I mean, to me, it's just simply ludicrous that aliens would travel hundreds of trillions of miles across the galaxy with far superior technology just to press down on our wheat and then go back home.
Sahil [00:05:56] It's wheat. Have you had a tortilla, you know how great a tortilla is?
Chris Impey [00:06:01] If you forgot the origin, then people will now comment about super complex things where someone will write an article that had this crop circle, which is very complicated, demonstrated a mathematical theorem that has never been seen in mathematics. So it's new mathematics. So it must have come from aliens and et cetera, et cetera. So you'll see this whole edifice of ridiculousness about it. The origin story, which I remember because I was in Britain as a student when it happened, is that the first crop circles are seen on the south of England and eventually it got into the press and everyone had a big laugh and nobody really took it seriously. And then the fringe press sort of said, oh, it could be aliens and so on. And then the two guys, two blokes who did it, who just got drunk one night and took boards and planks out into a field and made the crop circles, they fessed up and everyone had a good laugh. And at that point you might have thought, oh, it'll just go away. But no, then the copycat circles start appearing and they get more complicated and more. And people who don't know, and don't remember that story if they weren't there and didn't read about it at the time, forgot that. And so now it's its own thing. And that's classic Pseudo-Science. Alien abduction is another example because that's pretty serious. I mean, you've got to be very careful before you question someone's personal experience that they claim. But there's whole literature now on the psychology and the sociology and the psychopathy, if you like, of alien abduction reports and so on. And then there's some set of people who just take them at face value. Well, yeah, sure. Aliens have been abducting people. They've been doing that for decades. Why would we be surprised? They've have been visiting us for decades. They've been abducting people for decades and doing experiments on them. They've been pressing down wheat, they've been doing all sorts of things. It's just part of the whole superstructure, infrastructure of alien visiting the earth. So most scientists don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole.
Huda [00:07:54] So you guys are a buzzkill then, really?
Chris Impey [00:07:56] No, we like lots of other cool stuff, dark energy, dark matter, black holes like...
Sahil [00:08:01] We are going to-
Huda [00:08:02] We are
Chris Impey [00:08:04] They just happen to be really cool things that are within the realm of the laws of physics.
Huda [00:08:08] Oh, OK. All right, Chris.
Sahil [00:08:10] But also, I think it's important Chris, that we have guests like you because I don't remember the origin story because it hasn't been published as much in the media. Like, I don't even know it was two drunk blokes, which is so common in the UK.
Huda [00:08:24] How do people even do that?
Chris Impey [00:08:26] It's not actually that hard. I mean, it's a basic point is you can just have a little plan and boards of various sizes and a rope and a central tether so you can get the symmetry. I mean, I'll just take a different example, which ends up in the same bucket, the Nazca lines, these famous lines in Mexico which cover the desert and southern part of Mexico, all these geometric shapes covering hundreds of meters, kilometers, actually, and they classically been swept into the UFO and alien world because how could how could we possibly have done this? You can't even see these shapes. They were done supposedly hundreds of years ago during the age of Aztec time. But we didn't have planes then, so they couldn't have possibly known what they would look like from the air and they couldn't have possibly done them because they were too primitive and not smart enough. And so they become part of the UFO thing. So it's sort of like crop circles. And that's just a combination of ignorance and arrogance. It's the ignorance of not trying to think of a reasonable explanation. And the arrogance which I object to more is that these people were too stupid to have done this. The pyramids -you can't fit a knife between those rocks. You know, they were so accurately machined. And those people ask four thousand years ago they couldn't have done that. The aliens must have helped them to make the pyramids.
Huda [00:09:40] I didn't even know that that was a thing.
Chris Impey [00:09:41] And then there's a whole world of the aliens must have done X, Y or Z in the past because all these things are out there and we can explain them. And those people were too primitive to have done them. Give me a break.
Sahil [00:09:53] Well, Chris, I have a I have a good answer. So we've got the Taj Mahal in India, right? If you look at the Taj Mahal. And you look at the engravings and the specificity of engravings, you go, how the hell did they make something like this? Unless you know that there were only thirty thousand people working on it for 30 years, if you can't make that in 30 years with thirty thousand people, then you've not got a great labor force, do you? It's not like we suddenly became so intelligent in the last four thousand years that suddenly we are like, oh, now we have this very smart species. And you're right. It's the arrogance. It's the arrogance of thinking that those people that our ancestors were'nt smart enough and we are the so-called conscious beings that somehow know that they must have been something else involved in this.
Huda [00:10:34] I can't believe I did that about the pyramids, though. Like, I feel like that's a bit of a, that's a bit far. Let the Egyptians have that one.
Chris Impey [00:10:40] Well, there's a there's a good archeological example that comes into the news every now and then. It's got nothing to do with aliens. And I don't think people have even claimed it. But it's a perfect example of how we can integrate our forebears. The curse of modernity is to think we are the first generation or first era that really knows cool shit. That's just not true. OK, science, we know a lot more about the universe in the last hundred years, but our brains have not changed substantially for about forty or fifty thousand years. Those are the last known changes to the brain that enhanced our speech centers. And we're fully modern humans by 40 thousand years ago. So the only difference is we settled down, we didn't have to worry about dying so much as hunter gatherers and we developed civilization and technology, blah, blah, blah. But there's no difference. And its called AntiKythera Mechanism , its a Greek Word. And it was a truly amazing accidental find in the Aegean Sea. About one hundred and ten years ago, they found some rusted, corroded, pitted and compressed out of all recognition device artifact about the size of your hand from a shipwreck. The shipwreck was two thousand years ago. It was a Greek ship or like Greek era ship. It was going across the Mediterranean and to cut the story short after decades of war, it was so hard because it was so messed up and it used all sorts of advanced imaging techniques and so on to decode it. They figured out that this was an analog computer and it was designed to tell time to show the positions of all the planets to predict eclipse cycles on timescales of hundreds of years. Some of the gears are elliptical gears that they knew how to make two thousand years ago mechanically and more significant for an astronomer, the gears that show the positions of the major planets incorporate their elliptical motions. That's why they use elliptical gear. So they realized that Jupiter and Saturn, very subtle motions in the sky are non-uniform motions because they have elliptical orbits. Now, in the history books that was only found by Kepler four hundred years ago, the Greeks were not supposed to know about that, let alone make an incredible device to actually capture those motions. So this discovery has rewritten the book of history of technology. It's rewritten the book of history, of astronomy. My subject, it's incredible. And it was found by accident. So you've got to be a little humble when you think you know what happened and how we got to where we are and that we were the first people to know stuff
Huda [00:13:07] Human beings have this level of sort of like superiority almost to say that we are just this sort of incredible and only species on the planet that just, you know, figured it out all on our own type thing.
Chris Impey [00:13:19] Well, another piece of it that's not it's just a little more forgivable. It's not necessarily our amnesia or arrogance is, you know, we only live in the moment of the Internet. So go back to the crop circles. That origin story was before the Internet, right. 1970's. There's a lot of stuff we just don't know or have recorded. It might be in a book somewhere or in a magazine, in a library or in a newspaper, in an archive. But to most people now, if it's not on the Internet, it didn't happen.
Chris Impey [00:13:49] And that's where some of the amnesia comes from. Everything starts in the early 1990s. Pretty much
Sahil [00:13:54] Before that, there was no information available - people had to like physically go around and look for it.
Chris Impey [00:13:59] In the old days when all you had were, say, books, it was a pain in the ass to write a book. It took a long time. It's difficult. It cost money. You had editors and fact checkers and you didn't do it lightly. So books sort of meant something and novels of course, they were there for entertainment, but just factual books, manuals about things, encyclopedias and so on. Well, now it's all in Wikipedia and it's all on the Internet. And now we don't even have to think about it or question it's provenance or it's accuracy. And we know the Internet is riddled with misinformation and falsehoods and conspiracy theories. So navigating that is a lot harder than navigating information used to be.
Huda [00:14:36] We have to appreciate how difficult it used to be to kind of sit there and do this sort of research and actually put it all in a book. Nowadays, every Tom, Dick and Harry is writing a bloody book, you know, and I'm not even talking about just people that are credible, like I'm talking about people that aren't credible, like the amount of people that are writing their own biographies. And...
Sahil [00:14:57] They are not that interesting.
Chris Impey [00:14:57] Well, it's another thing we can thank amazon for. They created create space and these moments of self publishing, which are actually pretty easy to use, and you get a pretty professional looking product, whether what's in it is worth reading is another matter entirely.
Sahil [00:15:11] I'm glad that you pointed out Amazon, because it's been really bothering me for the last couple of days. How much I've paid for Jeff Bezos to go up there? Huda doesn't actually buy so much from Amazon at all.
Huda [00:15:21] I never buy anything from amazon.
Sahil [00:15:23] And it boggled my mind because when I was in America, I was only ordering from Amazon. It's like two days. It's here. Right. And you like this is amazing.
Chris Impey [00:15:30] Americans want it both ways. They want it now. Same day delivery. Forget about next day delivery. And they don't really want to think about the implications. I mean, luckily, there are investigative journalists and books have been written. And so the Amazon footprint on the world, its effect on wages, its effect on worker conditions, its effect on the planet through its carbon footprint, those things are now better known than they used to be. But still, everyone is addicted, pretty much to Amazon. If you asked two hundred million Americans to just cold turkey on Amazon as a collective action, no way.
Huda [00:16:04] I can't believe that because I very rarely online shop.
Sahil [00:16:06] It's really addictive. But my question was Jeff Bezos going into space? Is that more of a male ego thing or is it actually going to be used to find some information that we can use in the future,
Huda [00:16:18] like benefit us?
Sahil [00:16:19] Yeah, that may benefit us.
Chris Impey [00:16:20] Yeah, I'm I'm a little conflicted on this because I appreciated some of the modes of exploration of space in the past. I think we have learned something. I mean, you can you can always discount the entire history of, say, the moon landings and say that was all just a geopolitical pissing contest between the US and the Soviets.
Sahil [00:16:38] We are going to get to that.
Huda [00:16:39] We have so many questions.
Chris Impey [00:16:41] And it's true, it would never have happened without the Cold War, without other things happening. We never gone would have gone to the moon and we haven't been back for half a century. So some of the space history is very anomalous and very strange. And a lot of it was driven by military motives. This is different. This is commercial now and it's mixed. On the one hand, if you appreciate technology and people who do clever things with the technology, these private space companies have changed the economics of getting something into Earth's orbit dramatically, they reduce the cost per kilo into Earth orbit by a factor of 20 after it didn't go down at all with thanks to NASA for 40 years. Well, that's something. You know I don't know if that has value, but it's something it's demonstrations of technology. In terms of the billionaires,Yes. I mean, it's clearly ego trip of Branson, Musk and to be the first in orbit and to be there themselves. And it's not going to improve anything. And it was ludicrous coming out of Bezos's mouth. I mean, he just said so many ludicrous things around his flight and he obviously got in hot water for thanking all the people who bought things from Amazon for -
Sahil [00:17:47] And his workers, everyone who works for Amazon. That's like in your face.
Chris Impey [00:17:51] He said other things that just on their face are ridiculous. Like he said, the goal here is to get all our heavy industry offer and put it into orbit and be thinking, come on, get real . Are you serious? What are you smoking? So, you know, he's he's a smart guy, of course, and he's doing it for a reason. He's got economic models behind it and they probably will make money out of tourism from the high end and they'll bring the cost down so that wealthy people and not super rich people can do it and they will. The analogy that's always being made with commercial aviation is completely flawed because, yes, commercial aviation flying in the 1930s was expensive and only rich people did it and it was dangerous. And now four billion people flew last year on jets and so on around the world. But there's a huge difference. The four billion people that flew around the world on jets were getting from A to B. They were getting from A to B to visit people, to do business, to see their families, to visit new places. OK, there's a carbon footprint on that. But there was a reason it grew. That's not going to be the case in space. We're not going to go from a handful of billionaires to millions or billions of people going into space to do what? There's no reason to be there. So there's there's some deep holes in the whole argument about space travel in this model that we're seeing played out around us.
Huda [00:19:06] I like that you said for what? Because I always wonder that. There was something I read some time ago and there was just something to do with, you know, in the future we'll be able to go on a holiday, we'll go to space. And a part of me was kind of like, yeah, look, I mean, that's interesting because it's something just outside the universe. Right? But I was just like, what else would you do? Like, you'd go you'd look at it and go, yes, sweet.
Huda [00:19:30] What are you going to even look at?
Chris Impey [00:19:32] I mean there's not much to -- once you've experienced just what these people did for a few minutes, seeing the curvature of the Earth and the slender atmosphere. And it's fragile. Isn't it amazing. The insight that astronauts have had all six hundred of them. Fine. And then what? Why would you leave off earth or why do you want to go to a moon space or Mars space? You know, space was not made for us. Humans are incredibly maladapted to the space environment. It's an utter vacuum. It's absolutely cold. It's full of raditiation. We couldn't survive there for 10 seconds unassisted. So this is not a natural place for us to be and therefore even for a minute, let alone to live and work on a base or economy, so people will do it and they'll do it because they're funded by those deep pockets. Some will be the geopolitical thing agains. The new frontier of space is the space race between China and the United States, and they're vying for supremacy in that arena. We all worry about nuclear weapons again, even though the U.N. treaty of 1965 supposedly banned nukes in space. So there's a geopolitical part of this that will play out. There's the private sector part. There is mining asteroids and so on, buccaneering type stuff. But it's not going to change the world. It's not going to fundamentally alter how we live or improve it. So it's a sideshow and it's an expensive sideshow. There's a few arguments that are made that are not completely invalid. One of them is the act of learning how to live in space, especially on the moon or Mars, is that you have to perfect technologies that allow you to be completely self-contained. You have to perfect technologies allowed to recycle everything, to grow food from inert soil by hydroponics or whatever, and recycle your air and everything. So there's some efficiency to that. That's a model that might be useful on the earth,if you could scale it up and multiply because we're obviously trashing the planet by the way we live on the planet and you can't get away with that on space. It's simply not possible. But I'm not sure that alone is a good enough argument. It's true. It's a real argument because they do indeed have to develop these highly sustainable and self-contained ecologies and living situations to make colonies on the moon and Mars work but we're far from doing it. But they will have to do that.
Sahil [00:21:45] But what about doing it on Earth? What about making a sustainable living on earth? Do we actually and this is an argument that people give all the time for why we need to go out to space. And I know that you...I believe you are going for a Habitable conference next year. Is it 2022?
Chris Impey [00:22:01] Yeah
Sahil [00:22:01] And one of the things that I'm really curious about is what elements are going to be crucial for life on other planets and especially on Mars? And why did the whole fascination with Mars begin? And what has it given us over the years of research? Because I know there's another Mars rover going in a couple of days and all countries are sending something to Mars. What's the fascination with Mars and what have you found so far?
Chris Impey [00:22:21] Sure. Well, I want to answer that. But let me answer your first question. I don't know if I can totally, but why don't we do it on Earth? And I think it's an unfortunate answer is because we're lazy, because we don't absolutely have to. Just like climate change, it's in front of everyone.
Sahil [00:22:36] Climate change is a hoax.
Chris Impey [00:22:40] People are living climate change and now they're dying with climate change. But until the human nature is such that until it is truly an apocalyptic and proximate threat, you do everything you can to live your normal life and avoid it and deny it. And so we could live truly and fully, sustainably. And there are little experiments, very few, actually. But we're not going to do it because we're lazy, because the abundance of the earth is just keeping us fat and happy. And we haven't really been forced into a corner where it's do or die. It's not that stage yet. People do not react well psychologically to a slow rolling catastrophe. They only react to the proximity of death, someone holding a gun in their face and it could go off.
Sahil [00:23:25] When shit hits the fan.
Chris Impey [00:23:27] So that's why we just don't do it. It's not dire enough. And of course, the catch 22 is by the time it's dire enough that maybe too late. It's too late. For Mars that's a cultural answer I think. Mars is not a very habitable place. It's more habitable than the moon. It has a little atmosphere. It's super cold. It's one hundred times further away by the flight you would have to make to get there than the moon. So it's a very difficult destination. It's very hard to retrieve people and protect them, keep them safe. The radiation exposure is huge, but the reason why it's got an allure goes back a long time. It's been in the popular culture and consciousness for over a century, as Percival, who is a Boston merchant who made a lot of money and was interested in astronomy, used his retirement and his fortune to come out to the Western Desert and build the first telescope in the Western United States in 1892 or something. And he was motivated by the fact that Mars is going to make its closest approach the Earth for twenty years. And he got to take the best pictures ever taken at the time. Photographs, of course, of Mars. And he deluded himself into seeing canals on Mars...linear features. And he told himself a back story of how it was a dying Martian race, moving water from the poles to the equator to keep themselves alive. And he wrote popular books about it. And the idea of Mars as a living world with Martians goes back over one hundred years. There's a continuous threat in the American culture. In the 1920's you have the guy who wrote the Tarzan books, Edgar Rice Burroughs. He's known best for Tarzan, but he wrote a whole series of book about life on Mars with warriors and fierce buxom princesses and crazy animals, and that was a precursor in the 20s and 30s to the classic science fiction of Ray Bradbury and the classic era of science fiction of the 50s and 60s, Martian Chronicles and so on. So you have this long history in the popular culture going back a century of Mars and the imagination as a living world. And so, of course, it's intoxicating. And the science then has also gone through changes. When the first landers and orbiters went in the 60s and 70s, we decided it's an arid desert and it couldn't hold life on the surface. So that dashed all these hopes. But since the pendulum has swung back a bit because now we think Mars was wet and probably very habitable few billion years ago, oceans and life for sure possible. And there's still water under the surface, which we haven't been able to get to. So Mars is still interesting as a place for microbes anyway, for scientists. And it's just locked in as a place that evokes the god of war and it evokes all of these ideas of life and other civilizations.
Sahil [00:26:03] It just sounds so tedious. It sounds so tedious in terms of the amount of energy we are putting in. But as you have said, like I'm sure astronomers found out pretty early on, even scientists, that it's actually not a great place to live. You wrote the book, How It Begins. We have a lot of friends who debate this all the time and, you know, the big bang and how it's not possible that we could have a planet that was made like this. So I just wanted to know from you the beginning of the earth and how the earth came into being. How has the knowledge changed about it over the years? How is the information about it change? Do we know more now? Is it like there's a lot of misinformation out there?
Chris Impey [00:26:39] We're learning more through the last few decades. There's always was a general story about how planets formed and the Earth form. But until we discovered other planets, which we now know thousands of, we didn't really have a test of these theories or ideas. And now we know hundreds of Earth like planets around other stars, and we project those numbers to billions in the galaxy. And those other discoveries of the last few decades have really taught us more about how planets form and they've been formed the story of the Earth formation. Also, we have very good data because we explored the Earth. We've dug under the crust. We've brought back moon rocks. And the moon was a product of the early earth. The moon was the result of a collision with a Mars type object with the infant Earth when it was still almost molten. And we nailed down that part of the story, too, with the moon rocks that were brought back. And so, yeah, the idea of the earth is now pretty mature, but there's some very simple things we don't completely know. For instance, where did the water for the oceans of the Earth, where did it come from? There's still very vigorous scientific debate between whether that water was deposited afterwards by asteroids, meteorites that have frozen water in them. And there was a lot of bombardment in the early days and that would have been enough. But there's a countervailing theory that says that that water was always in the mantle of the Earth and it was essentially pressurized and extruded up to the surface in the early earth's history. We've seen water contained in rocks in Europe. Remember, we only can dig the tiniest little pinprick of a hole in the earth's crust. We don't really know what the mantle is like directly. That's how we can still be unsure of things like that. So the story of the Earth's formation, it's, I would say two thirds to three quarters sketched in, but not completely. But the date is very well known. The age of the earth, is measured to about one percent is 4.54 Billion years plus or minus 0.01. That's very well measured.
Sahil [00:28:29] That's pretty accurate.
Sahil [00:28:31] And the idea that there might have been an asteroid crashing into the planet that often, if that were true, shouldn't it be happening more often even now? And, you know, you talk about how people and governments are always, you know, they make you scared, especially newschannels saying an asteroid is going to crash in the next year and anything could happen. And most of the time it won't. And even if it does, the magnitude of damage won't be that much. So wouldn't the same, I guess the frequency of asteroids crashing in and supporting that theory, wouldn't that kind of defeat that?
Chris Impey [00:29:00] Well, it's all part of the story and it hangs together. The Earth and all the planets in the solar system were built from smaller pieces. They started off as little dust bunnies, essentially just essentially dust particles in the circulating disk. And they gradually grew by accretion to boulders and rocks and mountains and things that are called planetesmals, which are so size of small moons. And then eventually planets like the Earth and Mars and Venus and all the giant planets out there in the outer solar system, they'll have rocky cores that are sort of like large earth-like planets. So all the planets formed with their cores built that way. And what happens is that didn't take very long. It took 20 or 30 million years. It really isn't long out of 4.5 billion year history. And there was plenty of stuff left over. And so the first hundred million years saw a lot of impacts from all the stuff that was left over. And so that's why the first period of time was crazy and included many, many impacts. And then eventually that material was either dissipated or blew out of the solar system or into the sun or already landed on planets and there wasn't much left. It was mopped up essentially by the formation process, so there's not much left now. And so now we get an occasional impact about once every 50 to 100 million years and we can document that. And our check of that story are the airless worlds like the moon and Mars. Because we can look at the cratering history. Their surfaces are maps of the entire history of impact over their whole chronology of 4.5 Billion years. And you can look at their cratering record and see that it tells the same story.
Sahil [00:30:29] It just boggles my mind when astronomers talk about 20 to 30 million years as a small period of time, that's when I go, OK, this is too overwhelming. I don't know how I'm going to deal with this information. Just give me my uber eats. I just want to be lazy and I just want to get eat my shitty food and sleep and leave my shitty life. I don't want to talk to Chris because he's overwhelming me because it's so hard to fathom. And then we have things like black holes. Please give me the easiest definition of a black hole.
Sahil [00:30:55] And what was it in? Dark matter.
Chris Impey [00:30:59] They're very different. Let's start with black holes. Black holes have been around really since general relativity. So there are predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity going back one hundred years. He didn't believe they were real. His theory actually predicts them. And he thought it was a mathematical artifact, which is very interesting. He didn't trust his own theory, essentially. So the idea was out there in the twenties and thirties that a massive star at the end of its life would collapse and there would be no force to prevent it collapsing, more compact than the nuclear state of matter, like the atomic nucleus to a thing that we would have to call a black hole, because the escape velocity is the speed of light or greater. And at that point, nothing can escape. No matter, no radiation, nothing. And it's a very, incredibly small, dense object. So that was a prediction of its theory. And it just sort of sat there as a prediction that not even he believed for a while. And it wasn't until the 1960s that astronomers were able to get techniques good enough to show that, yes, they actually do exist. It was hard. It took decades to show. Now it's been shown abundantly. And now we know not only does the universe make black holes when big stars die, the universe makes black holes at the center of galaxies and every galaxy has a black hole. Our galaxy has four million times the mass of the sun black hole and the biggest galaxies have billions of times. And that's...
Sahil [00:32:17] Four million times the mass of this... Four million! It's not like yours and my weight. It's four million. Jesus Christ.
Chris Impey [00:32:26] But again, that's a small part of a galaxy. So that's right in the center of our galaxy. And our galaxy's mass is hundreds of billions of times the mass of the sun. So even though it's a big black hole, as a fraction of the galaxy, it's not really very much at all. It's a small fraction. So it's just something that happened in the center because the density was high and over time matter collapsed and the black hole ate and grew and grew and grew. And now we can see it and measure it. And black holes have matured as a scientific topic. Stephen Hawking, obviously, in the 70s and 80s developed the theory that Einstein came up with to talk about black hole properties in a more sophisticated way. We haven't been able to confirm some of his predictions. Some may never be confirmed. They're very difficult to test, but the observations have got really good and gravitational waves that come, the space time ripples that they produce won the Nobel Prize a few years ago and the black holes have won two in the last four Nobel Prizes. So scientists have got better at showing they actually exist.
Sahil [00:33:26] And why are they important to the origin story of the Earth?
Chris Impey [00:33:29] They're not really important to the origin story of the Earth because our stars are normal, middle aged, middle white star that isn't going to die that way. So even in our future, there's no black hole in our future nearby. The nearest black hole to the earth, to the sun and the earth is actually 200 light years away. It's quite far. So they're very rare because only the most massive stars die that way. And massive stars are rare compared to stars like the Sun or small stars. So they're rare. And that's part of why it took a while to show they exist, because the nearest examples are pretty far away.
Sahil [00:34:00] So why study them? Why study black holes? What was it? The first kind of evidence of gravity? Was that the reason for a lot of research?
Chris Impey [00:34:07] It's the way you test your theory of gravity so black holes do not exist in Newton's theory of gravity. There's no meaning to a black hole. There's no way his theory would have predicted it. It was a prediction of general relativity. And so studying black holes becomes a way to test general relativity in a new way. General relativity was tested soon after it was published in the 1920s and so on. But the black hole is the ultimate test of general relativity because it's the ultimate gravity situation where gravity is so intense that space time is essentially curved completely on itself and sealed off from the universe. A little pocket of space time is sequestered and sealed off from the universe. So it's a wonderful place to test what we still think is a pretty good theory, general relativity.
Huda [00:34:49] So if I went into the black hole, what would happen to me?
Sahil [00:34:52] Well, if it was a small black hole, you die before you actually got in, because on the way in, a gravity stretching force is extreme, so that if you fell in sideways or head to toe, it doesn't matter, you'd be ripped apart, your body would be ripped apart before you ever got to the event horizon. So the gravity stretching is so intense. However, the big black holes have more gravity, more total gravity because they're more massive, but they're stretching force is actually less. And hypothetically, you could survive falling into one of the very big black holes like the one in the middle of our galaxy. You just couldn't get there because it's 27000 light years away.
Huda [00:35:26] I'd probably die of old age.
Sahil [00:35:28] Yeah, and insurance won't cover it is all I'm saying. Yes. And Chris, did you watch the movie Interstellar?
Chris Impey [00:35:34] Oh yeah.
Sahil [00:35:35] What did you think about it? Like, I think Christopher Nolan loves confusing people and kind of putting these ideas out there and people go crazy trying to figure it out. I love that last image.
Sahil [00:35:45] Have you seen Interstellar Huda?
Huda [00:35:46] I have watched it.
Sahil [00:35:47] Do you remember the last scene where the world's just like kind of a real curve at the end? Is that supported by actual research and evidence?
Chris Impey [00:35:55] So you know when scientists judge film - science fiction films, we have a scale when we argue about it and talk about it like on a 0 to 10 scale, how well did they do the science? And scientists are not, as you would say buzz kill or
Huda [00:36:11] You can do it again.
Chris Impey [00:36:12] You give if it's a good filmmaker and a good script and a good film, you give them a creative license. Of course, it's a creative thing. So you don't insist that it be totally scientific. It's not a documentary. And that film was pretty high on the scale. Most scientists say it's quite well done. And of course, the main scientific consultant on that film was Kip Thorne, who's a gravity theorist at Caltech who shared the Nobel Prize a few years ago that we just were talking about. So he had very, very good consultation and he took most of it. He didn't follow every consultation. On occasion, I'm sure they said, well, that really couldn't happen. He would have said, well, it looks cool, so I'm going to do it anyway. But, you know, Kip Thorne's been interviewed and he appreciated what was done. He said it was informative. And in fact, Kip Thorne and his group at Caltech actually to make the movie, which was CGI, of course, they actually went and made new supercomputer simulations of massive black holes that inform the CGI. So it wasn't just a bunch of CGI people sitting in a room and dreaming stuff up like a cartoon. They actually did it based on the science. So that movie gets pretty high marks from most astronomers and physicists.
Huda [00:37:19] So what does that mean when I remember Matthew McConaughey is trying to get to his daughter through this fourth dimension? What is that and how do you explain that?
Chris Impey [00:37:29] All right. So that is one of the examples where he goes into speculation, and you're allowed to do that because we don't know what's inside the black hole exactly. We can't know. And if we went in to find out, we couldn't tell anyone what we found. So, you know, that is a place where you not only can give him artistic license, but the scientific license, because we don't know the answer to the question.
Sahil [00:37:50] And there is, as you said, like if it's a really massive black hole, that's where the idea of space time starts becoming weirder and weirder and you can kind of play around with it. And the idea of you can like kind of jump space time.
Huda [00:38:03] Yeah.
Sahil [00:38:04] And you can be at two places at the same time like that really boggles my mind.
Chris Impey [00:38:08] Yeah there's there's theoretical ideas about what could be going on inside a black hole where you could be in multiple places at the same time, where you could travel along a timeline and meet previous and future versions of yourself. Those are legitimate ideas in mathematics. We simply don't know if they exist in the universe.
Sahil [00:38:27] And actually so I'm a big believer and you can trash me for this. I'm a big believer in manifestation. And you know that our thoughts create our reality. And a lot of it is based on highly speculative scientific stuff that says that, you know, all realities exist. They all exist in the quantum universe and we choose what reality we want to be. And can that actually be explained by science or have we gotten close to that?
Chris Impey [00:38:51] Well, the idea of a multiple realities and multiple parallel quantum states and multiple universes, those are all certainly legitimate ideas in physics and astronomy. The part where they connect to us and our brains and our intentionality and our existence as creatures in the universe. That's less clear. And there's no sturdy theory for that. But the basis of having multiple realities and multiple dimensions, dimensions beyond the four that we live in and so on. Yes, they're fair ideas, they're speculative. But science and the point of research is if you're doing research as opposed to just reading a textbook where somebody knew this one hundred years ago, there's a Nobel Prize winner called Murray Galman physicist who said this. He said 'Research is what I do when I don't know what I'm doing' and that's actually it's glib, but it's actually pretty profound. So research in science - any science, biology, physics is working at the edge of knowledge because it's boring to work within the realm of what you know, why would you do this? That's not much fun. And as soon as you get that edge, you're uncertain, you're unsure. And that's OK. That's how it works. You can speculate beyond that edge or say, well, it might be like this, can I test that? And that's why science is fun. Some people don't think science is fun because I don't think they appreciate that really basic point about how research works. Well, also, you have to distinguish between boring and hard.
Sahil [00:40:11] Are you spiritual?
Chris Impey [00:40:12] No, not particularly. I hang out with Buddhist monks and teach them every few years. And I met three popes and and the Dalai Lama and all that, but none of it rubbed off.
Sahil [00:40:20] OK, so that that was going to be my next question, which was your book 'Humble Before The Void', where you went to North India. So I'm from North India, I live about 100 kilometers from Dharamsala, where Dalai Lama lives.
Chris Impey [00:40:32] I probably know the place. Where is it?
Sahil [00:40:34] Chandigarh.
Chris Impey [00:40:34] Oh, yeah, I've been there.
Sahil [00:40:36] And so you took that journey to teach Tibetan monks. Why do it? Why why that particular group of people who are quite satisfied with what they know and...
Chris Impey [00:40:45] Right.
Sahil [00:40:46] The whole idea that we all want to be satisfied and they've kind of achieved it.
Chris Impey [00:40:50] Well, actually, they're not completely satisfied. I mean, it started because I got a call from an educator in the Bay Area, who fell into it himself, and he said, how would you like to go and teach the Dalai Lama's monks Cosmology? It is not a question you ruminate over and say, I'll check my calendar. You just say yes, and then you go and you do it. So this sort of not obvious answer to your question is that the Dalai Lama, obviously, from his personal history and experience, is highly interested in science. He said in his autobiography, at age four, he was told that he was the 15th reincarnation of the Bodhi Satva of compassion, and that was just his life determined at that point. But he was asked what would you have done if you hadn't been told that? He said I would have been an engineer and as the spiritual leader of his people, he stayed interested in science. And he looks at the monastic tradition, which is very rigorous, that the monks and nuns have decades of training and philosophy and and rhetoric and religion and so on. Multiple religions, of course, not just theirs. And there was no math and science in it. And he was worried that the Tibetan culture, displaced from its homeland anyway, would become a museum piece if it was static. And so he said, the world runs by science and technology. I don't want my monastics to be ignorant of it and they don't get it in their training. It's very... It hasn't changed for centuries. And so he single handedly changed that. He also changed the rules so that nuns could be educated at the same level is as monks through the curriculum in the monasteries and nunneries. So he's he's very innovative in that. And he initially brought out Western educators like me to teach the monks in these workshops. And they do a series of workshops over years and and really get quite good at it. And then they would go and build science centers in their monasteries and try and teach it to the other monks and nuns and their monasteries and spread it around. And the other part of the answer, of course, lies with Buddhism itself, which we know is better described as a philosophy than a religion. It's a very non-dogmatic and it's very empirical. And so the training and the mindset of these monastics is to be curious. And the Buddha, as a historical figure, supposedly told his followers, don't just take everything I say for granted or believe it, test it as the metal-smith would with a knife or the blade that they just made. Test it against the truth, against reality, against what's in the world. So it totally fits to teach science to them.
Sahil [00:43:14] And how do they explain the universe for so long?
Chris Impey [00:43:17] You know there were these little toy cosmologies. And I mean, it's obviously a joint Hindu -Buddhist tradition, the Hindu part going back further, of course. So there were cosmologies that were just sort of cartoonish, almost flat Earth type cosmologies going back thousands of years. And the Dalai Lama has also commented on this. And he's aware that there are 12 or 15 different cosmological traditions in Hinduism and Buddhism. And he just says, well, I look at most of them and they're just silly. They're just wrong. They don't match what the universe is doing. But there are some parts of their tradition going back a long way that are very supple and very concordant with modern cosmology. So it's uncontroversial to them when you're teaching them that the universe contains innumerable worlds, that the cycles of time in the universe are on timescales of billions and perhaps trillions of years. A day in the life of Brahma is a billion years and a lifetime of Brahma is a trillion years. And it's also uncontroversial that these worlds could have sentient life forms like humans or totally unlike humans. So that's a premise of astrobiology, of course, too, so most of the concepts of astrobiology and cosmology are pretty concordant with that tradition, which is the one they tend to learn now.
Huda [00:44:34] So this is all multiple universes and omniverses, is that right? So-
Chris Impey [00:44:40] It's their version of it. It's not, of course, a formal scientific theory in their tradition, but in a descriptive way, it's saying very similar things.
Huda [00:44:48] OK, so what is the difference for someone like me when you say multi universes, but then there's omniverses?
Chris Impey [00:44:55] Well, I'm not sure I have a standard understanding of the word omnivorous as a dictionary thing, I'm not sure what that would mean, but there's sort of two levels of distinction. So to cosmologists, there's what we call the visible universe, and that's the universe you can see with your telescopes. And the visible universe. And we've done very well exploring that with big telescopes, Hubble Space Telescope and so on. The visible universe is not bounded by space, but by time. So essentially, we've never seen the edge of space, an edge, you know an edge to everything. All that happens is you look far back in time, then you see towards the big bang. So you run out of time, not space, because you're looking back towards the origin where everything was hot and dense. And you have to stay agnostic, if you like, about an edge to space because we haven't seen one. And again, in science, if it's not required and you didn't see it, there's no reason to say that it exists. Like the edge of space exists somewhere. And so in the normal standard, totally conventional cosmology, the physical universe, all that there is is much larger probably than the physical universe, what we can see. So that's one level of larger than what we see. And it could be hugely larger, like thousands of times bigger than the universe. Could be millions. We don't know. There's no bound on it from the theory. The second level, which is more avant garde, it's more part of modern cosmology, is when you trace the big bang back to a quantum event, because if you project this chronology for 13.8 billion years back, you end up projecting, if not a singularity, then a time when space time was curved and the density and temperature are incredibly high. And logically, the universe was one smaller than an atom. I mean, the Dalai Lama wrote a book called 'The Universe in a Single Atom'. So he knew this decades ago. So you have the universe in principle as a quantum event with what we know about quantum physics and quantum theory. It is entirely plausible that if our universe was a quantum event, the substrate reality that led to that event could have spawned other quantum events, other universes. And so that's the natural way you get to a multiverse.
Sahil [00:47:02] Yeah, that in a way makes sense, because I know quantum theory in itself is so complicated and still so much work is being done with quantum theory. Have you heard about that Oumuamua, the first object which was that long cigar shaped meteor. And a lot of people think that it might have been an alien ship or a probe. And there's been a lot of controversy about that.
Chris Impey [00:47:24] That's progressed in the last few years. So it was a bizarre cigar shaped object. Asteroids tend to be they're not spherical, but they're they're lumpy, but they're not very strange shape. That's a very strange shaped asteroid. And it had a very strange trajectory, had a strange path and speed through space. And the combination of its weird shape and reflectivity and its weird trajectory led a number of people, most prominently Abbe Lowell, the Harvard professor who wrote papers and then a book last year, got a lot of publicity on that to argue that it was an alien artifact just traveling through our solar system. So that was out there. That's been out there for a couple of years. It's the case as it is often the case. And UFO's are the perfect example that the killjoy astronomers have indeed found a fairly conventional explanation for it as just an asteroid. It's an unusual asteroid for sure, but it's not a bizarre has to be an alien artifact type object. And so there's a lot of stuff out there and we're discovering it all the time.
Huda [00:48:24] A bit ago when we were talking about asteroids on the Earth. Would that be what we see as shooting stars, by any chance?
Chris Impey [00:48:34] So luckily, you don't see asteroids, because if one of them hit the earth, that's all she wrote it would be over for us. Shooting stars are interesting because they are actually sand grain sized particles in the upper atmosphere just burning up. So they're tiny, but they're moving at about 20-30,000 miles an hour. And that's an enormous amount of energy. And so when they burn up, even if it's 50-70,000 feet in the upper atmosphere, they make a flash of light that you can see. That's what shooting stars are. So there's you know, while the big stuff doesn't hit the earth very often, there's much more small stuff and big stuff. And the small stuff hits the earth or comes to the atmosphere a lot more. And we should we should always look up every night before you go to bed, say your prayers, the fact that you have an atmosphere because it's protecting you from all that stuff. If there are things much bigger than the size of a grain of sand, like a pebble sized rock that's anywhere near the space station, and they see it they have to huddle in the central hub of the space station because it would destroy the thing. So all that small stuff moving that fast is pretty dangerous.
Sahil [00:49:39] Yeah. If it hits, you're done it.
Huda [00:49:41] And also, yeah, it would hurt because it's going so fast.
Sahil [00:49:43] It's going to kill you. It's not going to hurt. It's going to kill you.
Chris Impey [00:49:45] It's going to kill you.
Huda [00:49:48] So like would you recommend that we make wishes on those.
Sahil [00:49:52] Oh my God.
Chris Impey [00:49:52] I think it's it's harmless. I'm not going to recommend against it. I just I'm just going to say you shouldn't have any confidence in wish coming true.
Sahil [00:50:03] Yeah. And now suddenly it's not God, it's a shooting star, like let's pray to that. There's a shooting star and all my wishes come true. I did have a question about I want to put this to rest for once and for all is the moon landing.
Huda [00:50:16] I was going to go there next.
Sahil [00:50:18] What was the origin story of the moon landing not being true. And you know, that whole explanation of why is the flag in the pictures? Why does the flag seems to be moving even though there's no wind on the moon?
Chris Impey [00:50:28] Yeah, I mean, these are these are such classic urban legends that university professors teach classes about them. That's how classic they are. I'll just say that the fact that we know we went to the moon is because there's all this stuff that was left behind. We've been measuring using the reflectors and magnetometers on the moon for half a century to bounce radar and light off the moon. And that's how we knew. In case you didn't know, this is a little fact. The moon gets this much further from the earth every year and we know that because of what they follow behind, they've starting to die now because they're in their 80s. But there are 12 people who stood on the moon. And I will deny that personal experience of an alien abductee, but not of a moonwalker. So there are those people too. Polls put that percentage of the American public at seven or eight percent. One in 12 people don't think we went to the moon.
Sahil [00:51:19] That's a lot. That's a lot of people
Chris Impey [00:51:22] It is a lot. Well, when I'm teaching, I tell my kids in my class statistically hope it's not one in 12 of them. I say you go to a supermarket and there's standing in line there is probably one Apollo denier in the line behind you. Find out who they are and tell them why they are wrong. I oscillate between two positions on this. You know, as an educator and an educated citizen, it is super annoying to me that 1 in 12 people would be so willfully denying. Whether you think it was a geopolitical pissing contest and how we should spend the money or not? It was the sublime technological achievement of the last century. Remember, they went to the moon at a time when computers were the size of a living room and their technology was incredibly simple and it was an amazing thing to do. So why deny that technological achievement, whether it was well or poorly motivated? So that's on the one hand. On the other hand, if you made a list of the batshit crazy things that 1 in 12 Americans believe, including the grassy knoll and Elvis as seen in a Wal-Mart last week, it's just in the mix with all that stuff. So why get so agitated?
Sahil [00:52:31] I think it's because you're part of the Illuminati, Chris. When are you going to just admit it? Just make a symbol with your hands.
Chris Impey [00:52:38] On air so...
Sahil [00:52:40] Just do a hand gesture towards us? To indicate you're part of...
Huda [00:52:46] Do you want aliens to exist?
Chris Impey [00:52:48] I would like I mean, I think statistically they do because of the number of habitable worlds in the galaxy and beyond. So I'm not confident because we don't have evidence. But it's not that I want them to exist. I just think that they do. And I think it's going to take us a while to figure that out and demonstrate.
Huda [00:53:04] I wonder what that will be like.
Sahil [00:53:06] I think it'll be so underwhelming by that time. It'll be a really underwhelming experience and people will just forget about it the next day. They'll go 'Oh, we knew this was going to happen'.
Chris Impey [00:53:15] And well, I think the most likely we're so anthropocentric. We project through science fiction and films and TV shows that they're going to look similar to us and sort of humanoid with this bad skin conditions or something. Truth is, they might be so alien as to be unrecognizable or incomprehensible. I think that's actually more likely.
Huda [00:53:35] OK, so no acne then?
Sahil [00:53:36] No. And they're not going to look like E.T.
Huda [00:53:40] I really wish they did, though
Sahil [00:53:42] I don't I actually don't wish they do because it'll be it'll be cool for humans to look like idiots at the end of the day,
Chris Impey [00:53:50] Since you mentioned E.T., I'll throw one more thing in the mix about UFOs, aliens, etc., and life of the universe. E.T. Is the perfect example. The film is Spielberg's other movies, Close Encounters as well, and a lot of science fiction over the years of the fact that aliens are a metaphor for religion, they're religious metaphor, and they're they're used as a stand in for deities. So E.T. was the Christ story just very literally episode by episode. Just go through the thing. It's just that.
Huda [00:54:20] Wow, I've never though about that.
Chris Impey [00:54:21] More broadly. Well, so if you watch your favorite movies and TV shows and science fiction, you'll see that it bifurcates into the benign aliens that E.T. who can heal with their fingers and so on and the the malign ones that are going to destroy us. And that's essentially the religious metaphors of salvation and damnation. And they just merged religious landscape, our yearning for other and a supreme being into the alien world. And there we see it in the popular culture everywhere.
Huda [00:54:52] Well, what did it want to note to end on such a cliffhanger?
Sahil [00:54:56] Brilliant. Great storyteller Chris Impey, I've still wanted to talk about 'How it Ends', which came out before 'How it Begins', which is very interesting as well.
Huda [00:55:04] I love that you did both because you were like 'I've got I've got to end it now'.
Chris Impey [00:55:09] I did ass backwards, but it's OK.
Sahil [00:55:12] But thank you so much for coming on, Chris. It was refreshing for us to get someone.
Huda [00:55:17] I've learned a lot,
Chris Impey [00:55:18] But I'll ask her to explain it and she won't be able to.
Huda [00:55:20] I won't be able to. I'll be honest I can't.
Chris Impey [00:55:23] It was a good free wheeling conversation, the kind of enjoy. And if nobody likes it, we can all be podcast deniers and just pretend it's doesn't exist. And I'll just say I was never there.
Sahil [00:55:34] Pleasure to have you. Thank you for taking out the time.
Chris Impey [00:55:37] It's fun hanging out with you for a while.
Huda [00:55:39] Thank you so much.