#108 Thomas Zurbuchen: Adventures in Astrophysics

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish

Farnam Street

Business, Investing, Entrepreneurship

4.7 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2021

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Thomas Zurbuchen is currently Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, where he seeks answers to big questions about the universe and our place in it. Previously, he was a professor of space science and aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan and a founding director of its Center for Entrepreneurship. In this episode, Thomas and Shane discuss the origin of his passion for astrophysics, commercial spaceflight, exciting experiments going on at the International Space Station, the challenges of space flight, how he makes decisions, whether humans will ever live on Mars, and more.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	As a scientist, the answer must be, I don't know.
0:03.9	And by the way, that's not a cop out.
0:07.1	It's the answer to most questions that we ask in science.
0:11.0	I don't know or I don't yet know.
0:13.5	So for me, that question, we actually are making a ton, a ton of progress towards.
0:19.6	I mean, frankly, during my professional lifetime, it's probably the question where we've made
0:23.9	most groundbreaking discoveries. When I started my master's degree in astrophysics, we had
0:33.1	no planets elsewhere, other than the ones in our solar system.
0:37.7	In the meantime, we have thousands of those planets and some of them look awfully like
0:44.4	our own relative to the data we have, which are really, really, really sparse.
0:49.7	So we're on that track towards a belief or a sense that life, just like planetary systems,
1:00.8	life could also be very much distributed in the universe.
1:20.6	Hello and welcome to the Knowledge Project. I'm your host Shane Parish.
1:24.6	This podcast sharpens your mind by helping you master the best what other people have
1:27.9	already figured out.
1:40.6	Welcome to the Knowledge Project.
2:01.4	This episode is incredible. We talk about things we've learned from learning experiments
2:05.6	on the International Space Station, our missions to Mars and whether we'll ever colonize it,
2:11.0	how space is governed, and decision-making. In fact, this episode is a master class in
2:16.7	decision-making from someone who routinely makes billion dollar decisions. It's time to
2:21.9	listen and learn.
2:28.7	The Knowledge Project is sponsored by Metal Lab. For a decade, Metal Lab has helped some
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