Do we have definitive proof of life on other planets?

That's been the question I've been excited about since I was a little kid. Look at the stars, I'm wondering who else might be out there. A lot of my work also asks that next question of who's living that. Is anyone living that could be actually trying to find life? There are many interesting ideas for how life could have begun. It does seem like life started very quickly, but the thing you have to be careful with that is that it took four billion years to go from whatever that first creature was, all the way to us.

And if that's typical, then Earth doesn't have that long left and it's terrifying. Dr. David Kippick is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Columbia University. He's here to definitively answer the question, is there life on other planets? And what can we be doing to prepare? I tried to remain very open-minded about what the real answer is, but we have no idea what the motive of an alien would be. We seem to have evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars. When we talk about biosignatures like the Martian rocks or looking for gases and alien atmospheres, why do scientists feel comfortable calling that the legitimate science? But we feel uncomfortable talking about UFOs as legitimate ways of looking for aliens. For astronomers it's not a question of if surely there's someone out there but it does raise the question why would they have any interest in communicating with us? Hi I'm Mayan Bialik and I I'm Jonathan Cohen. And welcome to our breakdown. We're very honored today to feature literally the guy whose job it is to search for life on other planets. We're talking to Professor David Kipping, and Dr. Kipping is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Columbia. He's the director of the Cool Worlds Lab. He also has a YouTube channel by the same name, Cool Worlds, with over a million subscribers. And Dr. Kipping is here to definitively answer the question, is there life on other planets? And what can we be doing to prepare for that information?

He also discusses the evolution of human life, how we got to this point. And what Earth will look

like in a billion years, just a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. He's also going to talk

about black holes, wormholes, the multiverse, and baby universes, all that, and so much more we are thrilled to have Dr. David Kipping join us. Dr. Kipping welcome to the breakdown. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to finally be here. We would love for you to start us off with what are you most excited about in terms of the work you do and what it means for the larger universe? That's a great question. I mean that's a very broad question. It's a very fair one. I do so many things that excite me to be honest. My daytime job is looking for planets outside of the solar system and ideally trying to find moons around those planets as well. So we call these exoplanets, I mean they just planets outside planets outside the solar system. Technically, you could call planets inside the solar system, endo planets, endo, like inside, but nobody ever calls them that. And then the moons around those planets would call exo moons. So we've been on this journey for the last 25, 30 years of going from absolutely no information whatsoever about planets outside our solar system. So maybe, you know, for all we know, it could have just been the eight that we have in our backyard and maybe that was it. I mean, people did seriously speculate about that. They looked at other stars and they said, you know, there could be something special about our own star. But now we know when you look at the sky, that on average, every star has at least one planet around it, often much more than that. So it's totally blown us away with just the numbers that are out there. And then yet more, the diversity. So we're just discovering every day you pick up one of the latest astronomy journals and you see what's being found. It blows our mind over and over again. We're finding so many planets that are in between the size of Earth and Neptune, for instance. And we just don't know what they are. Are they scaled up versions of a rocky Earth, super-Earths, or are they scaled down versions of a gas giant, a gas dwarf, and we're still just totally in the dark, really, about the nature of those. Or maybe there could be something else entirely,

like a water world or something.

These are the questions that get a lot of extra plant scientists very excited. And then, of course, a lot of my work also asks that next question of, well, who's living there? Is anyone living there? Could we actually try and find life? And for me, I mean, that's been the question I've been excited about since I was a little kid,

was looking up at the stars and wondering

who else might be out there.

So, you know, we could talk about all of those things,

but that's a the question I've been excited about since I was a little kid, was looking up at the stars and wondering who else might be out there.

So, you know, we could talk about all of those things, but that's a broad brush of all the stuff that gets me excited. I mean, is Kevin Costner on the water world planet is what I want to know? But that's probably outside of the scope of this conversation. I mean, if the universe is infinite, then everything happens somewhere, right? So Kevin Costan is out there somewhere.

I just like thinking about David taking his lunchpale to work and... infinite than everything happens somewhere, right? So Kevin Costner's out there somewhere.

I just like thinking about David taking his lunchpale to work and being like, did I find life on other plans today? No? All right, not the best day. Let's keep going back. It is often a journey of, I mean, that's what discovery at science is often like that of highs and lows. So there's an emotional rollercoaster involved in order of this, but generally, I think it's a very exciting time to be alive.

This is actually something I was discussing with my older son who's 20, because we were stargazing the other night. And I was telling him that story that we old people, meaning someone who's over 40, will tell that memorizing the nine planets was my main job in terms of my relationship to astronomy or the universe. That was my job as a kid, right? And that sort of where things stopped for us. There was no internet for us to be looking things up. Our knowledge about the universe was incredibly vast and incredibly limited. And in just this one generation, I have a child who very casually understands that, oh, there's trillions and trillions of stars and planets and other galaxies and like, we're not alone, you know, that's just like a normal thing, right? For this next generation to be experiencing. Can you talk a little bit about sort of the bridge? What would you say is kind of like the most definitive breakthrough that we have seen that allows us to go from there are nine planets to there's actually only eight. And also there is so much beyond that we can now actually search for biosignatures. We can search for what it looks like when other planets possibly had life. What's that bridge? What happened in this generation? Yeah, you know what, I think there's actually two, there's two bridges. One is conceptual, which is just purely in our own heads, really. We could have found planets much exoplanets much sooner than we did, but it was at us that got on the way. And in other words, technological, which is the obvious answer. So I'll give you the conceptual one first. So even in the 1970s, and even arguing in the 60s, we had the capability with our telescopes to measure the wobbles of stars at a level of precision which was enough to detect some existing known exoplanets that we've detected in the recent years. So to be able to do that, you have to be able to see a star move back and forth and see its speed change to order of hundreds of meters per second.

And the very biggest planets, which are really close to the star, because obviously the closer the planet gets to the star and the heavier it is, the more it can tug, it can tug that and make it move around and oscillate very fast. A good example is like if you get a coin drop and you throw a coin down one of these charity wells and it speeds up as it gets closer and closer and closer And it's the same thing with planets, like the closer

and they get the faster they orbit,

and so the faster they took the star that they go around. So some of those speeds were approaching thousands of meters per second and we could have detected them back in the 60s and 70s. And actually in the 1950s there was one astronomer, His name was Struve, Otto Struve.

And he was completely forgotten about the time, but now everybody's sightsemmers, kind of this genius who had this insight. But he pointed out that, hey, maybe sometimes Jupiter mass planets don't live really far away from their star, like Jupiter does and Saturn does. Maybe sometimes they get really close. And of course, everybody thought it was crazy. was like how no, no, that does make any sense.

Like we think we understand how to do it to forms.

You need lots of pretenders, maybe sometimes they get really close. And of course, everybody thought it was crazy. It was like, no, no, that doesn't make any sense.

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