Clara Sousa-Silva: Searching for Signs of Life on Venus and Other Planets
生物与进化技术与编程音乐与艺术物理与宇宙学太空与探索
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phosphinedonearthatmospheregoingquantummoleculesuniverseplanetsvenusdatasciencemoleculealiengotaliensdoesnmeaninglookingoxygen
💬 精彩语录
"And to me, it's one of the most exciting possibilities in the biggest, most exciting questions before"
对我来说，这是之前最大、最令人兴奋的问题中最令人兴奋的可能性之一
— Clara Sousa-Silva （59:57.360）
🎙️ 完整对话（1912 条）
Lex Fridman (00:00.000)
The following is a conversation with Clara Souza Silva, a quantum astrochemist at Harvard
以下是与哈佛大学量子天体化学家 Clara Souza Silva 的对话
Lex Fridman (00:04.900)
specializing in spectroscopy of gases that serve as possible signs of life on other planets,
专门研究气体光谱，这些气体可能是其他行星上存在生命的迹象，
Lex Fridman (00:11.520)
most especially the gas phosphine.
尤其是气体磷化氢。
Lex Fridman (00:14.340)
She was a coauthor of the paper that in 2020 found that there is phosphine in the atmosphere
她是2020年发现大气中存在磷化氢论文的合著者
Lex Fridman (00:20.560)
of Venus and, thus, possible extraterrestrial life that lives in its atmosphere.
金星的大气层中可能存在外星生命。
Clara Sousa-Silva (00:26.920)
The detection of phosphine was challenged, reaffirmed, and is now still under active
磷化氢的检测受到挑战、重申，目前仍在积极进行中
Lex Fridman (00:31.320)
research.
研究。
Clara Sousa-Silva (00:32.720)
Quick mention of our sponsors, Onnit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed.
快速提及我们的赞助商 Onnit、Grammarly、Blinkist 和 Indeed。
Lex Fridman (00:38.000)
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
在说明中查看它们以支持此播客。
Clara Sousa-Silva (00:41.440)
As a side note, let me say that I think the search for life on other planets is one of
顺便说一句，我认为在其他行星上寻找生命是其中之一
Lex Fridman (00:45.520)
the most important endeavors in science.
科学领域最重要的努力。
Clara Sousa-Silva (00:47.560)
If we find extraterrestrial life and study it, we may find insights into the mechanisms
如果我们发现外星生命并对其进行研究，我们可能会深入了解其机制
Clara Sousa-Silva (00:53.240)
that originated life here on Earth, and more than life, the mechanisms that originated
地球上生命的起源，不仅仅是生命，还有起源的机制
Clara Sousa-Silva (00:58.240)
intelligence and consciousness.
智力和意识。
Lex Fridman (01:00.800)
If we understand these mechanisms, we can build them.
如果我们理解这些机制，我们就可以构建它们。
Lex Fridman (01:04.360)
But more than this, the discovery of life on other planets means that our galaxy and
但更重要的是，在其他行星上发现生命意味着我们的银河系和
Lex Fridman (01:09.100)
our universe is teeming with life.
我们的宇宙充满了生命。
Clara Sousa-Silva (01:11.960)
This is humbling and terrifying, but it is also exciting.
这是令人羞愧和可怕的，但也令人兴奋。
Lex Fridman (01:15.980)
We humans are natural explorers.
我们人类是天生的探险家。
Clara Sousa-Silva (01:17.940)
For most of our history, we explored the surface of the Earth and the contents of our minds.
在我们历史的大部分时间里，我们都在探索地球表面和我们的思想内容。
Lex Fridman (01:22.880)
But now, with spacefaring vessels, we have a chance to explore life beyond Earth, their
Clara Sousa-Silva (01:27.960)
physics, their biology, and perhaps the contents of their minds.
Clara Sousa-Silva (01:33.300)
This is the Lux Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Clara Souza Silva.
Clara Sousa-Silva (01:40.120)
Since you're the world expert in, well, in many things, but one of them is phosphine,
Lex Fridman (01:45.960)
would it technically be correct to call you the queen of phosphine?
Clara Sousa-Silva (01:52.840)
I go for Dr. Phosphine.
Lex Fridman (01:54.640)
Queen is an inherited title, I feel.
Lex Fridman (01:57.000)
But you still rule by love and power, so, but while having the doctor title, I got it.
Lex Fridman (02:05.760)
Kindness.
Clara Sousa-Silva (02:06.760)
Kindness.
Lex Fridman (02:07.760)
Kindness.
Clara Sousa-Silva (02:08.760)
In September 2020, you coauthored a paper announcing possible presence of phosphine
Clara Sousa-Silva (02:13.400)
in the atmosphere of Venus, and that it may be a signature of extraterrestrial life.
Clara Sousa-Silva (02:21.120)
Big maybe.
Lex Fridman (02:22.120)
Big maybe.
Clara Sousa-Silva (02:23.120)
There was some pushback, of course, from the scientific community that followed, friendly,
Lex Fridman (02:29.080)
loving pushback.
Clara Sousa-Silva (02:31.940)
Then in January, another paper from University of Wisconsin, I believe, confirmed the finding.
Lex Fridman (02:37.540)
So where do we stand in this saga, in this mystery of what the heck is going on, on Venus
Lex Fridman (02:44.440)
in terms of phosphine and in terms of aliens?
Lex Fridman (02:46.880)
Let's try to break it down.
Clara Sousa-Silva (02:50.720)
The short answer is we don't know.
Clara Sousa-Silva (02:53.920)
I think you and the rest of the public are now witnessing a pretty exciting discovery,
Lex Fridman (02:59.200)
but as it evolves, as it unfolds, we did not wait until we had, you know, years of
Lex Fridman (03:07.520)
data from 10 different instruments across several layers of the atmosphere.
Clara Sousa-Silva (03:14.080)
We waited until we had two telescopes with independent data months apart, but still,
Lex Fridman (03:21.480)
the data is weak.
Clara Sousa-Silva (03:23.100)
It's noisy.
Lex Fridman (03:24.100)
It's delicate.
Clara Sousa-Silva (03:25.100)
It's very much at the edge of instrument sensitivity, sensitivity, and so we still don't even know
Lex Fridman (03:31.480)
if it is phosphine.
Clara Sousa-Silva (03:33.080)
We don't even really know if the signal is real.
Lex Fridman (03:35.660)
People still disagree about that.
Clara Sousa-Silva (03:37.560)
I think at the more philosophical end of how this happened, I think it is a distinction,
Lex Fridman (03:44.400)
and myself and other coauthors were talking about this, it's a distinction between hypothesis
Clara Sousa-Silva (03:49.600)
generation and hypothesis testing.
Clara Sousa-Silva (03:52.560)
Now hypothesis testing is something that I think is the backbone of the scientific method,
Lex Fridman (04:01.160)
but it has a problem, which is if you're looking through very noisy data and you want to test
Lex Fridman (04:05.040)
the hypothesis, you may by mistake create a spurious signal.
Clara Sousa-Silva (04:10.960)
The safest, more conservative approach is hypothesis generation.
Lex Fridman (04:14.720)
You see some data and you go, what's in there?
Clara Sousa-Silva (04:17.500)
With no bias.
Clara Sousa-Silva (04:18.500)
Now this is much safer, much more conservative, and when there's a lot of data, that's great.
Clara Sousa-Silva (04:24.000)
When there isn't, you can clean the noise and take out the signal with it.
Lex Fridman (04:28.360)
The signal with a bath water, whatever the equivalent of the analogy would be.
Lex Fridman (04:33.280)
And so I think the healthy discourse that you described is exactly this.
Clara Sousa-Silva (04:37.400)
There are ways of processing the data, completely legitimate ways, checked by multiple people
Lex Fridman (04:41.720)
and experts where the signal shows up and then phosphine is in the atmosphere of Venus,
Lex Fridman (04:47.800)
and some where it doesn't, and then we disagree what that signal means.
Clara Sousa-Silva (04:52.420)
If it's real and it is an ambiguously phosphine, it is very exciting because we don't know
Lex Fridman (04:58.420)
how to explain it without life, but going from there to Venusians is still a huge jump.
Lex Fridman (05:05.960)
And so...
Lex Fridman (05:06.960)
Venusians.
Lex Fridman (05:07.960)
So that would be the title for the civilization, if it is a living and thriving on Venus's
Lex Fridman (05:12.920)
Venusians.
Clara Sousa-Silva (05:14.480)
Until we know what they call themselves and that's the name, yes.
Lex Fridman (05:18.600)
So this is the early analysis of data or analysis of early data.
Lex Fridman (05:25.040)
It was nevertheless, you waited until the actual peer reviewed publication to know?
Lex Fridman (05:30.000)
Of course.
Lex Fridman (05:31.000)
And analysis of the two different instruments months apart.
Lex Fridman (05:33.220)
So that's ALMA and JCMT, the two telescopes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (05:35.840)
I mean, it's still, I mean, it's really exciting.
Lex Fridman (05:39.540)
What did it feel like sort of sitting on this data?
Lex Fridman (05:42.520)
Like kind of anticipating the publication and wondering and still wondering, is it true?
Clara Sousa-Silva (05:50.480)
Like how does it make you feel that a planet in our solar system might have phosphine in
Lex Fridman (05:55.560)
the atmosphere?
Lex Fridman (05:56.560)
It's nuts.
Clara Sousa-Silva (05:57.560)
It's absolutely nuts.
Lex Fridman (06:01.360)
I mean...
Lex Fridman (06:02.360)
In the best possible way?
Lex Fridman (06:04.360)
I've been working on phosphine for over a decade.
Clara Sousa-Silva (06:08.080)
Before it was cool.
Lex Fridman (06:10.160)
Way before it was cool.
Clara Sousa-Silva (06:12.640)
Before anyone could spell it or heard of it.
Lex Fridman (06:15.640)
And at the time people either didn't know what phosphine was or only knew it for being
Clara Sousa-Silva (06:21.120)
just possibly the most horrendous molecule that ever graced the earth.
Lex Fridman (06:26.880)
And so no one was a fan.
Lex Fridman (06:30.660)
And I had been considering looking for it because I did think it was an unusual and
Lex Fridman (06:34.740)
disgusting but very promising sign of life.
Clara Sousa-Silva (06:37.480)
I've been looking for it everywhere.
Lex Fridman (06:40.040)
I really didn't think to look in the solar system.
Clara Sousa-Silva (06:42.280)
I thought it was all pretty rough around here for life.
Lex Fridman (06:49.280)
And so I wasn't even considering the solar system at all, never mind next door Venus.
Clara Sousa-Silva (06:53.760)
It was only the lead author of the study, Jane Greaves, who thought to look in the clouds
Clara Sousa-Silva (06:58.800)
of Venus and then reached out to me to say, I don't know phosphine but I know it's weird.
Lex Fridman (07:05.380)
How weird is it?
Lex Fridman (07:06.920)
And the answer is very weird.
Lex Fridman (07:09.060)
And so the telescopes we're looking at, this is visual data.
Lex Fridman (07:12.400)
That's what I mean by visual.
Clara Sousa-Silva (07:14.560)
You wouldn't see the phosphine.
Lex Fridman (07:15.560)
Well, but I mean it's a telescope.
Clara Sousa-Silva (07:18.920)
It's remote.
Lex Fridman (07:19.920)
It's remote.
Clara Sousa-Silva (07:20.920)
You're observing, you're what zooming in on this particular planet and what does the sensor
Lex Fridman (07:27.480)
actually look like?
Lex Fridman (07:28.920)
How many pixels are there?
Lex Fridman (07:30.760)
What does the data kind of look like?
Clara Sousa-Silva (07:32.840)
It'd be nice to kind of build up intuition of how little data we have based on which,
Clara Sousa-Silva (07:39.640)
I mean, if you look at like, I've just been reading a lot about gravitational waves and
Clara Sousa-Silva (07:44.640)
it's kind of incredible how from just very little, like probably the world's most precise
Clara Sousa-Silva (07:50.600)
instrument, we can derive some very foundational ideas about our early universe.
Lex Fridman (07:57.600)
And in that same way, it's kind of incredible how much data, how much information you can
Lex Fridman (08:01.360)
get from just a few pixels.
Lex Fridman (08:03.200)
So what are we talking about here in terms of based on which this paper saw possible
Lex Fridman (08:10.880)
signs of phosphine in the atmosphere?
Lex Fridman (08:13.700)
So phosphine, like every other molecule has a unique spectroscopic fingerprint, meaning
Lex Fridman (08:18.400)
it rotates and it vibrates in special ways.
Clara Sousa-Silva (08:21.860)
I calculated how many of those ways it can rotate and vibrate, 16.8 billion ways.
Lex Fridman (08:28.620)
What this means is that if you look at the spectrum of light and that light has gone
Clara Sousa-Silva (08:33.360)
through phosphine gas on the other end, there should be 16.8 billion tiny marks left, indentations
Lex Fridman (08:41.840)
left in that spectrum.
Clara Sousa-Silva (08:43.960)
We found one of those on Venus, one of those 16.8 billion.
Lex Fridman (08:49.000)
So now the game is, can we find any of the other ones?
Lex Fridman (08:53.760)
But they're really hard to spot.
Lex Fridman (08:55.200)
They're all in terrible places in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Lex Fridman (08:59.800)
And the instruments we use to find this one can't really find any other one.
Clara Sousa-Silva (09:04.440)
There's another one of the 16.8 billion we could find, but it would take many, many days
Clara Sousa-Silva (09:08.820)
of continuous observations and that's not really in the cards right now.
Lex Fridman (09:14.560)
There's all kinds of noise, first of all.
Clara Sousa-Silva (09:16.760)
There's all kinds of other signal.
Lex Fridman (09:20.920)
So how do you separate all of that out to pull out just this particular signature that's
Lex Fridman (09:28.760)
associated with phosphine?
Lex Fridman (09:31.120)
So the data kind of looks somewhat like a wave and a lot of that is noise and it's a
Clara Sousa-Silva (09:36.760)
baseline.
Lex Fridman (09:37.880)
And so if you can figure out the exact shape of the wave, you can cancel that shape out
Lex Fridman (09:42.120)
and you should be left with a straight line and if there's something there, an absorption,
Lex Fridman (09:46.840)
so a signal.
Lex Fridman (09:47.840)
So that's what we did.
Clara Sousa-Silva (09:49.580)
We tried to find out what was this baseline shape, cleaned it out and got the signal.
Clara Sousa-Silva (09:54.880)
That's part of the problem.
Lex Fridman (09:55.880)
If you do this wrong, you can create a signal.
Lex Fridman (09:59.040)
But that signal is at 8.904 wave numbers and we actually have more digits than that, but
Lex Fridman (10:07.000)
I don't remember by heart.
Lex Fridman (10:08.560)
And ALMA in particular is a very, very good telescope, array of telescopes and it can
Lex Fridman (10:14.600)
focus on exactly that frequency.
Lex Fridman (10:16.960)
And in that frequency, there are only two known molecules that absorb it all.
Lex Fridman (10:22.520)
So that's how we do it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (10:23.520)
We look at that exact spot where we know phosphine absorbs the other molecules SO2.
Clara Sousa-Silva (10:30.280)
If there is extraterrestrial life, whether it's on Venus or on exoplanets where you
Lex Fridman (10:36.460)
looked before, how does that make you feel?
Lex Fridman (10:40.560)
How should it make us feel?
Lex Fridman (10:42.400)
Should we be scared?
Lex Fridman (10:43.480)
Should we be excited?
Clara Sousa-Silva (10:46.160)
Let's say it's not intelligent life.
Lex Fridman (10:48.040)
Let's say it's microbial life.
Lex Fridman (10:51.760)
Is it a threat to us?
Lex Fridman (10:53.000)
Are we a threat to it?
Clara Sousa-Silva (10:55.120)
Or is it only, not only, but mostly a possibility to understand something fundamental, something
Lex Fridman (11:00.920)
beautiful about life in the universe?
Clara Sousa-Silva (11:04.400)
Hard to know.
Lex Fridman (11:05.400)
You would have to bring on a poet or a philosopher on the show.
Clara Sousa-Silva (11:11.640)
I feel those things.
Lex Fridman (11:12.640)
I just don't know if those are the right things to feel.
Clara Sousa-Silva (11:14.880)
I certainly don't feel scared.
Lex Fridman (11:16.520)
I think it's rather silly to feel scared.
Clara Sousa-Silva (11:19.240)
Definitely don't touch them.
Lex Fridman (11:21.140)
Sometimes in movies, don't go near it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (11:24.920)
Don't interfere.
Clara Sousa-Silva (11:26.200)
I think one of the things with Venus is because of phosphine, now there is a chance that Venus
Clara Sousa-Silva (11:33.940)
is inhabited.
Lex Fridman (11:34.940)
And in that case, we shouldn't go there.
Clara Sousa-Silva (11:39.020)
We should be very careful with messing with them, bringing our own stuff there that contaminates
Lex Fridman (11:46.480)
it.
Lex Fridman (11:48.240)
And Venus has suffered enough.
Clara Sousa-Silva (11:49.720)
If there's life there, it's probably the remains of a living planet, the very last survivors
Clara Sousa-Silva (11:56.160)
of what once was potentially a thriving world.
Lex Fridman (12:00.920)
And so I don't want our first interaction with alien life to be a massacre.
Lex Fridman (12:06.720)
So I definitely wouldn't want to go near out of a, let's say, galactic responsibility,
Lex Fridman (12:12.160)
galactic ethics.
Lex Fridman (12:14.400)
And I often think of alien astronomers watching us and how disappointed they would be if we
Lex Fridman (12:19.620)
messed this up.
Lex Fridman (12:20.620)
So I really want to be very careful with anything that could be life.
Lex Fridman (12:25.960)
But certainly I wouldn't be scared.
Clara Sousa-Silva (12:28.320)
Humans are plenty capable of killing one another.
Lex Fridman (12:30.360)
We don't need extraterrestrial help to destroy ourselves.
Clara Sousa-Silva (12:34.760)
Scared mostly of other humans.
Lex Fridman (12:36.120)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (12:37.120)
But these, this life, if there is life there, it does seem just like you said, it would
Lex Fridman (12:41.600)
be pretty rugged.
Clara Sousa-Silva (12:43.200)
It's like the cockroaches or Chuck Norris, I don't know.
Clara Sousa-Silva (12:47.200)
It's the, some kind of, it's something that survived through some very difficult conditions.
Clara Sousa-Silva (12:53.120)
That doesn't mean it would handle us, you know, it could be like war of the worlds.
Clara Sousa-Silva (12:58.160)
You come, just because you're resilient in your own planet doesn't mean you can survive
Clara Sousa-Silva (13:02.440)
another.
Clara Sousa-Silva (13:03.440)
The extremophiles, which are very impressive, we should all be very proud of our extremophiles.
Clara Sousa-Silva (13:08.520)
They wouldn't really make it in the Venusian clouds.
Lex Fridman (13:12.000)
So I wouldn't expect, because you're tough, even Chuck Norris tough, that you would survive
Clara Sousa-Silva (13:18.080)
on an alien planet.
Lex Fridman (13:20.800)
And then from the scientific perspective, you don't want to pollute the data gathering
Clara Sousa-Silva (13:25.520)
process by showing up there.
Lex Fridman (13:27.960)
The observer can affect the observed.
Lex Fridman (13:31.240)
How heartbreaking would it be if we found life on another planet and then we're like,
Lex Fridman (13:35.360)
oh, we brought it with us.
Clara Sousa-Silva (13:37.080)
It was my sandwich.
Lex Fridman (13:38.320)
But that's always the problem, right?
Lex Fridman (13:40.520)
And it's certainly a problem with Mars because we've visited the, if there is life on Mars
Clara Sousa-Silva (13:47.280)
or like remains of life on Mars, it's always going to be a question of like, well, maybe
Clara Sousa-Silva (13:52.320)
we planted it there.
Lex Fridman (13:53.680)
Let's not do the same with Venus.
Clara Sousa-Silva (13:55.060)
It's harder because when we try to go to Venus, things melt very quickly.
Lex Fridman (13:59.200)
So it's a little harder to pollute Venus.
Clara Sousa-Silva (14:04.160)
It's very good at destroying foreigners.
Lex Fridman (14:06.760)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (14:07.760)
Well, in terms of Elon Musk and terraforming planets, Mars is stop number one, then Venus
Lex Fridman (14:13.880)
maybe after that.
Lex Fridman (14:15.480)
So can we talk about phosphine a little bit?
Lex Fridman (14:19.080)
So you mentioned it's a pretty...
Clara Sousa-Silva (14:20.560)
Love talking about phosphine.
Lex Fridman (14:21.560)
Love phosphine.
Lex Fridman (14:22.560)
What's your Twitter handle?
Lex Fridman (14:23.560)
It's like Dr. Phosphine.
Clara Sousa-Silva (14:24.560)
It's Dr. Phosphine.
Lex Fridman (14:25.560)
Yes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (14:26.560)
You will be surprised here.
Lex Fridman (14:27.560)
It wasn't taken already.
Clara Sousa-Silva (14:28.560)
I just grabbed it.
Lex Fridman (14:29.560)
I didn't have to buy it off anyone.
Clara Sousa-Silva (14:32.560)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (14:33.560)
So what is it?
Lex Fridman (14:35.320)
What's phosphine?
Clara Sousa-Silva (14:36.320)
You already mentioned it's pretty toxic and troublesome and outside, troublesome, sorry.
Clara Sousa-Silva (14:43.560)
No, I love it.
Lex Fridman (14:45.240)
I'm going to stop calling it troublesome.
Lex Fridman (14:48.860)
So maybe what are some things that make it interesting chemically and why is it a good
Lex Fridman (14:56.560)
sign of life when it's present in the atmosphere?
Clara Sousa-Silva (15:00.440)
Like you've described in your paper, aptly titled the phosphine as a biosignature gas
Lex Fridman (15:06.120)
in exoplanet atmospheres.
Clara Sousa-Silva (15:08.320)
I suppose you wrote that paper before Venus.
Lex Fridman (15:10.960)
I did.
Clara Sousa-Silva (15:11.960)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (15:12.960)
I did.
Lex Fridman (15:13.960)
And no one cared.
Clara Sousa-Silva (15:14.960)
In that paper, I said something like, if we find phosphine on any terrestrial planet can
Clara Sousa-Silva (15:19.280)
only mean life.
Lex Fridman (15:20.280)
And everyone's like, yeah, that sounds about right.
Clara Sousa-Silva (15:21.680)
Let's go.
Lex Fridman (15:22.680)
And then Venus shows up and I was like, are you sure?
Clara Sousa-Silva (15:24.440)
I'm like, I was sure before I was sure.
Lex Fridman (15:27.720)
Now that it's right here, I'm less sure now that my claims are being tested.
Lex Fridman (15:35.900)
So phosphine, phosphine is a fascinating molecule.
Lex Fridman (15:38.680)
So it's shaped like a pyramid with a phosphorus up top and then three hydrogens.
Clara Sousa-Silva (15:43.920)
It's actually quite a simple molecule in many ways and you know, it's the most popular elements
Lex Fridman (15:49.240)
in the universe, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur.
Clara Sousa-Silva (15:54.920)
When you add hydrogen to them, it makes quite simple, quite famous molecules.
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:00.080)
You do it to oxygen, you get water, you do it to carbon, you get methane, you do it to
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:04.360)
nitrogen, you get ammonia.
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:06.260)
These are all molecules people have heard of, but you do it to phosphorus, you get phosphine.
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:11.560)
People haven't heard of phosphine because it's not really popular on earth.
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:16.560)
You really shouldn't find it anywhere on earth because it is extremely toxic to life.
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:22.400)
It interacts with oxygen metabolism and everything you know and love uses oxygen metabolism and
Lex Fridman (16:30.600)
it interacts fatally.
Lex Fridman (16:31.840)
So it kills in several very imaginative and very macabre ways.
Lex Fridman (16:37.740)
So it was used as a chemical warfare agent in the first world war and most recently by
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:43.040)
ISIS.
Lex Fridman (16:44.040)
So really bad.
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:46.100)
Most life avoids it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:48.220)
Even life that might not avoid it, so life that doesn't use oxygen metabolism, anaerobic
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:51.940)
life still has to put crazy amounts of effort into making it.
Lex Fridman (16:56.180)
It's a really difficult molecule to make, thermodynamically speaking.
Clara Sousa-Silva (16:59.440)
It's really difficult to make that phosphorus want to be together with that hydrogen.
Lex Fridman (17:04.220)
So it's horrible.
Clara Sousa-Silva (17:07.040)
Everyone avoids it.
Lex Fridman (17:08.040)
When they're not avoiding it, it's extremely difficult to make.
Clara Sousa-Silva (17:10.520)
You would have to put energy in, sacrifice energy to make it.
Lex Fridman (17:14.160)
And if you did go through all that trouble and made it, it gets reacted with the radicals
Clara Sousa-Silva (17:19.660)
in the atmosphere and gets destroyed.
Lex Fridman (17:22.320)
So we shouldn't find it anywhere and yet we do.
Clara Sousa-Silva (17:24.480)
This is kind of weird molecule that seems to be made by life and we don't even know
Lex Fridman (17:30.740)
why.
Clara Sousa-Silva (17:31.780)
Life clearly finds a use for it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (17:33.680)
It's not the only molecule that life is willing to sacrifice energy to make, but we don't
Clara Sousa-Silva (17:37.620)
know how or why life is even making it.
Lex Fridman (17:39.860)
So absolutely mysterious, absolutely deadly, smells horrifically.
Clara Sousa-Silva (17:46.340)
When it's made, it produces other kind of diphosphenes and it's been reported as smelling
Lex Fridman (17:50.580)
like garlicky, fishy death.
Clara Sousa-Silva (17:54.060)
Once someone referred to it as smelling like the, let me see if I remember, the rancid
Lex Fridman (17:58.140)
diapers of the spawn of Satan.
Clara Sousa-Silva (18:00.140)
Oh, very nice.
Lex Fridman (18:01.620)
Yeah, very vivid.
Lex Fridman (18:03.620)
And so...
Lex Fridman (18:04.620)
You're a poet after all.
Clara Sousa-Silva (18:05.620)
I didn't call it that, someone else did.
Lex Fridman (18:08.180)
And so it's just this horrific molecule, but it is produced by life.
Clara Sousa-Silva (18:12.700)
We don't know why.
Lex Fridman (18:14.220)
And when it is produced by life, it's done with enormous sacrifice and the universe does
Clara Sousa-Silva (18:18.780)
not sacrifice, life sacrifices.
Lex Fridman (18:22.460)
And so it's this strange, contradictory molecule that we should all be avoiding and yet seems
Clara Sousa-Silva (18:27.920)
to be an almost an ambiguous sign of life on rocky planets.
Lex Fridman (18:31.500)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (18:32.500)
Can we dig into that a little bit?
Lex Fridman (18:34.660)
So on rocky planets, is there biological mechanisms that can produce it?
Clara Sousa-Silva (18:43.900)
You said that why is unclear, why life might produce it, but is there an understanding
Clara Sousa-Silva (18:50.340)
of what kind of mechanisms might be able to produce it, this very difficult to produce
Lex Fridman (18:54.260)
molecule?
Lex Fridman (18:55.260)
We don't know yet.
Clara Sousa-Silva (18:57.220)
The enzymatic pathways of phosphine production by life are not yet known.
Lex Fridman (19:02.060)
This is not actually as surprising as it might sound.
Clara Sousa-Silva (19:04.420)
I think something like 80% of all the natural products that we know of, so we know biology
Lex Fridman (19:10.300)
makes them.
Clara Sousa-Silva (19:11.580)
We don't know how.
Clara Sousa-Silva (19:12.580)
It is much easier to know life produces something because you can put bacteria in a Petri dish
Lex Fridman (19:17.340)
and then watch and then that gas is produced, you go, oh, life made it.
Lex Fridman (19:21.300)
That actually happened with phosphine.
Lex Fridman (19:23.460)
But that's much easier to do of course, than figuring out what is the exact metabolic pathway
Lex Fridman (19:29.380)
within that life form that created this molecule.
Lex Fridman (19:33.100)
So we don't know yet.
Lex Fridman (19:35.340)
Phosphine is really understudied.
Clara Sousa-Silva (19:38.140)
No one had really heard of it until nowish.
Lex Fridman (19:40.700)
What you were presenting is the fact that life produces phosphine, not the process by
Clara Sousa-Silva (19:46.200)
which it produces phosphine.
Lex Fridman (19:47.780)
Is there an urgency now?
Clara Sousa-Silva (19:49.980)
Like if you were to try to understand the mechanisms, the, what did you call them, enzymatic
Lex Fridman (19:55.420)
pathways that produce phosphine, how difficult is that of a problem to crack?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:00:06.280)
all of human civilization.
Lex Fridman (1:00:07.720)
So to roll your eyes is not the right answer.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:00:12.520)
To roll your eyes presumes that you know anything about this world as opposed to just knowing
Lex Fridman (1:00:16.800)
point zero zero zero one percent of this world.
Lex Fridman (1:00:19.560)
And so being humble in the face of that, being open to the possibility of aliens visiting
Lex Fridman (1:00:26.760)
Earth is a good idea.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:00:29.120)
Not everything, though.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:00:30.160)
I'm not so open minded to the flat Earth hypothesis as there's a growing number of people believing
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:00:36.960)
in.
Lex Fridman (1:00:37.960)
But even then.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:00:38.960)
Or the inner Earth, I've got shouted at in a public talk about it.
Lex Fridman (1:00:42.200)
So like the Earth is hollow?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:00:43.760)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:00:44.760)
My understanding is that there's this conspiracy theory that as far as I can tell has no grounding
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:00:51.500)
in reality is that there's a slightly smaller Earth inside this one, which is just too cute
Lex Fridman (1:00:56.200)
as a concept.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:00:57.200)
That's awesome.
Lex Fridman (1:00:58.200)
And you can access it, I think, from Antarctica.
Lex Fridman (1:01:00.800)
And that's where we keep, and I quote, the mammoths and the Nazis.
Lex Fridman (1:01:05.240)
Yeah, I mean, that one is ridiculous.
Lex Fridman (1:01:08.700)
But like I do like.
Lex Fridman (1:01:09.700)
Hey, I thought you were keeping an open mind.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:01:12.800)
I genuinely think that's more likely than aliens visiting the Earth.
Lex Fridman (1:01:15.880)
And I say this as someone who has dedicated her life to finding like alien life.
Lex Fridman (1:01:21.920)
And so that's how improbable, I think, the visitations are.
Lex Fridman (1:01:27.680)
Because interstellar distances are so huge that it's just not really worth it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:01:32.720)
See, I have a different view on this whole thing.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:01:34.560)
I think the aliens that look like little green men are like extremely low probability event.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:01:43.080)
Like mammoths and Nazis under that level.
Lex Fridman (1:01:48.920)
But other kind of ideas, like the sad thing to me, and I think in my view, if there's
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:01:57.760)
other alien civilizations out there and they visited Earth, neither them or perhaps just
Lex Fridman (1:02:04.120)
us would be even able to detect them.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:02:06.920)
Like we wouldn't be open minded enough to see it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:02:10.400)
Like if, because our understanding of what is life, and I just talked to Sarah Walker,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:02:19.880)
who's.
Lex Fridman (1:02:20.880)
You know Sarah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:02:21.880)
Yeah, we talked for three hours about the question of what is life.
Lex Fridman (1:02:25.400)
Sarah's a good person to talk to about what is life.
Lex Fridman (1:02:29.320)
But like the whole point is we don't really, we have a very narrow minded view of what
Lex Fridman (1:02:33.520)
is life.
Lex Fridman (1:02:34.520)
And when it shows up, and it might be already here, trees and dolphins and so on, or mountains
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:02:45.080)
or I don't know, or the molecules in the atmosphere, or like people make fun of me.
Lex Fridman (1:02:53.400)
But I do think that ideas are kind of aliens themselves, or consciousness could be the
Lex Fridman (1:02:57.640)
aliens, or it could be the method by which they communicate.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:03:00.620)
We don't know shit about the way our human mind works.
Lex Fridman (1:03:03.640)
And the fact that this thing is a quantum process, please don't I understand this.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:03:09.600)
It's not woo woo.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:03:10.600)
I'm not I, we could, but it very well could be there could be something at the at the
Lex Fridman (1:03:14.520)
physics level, right?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:03:16.140)
It could be at the chemical or the biological level, things that are happening that we're
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:03:19.360)
just close to close minded, because our conception of life is at the level of like us, like at
Lex Fridman (1:03:27.120)
the jungle level of mammals.
Lex Fridman (1:03:30.080)
And on the time scale, that's the human time scale, we may not be able to perceive what
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:03:34.680)
alien life is actually like what the scale at which their intelligence realizes itself
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:03:42.640)
when we're not able to perceive.
Lex Fridman (1:03:45.040)
And the other thing that's really important about alien visitations, whether it happened
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:03:49.960)
or not, is especially after COVID in 2020, I'm losing a little bit of faith of our government
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:03:56.560)
being able to handle that that well, not our government, but us as a society, as a collective,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:04:04.120)
being able to deal with new things in an effective way that's inspiring, that's efficient, that
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:04:11.880)
like, whether it's if it's a dangerous thing to deal with it to alleviate the danger, whether
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:04:19.680)
it's the possibility of new discoveries and something inspiring to ride that wave and
Lex Fridman (1:04:24.880)
make it inspiring all those kinds of things.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:04:27.000)
I honestly think if aliens showed up, they would look around, everybody would ignore
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:04:31.120)
them and the government might like hide it, try to like see to keep it from the Chinese
Lex Fridman (1:04:36.480)
and the Russians if it's the United States, call it a military secret in a very close
Lex Fridman (1:04:41.400)
minded way.
Lex Fridman (1:04:42.880)
And then the bureaucracy would drown it away to where through paperwork, the poor aliens
Lex Fridman (1:04:48.000)
would just like waste away and sell somewhere like there's a certain
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:04:51.280)
That would not happen, that would never happen, part of the reason that I feel so confident
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:04:55.400)
that aliens have not visited because they would have had to visit just to have a look
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:04:59.480)
remotely, from Neptune or something, which makes no sense because interstellar travel
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:04.800)
is so difficult that it would be quite a ridiculous proposition, but that's the bit that I think
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:12.040)
is technically possible.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:13.540)
If they did come here and they were visible by anyone, detectable by anyone, the thought
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:18.880)
that any government, no matter, or any military could just contain them, these beings are
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:24.360)
capable of traveling interstellar distances when we can barely go to the moon, like barely
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:30.560)
go to the moon.
Lex Fridman (1:05:31.560)
These things would be way, way, way, way out there.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:32.560)
Way.
Lex Fridman (1:05:33.560)
And the fact that we think our puny military, even if all the military in the world got
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:38.360)
together and the fact that they could somehow contain it, that's the bit that's laughable.
Lex Fridman (1:05:44.240)
Ants trying to contain a human that visited them.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:47.000)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:05:48.000)
And scientists, you would have to bring scientists on board.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:50.560)
You've met a lot of scientists.
Lex Fridman (1:05:52.280)
How good are they at keeping secrets?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:53.680)
Because in my experience, they're absolutely appalling at keeping secrets.
Lex Fridman (1:05:58.760)
Yeah, that's terrible.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:05:59.760)
Even the Phosphine on Venus thing, which was a pretty well kept secret.
Lex Fridman (1:06:03.320)
This is true.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:06:04.320)
You had a bunch of people that were.
Lex Fridman (1:06:05.320)
I told my dad.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:06:06.320)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:06:07.320)
You know, my dad knew and hopefully didn't tell anyone, but if it had been an alien visiting,
Lex Fridman (1:06:12.680)
he probably would have told a mate, you know?
Lex Fridman (1:06:15.440)
And so these secrets could not be kept by any scientist that I know and certainly not
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:06:20.960)
collaborative scientists, which would be needed.
Lex Fridman (1:06:23.000)
You would need all sorts of scientific teams.
Lex Fridman (1:06:26.080)
So between the pathetic power of any world's military compared to any civilization capable
Lex Fridman (1:06:34.360)
of traveling and our absolute inability to keep secrets, absolutely not.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:06:41.600)
I will bet everything that we have not been visited because we are too pathetic to hold
Lex Fridman (1:06:46.320)
that truth.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:06:47.320)
If we're just making like a $10 bet, the possibility here that the main alien, say there exists
Lex Fridman (1:06:56.160)
one alien civil, other intelligent alien civilization in the galaxy.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:07:02.560)
To me, if they visit Earth, what's going to visit Earth is like the crappy, like the really
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:07:09.840)
crappy, short straw, like, like this, this like really dumb thing that's, I don't know,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:07:17.640)
like the early game boys or something like, there's a cartoon about this.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:07:20.680)
There's an alien that gets sent to Earth, Commander Spiff or something, and it's kind
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:07:26.520)
of a punishment or something, but that's not possible.
Lex Fridman (1:07:29.600)
That's the thing because interstellar distances are so hard to, to cross.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:07:34.040)
You have to do it on purpose.
Lex Fridman (1:07:35.040)
You have to do on purpose.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:07:36.040)
It has to be a big, big deal, and we know this because yes, you're right.
Lex Fridman (1:07:40.040)
We don't know enough about galactic biology.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:07:43.640)
We don't know what the universal rules of biology or biochemistry are because we only
Lex Fridman (1:07:47.960)
have the Earth, but we do know that the laws of physics are universal.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:07:53.560)
We can predict behavior in the universe and then see it happen based on these laws of
Lex Fridman (1:07:57.940)
physics.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:07:59.100)
We know that the laws of chemistry are universal.
Lex Fridman (1:08:01.900)
We know the periodic table is all they have to choose from.
Lex Fridman (1:08:05.240)
So yes, they may be some sort of unimaginable intelligence, but they still have to use the
Lex Fridman (1:08:11.000)
same periodic table that we have access to.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:08:13.960)
They still have a finite number of molecules they can do things with.
Lex Fridman (1:08:18.120)
So they still have to use the resources around them, the stars around them, the universe
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:08:22.700)
around them, and we know how much energy is in these places.
Lex Fridman (1:08:26.640)
And so yes, they may be very capable, capable beyond our wildest dreams, but they're still
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:08:32.480)
in the same universe, and we know a lot of those rules.
Lex Fridman (1:08:35.400)
We're not completely blind.
Lex Fridman (1:08:37.120)
But there's a colleague of yours at Harvard, Kamran Vafa, he's a theoretical physicist.
Lex Fridman (1:08:43.240)
I don't know if you know him.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:08:45.240)
I've only joined Harvard about six months ago.
Lex Fridman (1:08:48.240)
Okay.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:08:49.240)
It's time to meet all the theoretical physicists.
Lex Fridman (1:08:52.860)
So he's a string theorist, but his idea is that aliens that are sophisticated enough
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:09:01.280)
to travel interstellar like those kinds of distances will figure out actually ways to
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:09:05.840)
hack the fabric of the universe enough to have fun in other ways, like this universe
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:09:11.160)
is too boring.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:09:12.160)
Like you would figure out ways to create other universes, like you go outside the physics
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:09:17.740)
as we know it.
Lex Fridman (1:09:19.380)
So the reason we don't see aliens visiting us all over the place is they're having fun
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:09:23.440)
elsewhere.
Lex Fridman (1:09:24.440)
This is like way too boring.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:09:26.060)
We humans think this is fun, but it's actually mostly empty space that no fun is happening.
Lex Fridman (1:09:32.080)
There's no fun in visiting Earth for a super advanced civilization.
Lex Fridman (1:09:35.800)
So he thinks like if alien civilizations are out there, they found outside of our current
Lex Fridman (1:09:42.040)
standard models of physics ways of having fun that don't involve us.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:09:47.680)
That's probably true, but even the notion of visiting, that's so literally pedestrian.
Lex Fridman (1:09:52.540)
Of course we want to go there because going there is the only thing we know.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:09:55.800)
We see a thing we want, we want to go there and get it.
Lex Fridman (1:09:58.480)
But that is probably something they've no longer gotten need for.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:10:03.600)
I specifically don't particularly want to go to space.
Lex Fridman (1:10:08.080)
Sounds awful.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:10:09.080)
None of the things I like are going to be there.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:10:13.960)
My whole work is my whole career is finding life and understanding the universe.
Lex Fridman (1:10:17.880)
So I care a lot, but I care about knowing about it and I feel no need to go there to
Lex Fridman (1:10:23.840)
learn about it.
Lex Fridman (1:10:25.040)
And I think as we develop better tools, hopefully people will feel less and less a need to go
Lex Fridman (1:10:30.360)
everywhere that we know about.
Lex Fridman (1:10:33.120)
And I would expect any alien civilization worth the salt have developed observation
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:10:38.460)
tools and tools that allow them to understand the universe around them and beyond without
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:10:44.600)
having to go there.
Lex Fridman (1:10:46.160)
This going is so wasteful.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:10:48.120)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:10:49.120)
So more focused on the knowledge and learning versus the colonization, like the conquering
Lex Fridman (1:10:53.320)
and all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (1:10:55.280)
That's beneath them.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:10:57.480)
That's beneath them.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:10:58.480)
I mean, that said, do you think there's in your hopeful search for life through phosphine
Lex Fridman (1:11:04.160)
and other gases, do you think there's other alien civilizations out there?
Lex Fridman (1:11:11.080)
First do you think there's other life out there?
Lex Fridman (1:11:14.040)
First do you think there's life in the solar system?
Lex Fridman (1:11:17.040)
Second do you think there's life in the galaxy?
Lex Fridman (1:11:22.080)
And a third, do you think there's intelligent life in the solar system or the galaxy outside
Lex Fridman (1:11:26.560)
of earth?
Lex Fridman (1:11:28.000)
So intelligent life, I have no idea.
Lex Fridman (1:11:30.280)
It seems deeply unlikely possible, but I'm not even sure if it's plausible.
Lex Fridman (1:11:35.440)
So that's the special thing to you about earth is somehow intelligent life came to me.
Lex Fridman (1:11:38.880)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (1:11:39.880)
And it's only, you know, very briefly, probably extremely briefly.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:11:43.800)
Oh, you mean like it's always going to be like, we're going to destroy ourselves.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:11:48.640)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:11:49.640)
Oh boy.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:11:50.640)
We're going to continue on earth happily, probably more happily.
Lex Fridman (1:11:54.400)
So the trees and the dolphins will be here, I'm telling you.
Lex Fridman (1:11:56.960)
And the cockroaches and the incredible fungi, you know, they'll be fine.
Lex Fridman (1:12:02.320)
So life on earth will be fine, was fine before us and will be fine after us.
Lex Fridman (1:12:08.120)
So I'm not that worried about intelligent life, but I think it is unlikely, even on
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:12:12.160)
earth is unlikely out of, what is it, five billion species across the history of the
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:12:16.400)
earth.
Lex Fridman (1:12:17.400)
Yes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:12:18.400)
For an intelligent one and for a blink of an eye, possibly not much longer than that.
Lex Fridman (1:12:24.500)
So I wouldn't bet on that at all, though I would love it, of course, you know, I wanted
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:12:31.640)
to find aliens since I was a little girl.
Lex Fridman (1:12:34.680)
And so of course I initially wanted to find ones that I could be friends with and I've
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:12:40.900)
had to let go of that dream because it's so deeply implausible.
Lex Fridman (1:12:44.280)
But see the nice, and sorry to interrupt, but the nice thing about intelligent alien
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:12:47.680)
civilizations, they may have more biosignatures than nonintelligent ones.
Lex Fridman (1:12:52.480)
So they might be easier to detect, that would be the hope.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:12:56.320)
On earth that's not the case, but it could be the case elsewhere.
Lex Fridman (1:12:58.680)
Oh, it's not the case on earth.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:13:00.480)
Most of the biosignatures we have on earth are created by quite simple life.
Lex Fridman (1:13:06.000)
If you don't count pollution, pollution is all, all us baby.
Lex Fridman (1:13:11.200)
So you don't see polluting gases as a possible, like.
Lex Fridman (1:13:17.080)
I look for polluting gases.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:13:18.560)
I would love to find polluting gases.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:13:20.640)
Well, you know, I'd be worried for them, of course, the same way I, I think about my alien
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:13:26.520)
colleagues all the time looking at us and I'm sure they worry about our pollutions,
Lex Fridman (1:13:30.720)
but it would be a really good, robust, unambiguous sign of life if we found complex pollutants.
Lex Fridman (1:13:38.120)
So I look for those too.
Lex Fridman (1:13:39.440)
I just don't have any hope of finding them.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:13:41.080)
I think intelligent life in the galaxy at the same time that we're looking is deeply
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:13:47.800)
implausible, but life I think is inevitable and if it is inevitable, it is common.
Lex Fridman (1:13:56.160)
So I think there'll be life everywhere in the galaxy.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:14:00.080)
Now how common that life is, I think will depend a lot on whether there's life in the
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:14:04.680)
solar system beyond earth.
Lex Fridman (1:14:07.080)
So I'll adjust my expectations very much based on there being life in the solar system.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:14:13.220)
If there's life in the Venusian clouds, if there's life in the, if there are biosignals
Lex Fridman (1:14:19.380)
coming out of the plumes of Enceladus, if there's life on Titan.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:14:23.200)
Yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman (1:14:24.200)
Yeah, yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:14:25.200)
Plumes of Enceladus.
Lex Fridman (1:14:26.200)
That's the, that's the Saturn one.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:14:27.880)
It's the moon that has the geysers that come out.
Lex Fridman (1:14:30.320)
And so you can't see the, under the subterranean oceans, but.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:14:34.160)
It's supposed, so it would be in the atmosphere.
Lex Fridman (1:14:36.520)
I was going to ask you about that one.
Lex Fridman (1:14:39.000)
Have you looked at that?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:14:40.000)
Have you, is that a hope for you to use the tools you're using with RASCAL and other ways
Lex Fridman (1:14:49.360)
for detecting the 16,000 molecules that might be biosignatures to look at Enceladus?
Lex Fridman (1:14:56.400)
Yes, that's absolutely the plan.
Lex Fridman (1:14:59.920)
What's the limiting factor currently?
Lex Fridman (1:15:01.560)
Is it the quality of the telescopes, what's the quality of the data?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:15:06.760)
Yeah, the quality of the data, the observational data, and also the quality of RASCAL and other
Lex Fridman (1:15:12.560)
associated things.
Lex Fridman (1:15:13.560)
So we're missing a lot of fundamental data to interpret the data that we get and we don't
Lex Fridman (1:15:17.680)
have good enough data.
Lex Fridman (1:15:19.240)
But hopefully we will, in the coming decades, we'll get some information on Titan.
Lex Fridman (1:15:24.760)
We have Dragonfly going over.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:15:27.880)
We'll get the plumes of Enceladus.
Lex Fridman (1:15:31.400)
We will look at the clouds of Venus and there's other places.
Lex Fridman (1:15:34.040)
And so if we find any life or any sign of life ever, like on Mars, then I'll adjust
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:15:41.740)
my calculations and I'll say life is not just inevitable and common, but extremely common.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:15:48.520)
Because all of these places we've mentioned, the subterranean oceans on Enceladus, the
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:15:52.720)
methane oceans of Titan, the clouds of Venus, the acidic clouds of Venus, these are places
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:15:58.240)
that are very different from the places where we find life on Earth.
Lex Fridman (1:16:02.280)
Even the most extreme places.
Lex Fridman (1:16:04.200)
And so if life can originate in all of these completely different habitats, then life is
Lex Fridman (1:16:10.120)
even more resourceful than we thought, which means it's everywhere.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:16:14.860)
That's really exciting if it's everywhere.
Lex Fridman (1:16:17.200)
If there's life on just one of the moons, if it's on Mars.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:16:21.320)
Anywhere.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:16:22.320)
Anywhere in the solar system and I will bet everything I own that every solar system,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:16:27.080)
every planetary system has a potential for habitability.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:16:31.360)
Because even if they don't have a habitable planet, they'll have moons around other giant
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:16:35.440)
planets and there'll be so much life.
Lex Fridman (1:16:39.280)
So for me, that's the only thing to figure out now, whether life is inevitable and quite
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:16:44.960)
common throughout the galaxy or everywhere, but it's somewhere between those two.
Lex Fridman (1:16:51.860)
In life, I make no bets and if I had to bet, I would be against.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:16:58.480)
To me, like two discoveries in the 21st century would change everything.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:17:05.280)
One is, and maybe I'm biased, but one is a discovery of life in the solar system.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:17:12.800)
I feel like that would change our whole conception of how unique we are in the universe.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:17:18.600)
I think I'm much more eager than you are to jump from basic life to intelligent life.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:17:23.560)
I feel like if there's life everywhere, like the odds are, there has, like we cannot, like
Lex Fridman (1:17:31.880)
you have, oh, I see.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:17:34.320)
You're saying there could have been many intelligent civilizations out there, but they just keep
Lex Fridman (1:17:37.880)
dying out.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:17:38.880)
It's like little.
Lex Fridman (1:17:39.880)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:17:40.880)
I was detecting them, you know, ships in the night.
Lex Fridman (1:17:41.880)
Ships in the night.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:17:42.880)
No, that's ultra sad.
Lex Fridman (1:17:45.640)
Just like.
Lex Fridman (1:17:46.640)
Is it sad?
Lex Fridman (1:17:47.640)
The earth is not better for having us.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:17:50.400)
Is it, we, it doesn't owe us anything.
Lex Fridman (1:17:53.640)
Would you be sad to find alien giraffes?
Lex Fridman (1:17:56.120)
Would you be disappointed if you found alien giraffes?
Lex Fridman (1:17:59.240)
Because I would not.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:00.240)
No, well, giraffes, first of all, they look goofy with their necks and everything, but.
Lex Fridman (1:18:04.280)
We do not shit on giraffes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:05.720)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (1:18:06.720)
Giraffes are wondrous animals, are deeply understudied.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:09.240)
We still know so little about them because no one does PhDs in giraffes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:12.840)
I am disappointed I made a PhD in phosphine when people aren't doing PhDs in giraffes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:17.680)
We do not know enough about giraffes.
Lex Fridman (1:18:19.440)
I think it was like Ricky Gervais that did a whole, like a long thing.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:22.680)
You can't trust Ricky Gervais to talk about giraffes.
Lex Fridman (1:18:25.080)
That is not his expertise.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:26.560)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:18:27.560)
But it's a stupid necks, it doesn't make any sense.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:31.600)
I mean, that's fine.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:32.600)
Giraffes are very resourceful animals who do incredible things and can kick a lion in
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:36.880)
the face.
Lex Fridman (1:18:37.880)
Why don't you climb the tree?
Lex Fridman (1:18:38.880)
Why don't you climb the tree?
Lex Fridman (1:18:39.880)
You don't need to grow through the lengthy evolutionary process.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:42.480)
You're shitting on giraffes.
Lex Fridman (1:18:43.480)
Okay.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:44.480)
Giraffes are wondrous animals.
Lex Fridman (1:18:45.480)
Fine.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:46.480)
I would very appreciate it.
Lex Fridman (1:18:47.480)
Take it back.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:48.480)
I take it back.
Lex Fridman (1:18:49.480)
I apologize.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:50.480)
I trust your expertise on this.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:18:54.280)
The thing that makes humans really fascinating, and I think the earth, but I'm a human, is
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:19:01.560)
we create things that are, yes, there's all the ugliness in the world.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:19:09.400)
There's all the, on the biological, on the chemical level, there's the pollution, but
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:19:16.200)
we create beauty.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:19:18.500)
If you even from a physics perspective, look at symmetry as somehow capturing beauty, the
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:19:23.840)
breaking of symmetries, stuff grounded in all the different definitions of symmetry,
Lex Fridman (1:19:28.320)
we're good at creating things.
Lex Fridman (1:19:31.540)
So are spiders.
Lex Fridman (1:19:35.020)
But not giraffes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:19:36.020)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (1:19:37.020)
But yes, this is a...
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:19:38.020)
Spiders.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:19:39.020)
Spiders that create little bubbles of air so they can breathe underwater, they can literally
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:19:43.360)
scuba dive.
Lex Fridman (1:19:44.360)
There are spiders that can create parachutes so they can glide.
Lex Fridman (1:19:48.440)
And talk about symmetry, look what spiders can do.
Lex Fridman (1:19:51.240)
And I just thought of spiders, but if I was an alien species coming to earth, there'll
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:19:56.680)
be plenty to wonder, and we would just be one of the things, clunky, naked monkey.
Lex Fridman (1:20:05.600)
The ants might be even more fascinating.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:20:07.680)
The ants.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:20:08.680)
The ants can figure out exactly through some emergent consciousness what the maximum distance
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:20:14.680)
between their trash, their babies, and their food is just from without any of them knowing
Lex Fridman (1:20:22.000)
how to do this.
Lex Fridman (1:20:23.000)
And collectively they've learned how to do this.
Lex Fridman (1:20:24.720)
If I was an alien species, I'll be looking at that.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:20:27.200)
Well, so that was the other thing I was going to mention.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:20:29.200)
The second thing is I tend to believe we can engineer consciousness, but at the basic level,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:20:35.840)
in the source of consciousness, because if consciousness is unique to humans, and if
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:20:42.600)
we can engineer it, that gives me hope that it could be present elsewhere in the universe.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:20:47.800)
That's the other thing that makes, it's an open question, that makes humans perhaps special
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:20:53.600)
is not maybe the presence of consciousness, but somehow a presence of elevated consciousness.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:21:00.260)
It does, again, maybe human centric, but it feels like we're more conscious than giraffes,
Lex Fridman (1:21:04.800)
for example, and spiders.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:21:06.360)
Yes, I won't deny that.
Lex Fridman (1:21:08.960)
There is something special about humans.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:21:10.440)
They're my favorite species.
Lex Fridman (1:21:12.440)
They are.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:21:14.160)
They are.
Lex Fridman (1:21:16.080)
Some of my best friends are humans.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:21:21.720)
I think highly of humans.
Lex Fridman (1:21:24.240)
It's great.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:21:25.240)
I just don't have great hope for our longevity, and specifically I don't have great hope given
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:21:31.160)
that we're the only species that are five billion that did this cool consciousness trick.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:21:35.520)
I just, I don't want to bet on finding a kinship elsewhere.
Lex Fridman (1:21:42.240)
That's quite interesting to think about.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:21:44.040)
I don't think I've even considered that possibility that there would be life in the solar system,
Lex Fridman (1:21:51.720)
so that indicates that very possibly life is literally everywhere.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:21:57.520)
Everywhere it can happen, it does.
Lex Fridman (1:21:59.600)
And especially what we're discovering with the exoplanets now, how numerous they are,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:22:06.200)
or earthlike habitable, quote unquote, planets, they're everywhere.
Lex Fridman (1:22:12.200)
The most common type of planet is rocky, it seems.
Lex Fridman (1:22:16.620)
But I didn't consider the possibility that life is literally everywhere, and yet intelligent
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:22:21.880)
life is nowhere long enough to communicate with each other, to form little clusters of
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:22:30.600)
civilizations that expand beyond the solar system and so on.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:22:35.680)
Man, maybe becoming a multi planetary species is a less likely pursuit than we imagine.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:22:43.800)
I agree.
Lex Fridman (1:22:44.800)
But one of the things that makes humans beautiful is we hope.
Lex Fridman (1:22:49.040)
What I hope for humanity, and one of the things I hope for is that we become less obsessed
Lex Fridman (1:22:56.620)
with conquering, and we become less obsessed with spreading ourselves.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:23:03.360)
I hope that we transcend that, that we're happy with the universe without having to
Lex Fridman (1:23:08.880)
go and take it.
Lex Fridman (1:23:11.240)
So you can hope for the species without hoping for a multi planetary existence.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:23:18.060)
That is only, I think, the drive of our most primitive instincts to go and take, to go
Lex Fridman (1:23:26.840)
and plant a flag somewhere.
Lex Fridman (1:23:28.240)
We love planting a flag somewhere.
Lex Fridman (1:23:31.060)
And maybe we could overcome that minor drive.
Lex Fridman (1:23:35.340)
And once we do, the AI systems we build will destroy us because we're too peaceful, and
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:23:41.480)
they will go and conquer and plant the flags.
Lex Fridman (1:23:43.720)
Best of luck to them.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:23:44.720)
Rock roaches will be happy to keep to the business as they always have.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:23:50.880)
I tend to believe that robots can have the same elegance and consciousness and all the
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:23:58.240)
qualities of kindness and love and hope and fear that humans have.
Lex Fridman (1:24:02.760)
In principle, they could, yes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:24:05.160)
I don't really trust the people who make them.
Lex Fridman (1:24:10.700)
This is about the giraffe comment, isn't it?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:24:13.040)
I haven't forgiven you for shitting on giraffes, whatever they've done to you.
Lex Fridman (1:24:18.440)
Just as a small tangent, your master's thesis is also fascinating.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:24:22.480)
Maybe we could talk about it for just a little bit.
Lex Fridman (1:24:25.040)
It's titled Influence of a Star's Evolution on its Planetary System.
Lex Fridman (1:24:30.080)
So this interplay between a star and a planet, is there something interesting you could say
Lex Fridman (1:24:35.240)
about what you've learned about this journey that a star takes and the planets around it?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:24:42.400)
Well, when I was younger and I was told what would happen ultimately to the Earth as the
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:24:49.040)
sun expands towards a red giant and mercury would just like fall in and then Venus fall
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:24:57.680)
in and the sun doesn't care.
Lex Fridman (1:24:59.840)
And it just seemed so, I felt so small.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:25:05.720)
I felt like the Earth and everything on it, it's just the universe doesn't care.
Lex Fridman (1:25:10.480)
Even our sun doesn't care.
Lex Fridman (1:25:12.400)
And I think I felt like our sun should feel some sort of responsibility for its planets.
Lex Fridman (1:25:17.800)
And it just felt like such a violent and neglectful parent.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:25:21.280)
It's like a parent eating its own children.
Lex Fridman (1:25:23.360)
It's horrible.
Lex Fridman (1:25:24.360)
It's just a horrible notion, but it made me think, what if there's some sort of generation?
Lex Fridman (1:25:31.000)
And so at the time when I was doing my master's, there was a notion of the white dwarf cemetery,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:25:36.360)
which is this idea that when stars become white dwarfs, that death is so horrible that
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:25:41.400)
planets, potentially habitable planets that could have been habitable before, they're
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:25:45.720)
now gone.
Lex Fridman (1:25:46.720)
There's no chance for life.
Lex Fridman (1:25:48.720)
But then I thought, what if life returns?
Lex Fridman (1:25:52.320)
Now it's a white dwarf, it's calmed down, it's not going to go anywhere.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:25:55.280)
White dwarfs are very stable across like universal timescales.
Lex Fridman (1:25:59.680)
And so could you have planets around the white dwarf that could themselves get life again?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:26:05.400)
No, life doesn't care.
Lex Fridman (1:26:07.960)
And so my work was basically killing dozens of planets, thousands of times.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:26:14.400)
I just ran thousands and thousands of end body simulations.
Lex Fridman (1:26:18.400)
Oh, you simulated this?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:26:19.720)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:26:20.720)
So I simulated the star growing and just eating all these planets up and just absolute chaos.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:26:26.920)
The orbits of the planets would change as the star loses mass.
Lex Fridman (1:26:29.960)
So you would have like Jupiter planets just crashing into the other planets, throwing
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:26:34.800)
them into the sun early.
Lex Fridman (1:26:36.480)
It was terrifying to watch these simulations.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:26:40.720)
It was absolute carnage.
Lex Fridman (1:26:44.680)
But if you run thousands of these simulations, some systems find new balance ways of staying
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:26:50.400)
alive.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:26:52.000)
Some systems post star death find stable orbits again for billions of years, more than enough
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:26:59.640)
for life to originate again.
Lex Fridman (1:27:01.840)
And so that was my idea during that time that Thesis was trying to explore this notion of
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:27:09.480)
life coming back.
Lex Fridman (1:27:12.280)
And this idea of the universe doesn't care if you're here or not, and it will go about
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:27:18.160)
its business.
Lex Fridman (1:27:19.160)
Andromeda will crash into us and doesn't care.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:27:23.460)
No one cares if you're alive in the universe.
Lex Fridman (1:27:25.880)
And so letting go of that preciousness of life, I found very useful at that stage of
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:27:31.080)
my career.
Lex Fridman (1:27:32.080)
And instead, I just thought, if life is inevitable, it doesn't matter that it came by four billion
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:27:38.520)
years ago.
Lex Fridman (1:27:39.520)
It can start again four billion years later.
Lex Fridman (1:27:41.760)
And maybe that is nice.
Lex Fridman (1:27:44.200)
Maybe that's where hope lies, the Phoenix rising everywhere.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:27:49.200)
Planets being destroyed and created and we're here now and others will be more or less hereish
Lex Fridman (1:27:56.240)
billions of years later.
Lex Fridman (1:27:57.640)
So accepting the cycle of death and life and yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:28:02.360)
Not taking it personally.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:28:03.360)
Not taking it personally.
Lex Fridman (1:28:05.000)
The sun doesn't owe us anything.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:28:06.480)
It's not a bad parent.
Lex Fridman (1:28:08.240)
It's not a parent at all.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:28:10.360)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:28:11.360)
I was looking at the work of Freeman Dyson and seeing how this universe eventually will
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:28:18.600)
just be a bunch of supermassive black holes before they also evaporate.
Lex Fridman (1:28:22.760)
A bunch of tiny black holes too.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:28:24.680)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:28:25.680)
Absolute quiet.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:28:26.680)
Everyone, all the black holes a little too far away from one another to even interact
Lex Fridman (1:28:30.920)
until it's just silence forever.
Lex Fridman (1:28:34.640)
But until then, many, many cycles of death and destruction and rebirth.
Lex Fridman (1:28:40.680)
And rebirth.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:28:42.400)
You kept bringing up sort of coding stuff up.
Lex Fridman (1:28:44.960)
I wanted to ask two things.
Lex Fridman (1:28:47.000)
First of all, what programming language do you like?
Lex Fridman (1:28:52.280)
And also what, because you're as a computational quantum astrochemist, no, yes, that's right.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:29:05.520)
You're kind of, you could say you're actually understanding some exceptionally complicated
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:29:11.480)
things with one of the things you're using is the tools of computation of programming.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:29:18.120)
Is there a device you can give to people, because I know quite a few that have not practiced
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:29:24.280)
that tool and have fallen in love with a particular science, whatever it's biology and chemistry
Lex Fridman (1:29:28.800)
and physics and so on.
Lex Fridman (1:29:30.840)
And if they were interested in learning to program and learning to use computation as
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:29:37.080)
a tool in their particular science, is there advice you can give on programming and also
Lex Fridman (1:29:41.680)
just maybe a comment on your own journey and the use of programming in your own life?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:29:48.200)
Well, I'm a terrible programmer.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:29:50.920)
A lot of scientists, their programming is bad because we never learned formal programming.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:29:55.360)
We learned science, physics, chemistry.
Lex Fridman (1:29:58.040)
And then we were told, oh, you can, you have to get these equations modeled and run through
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:30:03.040)
a simulation.
Lex Fridman (1:30:04.040)
And you're like, oh, okay, so I'm going to learn how to code to do this.
Lex Fridman (1:30:07.500)
And you learn just as much as you need to run these simulations and no more.
Lex Fridman (1:30:12.040)
So they're rarely optimized and they're really clunky.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:30:15.160)
Six months later, you can't read your own code.
Lex Fridman (1:30:17.240)
My variable names are extremely embarrassing.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:30:19.360)
I still have error messages for different compilation errors that say things like, at
Lex Fridman (1:30:26.880)
least your dad loves you, Clara.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:30:29.600)
You know, it doesn't help me at all.
Lex Fridman (1:30:32.600)
Just like you suck at coding, but there's other things in your life.
Lex Fridman (1:30:36.680)
So I'm a bad programmer.
Lex Fridman (1:30:37.880)
And so, you know, if that will give hope to anyone else who's a bad programmer, I can
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:30:41.240)
still do pretty impressive science.
Lex Fridman (1:30:44.360)
But I learned, I think I started learning MATLAB and Java when I was in college.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:30:48.880)
It did me no good at all.
Lex Fridman (1:30:50.720)
It has not been particularly useful.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:30:52.480)
I learned some Fortran that was very useful, even though it's really not a fun language
Lex Fridman (1:30:58.200)
because so much of legacy code is in Fortran.
Lex Fridman (1:31:02.680)
And so if you want to use other people's code who have now retired, Fortran will be nice.
Lex Fridman (1:31:08.240)
And then I used IDL to visualize.
Lex Fridman (1:31:10.160)
So that simulation and body simulation, those all Fortran and IDL.
Lex Fridman (1:31:14.960)
But thankfully, since I've left college, I've just learned Python like a normal person and
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:31:19.520)
that has been much nicer.
Lex Fridman (1:31:21.600)
So most of my code now is in Python.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:31:24.360)
I should also make a few quick comments as well.
Lex Fridman (1:31:26.840)
So one is, you say you're sort of bad at programming.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:31:30.680)
I've worked with a lot of excellent scientists that are quote unquote bad at programming.
Lex Fridman (1:31:36.880)
They're not.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:31:37.880)
It gets the job done.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:31:38.880)
In fact, there's a downside to sort of, especially getting a software engineering education.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:31:45.680)
If I were to give advice, especially if you're doing a computer science degree and you're
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:31:50.520)
doing software engineering, is not to get lost in the optimization of the correct, there's
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:31:58.280)
an obsession, you could see it in like Stack Overflow, of the correct way to do things.
Lex Fridman (1:32:04.000)
And I think you can too easily get lost in constantly trying to optimize and do things
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:32:11.000)
the correct way when you actually never get done.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:32:13.440)
The same thing happens, you have like communities of people obsessed with productivity and they
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:32:19.960)
keep researching productivity hacks and then they spend like 90% plus of their time figuring
Lex Fridman (1:32:25.440)
out how to do things productively and then never actually do anything.
Lex Fridman (1:32:29.560)
So there's a certain sense if you focus on the task that needs to be done, that's what
Lex Fridman (1:32:34.320)
programming is for.
Lex Fridman (1:32:35.520)
So not over optimizing, not thinking about variable names in the following sense.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:32:43.760)
Sometimes you think, okay, I'm going to write code that's going to last for decades.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:32:47.440)
In reality, your code, if it's well written or poorly written, will be very likely obsolete
Lex Fridman (1:32:53.180)
very quickly.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:32:54.760)
The point is to get the job done really well.
Lex Fridman (1:32:57.600)
So there's a trade off there that you have to make sure to strike.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:33:02.320)
I should also comment as a public service announcement or a request, if there's any
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:33:08.560)
world class Fortran or Cobalt programmers out there, I'm looking for them, I want to
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:33:13.120)
talk to you.
Lex Fridman (1:33:14.120)
That will not be me, I'm a terrible Fortran programmer.
Lex Fridman (1:33:18.000)
But it's fascinating because so much of the world in the past and still runs programming
Lex Fridman (1:33:23.480)
languages and there's no experts on it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:33:26.400)
They're all retiring.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:33:28.760)
I disagree slightly in that I think because I can get the job done, I'm a programmer.
Lex Fridman (1:33:33.480)
But because no one else can look at my code and know how I got my job done, I'm a bad
Lex Fridman (1:33:37.880)
programmer.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:33:38.880)
That's how I'm defining it.
Lex Fridman (1:33:39.880)
Including yourself.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:33:40.880)
Including myself six months later, I'm working with a new student right now and she sent
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:33:44.920)
me some messages on Slack being like, what is this file that you've got with some functions
Lex Fridman (1:33:52.720)
that run?
Lex Fridman (1:33:53.720)
And I was like, this was from 2018, it wasn't that long ago and I can no longer remember
Lex Fridman (1:33:59.840)
what that code does.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:34:00.840)
I'm going to spend now two days reading through my own code and trying to improve it.
Lex Fridman (1:34:06.480)
And I do think that's frustrating.
Lex Fridman (1:34:08.520)
And so I think my advice to any young people who want to get into astronomy or astrobiology
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:34:15.680)
or quantum chemistry is that I certainly find it much easier to teach the science concepts
Lex Fridman (1:34:22.240)
to a programmer than the programming to a scientist.
Lex Fridman (1:34:25.840)
And so I would much, much faster hire someone who knows programming but barely knows where
Lex Fridman (1:34:33.080)
space is than teach programming to an astronomer.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:34:37.440)
Oh, that's fascinating.
Lex Fridman (1:34:39.000)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:34:40.000)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (1:34:41.000)
This is true.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:34:42.000)
I mean, yeah, there's some basics.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:34:43.000)
I'm focusing too much on the silver lining because the people that write MATLAB code,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:34:47.920)
yeah, single variable, single letter variable names, those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (1:34:52.400)
And it's accessibility, right?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:34:53.960)
It's I want my code to be open source and it is, it's on GitHub, anyone can download
Lex Fridman (1:34:59.040)
it.
Lex Fridman (1:35:00.040)
But is it really open source if it's written so cryptically, so poorly that no one can
Lex Fridman (1:35:04.160)
really use it to its full functionality?
Lex Fridman (1:35:06.240)
Have I really published my work and that weighs on me?
Lex Fridman (1:35:11.560)
I feel guilty for my own inadequacies as a programmer.
Lex Fridman (1:35:16.800)
But you can only do so much.
Lex Fridman (1:35:18.040)
I've already learned quantum chemistry and astrophysics.
Lex Fridman (1:35:20.440)
So yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of ways to contribute to the world.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:35:28.000)
One of them is publication, but publishing code is a fascinating way to contribute to
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:35:32.880)
the world, even if it's very small, very basic element, great code.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:35:38.960)
I guess I was also kind of criticizing the software engineering process versus like,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:35:44.760)
which is a good thing to do is code that's readable, almost like without documentation,
Lex Fridman (1:35:50.240)
it's readable, it's understandable.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:35:52.760)
The variable names, the structure, all those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (1:35:55.880)
That's the dream.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:35:56.880)
That's the dream.
Lex Fridman (1:35:57.880)
This is a dumb question.
Lex Fridman (1:35:58.880)
What do you, all right.
Lex Fridman (1:35:59.880)
No, no, tell me a dumb question.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:36:00.880)
I want to hear it.
Lex Fridman (1:36:01.880)
Okay.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:36:02.880)
I mean, okay, this is the question about beauty.
Lex Fridman (1:36:08.160)
It's way too general.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:36:09.160)
It's very impossible.
Lex Fridman (1:36:10.160)
It's like asking, what's your favorite band?
Lex Fridman (1:36:12.240)
What's your favorite music band?
Lex Fridman (1:36:13.240)
Oh, I thought you meant wavelength band.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:36:15.040)
I was like, I definitely have favorite wavelength bands.
Lex Fridman (1:36:17.520)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (1:36:18.520)
Well, it's hard to narrow it down, huh?
Lex Fridman (1:36:21.680)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (1:36:22.680)
What do you use the most beautiful idea in science?
Lex Fridman (1:36:25.360)
It's not a dumb question.
Lex Fridman (1:36:27.160)
Do you want to try the question again proudly?
Lex Fridman (1:36:31.240)
Okay.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:36:32.760)
I have a really good question to ask you.
Lex Fridman (1:36:35.240)
Okay.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:36:36.240)
Don't oversell it.
Lex Fridman (1:36:37.240)
I've got an okay question to ask you, you know?
Lex Fridman (1:36:42.240)
What do you use the most beautiful idea in science, something you just find inspiring
Lex Fridman (1:36:49.760)
or just maybe the reason you got into science or the reason you think science is cool?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:37:00.000)
My favorite thing about science is kind of the connection between the scales.
Lex Fridman (1:37:05.480)
So when I was little and I wanted to know about space, I really felt that it would make
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:37:11.040)
me feel powerful to be able to predict the heavens.
Lex Fridman (1:37:15.040)
Something so much larger than myself that felt really powerful.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:37:19.520)
It was almost a selfish desire and that's what I wanted.
Lex Fridman (1:37:23.080)
There was some control to being able to know exactly what the sky would do.
Lex Fridman (1:37:29.560)
And then as I got older and I got more into astronomy and I didn't just want to know how
Lex Fridman (1:37:34.120)
the stars moved.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:37:35.120)
I wanted to know how the planets around them moved.
Lex Fridman (1:37:38.040)
And then as I got deeper into that field, I really didn't care that much about the planets.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:37:41.880)
I wanted to know about the atmospheres around the planets and then the molecules within
Lex Fridman (1:37:45.280)
those atmospheres and what that might mean.
Lex Fridman (1:37:48.480)
So I ended up shrinking my scale until it was literally the quantum scale.
Lex Fridman (1:37:53.720)
And now all my work, the majority of my work is on this insane quantum scale.
Lex Fridman (1:37:59.780)
And yet I'm using these literal tiny, tiny tools to try and answer the greatest questions
Lex Fridman (1:38:10.000)
that we've ever been able to ask.
Lex Fridman (1:38:12.980)
And this crossing of scales from the quantum to the astronomical, that's so cool, isn't
Lex Fridman (1:38:20.280)
it?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:38:21.280)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:38:22.280)
It spans the entirety, the tiny and the huge.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:38:24.920)
That's the cool thing about, I guess, being a quantum astrochemist is you're using the
Lex Fridman (1:38:30.120)
tools of the tiny to look at the heavenly bodies, the giant stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:38:35.520)
And the potential life out there that this is the thing that connects us, that you can't
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:38:41.040)
escape the rules of the quantum world and how universal they themselves are despite
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:38:45.740)
being probabilistic.
Lex Fridman (1:38:48.040)
And that makes me feel really pleased to be in science, but in a really humbling way.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:38:56.160)
It's no longer this thirst for power.
Lex Fridman (1:39:00.600)
I feel less special the more work I do, less exceptional the more work I do.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:39:05.560)
I feel like humans and the earth and our place in the universe is less and less exceptional.
Lex Fridman (1:39:11.200)
And yet I feel so much less lonely.
Lex Fridman (1:39:14.820)
And so it's been a really good trade off that I've lost power, but I've gained company.
Lex Fridman (1:39:19.680)
Wow.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:39:20.820)
That's a beautiful answer.
Lex Fridman (1:39:21.820)
I don't think there's a better way to actually end it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:39:23.680)
You're right.
Lex Fridman (1:39:24.680)
I asked a mediocre question and you came through.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:39:27.500)
You made the question good by a brilliant answer.
Lex Fridman (1:39:34.100)
You're the Michael Jordan and I'll be the Dennis Rodman.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:39:39.120)
I don't know enough about basketball.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:39:40.880)
I mean, literally you've reached the peak of my basketball knowledge because I know
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:39:44.280)
that those people are basketball pros, I believe, but only because I watch Space Jam, I think.
Lex Fridman (1:39:50.120)
Are there books or movies in your life?
Lex Fridman (1:39:53.680)
Long ago or recently, do you have any time for books and movies had an impact on you?
Lex Fridman (1:39:59.000)
What ideas did you take away?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:40:02.040)
I absolutely have time for books and movies.
Lex Fridman (1:40:04.200)
I try as best I can to not work very hard.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:40:08.880)
I mostly fail.
Lex Fridman (1:40:09.880)
I should point out.
Lex Fridman (1:40:11.320)
But I think I'm a better scientist when I don't work evenings and weekends.
Lex Fridman (1:40:18.000)
If I get four good hours in a day, I often don't.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:40:21.080)
I often get eight crappy hours, emails, meetings, bad code, data processing.
Lex Fridman (1:40:28.020)
But if I can get four high quality scientific hours, I just stop working for the day because
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:40:33.640)
I know it's diminishing returns after that.
Lex Fridman (1:40:35.840)
So I have a lot of time.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:40:37.400)
I try to make as much time as I can.
Lex Fridman (1:40:40.280)
Can you kind of dig into what it takes to be, one, productive, two, to be happy as a
Lex Fridman (1:40:50.560)
researcher?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:40:51.560)
Because I think it's too easy in that world because you have so many hats, you have to
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:40:58.280)
wear so many jobs, you have to be a mentor, a teacher, a head of a research group to research
Lex Fridman (1:41:05.000)
yourself.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:41:06.000)
You have to do service, all the kinds of stuff you're doing now with education and interviews.
Lex Fridman (1:41:15.400)
So as a public science, like being a public communicator, that's a job.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:41:22.480)
The whole thing.
Lex Fridman (1:41:23.480)
Pays very poorly.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:41:24.480)
I'll pay you in Bitcoin.
Lex Fridman (1:41:28.520)
Okay.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:41:29.520)
I'll take Bitcoin.
Lex Fridman (1:41:33.360)
So is there some advice you can give to the process of being productive and happy as a
Lex Fridman (1:41:41.800)
researcher?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:41:42.800)
I think, sadly, it's very hard to feel happy as a scientist if you're not productive.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:41:47.480)
It's a bit of a trap, but I certainly find it very difficult to feel happy when I'm not
Lex Fridman (1:41:53.000)
being productive.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:41:54.800)
It's become slightly better.
Lex Fridman (1:41:56.140)
If I know my students are being productive, I can be happy.
Lex Fridman (1:41:59.840)
But I think a lot of senior scientists, once they get into that mindset, they start thinking
Lex Fridman (1:42:05.600)
that their student science is theirs.
Lex Fridman (1:42:07.600)
And I think this happens a lot with senior scientists.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:42:10.840)
They have so many hats, as you mentioned, they have to do so much service and so much
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:42:14.680)
admin, that they have very little time for their own science.
Lex Fridman (1:42:18.900)
And so they end up feeling ownership over the junior people in their labs and their
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:42:24.000)
groups.
Lex Fridman (1:42:25.000)
And that's really heartbreaking.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:42:26.000)
I see it all the time.
Lex Fridman (1:42:28.940)
And that, I think I've escaped that trap.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:42:31.960)
I feel so happy, even when I'm not productive, when my students are productive.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:42:38.360)
I think that sensation I was describing earlier of they only need to be half as productive
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:42:44.160)
as me for me to feel like I've done my job for humanity.
Lex Fridman (1:42:50.640)
So that has been the dynamic I've had to worry about.
Lex Fridman (1:42:55.240)
But to be productive is not clear to me what you have to do.
Lex Fridman (1:42:58.400)
You have to not be miserable otherwise.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:42:59.720)
I find it extremely hard when I'm having conflicts with collaborators, for example, kind of very
Lex Fridman (1:43:06.640)
hard to enjoy the work we do.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:43:08.500)
Even if the work is this fantastical phosphine or things that I know I love, still very difficult.
Lex Fridman (1:43:16.040)
So I think choosing your collaborators based on how well you get along with them is a really
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:43:22.760)
sound scientific choice.
Lex Fridman (1:43:26.140)
Being a miserable collaborator ruins your whole life.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:43:29.560)
It's horrible.
Lex Fridman (1:43:30.560)
It makes you not want to do the science.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:43:32.240)
It probably makes you do clumsy science because you don't focus on it.
Lex Fridman (1:43:35.700)
You don't go over it several times.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:43:37.400)
You just want it to be over.
Lex Fridman (1:43:39.560)
And so I think in general, just not being a douchebag can get so much good science done.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:43:47.880)
Just find the good people in your community and collaborate with them.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:43:51.520)
Even if they're not as good scientists as others, you'll get better science out.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:43:55.040)
Yeah, don't be a douchebag yourself and surround yourself by other cool people.
Lex Fridman (1:43:59.520)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (1:44:00.520)
And then you'll get better science than if you would try to work with three geniuses
Lex Fridman (1:44:04.680)
who are just hell to be around.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:44:07.760)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:44:08.760)
I mean, there's parallel things like that.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:44:12.080)
I'm very fortunate now.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:44:14.720)
I was very fortunate at MIT to have friends and colleagues there that were incredible
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:44:18.920)
to work with.
Lex Fridman (1:44:19.920)
But I'm currently sort of, I'm doing a lot of fun stuff on the side, like this little
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:44:29.160)
podcast thing and I mentioned to you, I think, robotics related stuff.
Lex Fridman (1:44:35.360)
I was just at Boston Dynamics yesterday checking out their robots.
Lex Fridman (1:44:41.440)
And I'm currently, I guess, hiring people to help me with a very fun little project
Lex Fridman (1:44:46.320)
around those robots.
Lex Fridman (1:44:47.320)
Want to put an ad in?
Lex Fridman (1:44:48.320)
No.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:44:49.320)
I have more applications I can possibly deal with, there's thousands.
Lex Fridman (1:44:53.800)
So it's not an ad, it's the opposite.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:44:57.680)
We need to put an ad out for someone to help you go through the applications.
Lex Fridman (1:45:00.640)
Well, that too is already there.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:45:03.440)
Over 10,000 people apply for that.
Lex Fridman (1:45:04.840)
An infinite Master Yoshika doll of application management.
Lex Fridman (1:45:09.560)
But the point is, it's not exactly, the point is, like what I'm very distinctly aware of
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:45:16.800)
is life is short and productivity is not the right goal to optimize for, at least for me.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:45:26.440)
The right goal to optimize for is how happy you are to wake up in the day and to work
Lex Fridman (1:45:32.440)
with the people that you do.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:45:34.120)
Because the productivity will take care of itself.
Lex Fridman (1:45:36.360)
Agreed.
Lex Fridman (1:45:37.360)
And so like, it's so important to select the people well.
Lex Fridman (1:45:42.320)
And I think one of the challenges with academia, as opposed to sort of the thing I'm currently
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:45:46.520)
doing is, like, saying goodbye is sometimes a little bit tougher.
Lex Fridman (1:45:51.880)
Because your colleagues are there, I mean, their goodbye hurts.
Lex Fridman (1:45:58.400)
And then if you have to spend the rest, you know, for many years to come, still surrounded
Lex Fridman (1:46:02.200)
by them in the community, it's tougher.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:46:04.540)
It kind of adds, puts extra pressure to stay in that relationship, in that collaboration.
Lex Fridman (1:46:13.440)
And in some sense, that makes it much more difficult, but it's still worth it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:46:17.080)
It's still worth it to break ties if you don't, if you're not happy, if there's not that magic,
Lex Fridman (1:46:25.360)
that dance.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:46:26.360)
I talked to this guy named Daniel Kahneman.
Lex Fridman (1:46:30.800)
Oh, I know.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:46:32.000)
Danny Kahneman.
Lex Fridman (1:46:33.000)
Danny, yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:46:34.000)
Boy, did that guy make me realize, like, what a great collaborator is.
Lex Fridman (1:46:39.360)
Well, he had Tversky, right?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:46:41.720)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:46:42.720)
So they had, obviously, they had a really deep collaboration there, but, like, I collaborated
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:46:48.480)
with him on a conversation, like, just, like, talking about, I don't know what we're talking
Lex Fridman (1:46:53.160)
about.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:46:54.160)
I think cars, autonomous vehicles, but the brainstorming session, I'm like a nobody.
Lex Fridman (1:46:59.560)
And the fact that he would, with that childlike curiosity and that dance of thoughts and ideas
Lex Fridman (1:47:04.280)
and the push and pull and the, like, and the lack of ego, but then enough ego to have a
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:47:09.720)
little bit of a stubbornness over an idea and a little bit of humor and all those things,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:47:13.800)
it's like, holy shit, that person, also the ability to truly listen to another human,
Lex Fridman (1:47:19.440)
it's like, okay, that's what it takes to be a good collaborator.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:47:23.560)
It made me realize that I haven't been, I've been very fortunate to have cool people in
Lex Fridman (1:47:27.840)
my life, but there's, like, levels even to the cool.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:47:30.960)
Yeah, I don't think you can compete with Danny Kahneman on cool.
Lex Fridman (1:47:34.400)
He's just incredible.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:47:36.400)
Everybody was like, okay, I guess what I'm trying to say is that collaboration is an
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:47:41.400)
art form, but perhaps it's actually a skill, is allowing yourself to develop that skill
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:47:47.440)
because that's one of the fruitful skills.
Lex Fridman (1:47:50.160)
And praise it in students, you know, and I think it is something you can really improve
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:47:56.240)
on.
Lex Fridman (1:47:57.240)
I've become a better collaborator as the years have gone on.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:47:59.680)
I don't have some innate collaborative skills.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:48:03.240)
I think they're skills I've developed, and I think in science there's this really destructive
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:48:10.080)
notion of the lone wolf, the scientist who sees things where others don't, you know,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:48:15.000)
then that's really appealing and people really like either fulfilling that or pretending
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:48:19.120)
to be fulfilling that.
Lex Fridman (1:48:21.360)
And first of all, it's mostly a lie.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:48:25.480)
Any modern scientist, particularly in astronomy, which is so interdisciplinary, any modern scientist
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:48:30.640)
that's doing it on their own is doing a crappy job most likely because you need an independent
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:48:36.760)
set of eyes to help you do things.
Lex Fridman (1:48:39.000)
You need experts in the sub fields that you're working on to check your work.
Lex Fridman (1:48:43.960)
But most importantly, it's just a bad idea.
Lex Fridman (1:48:49.840)
It doesn't lead to good science and it leaves you miserable.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:48:54.120)
I was recently, I had some work that I was avoiding and I thought maybe I should pursue
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:48:58.920)
the scientific project because I don't care enough about the outcome and it's going to
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:49:03.200)
be a lot of hard work.
Lex Fridman (1:49:04.200)
And I was trying to balance these two things to be really difficult.
Lex Fridman (1:49:07.720)
And the outcome is that maybe 10 people will cite me in the next decade because it's not,
Lex Fridman (1:49:12.400)
no one's asking for this question to be answered.
Lex Fridman (1:49:16.120)
And then I found myself working with this collaborator, Jason Dittman.
Lex Fridman (1:49:21.000)
And I spent a whole afternoon hours with him working on this and time flew by and I just
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:49:27.720)
felt taller and like I could breathe better.
Lex Fridman (1:49:31.960)
I was happier, I was a better person when it was done.
Lex Fridman (1:49:35.480)
And that's because he's a great collaborator.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:49:38.840)
He's just a wonderful person that brings out joy out of science that you're doing with
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:49:43.560)
him.
Lex Fridman (1:49:45.400)
And that's really the trick.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:49:46.920)
You find the people that make you feel that way about the science you're doing and you
Lex Fridman (1:49:52.240)
stop worrying about being the lone wolf.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:49:55.720)
That's just a terrible dream that will leave you miserable and your science will be shit.
Lex Fridman (1:50:01.320)
And since I'm Russian, just murder anybody who doesn't fall into that beautiful collaborative
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:50:08.120)
relationship.
Lex Fridman (1:50:10.360)
We were talking about books.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:50:11.920)
Books, yes.
Lex Fridman (1:50:13.420)
Is there books, movies?
Lex Fridman (1:50:14.420)
Why was I talking about my productivity?
Lex Fridman (1:50:16.360)
Oh, you said you maybe don't have time for books and movies.
Lex Fridman (1:50:18.920)
And you said you must make time for books and movies.
Lex Fridman (1:50:22.800)
Make time to not work.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:50:24.620)
Make time to not work whatever that looks like to you.
Lex Fridman (1:50:28.160)
But there's plenty.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:50:31.320)
When I was younger, I found a lot of my scientific fulfillment in books and movies.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:50:36.940)
Now as I got older, I have plenty of that in my work and I try to read outside my field.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:50:43.680)
I read about Danny Kahneman's work instead.
Lex Fridman (1:50:47.620)
But when I was little, it was Contact, the Carl Sagan book.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:50:52.080)
I really thought I was just like Ellie and I was going to become Ellie.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:50:59.960)
I really resonated with me, that character and the notions of life and space and the
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:51:06.600)
universe.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:51:07.600)
Even the idea of then the movie came out and I got to put Jodie Foster in that, which helped.
Lex Fridman (1:51:17.440)
But even the notion of if it is just us, what an awful waste of space, I find extremely
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:51:23.740)
useful as a concept to think maybe we are special, but that would suck is a really nice
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:51:30.280)
way of thinking of the search for life, that it's much better to not be special and have
Lex Fridman (1:51:35.720)
company.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:51:36.720)
I got that from Carl Sagan.
Lex Fridman (1:51:39.440)
So that's where I always recommend.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:51:42.080)
Let me ask one other ridiculous question.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:51:45.880)
We talked about the death and life cycle that is ever present in the universe until it's
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:51:53.120)
not, until it's supermassive and little black holes too at the end of the universe.
Lex Fridman (1:51:58.760)
What do you think is the why, the meaning of it all?
Lex Fridman (1:52:02.760)
What do you think is the meaning of life here on Earth and the meaning of that life that
Lex Fridman (1:52:09.840)
you look for, whether it's on Venus or other exoplanets?
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:52:14.280)
I think there's none.
Lex Fridman (1:52:16.000)
I find enormous relief in the absence of meaning.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:52:19.160)
I think chasing for meaning is a human desire that the universe doesn't give two shits about.
Lex Fridman (1:52:29.240)
But you still enjoy...
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:52:30.240)
I enjoy finding meaning in my life.
Lex Fridman (1:52:33.320)
I enjoy finding where the morality lies.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:52:38.400)
I enjoy the complication of that desire and I feel that is deeply human, but I don't feel
Lex Fridman (1:52:47.800)
that it's universal.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:52:49.760)
It's somehow absolute.
Lex Fridman (1:52:50.760)
Like we conjure it up.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:52:54.080)
We bring it to life through our own minds, but it's not any kind of fundamental way real.
Lex Fridman (1:52:59.880)
No.
Lex Fridman (1:53:01.240)
And the same way the sun is not to be blamed for destroying its own planets.
Lex Fridman (1:53:07.760)
The universe doesn't care because it has no meaning.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:53:12.600)
It owes us nothing.
Lex Fridman (1:53:14.400)
And looking for meaning in the universe is demanding answers.
Lex Fridman (1:53:18.080)
Who are we?
Lex Fridman (1:53:19.080)
We're nothing.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:53:20.080)
We don't get to demand anything and that includes meaning.
Lex Fridman (1:53:23.280)
And I find it very reassuring because once there is no meaning, I don't have to find
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:53:28.560)
it.
Lex Fridman (1:53:30.800)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:53:34.320)
Once there's no meaning, it's a kind of freedom in a way.
Lex Fridman (1:53:38.240)
You sound a bit like...
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:53:41.240)
I'm happy about it.
Lex Fridman (1:53:42.240)
This isn't a depressing outlook as far as I'm concerned.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:53:44.320)
It's happiness.
Lex Fridman (1:53:45.320)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:53:46.320)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:53:47.320)
So, I mean, there's a...
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:53:48.320)
I don't know if you know who Sam Harris is, but he, despite the pushbacks from the entirety
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:53:53.440)
of the world, really argues hard that free will is an illusion, that the deterministic
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:54:01.880)
universe and it's all already been predetermined and he's okay with it.
Lex Fridman (1:54:06.880)
And he's happy with it, that he's distinctly aware of it.
Lex Fridman (1:54:11.840)
And that's okay.
Lex Fridman (1:54:12.840)
The quantum world will disagree with him on the deterministic nature of nature.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:54:16.480)
Well, he's not saying it's deterministic, but he's saying that the randomness doesn't
Lex Fridman (1:54:22.540)
help either.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:54:24.880)
Randomness does not help in the experience of feeling like you're the decider of your
Lex Fridman (1:54:31.280)
own actions.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:54:33.100)
That he kind of is okay with being a leaf flowing on the river, or being the river,
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:54:40.640)
as opposed to having or being like a fish or something that can decide its swimming
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:54:45.040)
direction.
Lex Fridman (1:54:46.040)
He's okay just embracing the flow of life.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:54:48.600)
I mean, in that same way, it kind of sounds like your conception of meaning.
Lex Fridman (1:54:53.360)
I mean, it just is.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:54:56.920)
The universe doesn't care.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:54:58.960)
It just is what it is and we experience certain things and some feel good and some don't.
Lex Fridman (1:55:04.720)
And that's life.
Lex Fridman (1:55:08.400)
But I don't feel like that about life.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:55:10.040)
I think life does have meaning and it's laudable to look for that meaning in life.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:55:16.040)
I just don't think you can apply that beyond life and certainly not beyond earth.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:55:22.080)
That this notion of meaning is a human construct and so it only applies within us and the other
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:55:31.440)
life forms and planet types that suffer from our intrusions or rejoice from our interactions.
Lex Fridman (1:55:40.640)
But this meaning is ours to do as we please.
Lex Fridman (1:55:44.820)
We created it, we've created a need for it, and so that's our problem to solve.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:55:49.520)
I don't apply it beyond us.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:55:51.200)
I think we as humans have a lot of responsibilities, but they're moral responsibilities.
Lex Fridman (1:55:55.640)
And a lot of those responsibilities are much more easily fulfilled if you find meaning
Lex Fridman (1:55:59.800)
in them.
Lex Fridman (1:56:00.840)
So I think there's value to meaning, whether it's real or not.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:56:04.640)
I just think we gain nothing from trying to anthropomorphize the entire universe.
Lex Fridman (1:56:11.000)
And also that's the height of hubris.
Lex Fridman (1:56:13.800)
That's not for us to do.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:56:15.360)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (1:56:16.360)
It also could be just like duality and quantum mechanics.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:56:19.640)
It could be both that there is meaning and that there isn't.
Lex Fridman (1:56:25.600)
And we're somehow depending on the observer, depending on the perspective you take on the
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:56:32.440)
thing.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:56:33.440)
I mean, even on earth that's true, but whether things have meaning or not depends a lot on
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:56:38.640)
who's looking.
Lex Fridman (1:56:41.640)
Whether it's us humans, the aliens or the giraffes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:56:45.440)
Clara, this was an incredible conversation.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:56:49.800)
I mean, I learned so much, but I also am just inspired by the passion you have in not finding
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:56:57.160)
meaning in the universe.
Lex Fridman (1:57:00.040)
I'm very passionate about not finding meaning in the universe.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:57:04.240)
You're the most inspiring nihilist I've ever met.
Lex Fridman (1:57:06.640)
I'm just kidding.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:57:08.640)
You are truly an inspiring communicator of everything from phosphine to life to quantum
Lex Fridman (1:57:17.480)
astrochemistry.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:57:18.480)
I can't wait to see what other cool things you do in your career, in your scientific
Lex Fridman (1:57:24.440)
life.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:57:25.440)
Thank you so much for wasting your valuable time with me today.
Lex Fridman (1:57:28.120)
I really appreciate it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:57:30.120)
It was my pleasure.
Lex Fridman (1:57:31.120)
I'd already got my four hours of productivity before I got here.
Lex Fridman (1:57:33.880)
And so it's not a waste.
Lex Fridman (1:57:35.240)
It's all downhill from there.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:57:37.320)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman (1:57:38.320)
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Clara Sousa Silva.
Lex Fridman (1:57:41.320)
And thank you to Onnit, Grammarly, Blinkist, and Indeed.
Lex Fridman (1:57:46.600)
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
Lex Fridman (1:57:50.440)
And now let me leave you with some words from Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:57:54.160)
The earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever.
Clara Sousa-Silva (1:58:00.360)
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman (20:00.380)
It's really difficult.
Clara Sousa-Silva (20:01.380)
If I'm not mistaken, even the scent of truffles, obviously a billion dollar industry, huge
Lex Fridman (20:08.740)
deal.
Clara Sousa-Silva (20:09.740)
Until quite recently, it wasn't known exactly how those scents, those molecules that create
Lex Fridman (20:14.340)
this incredible smell were produced.
Clara Sousa-Silva (20:16.500)
This is a billion dollar industry.
Lex Fridman (20:17.980)
As you can imagine, there is no such pressure.
Clara Sousa-Silva (20:21.060)
There's no phosphine lobby or anything that would push for this research, but I hope someone
Lex Fridman (20:26.420)
picks it up and does it.
Lex Fridman (20:29.100)
And it isn't crazy because we know that phosphine is really hard to make.
Lex Fridman (20:33.620)
We know it's really hard for it to happen accidentally.
Clara Sousa-Silva (20:36.620)
Even lightning and volcanoes that can produce small amounts of phosphine, it's extremely
Lex Fridman (20:41.920)
difficult for even these extreme processes to make it.
Lex Fridman (20:44.740)
So it's not really surprising that only life can do it because life is willing to make
Lex Fridman (20:49.260)
things at a cost.
Lex Fridman (20:52.180)
So maybe on the topic of phosphine, what, again, you've gotten yourself into trouble.
Lex Fridman (20:58.780)
I'm going to ask you all these high level poetic questions.
Clara Sousa-Silva (21:01.300)
I apologize.
Lex Fridman (21:02.300)
No, I would love it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (21:04.700)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (21:05.700)
When did you first fall in love with phosphine?
Clara Sousa-Silva (21:09.980)
It wasn't love at first sight.
Lex Fridman (21:11.500)
It was somewhere between a long relationship and Stockholm syndrome.
Clara Sousa-Silva (21:20.460)
When I first started my PhD, I knew I wanted to learn about molecular spectra and how to
Lex Fridman (21:25.500)
simulate it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (21:26.500)
I thought it was really outrageous that we as a species couldn't detect molecules remotely.
Clara Sousa-Silva (21:32.220)
We didn't have this perfect catalog ready of the molecular fingerprint of every molecule
Clara Sousa-Silva (21:36.660)
we may want to find in the universe.
Lex Fridman (21:39.000)
And something as basic as phosphine, the fact that we didn't really know how it interacted
Clara Sousa-Silva (21:43.580)
with light and so we couldn't detect it properly in the galaxy, I was so indignant.
Lex Fridman (21:50.100)
And so initially I just started working on phosphine because people hadn't before.
Lex Fridman (21:55.900)
And I thought we should know what phosphine looks like and that was it.
Lex Fridman (22:01.260)
And then I read every paper that's ever been published about phosphine.
Clara Sousa-Silva (22:04.340)
It was quite easy because there aren't that many.
Lex Fridman (22:07.780)
And that's when I started learning about where we had already found it in the universe and
Lex Fridman (22:13.300)
what it meant.
Lex Fridman (22:15.380)
I started finding out quite how little we know about it and why.
Lex Fridman (22:20.380)
And it was only when I joined MIT and I started talking to biochemists that it became clear
Lex Fridman (22:27.820)
that phosphine wasn't just weird and special and understudied and disgusting.
Clara Sousa-Silva (22:33.480)
It was all these things for oxygen loving life.
Lex Fridman (22:37.020)
And it was the anaerobic world that would welcome phosphine and that's when the idea
Clara Sousa-Silva (22:42.780)
of looking for it on other planets became crystallized.
Clara Sousa-Silva (22:46.540)
Because oxygen is very powerful and very important on Earth but that's not necessarily going
Clara Sousa-Silva (22:52.340)
to be the case on other exoplanets.
Lex Fridman (22:54.360)
Most planets are oxygen poor, overwhelmingly most planets are oxygen poor.
Lex Fridman (22:59.820)
And so finding the sign of life that would be welcomed by everything that would live
Lex Fridman (23:06.180)
without oxygen on Earth seemed so cool.
Lex Fridman (23:12.700)
But ultimately the project at first was born out of the idea that you want to find that
Lex Fridman (23:16.820)
molecular fingerprint of a molecule.
Lex Fridman (23:22.460)
And this is just one example.
Lex Fridman (23:24.860)
And that's connected to then looking for that fingerprint elsewhere in a remote way.
Lex Fridman (23:33.620)
And obviously that then at that time where exoplanets already, when you were doing your
Lex Fridman (23:37.780)
PhD, and by the way you should say your PhD thesis was on phosphine.
Clara Sousa-Silva (23:41.180)
It was all on phosphine, 100% on phosphine with a little bit of ammonia.
Lex Fridman (23:45.700)
I have a chapter that I did where I talked about phosphine and ammonia.
Lex Fridman (23:51.300)
But no, phosphine was very much my thesis.
Lex Fridman (23:55.500)
But at that time when you're writing it there's already a sense that exoplanets are out there
Lex Fridman (24:01.020)
and we might be able to be looking for biosignatures on those exoplanets?
Lex Fridman (24:08.420)
Pretty much.
Clara Sousa-Silva (24:09.420)
I did my PhD in 2015.
Lex Fridman (24:11.580)
We found the first exoplanets in the kind of mid to late 90s.
Lex Fridman (24:15.780)
So exoplanets were known.
Clara Sousa-Silva (24:17.620)
It was known that some had atmospheres and from there it's not a big jump to think, well,
Clara Sousa-Silva (24:22.380)
if some have atmospheres, some of those might be habitable and some of those may be inhabited.
Lex Fridman (24:30.180)
So how do you detect, you started to talk about it, but can we linger on it?
Lex Fridman (24:35.100)
How do you detect phosphine on a faraway thing, rocky thing, rocky planet?
Lex Fridman (24:43.000)
What is spectroscopy?
Lex Fridman (24:45.880)
What is this molecular fingerprint?
Lex Fridman (24:47.820)
What does it look like?
Lex Fridman (24:49.420)
You've kind of mentioned the wave, but what are we supposed to think about?
Lex Fridman (24:52.980)
What are the tools?
Lex Fridman (24:53.980)
What are the uncertainties?
Lex Fridman (24:55.860)
All those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (24:57.380)
So the path can go this way.
Lex Fridman (24:59.780)
You've got light, kind of pure light.
Clara Sousa-Silva (25:03.840)
You can crack that light open with a prism or a spectroscope or water and make a rainbow.
Clara Sousa-Silva (25:10.620)
That rainbow is all the colors and all the invisible colors, the ultraviolet, the infrared.
Lex Fridman (25:17.460)
And if that light was truly pure, you could consider that rainbow to just cover continuously
Lex Fridman (25:22.800)
all of these colors.
Lex Fridman (25:24.820)
But if that light goes through a gas, we may not see that gas.
Clara Sousa-Silva (25:28.140)
We certainly cannot see the molecules within that gas, but those molecules will steal,
Clara Sousa-Silva (25:33.180)
absorb some of that light, some, but not all.
Lex Fridman (25:38.300)
Each molecule absorbs only very specific colors of that rainbow.
Lex Fridman (25:42.840)
And so if you know, for example, that shade of green can only be absorbed by methane,
Lex Fridman (25:48.420)
then you can watch.
Clara Sousa-Silva (25:49.420)
As a planet passes in front of a star, the planet's too far away, you can't see it.
Lex Fridman (25:54.400)
And it has an atmosphere.
Clara Sousa-Silva (25:55.400)
That atmosphere is far too small, you definitely can't see it.
Lex Fridman (25:58.900)
But the sunlight will go through that atmosphere.
Lex Fridman (26:01.280)
And if that atmosphere is methane, then on the other side, that shade of blue, I can't
Clara Sousa-Silva (26:06.340)
remember if I said blue or green, that color will be missing because methane took it.
Lex Fridman (26:11.960)
And so with phosphine, it's the same thing.
Clara Sousa-Silva (26:14.540)
It has specific colors, 16.8 billion colors that it absorbs it and nothing else does.
Lex Fridman (26:22.020)
And so if you can find them and notice them missing from the light of a star that went
Clara Sousa-Silva (26:28.060)
through a planet's atmosphere, then you'll know that atmosphere contains the molecule.
Lex Fridman (26:33.260)
How cool is that?
Lex Fridman (26:34.260)
That's incredible.
Lex Fridman (26:35.260)
So you can have this fingerprint within the space of colors and there's a lot of molecules.
Lex Fridman (26:40.820)
And I mean, I wonder, that's a question of like how much overlap there is.
Lex Fridman (26:45.060)
How close can you get to the actual fingerprint?
Lex Fridman (26:48.300)
Like can phosphine unlock the iPhone with its lights on?
Clara Sousa-Silva (26:52.220)
You said 16.8 billion, so presumably this rainbow is discretized into little segments
Lex Fridman (27:00.020)
somehow.
Clara Sousa-Silva (27:01.020)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (27:02.020)
How many total are there?
Lex Fridman (27:03.980)
How a lot is 16.8 billion?
Lex Fridman (27:06.700)
It's a lot.
Clara Sousa-Silva (27:07.940)
We don't have the instruments to break these, break any light into this many tiny segments.
Lex Fridman (27:14.340)
And so with the instruments we do have, there's huge amounts of overlap.
Clara Sousa-Silva (27:19.060)
As an example, a lot of the ways it's detectable is because the carbon and the hydrogens, they
Lex Fridman (27:27.660)
vibrate with one another, they move, they interact.
Lex Fridman (27:30.700)
But every other hydrocarbon, acetylene, isoprene has carbon and hydrogens also vibrating and
Lex Fridman (27:38.460)
rotating.
Lex Fridman (27:39.460)
And so it's actually very hard to tell them apart at low resolutions and our instruments
Lex Fridman (27:44.540)
can't really cope with distinguishing between molecules particularly well.
Lex Fridman (27:50.260)
But in an ideal world, if we had infinite resolution, then yes, every molecule's spectral
Lex Fridman (27:55.460)
features will be unique.
Clara Sousa-Silva (27:57.580)
Yeah, like almost too unique, like it would be too trivial.
Lex Fridman (28:01.780)
At the quantum level, they're unique.
Clara Sousa-Silva (28:04.220)
At our level, there's huge overlap.
Lex Fridman (28:07.100)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (28:08.100)
So you can start to then try to disambiguate the fact that certain colors are missing,
Lex Fridman (28:16.860)
what does that mean?
Lex Fridman (28:18.080)
And hopefully they're missing in a certain kind of pattern where you can say with some
Lex Fridman (28:21.740)
kind of probability, there's this gas, not this gas.
Lex Fridman (28:24.460)
So you're solving that gaseous puzzle.
Lex Fridman (28:28.460)
I got it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (28:29.460)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (28:30.460)
We can go back to Venus actually and show that.
Lex Fridman (28:31.720)
So with this, I mentioned those two molecules that could be responsible for that signal,
Lex Fridman (28:36.460)
the resolution that we have.
Clara Sousa-Silva (28:37.780)
It was phosphine and SO2, sulfur dioxide.
Lex Fridman (28:43.180)
And that resolution could really be one of the other, but in the same bandwidth, so in
Clara Sousa-Silva (28:47.780)
the kind of the same observations, there was another region where phosphine does not absorb,
Lex Fridman (28:52.440)
we know that, but SO2 does.
Lex Fridman (28:55.180)
So we just went and checked and there was no signal.
Lex Fridman (28:58.660)
So we thought, oh, then it must be phosphine.
Lex Fridman (29:01.980)
And then we submitted the paper.
Lex Fridman (29:05.620)
The rest is history.
Clara Sousa-Silva (29:06.620)
I got it.
Lex Fridman (29:07.620)
Well, yeah, that's beautifully told.
Clara Sousa-Silva (29:13.220)
Is there, so the telescopes we're talking about are sitting on earth.
Lex Fridman (29:18.180)
What can it help solving this fingerprint, molecular fingerprint problem if we do a flyby?
Clara Sousa-Silva (29:26.260)
Does it help if you get closer and closer or are telescopes pretty damn good for this
Lex Fridman (29:31.760)
kind of puzzle solving?
Clara Sousa-Silva (29:34.340)
Telescopes are pretty good, but the earth's atmosphere is a pain.
Clara Sousa-Silva (29:37.780)
I mean, I'm very thankful for it, but it does interrupt a lot of measurements and a lot
Clara Sousa-Silva (29:43.540)
of regions where phosphine would be active, they are not available.
Lex Fridman (29:47.260)
The earth is not transparent in those wavelengths.
Lex Fridman (29:52.300)
So being above the atmosphere would make a huge difference.
Clara Sousa-Silva (29:55.380)
Then proximity matters a lot less, but just escaping the earth's atmosphere would be wonderful.
Lex Fridman (30:00.580)
But then it's really hard to stay very stable and if there is phosphine on Venus, there's
Lex Fridman (30:06.220)
very little of it in the clouds.
Lex Fridman (30:08.700)
And so the signal is very weak and the telescopes we can use on earth are much bigger and much
Lex Fridman (30:15.580)
more stable.
Lex Fridman (30:16.740)
So it's a bit of a trade off.
Lex Fridman (30:18.500)
So is it, are you comfortable with this kind of remote observation?
Clara Sousa-Silva (30:24.620)
Is it at all helpful to strive for going over to Venus and like grabbing a scoop of the
Lex Fridman (30:32.820)
atmosphere or is remote observation really a powerful tool for this kind of job?
Clara Sousa-Silva (30:39.260)
Like the scoop is not necessary.
Lex Fridman (30:41.900)
Well a lot of people want to scoop, I get it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (30:44.820)
I get it completely.
Lex Fridman (30:45.820)
That's my natural inclination, yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (30:47.380)
I don't want to scoop specifically because if it is life, I want to know everything I
Lex Fridman (30:51.860)
can remotely before I interfere.
Lex Fridman (30:55.660)
So that's my, I've got ethical reasons against the scoop more than engineering reasons against
Lex Fridman (30:59.660)
the scoop.
Lex Fridman (31:00.660)
But I have some engineering reasons against the scoop.
Clara Sousa-Silva (31:03.380)
Scoop is not a technical term, but I feel like now it's too late to take it back.
Clara Sousa-Silva (31:10.000)
We don't understand the clouds well enough to plan the scoop very well.
Lex Fridman (31:14.380)
Because it's not that saturated, like there's not that much of it present.
Clara Sousa-Silva (31:18.900)
No, and the place is nasty.
Clara Sousa-Silva (31:21.780)
You know, it's not going to be easy to build something that can do the task reliably and
Clara Sousa-Silva (31:28.220)
can be trusted, the measurements can be trusted and then pass that message on.
Lex Fridman (31:33.220)
So actually I'm for an orbiter.
Clara Sousa-Silva (31:35.500)
I think we should have orbiters around every solar system body whose job is just to learn
Lex Fridman (31:40.420)
about these places.
Clara Sousa-Silva (31:42.180)
I'm disappointed we haven't already got an orbiter around every single one of them.
Lex Fridman (31:47.100)
A small, it can be a small satellite.
Lex Fridman (31:49.420)
Getting data, figuring out, you know, how do the clouds move?
Lex Fridman (31:52.220)
What's in them?
Lex Fridman (31:53.300)
How often is there lightning and volcanic activity?
Lex Fridman (31:56.220)
Where's the topography?
Lex Fridman (31:57.220)
Is it changing?
Lex Fridman (31:58.980)
Is there a biosphere actively doing things?
Clara Sousa-Silva (32:02.020)
We should be monitoring this from afar.
Lex Fridman (32:05.020)
And so I'm for over the atmosphere, hopefully around Venus, that would be, that would be
Clara Sousa-Silva (32:11.500)
my choice.
Lex Fridman (32:12.500)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (32:13.500)
So now recently Venus is all exciting about a phosphine and everything.
Clara Sousa-Silva (32:19.260)
Is there other stuff maybe before we were looking at Venus or now looking out into other
Lex Fridman (32:25.260)
solar systems?
Clara Sousa-Silva (32:26.980)
Is there other promising exoplanets or other planets within the solar system that might
Clara Sousa-Silva (32:32.900)
have phosphine or might have other strong biosignatures that we should be looking for
Lex Fridman (32:40.700)
like phosphine?
Clara Sousa-Silva (32:41.700)
There's a few, but outside the solar system, all are kind of promising candidates.
Lex Fridman (32:48.380)
We know so little about them.
Clara Sousa-Silva (32:49.940)
For most of them, we barely know their density.
Clara Sousa-Silva (32:53.880)
Most of them, we don't even know if they have an atmosphere, nevermind what that atmosphere
Clara Sousa-Silva (32:57.900)
might contain.
Lex Fridman (32:59.260)
So we're still very much at the stage where we have detected promising planets, but they're
Clara Sousa-Silva (33:03.960)
promising in that they're about the right size, about the right density.
Clara Sousa-Silva (33:08.700)
They could have an atmosphere and they're about the right distance from their host star.
Lex Fridman (33:13.180)
But that's really all we know.
Lex Fridman (33:15.180)
Near future telescopes will tell us much more, but for now we're just guessing.
Lex Fridman (33:20.780)
So you said near future, so there's hope that there'll be telescopes that can see that far
Lex Fridman (33:25.660)
enough to determine if there's an atmosphere and perhaps even the contents of that atmosphere?
Clara Sousa-Silva (33:31.460)
Absolutely.
Clara Sousa-Silva (33:32.460)
JWST, launching later this year, will be able to get a very rough sense of the main atmospheric
Clara Sousa-Silva (33:39.380)
constituents of planets that could potentially be habitable.
Lex Fridman (33:44.380)
And that's this year.
Lex Fridman (33:46.060)
What's the name?
Lex Fridman (33:47.060)
JWST, the James Webb Space Telescope.
Clara Sousa-Silva (33:49.660)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (33:50.660)
And that's going to be out in space, past the atmosphere.
Clara Sousa-Silva (33:53.060)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (33:54.060)
Is there something interesting to be said about the engineering aspect of the telescope?
Clara Sousa-Silva (33:57.300)
I mean, it's an incredible beast, but it's a beast of many burdens.
Lex Fridman (34:02.940)
So it's going to do, it's going to.
Clara Sousa-Silva (34:05.580)
See, you are a poet.
Lex Fridman (34:07.300)
You are, yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (34:08.720)
I love it.
Lex Fridman (34:09.720)
This is very eloquent.
Clara Sousa-Silva (34:10.720)
You're speaking to the audience, which I appreciate.
Lex Fridman (34:15.300)
So yeah, so it's a giant engineering project and is it orbiting something, do you know?
Lex Fridman (34:20.700)
So it's going to be above the atmosphere and it will be doing lots of different astrophysics.
Lex Fridman (34:26.220)
And so some of its time will be dedicated to exoplanets, but there's an entire astronomy
Clara Sousa-Silva (34:33.180)
field fighting for time before the cryogenic lifetime of the instrument.
Lex Fridman (34:40.340)
And so when I was looking for the possibility of finding phosphine on distant exoplanets,
Clara Sousa-Silva (34:45.980)
I used JWST as a way of checking with this instrument that we will launch later this
Lex Fridman (34:52.500)
year, could we detect phosphine on an oxygen poor planet?
Lex Fridman (34:56.740)
And there I put very much a hard stop where some of my simulation said, yes, you can totally
Lex Fridman (35:02.140)
do it, but it will take a little under the cryogenic lifetime of this machine.
Lex Fridman (35:07.020)
So then I had to go, well, that's not going to, no one's going to dedicate all of JWST
Lex Fridman (35:11.960)
to look for my molecule that no one cared about.
Lex Fridman (35:15.420)
So we're very much at that edge, but there'll be many other telescopes in the coming decades
Clara Sousa-Silva (35:21.200)
that will be able to tell us quite a lot about the atmospheres of potentially habitable planets.
Lex Fridman (35:26.060)
So you mentioned simulation.
Lex Fridman (35:28.400)
This is super interesting to me.
Lex Fridman (35:30.220)
And this perhaps could be a super dumb question, but I think I haven't been able to, I haven't
Lex Fridman (35:36.860)
been able to prove you wrong on that one.
Clara Sousa-Silva (35:38.940)
You simulate molecules to understand how they look from a distance is what I understand.
Lex Fridman (35:43.660)
Like what does that simulation look like?
Lex Fridman (35:46.740)
So it's talking about which colors that the rainbow will be missing.
Lex Fridman (35:52.160)
Is that the goal of the simulation?
Clara Sousa-Silva (35:54.740)
That's the goal, but it's really just a very, very nasty Schrodinger's equation.
Lex Fridman (35:59.620)
So it's a quantum simulation.
Clara Sousa-Silva (36:01.100)
Oh, so it's simulating at the quantum level.
Lex Fridman (36:03.780)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (36:04.780)
So I'm a quantum astrochemist.
Lex Fridman (36:05.780)
Hi, I'm Clara.
Clara Sousa-Silva (36:07.180)
I'm a quantum astrochemist.
Lex Fridman (36:08.180)
That's how we should have started this conversation.
Lex Fridman (36:10.300)
Can you describe the three components of that quantum astro and chemist and how they interplay
Lex Fridman (36:17.340)
together?
Lex Fridman (36:18.920)
So I study the quantum behavior of molecules, hence the quantum and the chemist specifically
Lex Fridman (36:26.060)
so I can detect them in space, hence the astro.
Lex Fridman (36:31.120)
So what I do is I figure out the probability of a molecule being in a particular state.
Clara Sousa-Silva (36:38.620)
There's no deterministic nature to the work I do, so it's every transition is just a likelihood.
Lex Fridman (36:45.220)
But if you get a population of that molecule, it will always happen.
Lex Fridman (36:50.640)
And so this is all at the quantum level.
Clara Sousa-Silva (36:52.460)
It's a Schrodinger equation on, I think, 27 dimensions.
Lex Fridman (36:55.860)
I don't remember it by heart.
Lex Fridman (36:57.880)
And what this means is I'm solving these giant quantum matrices.
Lex Fridman (37:03.660)
And that's why you need a lot of computer power, giant computers, to diagonalize these
Clara Sousa-Silva (37:09.060)
enormous matrices, each of whom describes a single vibrational behavior of a molecule.
Lex Fridman (37:17.440)
So I think phosphine has 17.5 million possible states it can exist in.
Lex Fridman (37:26.120)
And transitions can occur between pairs of these states, and there's a certain likelihood
Lex Fridman (37:31.160)
that they'll happen.
Clara Sousa-Silva (37:32.160)
This is the quantum world.
Lex Fridman (37:33.160)
Nothing is deterministic.
Clara Sousa-Silva (37:34.160)
There's just a likelihood that it will jump from one state to another.
Lex Fridman (37:38.560)
And these jumps, they're transitions, and there's 16.8 billion of them.
Clara Sousa-Silva (37:44.220)
When energy is absorbed, that corresponds to this transition, we see it in the spectrum.
Lex Fridman (37:48.980)
This is more quantum chemistry than you had asked for.
Clara Sousa-Silva (37:50.700)
I'm sorry.
Lex Fridman (37:51.700)
No, no.
Clara Sousa-Silva (37:52.700)
I'm sorry.
Lex Fridman (37:53.700)
Brain's broken.
Lex Fridman (37:54.700)
So when the transitions happen between the different states, somehow the energy maps
Lex Fridman (37:59.840)
the spectrum.
Clara Sousa-Silva (38:00.840)
Exactly.
Clara Sousa-Silva (38:01.840)
Energy corresponds to a frequency, and a frequency corresponds to a wavelength, which corresponds
Clara Sousa-Silva (38:06.760)
to a color.
Lex Fridman (38:08.180)
So there's some probability assigned to each color then?
Clara Sousa-Silva (38:11.800)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (38:12.800)
And that probability determines how intense that transition will be, how strong.
Lex Fridman (38:17.060)
And so you run this kind of simulation for particular, so that's 17.5 squared or something
Lex Fridman (38:23.280)
like that.
Lex Fridman (38:24.280)
So 15.5 million energies, each one of whom involves diagonalizing a giant matrix with
Lex Fridman (38:30.600)
a supercomputer.
Clara Sousa-Silva (38:31.600)
I wonder what the most efficient algorithm for diagonalization is, but there's some kind
Lex Fridman (38:36.960)
of...
Clara Sousa-Silva (38:37.960)
There's many.
Lex Fridman (38:38.960)
Depends on kind of the shape of the matrix.
Lex Fridman (38:41.840)
So they're not random matrices.
Lex Fridman (38:43.600)
So some are more diagonal than others, and so some need more treatment than others.
Clara Sousa-Silva (38:48.580)
Most of the work ends up going in describing the system, this quantum system in different
Clara Sousa-Silva (38:52.960)
ways until you have a matrix that is close to being diagonal, and then it's much easier
Clara Sousa-Silva (38:57.560)
to clean it up.
Lex Fridman (38:59.480)
So how hard is this puzzle?
Lex Fridman (39:03.840)
So you're solving this puzzle for phosphine, right?
Lex Fridman (39:08.400)
Is this...
Lex Fridman (39:09.400)
Are we supposed to solve this puzzle for every single molecule?
Lex Fridman (39:12.240)
Exactly.
Clara Sousa-Silva (39:13.240)
Oh boy.
Clara Sousa-Silva (39:14.240)
Yes, I calculated if I did the work I did for phosphine, again, for all the molecules
Clara Sousa-Silva (39:20.320)
for which we don't have spectra, for which we don't have a fingerprint, it would take
Lex Fridman (39:25.040)
me 62,000 years, a little over.
Clara Sousa-Silva (39:28.560)
62,000 years.
Lex Fridman (39:30.080)
What time flies when you're having fun?
Clara Sousa-Silva (39:31.960)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (39:32.960)
But you write that there are about 16,000 molecules we care about when looking for a
Clara Sousa-Silva (39:38.320)
new Earth or when we try to detect alien biosignatures.
Clara Sousa-Silva (39:43.040)
If we want to detect any molecules from here, we need to know their spectra, and we currently
Clara Sousa-Silva (39:48.720)
don't.
Lex Fridman (39:49.720)
So to solve this particular problem, that's my job.
Lex Fridman (39:53.000)
What was that?
Lex Fridman (39:54.000)
I mean, that's absolutely correct.
Clara Sousa-Silva (39:55.880)
I could have not said it better myself.
Lex Fridman (39:57.880)
Did you take that from my website?
Clara Sousa-Silva (39:59.360)
Yeah, I think I stole it.
Lex Fridman (40:00.800)
And your website is excellent, so it's a worthy place to steal stuff from.
Clara Sousa-Silva (40:04.680)
Thank you.
Lex Fridman (40:05.680)
How do you solve this problem for the 16,000 molecules we care about, of which phosphine
Lex Fridman (40:12.120)
is one?
Lex Fridman (40:13.120)
Yes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (40:14.120)
So, taking a step a little bit out of phosphine, is there...
Lex Fridman (40:21.360)
Well, we were having so much fun.
Clara Sousa-Silva (40:23.480)
We were having so much fun.
Lex Fridman (40:24.480)
No, no, we're not saying bye.
Clara Sousa-Silva (40:25.480)
No, no, no.
Lex Fridman (40:26.480)
It's sticking around.
Clara Sousa-Silva (40:27.480)
I'm just saying we're joining, more friends coming to the party.
Lex Fridman (40:30.720)
How do you choose other friends to come to the party that are interesting to study as
Lex Fridman (40:35.440)
we solve one puzzle at a time through the space of 16,000?
Lex Fridman (40:40.280)
So we've already started.
Clara Sousa-Silva (40:41.280)
Out of those 16,000, we understand water quite well, methane quite well, ammonia quite well,
Lex Fridman (40:46.840)
carbon dioxide.
Clara Sousa-Silva (40:47.840)
I could keep going.
Lex Fridman (40:49.600)
And then we understand molecules like acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, more or less.
Lex Fridman (40:55.940)
And that takes us to about 4% of those 16,000.
Lex Fridman (40:59.220)
We understand about 4% of them, more or less.
Clara Sousa-Silva (41:02.320)
Phosphine is one of them.
Lex Fridman (41:04.280)
But the other 96%, we just really have barely any idea at all of where in the spectrum of
Clara Sousa-Silva (41:11.040)
light they would leave a mark.
Lex Fridman (41:14.720)
I can't spend the next 62,000 years doing this work.
Lex Fridman (41:19.280)
And I don't want to, even if somehow I was able, that wouldn't feel good.
Lex Fridman (41:26.420)
So one of the things that I try to do now is move away from how I did phosphine.
Lex Fridman (41:32.600)
So I did phosphine really the best that I could, the best that could be done with the
Clara Sousa-Silva (41:37.040)
computer power that we have, trying to get each one of those 16.8 billion transitions
Clara Sousa-Silva (41:42.280)
mapped accurately, calculated.
Lex Fridman (41:46.640)
And then I thought, what if I do a worse job?
Lex Fridman (41:50.000)
What if I just do a much worse job?
Lex Fridman (41:53.160)
Can I just make it much faster and then it's still worth it?
Lex Fridman (41:57.680)
How bad can I get before it's worthless?
Lex Fridman (42:02.120)
And then could I do this for all the other molecules?
Lex Fridman (42:05.380)
So I created exactly this terrible, terrible system.
Lex Fridman (42:10.560)
So how, what's the answer to that question, that fundamental question I ask myself all
Clara Sousa-Silva (42:14.120)
the time in other domains.
Lex Fridman (42:15.600)
How crappy can I be before I'm useless?
Clara Sousa-Silva (42:17.400)
Before somebody notices.
Clara Sousa-Silva (42:18.400)
Turns out pretty crappy because no one has any idea what these molecules look like.
Clara Sousa-Silva (42:26.520)
Anything is better than nothing.
Lex Fridman (42:28.640)
And so I thought, how long will it take me to create better than nothing spectra for
Lex Fridman (42:33.040)
all of these molecules?
Lex Fridman (42:34.040)
And so I created RASCAL, Rapid Approximate Spectral Calculations for All.
Lex Fridman (42:42.480)
And what I do is I use organic chemistry and quantum chemistry and kind of cheat them both.
Lex Fridman (42:48.440)
I just try to figure out what is the fastest way I could run this.
Lex Fridman (42:53.000)
And I simulate rough spectra for all of those 16,000.
Lex Fridman (42:57.520)
So I've managed to get it to work.
Clara Sousa-Silva (42:59.560)
It's really shocking how well it works considering how bad it is.
Lex Fridman (43:03.040)
Is there insights you could give to like the tricks involved in making it fast?
Clara Sousa-Silva (43:08.600)
Like what are the maybe some insightful shortcuts taken that still result in some useful information
Lex Fridman (43:16.520)
about the spectra?
Clara Sousa-Silva (43:18.120)
The insights came from organic chemistry from decades ago.
Clara Sousa-Silva (43:22.280)
When organic chemists wanted to know what a compound might be, they will look at a spectrum
Lex Fridman (43:26.840)
and see a feature and they would go, I've seen that feature before.
Clara Sousa-Silva (43:31.120)
That's usually what happens when you have a carbon triple bonded to another carbon.
Lex Fridman (43:36.040)
And they were mostly right.
Clara Sousa-Silva (43:37.440)
Almost every molecule that has a carbon triple bonded to another one looks like that.
Clara Sousa-Silva (43:42.480)
Has other features different that distinguish them from one another, but they have that
Lex Fridman (43:47.360)
feature in common.
Clara Sousa-Silva (43:49.320)
We call these functional groups.
Lex Fridman (43:51.280)
And so most of that work ended up being abandoned because now we have mass spectrometry.
Clara Sousa-Silva (43:57.080)
We got nuclear magnetic resin spectroscopy, so people don't really need to do that anymore.
Lex Fridman (44:03.160)
But these ancient textbooks still exist and I've collected them all as many as I could.
Lex Fridman (44:09.560)
And there are hundreds of these descriptions where people have said, oh, whenever you have
Clara Sousa-Silva (44:13.880)
a iodine atom connected to this one, there's always a feature here and it's usually quite
Clara Sousa-Silva (44:20.620)
sharp and it's quite strong.
Lex Fridman (44:22.940)
And some people go, oh yeah, that's really broad feature.
Clara Sousa-Silva (44:24.980)
Every time that combination of atoms and bonds.
Lex Fridman (44:28.220)
So I've collected them all and I've created this giant dictionary of all these kind of
Clara Sousa-Silva (44:32.720)
puzzle pieces, these Lego parts of molecules.
Lex Fridman (44:37.440)
And I've written a code that then puts them all together in some kind of like Frankenstein's
Clara Sousa-Silva (44:41.640)
monster of molecules.
Lex Fridman (44:43.760)
So you asked me for any molecule and I go, well, it has these bonds and this atom dangling
Clara Sousa-Silva (44:48.780)
off this atom and this cluster here, and I tell you what it should look like and it kind
Lex Fridman (44:55.640)
of works.
Lex Fridman (44:57.320)
So this creates a whole portfolio of just kind of signatures that we could look for.
Lex Fridman (45:03.600)
Rough, very rough signatures.
Lex Fridman (45:05.160)
But still useful enough to analyze the atmospheres, the telescope generated images of other planets?
Lex Fridman (45:14.360)
Close.
Clara Sousa-Silva (45:15.540)
Right now it is so complete.
Lex Fridman (45:18.960)
So it has all of these molecules that it can tell you, say you look at an alien atmosphere
Lex Fridman (45:24.080)
and there's a feature there.
Lex Fridman (45:26.320)
It can tell you, oh, that feature, that's familiar.
Clara Sousa-Silva (45:29.100)
It could be one of these 816 molecules, best of luck.
Lex Fridman (45:34.160)
So I think the next step, which is what I'm working on is telling you something more useful
Clara Sousa-Silva (45:38.520)
than it could be one of those 816 molecules.
Lex Fridman (45:41.320)
That's still true.
Clara Sousa-Silva (45:42.320)
I wouldn't say it's useful.
Lex Fridman (45:43.800)
So it can tell you, but only 12% of them also have a feature in this region.
Lex Fridman (45:48.680)
So go look there.
Lex Fridman (45:49.680)
And if there's nothing there, it can't be those and so on.
Clara Sousa-Silva (45:53.400)
It can also tell you things like you will need this much accuracy to distinguish between
Lex Fridman (45:58.000)
those 816.
Lex Fridman (46:00.220)
So that's what I'm working on.
Lex Fridman (46:03.080)
But it's a lot of work.
Lex Fridman (46:04.480)
So this is really interesting, the role of computing in this whole picture.
Lex Fridman (46:09.000)
You mentioned code.
Lex Fridman (46:10.200)
So like you as a quantum astrochemist, there is some role for programming in your life,
Lex Fridman (46:18.600)
in your past life, in your current life, in your group?
Clara Sousa-Silva (46:21.440)
Oh yeah, almost entirely.
Clara Sousa-Silva (46:22.440)
I'm a computational quantum astrochemist, but that doesn't roll off the tongue very
Clara Sousa-Silva (46:25.400)
easily.
Lex Fridman (46:26.400)
So this is fundamentally computational.
Clara Sousa-Silva (46:28.520)
Like if you want to be successful in the 21st century in doing quantum astrochemistry, you
Lex Fridman (46:32.480)
want to be computational?
Clara Sousa-Silva (46:33.480)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (46:34.480)
All quantum chemistry is computational at this point.
Clara Sousa-Silva (46:36.680)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (46:37.680)
So does machine learning play a role at all?
Clara Sousa-Silva (46:40.560)
Is there some extra shortcuts that could be discovered through, like you see all that
Lex Fridman (46:46.080)
success with protein folding, right?
Clara Sousa-Silva (46:48.280)
A problem that thought to be extremely difficult to apply machine learning to because it's,
Lex Fridman (46:58.800)
I mean mostly because there's not a lot of already solved puzzles to train on.
Clara Sousa-Silva (47:04.800)
I suppose the same exact thing is true with this particular problem, but is there hope
Lex Fridman (47:09.320)
for machine learning to help out?
Clara Sousa-Silva (47:11.480)
Absolutely.
Lex Fridman (47:12.600)
Currently you've laid out exactly the problem.
Clara Sousa-Silva (47:14.920)
The training set is awful and because there's so, a lot of this data that I'm basing it
Lex Fridman (47:21.800)
on is literally many decades old.
Clara Sousa-Silva (47:24.000)
The people who worked on it and data that I get, often they're dead and the files that
Lex Fridman (47:29.520)
I've used, some of them were hand drawn by someone tired in the seventies.
Clara Sousa-Silva (47:34.240)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (47:35.240)
So I can of course have a program training on these, but I would just be perpetuating
Clara Sousa-Silva (47:40.560)
these mistakes without hope of actually verifying them.
Lex Fridman (47:43.840)
So my next step is to improve this training set by hand and then try to see if I can apply
Clara Sousa-Silva (47:51.360)
machine learning on the full code of the full 16,000 molecules and improve them all.
Lex Fridman (47:57.240)
But really I need to be able to test the outcomes with experimental data, which means convincing
Clara Sousa-Silva (48:01.500)
someone in a lab to spend a lot of money putting very dangerous gases in chambers and measuring
Lex Fridman (48:08.560)
them at outrageous temperatures.
Lex Fridman (48:11.260)
So it's a work in progress.
Lex Fridman (48:13.520)
And so collecting huge amounts of data about the actual gases.
Lex Fridman (48:18.400)
So you are up for doing that kind of thing too.
Lex Fridman (48:22.520)
So actually like doing the full end to end thing, which is like having a gas, collecting
Clara Sousa-Silva (48:29.680)
data about it, and then doing the kind of analysis that creates the fingerprint and
Lex Fridman (48:35.760)
then also analyzing using that library, the data that comes from other planets.
Lex Fridman (48:40.120)
So you do the full.
Lex Fridman (48:41.760)
Full from birth to death.
Clara Sousa-Silva (48:43.600)
Interesting.
Lex Fridman (48:44.600)
Yes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (48:45.600)
I worked in an industrial chemistry laboratory when I was much younger in Slovenia and there
Lex Fridman (48:50.880)
I worked in the lab actually collecting spectrum and predicting spectrum.
Lex Fridman (48:56.640)
What's it like to work with a bunch of gases that are like not so human friendly?
Lex Fridman (49:00.800)
It's terrifying.
Clara Sousa-Silva (49:01.800)
It's horrific.
Lex Fridman (49:03.160)
It's so scary.
Lex Fridman (49:04.320)
And I love my job.
Clara Sousa-Silva (49:06.280)
I'm willing to clearly sacrifice a lot for it, you know, job, stability, money, sanity.
Lex Fridman (49:15.160)
But I only worked there for a few months and it was really terrifying.
Lex Fridman (49:20.440)
There's just so many ways to die.
Clara Sousa-Silva (49:22.800)
You know, usually you only have a handful of ways to die every day, you know.
Lex Fridman (49:26.200)
And if you work in a lab, there's so many more, orders of magnitude more.
Lex Fridman (49:30.800)
And I was very bad at it.
Lex Fridman (49:32.920)
I'm not a good hands on scientist.
Clara Sousa-Silva (49:35.840)
I want a laptop connected to a remote super computer or a laptop connected to a telescope.
Lex Fridman (49:43.240)
I don't need to be there to believe it.
Lex Fridman (49:46.960)
And I am not good in the lab.
Lex Fridman (49:48.760)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (49:49.760)
When there's a bunch of things that can poison you, a bunch of things that could explode
Lex Fridman (49:53.200)
and they're gaseous and they're often, maybe they might not even have a smell or they might
Clara Sousa-Silva (49:57.720)
not be visible.
Lex Fridman (49:59.820)
It's like...
Lex Fridman (50:00.820)
So many of them give you cancer.
Lex Fridman (50:02.240)
It's just so cruel.
Lex Fridman (50:03.840)
And some people love this work, but I've never enjoyed experimental work.
Lex Fridman (50:09.120)
It's so ungrateful.
Lex Fridman (50:11.120)
So lonely.
Clara Sousa-Silva (50:12.120)
Well, most, I mean, so much work is lonely if you find the joy in it, but you enjoy the
Clara Sousa-Silva (50:18.440)
results of it.
Lex Fridman (50:19.920)
Yes.
Lex Fridman (50:20.920)
So I'm very thankful for all the experimentalists in my life, but I'll do the theory.
Clara Sousa-Silva (50:26.160)
They do the experiment and then we talk to one another and make sure it matches.
Clara Sousa-Silva (50:30.200)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (50:31.200)
Beautiful.
Lex Fridman (50:32.200)
What are spectroscopic networks?
Lex Fridman (50:34.400)
Those look super cool.
Lex Fridman (50:35.480)
Are they related to what we were talking about?
Lex Fridman (50:37.600)
The picture look pretty.
Clara Sousa-Silva (50:38.600)
Oh, yes, slightly.
Lex Fridman (50:39.600)
So remember when I mentioned the 17.5 million energy levels?
Clara Sousa-Silva (50:44.400)
Yes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (50:45.400)
There are rules for each molecule on which energy levels they can jump from and to and
Lex Fridman (50:51.640)
how likely it is to make that jump.
Lex Fridman (50:53.900)
And so if you plot all the routes it can take, you get this energy network, which is like
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:01.040)
a ball.
Lex Fridman (51:02.040)
So these are the constraints of the transitions that could be taken.
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:06.200)
Exactly for each molecule.
Lex Fridman (51:07.680)
Interesting.
Lex Fridman (51:08.680)
And they're not, so it's not a fully connected, it's like it's sparse somehow.
Lex Fridman (51:13.840)
Yes, you get islands sometimes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:15.800)
You get a molecule can only jump from one set of states to another and it's trapped
Lex Fridman (51:20.920)
now in this network.
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:21.920)
It can never go to another network that could have been available to other siblings.
Lex Fridman (51:27.680)
Is there some insights to be drawn from these networks?
Lex Fridman (51:30.060)
Like something cool that you can understand about a particular molecule because of it?
Lex Fridman (51:33.800)
Yes.
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:34.800)
Some molecules have what we call forbidden transitions, which aren't really forbidden
Lex Fridman (51:38.800)
because it's quantum.
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:39.800)
There are no rules.
Lex Fridman (51:40.800)
No, I'm not joking.
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:41.800)
One of the rules is just the rules are very often broken in the quantum world.
Lex Fridman (51:45.880)
And so forbidden transitions doesn't actually mean they're forbidden.
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:49.240)
Low probability.
Lex Fridman (51:50.240)
Exactly.
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:51.240)
They just become deeply unlikely.
Lex Fridman (51:52.640)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:53.640)
Cool.
Lex Fridman (51:54.640)
And so you could do all the same, like I'm coming from a computer science world, I love
Clara Sousa-Silva (51:58.620)
graph theory.
Lex Fridman (51:59.620)
So you can do all the same graph theoretic kind of analysis of clusters or something
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:05.320)
like that.
Lex Fridman (52:06.320)
Exactly.
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:07.320)
All those kinds of things.
Lex Fridman (52:08.320)
And draw insights from it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:09.320)
Cool.
Lex Fridman (52:10.320)
And they're unique for each molecule.
Lex Fridman (52:11.320)
And the networks that you mentioned, that's actually not too difficult a layer of quantum
Lex Fridman (52:17.040)
physics.
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:18.040)
By then, all the energies are mapped.
Lex Fridman (52:19.960)
So we've had high school children work on those networks.
Lex Fridman (52:23.420)
And the trick is to not tell them they're doing quantum physics until like three months
Lex Fridman (52:26.380)
in when it's too late for them to back out.
Lex Fridman (52:29.140)
And then you're like, you're a quantum physicist now.
Lex Fridman (52:31.080)
And it's really nice.
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:32.080)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (52:33.080)
Okay.
Lex Fridman (52:34.080)
But like the promise of this, even though it's 16,000, even just a subset of them, that's
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:37.400)
really exciting because then you can do as the telescope data get better and better,
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:41.640)
especially for exoplanets, but also for Venus.
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:46.120)
You can then start like getting your full, like, you know how you get like blood work
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:50.520)
done or like you get your genetic testing to see what your ancestors are.
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:54.760)
You can get the same kind of like high resolution information about interesting things going
Clara Sousa-Silva (52:59.760)
on on a particular planet based on the atmosphere.
Lex Fridman (53:02.240)
Right?
Clara Sousa-Silva (53:03.240)
Exactly.
Lex Fridman (53:04.240)
How cool would that be if we could, you know, scan an alien planet and go,
Clara Sousa-Silva (53:07.360)
oh, this is what the clouds are made of.
Lex Fridman (53:09.080)
This is what's in the surface.
Clara Sousa-Silva (53:10.680)
These are the molecules that are mixing.
Lex Fridman (53:12.640)
Here are probably oceans because you can see these types of molecules above it.
Lex Fridman (53:16.880)
And here are the Hadley cells.
Lex Fridman (53:19.360)
Here are how the biosphere works.
Clara Sousa-Silva (53:22.300)
We could map this whole thing.
Clara Sousa-Silva (53:24.160)
Wouldn't it be cool if the aliens like are aware of these techniques and like would spoof
Clara Sousa-Silva (53:28.320)
like the wrong gases, just to like pretend that's how they can be, it's like an invisibility
Lex Fridman (53:33.680)
cloak.
Clara Sousa-Silva (53:34.680)
They can generate gases that would throw you off or like, or do the opposite.
Lex Fridman (53:39.440)
They pretend they will artificially generate phosphine.
Lex Fridman (53:42.200)
So like, like the dumb, the dumb apes on earth again, like go out, like flying in different
Lex Fridman (53:47.840)
places because it's just fun.
Clara Sousa-Silva (53:49.660)
It's like some teenager alien somewhere, just pranking.
Lex Fridman (53:53.440)
Yeah.
Clara Sousa-Silva (53:54.440)
I was asked that exact question this Saturday by, by a 70 year old boy in Canada, but it
Lex Fridman (54:04.240)
was the first time I'd been asked that question, the second in a week.
Clara Sousa-Silva (54:10.400)
We're kindred spirits, him and I.
Clara Sousa-Silva (54:12.540)
We can, they can prank us to some extent, but the, this work of interpreting an alien
Clara Sousa-Silva (54:19.520)
atmosphere means you're reading the atmosphere as a message and it's very hard to hide signs
Clara Sousa-Silva (54:25.760)
of life in an atmosphere because you can try to prank us, but you're still going to fart
Lex Fridman (54:32.160)
and breathe and somehow metabolize the environment around you and call that whatever you call
Lex Fridman (54:37.960)
that and release molecules.
Lex Fridman (54:41.160)
And so that's really hard to hide.
Lex Fridman (54:42.520)
You know, you can go very quiet.
Clara Sousa-Silva (54:44.820)
You can throw out some weird molecule to confuse us further, but we can still see all your
Lex Fridman (54:50.400)
other metabolites.
Clara Sousa-Silva (54:51.400)
Yeah.
Lex Fridman (54:52.400)
It's hard to fake.
Clara Sousa-Silva (54:53.400)
Is there, so you kind of mentioned like water that what, what other gases are there that
Lex Fridman (55:00.800)
we know about that are like high likelihood as biosignatures in terms of life?
Clara Sousa-Silva (55:06.800)
I mean, what are your other favorites in terms of, so, so we've got phosphine, but like what,
Lex Fridman (55:14.400)
what else is a damn good signal to be a, that you think about that we should be looking
Clara Sousa-Silva (55:19.080)
for if we look at another atmosphere, is there gases that come to mind or are there all sort
Lex Fridman (55:23.760)
of possible biosignatures that we should love equally?
Clara Sousa-Silva (55:29.080)
There's many, so there's water.
Lex Fridman (55:31.600)
We know that's important for life as we know it.
Clara Sousa-Silva (55:33.480)
There's molecular oxygen on earth.
Clara Sousa-Silva (55:35.400)
That's probably the most robust sign of life, particularly combined with small amounts of
Clara Sousa-Silva (55:39.720)
methane.
Lex Fridman (55:40.720)
And it's true that the majority of the oxygen in our atmosphere is a product of life.
Lex Fridman (55:44.700)
And so if I was an alien astronomer and I saw earth's atmosphere, I'm, I would get a
Lex Fridman (55:50.680)
Nobel I think on, you know,
Lex Fridman (55:52.640)
What would you notice?
Lex Fridman (55:53.640)
I mean, this is a really,
Clara Sousa-Silva (55:54.640)
I would be very excited about this.
Lex Fridman (55:57.560)
About the oxygen.
Clara Sousa-Silva (55:58.560)
I'm not finding 20%, 21% of oxygen atmosphere.
Lex Fridman (56:02.280)
That's very unusual.
Lex Fridman (56:03.280)
So would that be the most exciting thing to you from an alien perspective about earth
Clara Sousa-Silva (56:07.160)
in terms of the tech, like analyzing the atmosphere, like what are the biosignatures of life on
Lex Fridman (56:12.400)
earth?
Clara Sousa-Silva (56:13.400)
Would you say in terms of the contents of the atmosphere is oxygen, high amount of oxygen,
Clara Sousa-Silva (56:18.160)
pretty damn good sign.
Lex Fridman (56:19.600)
I mean, it's not as good as the TV signals we've been sending out.
Clara Sousa-Silva (56:23.440)
Those are slightly more robust than oxygen.
Lex Fridman (56:27.760)
Oxygen on its own has false positives for life.
Lex Fridman (56:30.140)
So there's still ways of making it, but it's, it's a pretty robust sign of life in the context
Clara Sousa-Silva (56:36.520)
or atmosphere with the radiation that the sun produces, our position in relation to
Clara Sousa-Silva (56:41.480)
the sun, the other components of our atmosphere, the volcanic activity we have, all of that
Lex Fridman (56:47.040)
together makes the 20% of oxygen extremely robust sign of life.
Lex Fridman (56:53.920)
But outside that context, you could still produce oxygen without life.
Lex Fridman (56:59.520)
But phosphine, although better in the sense of it is much harder to make, it has lower
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:03.520)
false positives, still has some.
Lex Fridman (57:06.260)
So I'm actually against looking for specific molecules unless we're looking for like CFCs.
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:12.080)
If we find CFCs, that's definitely aliens, I feel confident, chlorofluorocarbons.
Lex Fridman (57:16.900)
And so, you know, if aliens had been watching us, they would have been going, oh no, CFCs.
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:22.520)
I mean, they're not going to last long.
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:25.200)
Let's, you know, everyone's writing their thesis on the end of, the end of the earth.
Lex Fridman (57:30.560)
And then we got together, we stopped using them.
Lex Fridman (57:33.280)
I like to think they're really proud of us.
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:35.440)
You know, they literally saw our ozone hole shrinking.
Lex Fridman (57:38.280)
They've been watching it and they saw it happen.
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:40.200)
I think to be honest, they're more paying attention to the whole nuclear thing.
Lex Fridman (57:43.440)
I don't think they care.
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:44.440)
It's not going to bother them.
Lex Fridman (57:45.440)
Oh, I mean, worried about us.
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:46.440)
Oh yes.
Lex Fridman (57:47.440)
Oh no, worried about us.
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:48.440)
They, I mean, this is why the aliens have been showing up recently.
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:53.040)
It's like, if you, if you look at, I mean, there is, I mean, it's probably, there's a
Clara Sousa-Silva (57:56.960)
correlation with a lot of things, but what the ufologists quote unquote often talk about
Clara Sousa-Silva (58:02.080)
is that there seems to be a much higher level of UFO sightings since like in the nuclear
Clara Sousa-Silva (58:08.400)
age.
Lex Fridman (58:09.720)
So like if aliens were indeed worried about us, like if you were aliens, you would start
Clara Sousa-Silva (58:14.000)
showing up when the living organisms first discovered a way to destroy the entire, the
Lex Fridman (58:21.000)
entire colony.
Clara Sousa-Silva (58:22.680)
Can the increase in sightings not have to do with the fact that people now have more
Lex Fridman (58:28.720)
cameras?
Clara Sousa-Silva (58:29.720)
It's an interesting thing about science, like with UFO sightings, it's like either 99.9%
Lex Fridman (58:37.600)
of them are false or 100% of them are false.
Clara Sousa-Silva (58:40.240)
The interesting thing to me is that in that 0.01%, there's a lot of things in science
Lex Fridman (58:46.320)
that are like these weird outliers that are difficult to replicate.
Clara Sousa-Silva (58:52.080)
You have like, there's even physical phenomena, ball lightning.
Clara Sousa-Silva (58:55.120)
There's difficult things to artificially create in large amounts or observe in nature in large
Clara Sousa-Silva (59:00.960)
amounts in such a way that you can do it to apply the scientific method that could be
Clara Sousa-Silva (59:05.640)
just things that like what happened like a few times or once and you're like, what the
Lex Fridman (59:11.600)
hell is that?
Lex Fridman (59:13.420)
And that's very difficult for science to know what to do with.
Clara Sousa-Silva (59:16.280)
I'm a huge proponent of just being open minded because when you're open minded about aliens,
Clara Sousa-Silva (59:20.920)
for example, it allows you to think outside of the box in other domains as well.
Lex Fridman (59:27.600)
And somehow that will result, like if you're open minded about aliens and you don't laugh
Clara Sousa-Silva (59:33.280)
it off immediately, what happens is somehow that's going to lead to a solution to a P
Clara Sousa-Silva (59:37.560)
equals NP or P not equals NP.
Clara Sousa-Silva (59:39.760)
Like in ways that you can't predict, the open mindedness has tertiary effects that will
Clara Sousa-Silva (59:45.880)
result in progress, I believe, which is why I'm a huge fan of aliens because it's like
Lex Fridman (59:51.840)
because too many scientists roll their eyes at the idea of aliens, alien life.
Lex Fridman (59:57.360)
And to me, it's one of the most exciting possibilities in the biggest, most exciting questions before
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